Ban Ki-Moon Gets It Wrong Shoshana Bryen

https://www.newsweek.com/ban-ki-moon-gets-it-wrong-opinion-1605816#slideshow/183474

Ban Ki-moon, former secretary-general of the United National, has had a thought. It is, unfortunately, not a good one. Acknowledging that the Oslo Accords are a failure (true), he then posits two things.

First, that the Israelis and Palestinians must recognize “the fundamental asymmetry between [them]. This is not a conflict between equals that can be resolved through bilateral negotiations, confidence-building measures or mutual sequencing of steps—the traditional conflict-resolution tools.” (Both untrue and true.)

Second, the negotiation failure is because “Israel has pursued a policy of incremental de facto annexation in the territories it has occupied since 1967, to the point where the prospect of a two-state solution has all but vanished.” (Just untrue.)

It is not a “conflict between equals,” but it is true that “confidence-building” and so forth will not work—because the Palestinians remain in a self-avowed state of war with Israel. It is the last remnant of the pan-Arab war against the Jewish state that began before 1948 and is now slowly resolving as follows: “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Those words should sound familiar to Ban because they are from UN Resolution 242, adopted in the wake of 1967’s Six Day War. Starting with Egypt and Jordan, followed by the Sunni Gulf states, then Sudan and Morocco openly as well as other Arab and African countries quietly, the normalization movement represents precisely the “new approach” Ban seeks.

Op-Ed: Jews becoming commonplace in conservative ‘new media’Benyamin Korn (2011)

Excerpt:

Significant relative newcomers include bloggers such as Ted Belman of IsraPundit, Dan Greenfield of SultanKnish and Ruth King of Ruthfully Yours, along with sites such as Israel Matzav, YidWithLid, Yeshiva World News and the Yiddish-titled but English-language Vos Iz Neias? (What’s New?).

Psychoanalysis in the Age of Apology Stephen Rittenbarg, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/psychoanalysis_int_he_age_of_apology.html

The age of apology has now extended beyond the political world to the psychotherapeutic consulting room. The American Psychoanalytic Association has offered a heartfelt mea culpa for trauma caused to LGBTQI patients.

Ever since it emerged from the Viennese consulting rooms of Sigmund Freud, political Utopians have used psychoanalysis to diagnose and cure social ills. From early Freudo-Marxists like Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Reich to Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman in the 60s, they argued that neurosis would disappear once the repressive chains of capitalism were broken. Unlike Freud, who viewed human beings as the authors of their own psychological misery, the Freudo-Marxists viewed happiness as the natural human condition, corrupted by external institutions like religion and capitalism. It is therefore the duty of psychoanalysts to align themselves with their patients’ struggles against those patriarchal institutions. Despite their efforts, utopia never arrived and so, like other revolutionaries, they turned on one another, demanding confessions and apology. In the Soviet Union, those who did not share the utopian faith were themselves ‘analyzed,’ given psychiatric diagnoses and locked up in mental hospitals. So far in this country, dissidents have not been hospitalized. Instead. they must confess to having been misguided and been the cause of the very pain they supposedly sought to cure. If they don’t they risk expulsion from the ‘woke’ community of analysts.

Utopian yearnings never die, but since they can never be realized, scapegoats must be found.

Recent Petitions Singling Out Israel for Condemnation Are Anti-Semitic by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17519/israel-petitions-antisemitic

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats.

Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups….

“Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.” — Thomas L. Friedman.

There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: “Who is to blame for all of Germany’s evils?” And before the crowd can shout “the Jews,” a man in the front row screams out: “The bicycle riders.” Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, “Why the bicycle riders?” To which the man responds, “Why the Jews?” …. There is no good response.

Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

Let there be no doubt that the recent spate of one-sided petitions singling out Israel for condemnation are motivated by hatred of Israel, precisely because it is the nation state of the Jewish people.

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats. Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups that seem to focus more on Israel than on their own mission to improve the lives of their members.

Defund the FBI  Republicans need to abandon their longtime, reflexive  loyalty to the FBI. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/defund-the-fbi/

It’s been a gold star week for the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nearly six months after the events of January 6, the FBI, under the direction of Joe Biden’s vengeful Justice Department, is accelerating the nationwide manhunt for anyone involved. Since June 23, agents have arrested 17 people from Florida to California. Charges range from assaulting police officers and criminal trespassing to something called “destruction of property in special maritime and territorial jurisdiction and aiding and abetting.”

The dragnet is part of the nonstop campaign of terror unleashed by the Biden regime against the political Right. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing and Capitol protesters to terrorists, pledged the “Capitol breach” probe would be his top priority. Garland last week bragged in a press release that his department reached the “benchmark” of arresting 500 people and warned he would “hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable” for their actions that day. His prosecutors routinely ask the courts to keep the accused behind bars awaiting trials that won’t start until late this year or perhaps even 2022; dozens have been held for months in a D.C. jail that specifically houses January 6 defendants.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, despite assurances his agency treats all protesters the same regardless of partisan affiliation (LOL), is happy to assist Garland in his mission. Wray insists “domestic violent extremists”—code for Trump supporters—pose the greatest security threat to the country.

When Collaboration Is Capitulation “Consensus” in the American education establishment is not a recommendation. It is a warning. By Peter W. Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/when-collaboration-is-capitulation/

In response to my article “Counterfeit Civics,” and in defense of Educating for American Democracy (EAD), Paul Carrese and James Stoner are not only eloquent but also persuasive on one important point: they personally uphold the good intentions of this plan to transform American education. Beyond that we enter into disagreements, both over the general intellectual tenor of EAD and what the alternatives to it might be. They also attribute to me several views that I do not hold.

But let’s start with a point of easy agreement. Carrese and Stoner urge that “Conservatives should read the Educating for American Democracy documents for themselves, not be led by repeated caricatures that give no indication of having studied and digested the entire project.” I agree. In fact, I provided links to those documents in my article for American Greatness and called for a “close” reading of the same. Anyone who recognizes the importance of this major public policy proposal really should devote the time to read it in its entirety, including the footnotes, and not just the Roadmap, but also the full report.

Better still would be to go further by digging into some of the source material and the controversies that underlie EAD. The proposal did not spring up from the deliberations of the steering committee, the six task forces, the two working groups, the advisory council, and the corresponding principal investigators without drawing deeply from the well of collective wisdom in contemporary educational theory and practice. That, of course, is part of the problem. 

EAD represents “consensus”—“a national-consensus, collaborative effort across philosophical and political differences,” as Carrese and Stoner put it. That is to say, EAD represents the views of the same educational establishment that has brought ruin to much of American K-12 education. “Consensus” in this case is not a recommendation. It is a warning.

Schooled in Hate Teaching black kids in public schools to hate the police. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/schooled-hate-richard-l-cravatts/

When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.

At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,

The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.

More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.

It’s 1776 All Over Again Corporatist elite power vs. individual liberty. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/its-1776-all-over-again-joseph-hippolito/

As the nation prepares to celebrate the 245th anniversary of its independence, Americans face perhaps their biggest existential crisis, one reflecting the issues that led to the Revolutionary War.

That crisis extends beyond critical race theory and Covid-19 vaccination. Those issues merely reflect a far deeper crisis: the demand by the powers-that-be for Americans to think of themselves as subjects rather than citizens.

Silverton, Colo., a town with about 600 residents, provides a succinct illustration. On June 14, Mayor Shane Fuhrman unilaterally banned the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings of the town’s trustees. When 10 people and two trustees responded by rising to recite the pledge, Fuhrman threatened to expel anyone who followed suit.

“To tell members of the public they are not allowed to say the Pledge of Allegiance during public comment and threaten to have them removed … violates every single one of their First Amendment rights,” Trustee Molly Barela told Denver’s KDVR-TV.

Meanwhile, school boards planning to implement critical race theory and transgender policy face passionate resistance from parents and students across the country. In Loudoun County, Va., opposition erupted after the school board fired a physical education teacher who expressed opposition to transgender policy during a board meeting. One parent, a spokesman for a group seeking to recall the board’s members, said the board wanted to stifle the parents’ role in their children’s education.

In response, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe dismissed concerns about critical race theory as conspiracy theories.

Yet critical race theory reflects the Maoist approach to Marxist revolution, as FrontPage Magazine reported in “Beijing’s Lies Matter.” As Mao said in 1963: “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Black theologian James Cone developed critical race theory while two activists and scholars, Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, crystallized Marxist thought on “white supremacy” and “white privilege.” Allen and Ignatiev joined the Maoists when splits arose among American communists.

Elsewhere, influencers tell Americans to “trust the science” while demanding mass vaccination against Covid-19. Influencers even advocate “vaccine passports” to ensure compliance by holding shopping, employment and school attendance hostage. On Tuesday, the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan announced that all employees must be vaccinated by Sept. 10 or lose their jobs.

Celebrating Freedom in the Shadow of Tyranny Amidst the barbecues and fireworks – remembering with gratitude the words of the Declaration. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/celebrating-freedom-shadow-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

This year we celebrate our nation’s birth at a time when the foundational ideas that animated our break with England are under siege throughout our political, business, educational, and cultural institutions. The iconic preamble to the Declaration of Independence–– “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”––is under assault, and tyrannical ambition continues to undermine the infrastructure of our liberty.

We focus so frequently on that world-changing preamble that we forget the bulk of the Declaration is a detailed indictment of George III in terms that evoke Classical tyranny, which Aristotle defined as “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will.” The cost of that tyranny is the weakening both of political freedom limited by the tyrant’s will; and of the independence necessary for self-government and full human dignity.

The Declaration, then, contrasts unalienable rights and political freedom with their opposite, tyranny, laying the foundations of a government that by design checks the excesses of power that destroy both independence and freedom. Rather than depend, as the Left has done since the French Revolution, on the progressive improvement of human nature, the Founders believed that people are by nature driven by “passions and interests,” as Madison called them. These forces motivating human destructive action cannot be eliminated or improved either by greater knowledge or by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called technocratic oligarchs. Rather, political institutions must divide and balance power so that “ambition counters ambition,” preserving the freedom of all, and forestalling tyranny whether of the minority or the majority.

A century of progressive assaults on the Founders’ architecture has weakened this defense against tyranny. Power has increasingly been expanded and concentrated in the federal government and its agencies. These bureaucracies are insulated from accountability to the people, and unconstitutionally combine the three functions of government––legislative, judicial, and executive––into one institution backed by the coercive power of the state.

Hence the overweening actions of agencies such as the IRS or the EPA, both of which under the Biden administration have seen their powers and funding increase. And who can forget the feckless arrogance of the NIH and the CDC during the pandemic, as it serially revised its diktats, on everything from masks to the virus’ origins, with every shift of the political winds? Or the Small Business Administration and the USDA illegally doling out grants on the basis of race?

Fauci vs. the Science By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fauci-vs-the-science/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently said that disagreement with him is usually just disagreement with the science. He also keeps insisting that even if the guidance from the CDC on masks is changing, “it can’t hurt” to wear masks.

But the science is in flux. For children, maybe it does hurt. In the Journal of the American Medical Association for Pediatrics, a new paper was published suggesting that the evidentiary basis for requiring children to wear masks was weak and that there was evidence that wearing masks caused children to inhale too much carbon dioxide. The normal CO2 limit is 0.04 percent. The upper safety limit is 0.2 percent. Children wearing masks were getting sometimes as much as 1.6 percent. One can only imagine how much worse it would be if it were — as the CDC initially recommended — a test done on children wearing them outdoors during athletic activities. The authors end, “We suggest that decision-makers weigh the hard evidence produced by these experimental measurements accordingly, which suggest that children should not be forced to wear face masks.” Check it out.