FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

President Biden’s Middle East Policy by Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3xnO4f1

Disengagement from the Middle East?

The Middle East is situated between Europe, Asia and Africa, and between the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

President Biden wishes to disengage from the Middle East, but the Middle East does not intend to disengage from the US.

The US is perceived by rogue Middle East entities as “The Great Satan” and the mega-obstacle on their way to achieve their mega-goal: bringing the West to submission, militarily, culturally and religiously. This mega-goal has been deeply-rooted since the 7th century, independent of US policies.

Isolation is not a realistic option in the increasingly globalized village, where rogue Middle East regimes are engaged in the proliferation of terrorism, non-conventional military technologies and drug trafficking around the globe. Their reach extends all the way to the American continent, impacting the US homeland security.

Will the US lead – or follow – the engagement process?  Will the engagement with rogue Middle East entities be conducted mostly around the US – or the Middle East – “end zone”?

The Biden team’s track record

President Biden’s Middle East policy reflects the worldview of his top foreign policy and national security team, most notably Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who has been President Biden’s most influential advisor since 2002-2008 (similar to Secretary Baker’s influence on President Bush), when Blinken was the Democratic Staff Director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Other leading members of the team are Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, William Burns, the CIA Director and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. They – like Blinken – played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Middle East policy.

For instance, they were instrumental in carving the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran (JCPOA), which followed the US embrace of Iran’s Ayatollahs (Shiite terrorism), while demoting the stature of the pro-US Saudis, the UAE and Bahrain.  This has intensified the existential threat to these regimes, injuring the US’ strategic reliability, and driving its traditional Arab allies closer to China and Russia.

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Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution Francis Menton

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d27aee23c

Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state’s attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

The New York Post today has an 8-page special section that starts off on page 4 with the headline “AG: Governor Is A Groper.” Here’s the lead paragraph:

Gov. Cuomo was exposed in a blockbuster investigative report made public Tuesday as a dirty old man who used his powerful position to sexually harass female underlings less than half his age — including by touching their “intimate body parts” without consent.

Here’s the cover from today’s Post:

What has occurred is that lawyers working under the authority of Attorney General Letitia James have spent the past several months looking into allegations of sexual harassment by various women against Cuomo. Yesterday, the investigators issued their 165 page Report. The Report considers claims by some eleven women, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate touching to groping to lewd comments. (Unlike with, say, Bill Clinton, there do not appear to be any allegations of actual unwanted sexual intercourse.). The investigators find the claims to be credible, and the conduct of the Governor to be in violation of state law.

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Time to take advantage of cracks in Tehran’s armor By Ruthie Blum 

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/time-to-take-advantage-of-cracks-in-tehrans-armor-opinion-675992

There’s nothing new about the powers-that-be in Tehran speaking out of both sides of their mouths, particularly when switching from Farsi to other languages. The only “novelty” was the inauguration on Tuesday – and swearing-in before the Majlis on Thursday – of Ebraim Raisi as Iran’s eighth president, replacing Hassan Rouhani in the role that he’s held since 2013.

Though it remains to be seen how Raisi “The Butcher” handles the predicament currently confronting the Islamic Republic, it’s safe to say that one way in which he’ll toe the ayatollahs’ line is to rule with an iron fist while lying about it for international consumption.

Indeed, as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hand-picked victor in the staged June 18 “election,” Raisi is certain to hit the ground running where attempting to quash the countrywide protests that have been plaguing his country for the past few weeks is concerned.
Nor is there any doubt that he’ll continue his predecessors’ tradition of pinning the blame for the public’s dire economic straits on the United States and Israel – the former for “crippling sanctions,” and the latter for aggression.

At this juncture, however, the Iranian people are so fed up with their plight at the hands of the regime that they’re no longer willing to be fed the propaganda. They want actual sustenance in the form of food on the table and water in the tap, both of which are running as scarce as electricity.

The fact that their slogans at mass demonstrations include calls for Khamenei’s death means that they no longer fear the torturous punishment that befalls Iranian dissidents. Their denunciations of the government’s funding of Palestinian terrorism, let alone its bankrolling ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, indicates that they have become emboldened by the sense that they have nothing left to lose

THE TROUBLE is that what they have to gain could easily be thwarted by fantasists in Washington. Yes, the administration of US President Joe Biden incredibly refuses to abandon its notion that a return to some form of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries from which former president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 – is the way to curb the threat from Tehran.

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It Doesn’t Take Censorship to Fight a Pandemic Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/it-doesnt-take-censorship-to-fight.html

After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now,” he falsely claimed.

Fauci as usual is wrong. The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.

There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.

Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist. Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science, played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a country where the media had not yet been consolidated.

Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now the case..

There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and dangerous.

Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in public creating a sense of transparency and trust.

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Vaccination Weaponization The Biden Administration should look in the mirror before casting stones at others. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/04/vaccination-weaponization/

 It was always going to be Herculean to inoculate, with an untried vaccine, a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million, across a vast continent—in an era when the media routinely warps the daily news. 

Some minorities understandably harbored distrust of prior government vaccination programs. 

Nearly 40 million foreign residents in America are from countries where corrupt governments had long ago lost the trust of the population. 

The anti-vaccination movement was distrustful of what the government said was safe—given the rush to produce previously untried mRNA inoculation methodologies. 

Rural and inner-city poor were sometimes not so easily reached, much less persuaded. 

Yet politics played the most obstructive role early on. Candidate Joe Biden talked grandly of reviving the World War II war production board. He deliberately omitted that it was Donald Trump who emulated FDR’s mobilization of private enterprise under government auspices. 

Trump offered legal protections for companies to accelerate their research and development—in hopes that competition, profits, and public oversight would result in COVID-19 vaccinations just 10 months after the pandemic hit. 

And it worked. Mostly safe and effective vaccinations were rolled out shortly after the election. Some 17 million were inoculated by the time of Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. 

Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the days when he still posed as a bipartisan professional, had dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year 2020. Joe Biden publicly doubted that Trump’s vaccination efforts would either work or be safe. 

In a nationally televised debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris shamefully said she would never be vaxxed with any shot associated with President Trump. All that proved disastrous messaging for an already skeptical nation. 

Pfizer had promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October on the eve of the election. Then it mysteriously went silent—only to suddenly announce its successful  vaccination, just a few days after the November 3 voting. 

Joe Biden continued the politicization of the vaccination program by bizarrely and falsely declaring on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet Biden himself was first vaccinated on December 21 on live television. 

Soon Biden grandly promised that all those who were vaccinated would be safe from infection from the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. And thus they could resume normal lives without masks, quarantines, or social distancing. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Place in the New Order: A Practitioner’s Perspective by Yaakov Amidror

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://jstribune.com/yaakov-amidror-israels-place-in-new-world-order/

The world Israel lives in is dramatically different from the one in which our elders grew up, amid Cold War tensions and with large Arab armies at Israel’s borders. Within the last decade we witnessed the rise of China, America’s announced intention to reduce its presence in the Middle East, the aggressiveness of a weakened but assertive Russia, and the consequences of turmoil in the Middle East. We are faced with multiple threats, including a shifting balance of power in Asia and an increasingly lawless global system—scarred by the failure of globalization during the COVID-19 crisis. Amid all this, it is imperative that Israel sustain its own strength, while working hard to restore bipartisan support in the United States and making good use of the new alignments in the Eastern Mediterranean and with like-minded Sunni Arab nations.

A World of Difference

How different is the world we live in from that which we have been raised to expect? To answer this question we need to define the relevant timeframe discussed in this essay. Clearly this is a world radically different from the one in which I came of age and learned my trade as an intelligence officer—the post-1945 world in which two overly armed nuclear powers, the US and the Soviet Union, faced each other in deadly competition across the globe (with a block of the “non-aligned” trying, not always successfully, to stay on the sidelines); and the post-1948 world in which Israel faced the threat of enemy Arab states surrounding it with a million armed men, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighter aircraft.

Since then, the Soviet Union has fallen apart and in our region, no Arab army (other than the Egyptian military) is large or significant enough to constitute a threat. But to better understand the world in which Israel must function, the changes—globally as well as regionally—within the last decade provide the relevant frame of analysis. This has been a decade in which the global distribution of power became much more evident, in light of several developments:

Eight years of rule—now set to be extended indefinitely—by Xi Jinping in China, under whose leadership the People’s Republic of China pursues a strategy of aggressive growth. It is already America’s peer rival, as it seeks a revision of the global order; this, in turn, has set in motion drastic changes in the global alignments and alliances.

The return of the Democrats to power in both branches of government in the US and the ensuing debate (and internal fissures) on aspects of policy—including the “special relationship” with Israel—amid signs of radical polarization, leading the US away from the traditional role it is expected to play in the region and beyond.

The willingness and ability of Russia, despite demographic decline and severe economic limitations, to play an outsized role due to its readiness to use force, led by an assertive president and backed by an impressive and intimidating nuclear arsenal.

The dramatic and confusing events of the so-called Arab Spring, which brought about the disintegration of several states. It is now evident that the non-Arab powers—Iran, Turkey, and Israel—are the tone-setters in a region once viewed as the heartland of Arab nationalism.

Looking toward the future, five key cycles of dynamic changes seem to have a transformative role and need to be addressed by policy makers.

The Chinese Challenge

China is fast becoming the dynamic revisionist power in the global order—deliberately and rather aggressively expanding its circle of influence. It does not fear competing with the US; rather, it seeks to pose the Chinese model as an alternative to Western democracy and pushes for structural change in any international organization and forum it is part of, or uses existing organizations to implement its own interests. It has become more centralized and utilizes modern technology to tighten its grip on its citizens; hence, its overt self-confidence is evident as Xi rewrites the rules that have held for the last 30 years.

Additionally, the People’s Republic of China did not recoil from the use of force to impose its will on Hong Kong and integrate it within the Chinese system, in breach of the understanding reached with the United Kingdom as to the rights of the former colony. Nor did it hesitate to threaten Australia, to take over atolls and uninhabited islands within the so-called Nine-Dash Map, build military bases, and revive nationalist claims from the 1930s, and to do so in dangerous proximity to other nations in the South China Sea, which have competing claims over the same locations.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Moral Anorexia in the Cognitive War Against Israel Meet the virtue-signaling progressives who promote lies about the Jewish state. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/moral-anorexia-cognitive-war-against-israel-richard-l-cravatts/

The cognitive war against Israel, which has continued almost unabated since the Jewish state’s founding, intensifies after specific events on the ground, as happened in May during Israel’s latest incursion into Gaza to suppress homicidal rocket fire from Hamas terrorists. When more than 3000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into southern Israeli towns by Hamas with the express purpose of murdering Jewish civilians there was, of course, an almost universal silence; only when Israel, in its necessary self-defense, finally moved to neutralize terrorist enclaves and stop the deadly rocket fire did academics, NGOs, unions, and the other reliably anti-Israel entities rise up in a collective denunciation of the Jewish state, howling about Israel’s malign behavior.

Perennially unhappy with the very existence of Israel, anti-Israel activists and scolds use any escalation in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to renew their incessant, obsessive criticism of Israel, ignoring the existential threat Israel faces from homicidal psychopaths dedicated to the murder of its citizens and focusing instead of mendacious claims of colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, asymmetrical warfare, disproportionate force, land theft, illegality, apartheid and unredeemable and intolerable racism on the part of Jewish extremist settlers occupying an indigenous people’s land.

Even corporations got into the act, the latest being the shameful boycott launched in the so-called “occupied territories,” Judea and Samaria, by Ben & Jerry’s, the eponymous ice cream company created by two Vermont leftists.

Trumpeting the virtue-signaling rationale for their corporate decision to defame the Jewish state in a New York Times op-ed, “Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle,” the two founders, Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, claimed they “took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values” and that they “believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights . . ,” although like their fellow travelers in the social justice left, it is never clear how, in this case, anyone’s human rights or equality will be enhanced or protected by being deprived of eating ice cream.

In fact, like all social justice warriors, Ben and Jerry make the same hypocritical error that all progressives do when they purported seek justice and equality for the oppressed; namely, they care nothing for any other parties involved—in this case, Israelis who live in the biblical areas of Judea and Samaria, carelessly referred to as the West Bank.

In the Manichean view of the world embraced by leftists, oppressors deserve no protection and will not be insulated from harm when social justice for the oppressed is achieved—even if that involves resistance, violence, insurrection, military conflict, revolution, and the overthrow of the prevailing order. Social justice does not imply or necessitate justice for all parties, only the oppressed victims. In the case of the Palestinians and Israelis, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) seek justice in the Holy Land, but only for the so-called Palestinians, not for Israelis. If the creation of a new Palestinian state entails the extirpation of the Jewish one, so be it.

The rectitude of academics or corporate heads pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

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Opposition to vaccination passports comes from an unexpected quarter By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/opposition_to_vaccination_passports_comes_from_an_unexpected_quarter.html

The Democrats, for much of the 20th century, represented the American working class. However, they built their latest political empire by targeting myriad special interest groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQs, Muslims, Jews, the handicapped, etc., in addition to the reliable college-educated, White voters. Despite Democrats’ paeans to diversity, though, the coalition’s disparate members often dislike each other. That schism is showing as Blacks and Hispanics realize that the vaccine passports that White Democrats are urging damage their communities. Boston’s mayor, though, is pushing back.

It’s unquestionable that both Blacks and Hispanics have been resistant to the vaccine:

“No, Black people, there is no white supremacist scheme behind the COVID vaccine”
“CDC: Blacks and Hispanics still least likely to be vaccinated”
“US Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark”
“Young Latino and Black people have the lowest rate of COVID-19 vaccination in L.A. County, new data show”

Given their consistent unwillingness to subject themselves to the vaccine, it will have a profound effect on Blacks and Hispanics that Democrat politicians and political bodies (mostly White), on the one hand, and corporations (mostly White-managed), on the other hand, are working together to demand vaccine passports to function in the modern world.

In New York, Bill de Blasio is requiring a vaccine passport for New Yorkers who want to eat inside restaurants (as opposed to on the street with the crazy homeless), attend performances, or go to the gym. Timothy Carney has rightly pointed out that this will create an illegal disparate impact:

Here’s where it gets hairy: There are great racial disparities in vaccination rates in New York City, which means there will be a hugely disparate impact from de Blasio’s rules.

More than 47% of white New Yorkers are vaccinated, according to Bloomberg’s tracker, compared to 33% of black New Yorkers and just under 45% of Hispanics in the city.

That means that black New Yorkers will be barred from public accommodations at a far higher rate than will white New Yorkers. This is kind of an awkward policy.

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Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy It seemed to work in New Zealand and Australia, but now ruinous, oppressive lockdowns are back. By Jay Bhattacharya and Donald J. Boudreaux

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-covid-coronavirus-pandemic-lockdowns-china-australia-new-zealand-11628101945?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Much of the pathology underlying Covid policy arises from the fantasy that it is possible to eradicate the virus. Capitalizing on pandemic panic, governments and compliant media have used the lure of zero-Covid to induce obedience to harsh and arbitrary lockdown policies and associated violations of civil liberties.

Among all countries, New Zealand, Australia and especially China have most zealously embraced zero-Covid. China’s initial lockdown in Wuhan was the most tyrannical. It infamously locked people into their homes, forced patients to take untested medications, and imposed 40-day quarantines at gunpoint.

On March 24, 2020, New Zealand imposed one of the most onerous lockdowns in the free world, with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, a prohibition on going outside, and official encouragement of citizens to snitch on neighbors. In May 2020, having hit zero-Covid, New Zealand lifted lockdown restrictions, except quarantines for international travelers and warrantless house searches to enforce lockdown.

Australia also took the zero-Covid route. While the initial steps focused on banning international travel, the lockdowns there also involved closed schools, occasional separation of mothers from premature newborns, brutal suppression of protests, and arrests for wandering more than 3 miles from home.

New Zealand’s and Australia’s temporary achievement of zero-Covid and China’s claimed success were greeted with fanfare by the media and scientific journals. China’s authoritarian response seemed so successful—despite the country’s record of lying about the virus—that panicked democratic governments around the world copied it. The three countries lifted their lockdowns and celebrated.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Americans Forgot Communism Only those who lived in its shadow seem to be worried about contemporary parallels by Mary Mycio

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/communism-mary-mycio

When communism collapsed in Europe 30 years ago, it seemed vanquished. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be none of those things and broke into 15 independent countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, McDonald’s replaced Marx, and no one argued anymore that real communism still hadn’t been tried.

But old, familiar ideas are making a comeback on both sides of what used to be a great ideological divide. In Russia, Josef Stalin’s approval rating recently reached an all-time high. Meanwhile, American millennials’ stated approval of communism and socialism has been steadily rising in polls. After the fascism panic of Donald Trump’s presidency, driven and capitalized on by the media and publishing industries, it’s not surprising that the American left often sees historical evil even in ordinary populism. That the 20th century’s other murderous totalitarianism is gaining popularity in response, however, is alarming.

Some attribute this trend to the failures of capitalism after the Great Recession, which gave rise to the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders and his own brand of socialism, which he claims to be like Denmark’s (which isn’t actually socialist). Another reason may be that the United States simply hasn’t had a communism panic for more than a generation. And why should it? Who cares about a defeated adversary? After 1991, the Reds weren’t coming for anyone. Then again, Nazis haven’t enjoyed a reputational bounce back since their defeat the way the Soviets have. There is no Godwin’s law for Stalin.

A better explanation is that Americans and others across the West have simply forgotten about it all, or never learned about it in the first place: the Soviet dictators, the purges and terror, the dissidents and refuseniks, the gulags and famines and genocides, the millions shot, starved, worked, and frozen to death. All of it hardly exists in our common imagination. Most Americans have no idea what Soviet communism, which was still around relatively recently, actually looked like.

Communism and Nazism both used state violence to commit mass murder and impose a single ideology on entire populations, but they did it for different reasons. Put simply in contemporary terms, the Nazis imposed inequality to achieve racial supremacy, while the Soviets imposed equality to achieve a universal utopia. Both murdered millions, but the Soviet project naturally found more gullibly receptive audiences abroad over a longer period of time.

To take a relevant metaphor, Americans have a certain herd immunity to Nazism and fascism. The early warning signs have been deeply etched into our psyches with the rich and terrible tapestry of books, movies, and art about the Holocaust. Like T-cells in the immune system, constant exposure to the legacy of fascism is part of our cultural memory. We know what it looks like and where it leads, and we have the antibodies to stave it off. It persists on the margins, of course. But it’s far from mainstream.