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A Breakout Moment for a New Approach to Iran Neither arms control nor military force is realistic. What would a more practical policy look like?By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-deal-jcpoa-military-biden-ebrahim-raisi-11628101285?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mohammad Khatami, an affable, intellectual cleric who believed in the Islamic revolution but wanted more humanity and democracy in government, unexpectedly won the Iranian presidential election on May 23, 1997. His victory marked the beginning of the Western left’s conviction that the clerical regime was evolving into a less religious and oppressive system.

But that isn’t panning out. Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric renowned for his ruthlessness, became president this week and is the apparent successor to Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. Joe Biden may be forced to answer a question presidents have preferred to avoid: Would Washington use force to stop the development of Iranian nuclear weapons? American presidents since 2002, when the Islamic Republic’s clandestine atomic program was revealed, have declared that Iran’s possessing such arms is unacceptable.

President Biden appears unprepared to unleash the U.S. Air Force, and the administration can’t plausibly argue that opening up more trade hurts the theocracy’s aggressive, Islamist ambitions. This leaves few options beyond economic penalties. The White House probably doesn’t appreciate the irony of its now reportedly contemplating leveling more sanctions on Tehran to coerce Mr. Khamenei to re-enter the nuclear deal, after Mr. Biden and his Iran team derided the sanctions diplomacy of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, with its sunset clauses and nonchalance about aggressive inspections, made sense as an arms-control agreement if the accord was merely one step in a process. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has, in his own way, stated exactly this, endorsing the need to make the agreement “longer, stronger, broader.” That wouldn’t be necessary if the JCPOA actually stopped, as former Secretary of State John Kerry put it, “all pathways” to the bomb and did something about the theocracy’s ballistic missiles and imperialism.

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Hassan Rouhani’s Iranian Presidency Has Been an Abject Failure by Con Coughlin

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17611/iran-rouhani-presidency

[W]ith the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Mr Raisi’s victory in Iran’s indisputably rigged elections in June should be seen not so much as a victory for the country’s ultra-conservative supporters of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a desperate attempt by regime hardliners to protect the Islamic revolution from mounting unrest.

So, far from being the president that transformed Iran’s fortunes for the better, Mr Rouhani will forever be remembered as one of the most disastrous leaders in the country’s history.

When Iranian President Hassan Rouhani leaves office today, Thursday, he will do so in the knowledge that his eight-year term has been little more than an abject failure, both at home and abroad.

Back in 2013, when the 72-year-old Mr Rouhani became Iran’s seventh post-revolutionary president, his central campaign pledge was to improve the country’s economic well-being. In addition he promised to adopt a more liberal approach to domestic policy while seeking to forge a more constructive engagement with the outside world.

Eight years later, with the Iranian economy on its knees and the country facing further international isolation, Mr Rouhani finds himself leaving office with his reputation in tatters and the ruling Islamic regime facing a desperate battle for survival.

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Mr Rouhani’s years of catastrophic misrule is that he is to be replaced by Ebrahim Raisi, known universally by Iranians as the “Butcher of Tehran.”

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SCOOP: California YMCA Hosts Pornographer To Teach Children Art, Holds ‘Youth Only’ Events By Spencer Lindquist

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/04/scoop-california-ymca-hosts-pornographer-to-teach-children-art-holds-youth-only-events/

This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.

On July 20th, the Burbank, California YMCA’s Social Impact Center, which also hosts “youth only” events, hosted an all-ages event called “Pop Art,” where Blake Rodriguez, whose work features pornographic depictions of characters from popular children’s shows, delivered a “painting workshop.”

The Social Impact Center, which touts itself as “Burbank’s first and only LGBTQIA+ Resource Center, posted an advertisement for the event and directly tagged Rodriguez’s art account @blakerodart, which prominently displays a number of deeply disturbing images, including a painting titled “Disney Orgy” that features various Disney characters engaged in group sex. 

One piece of Rodriguez’s work depicted characters from the children’s show “Teletubbies” viewing pixelated pornography. Another painting featured a young boy holding a condom and the words “Fuck Boy” above him. 

All of these disturbing images, as well as many more that also depict nude characters from children’s shows, some of them engaging in sexual acts, were posted before the Social Impact Center tagged his art account and organized this event, indicating the YMCA was completely aware of the type of “art” Rodriguez specializes in before deciding to host him for an event with children. 

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They Don’t Speak for Me The need for free black thought in academia—and beyond Erec Smith

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/african-american-viewpoint-diversity-in-academia

Has this ever happened to you?

You proudly embrace your individuality and freedom of speech, but you work in an environment in which people who neither know you nor agree with your viewpoints are responsible for representing you solely because they look like you. The world treats these “spokespeople” as the de facto experts on what you are all about; when you express a viewpoint that does not align with theirs, they and their listeners see you as an aberration or a misguided soul. Then people start to see you as inauthentic or a cautionary tale of what can happen when someone does not abide by the rules and mandates of the spokespeople.

It is currently happening to me. I’m black, a professor of rhetoric, my environment is academia, and the aforementioned spokespeople are those who insist that they speak for all black academics, if not all blacks, generally. Though such keepers of black authenticity can be found in many places, they present themselves in my field, rhetoric and composition, as proponents of “black linguistic justice.”

What is “black linguistic justice?” It’s the idea that making black students write in standard English is inherently racist. Black students should be allowed to write in “black English.” A manifesto, titled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a Demand for Black Linguistic Justice!” seeks change that it insists will liberate black students from the tyranny of thesis statements and the third-person point of view. The manifesto declares:

As language and literacy researchers and educators, we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.

The hyperbolic statements and dramatic metaphors (academic streets?) don’t stop there. In a separate preface, a prominent black scholar in my field writes about black linguistic justice immediately in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd:

For too long, our field has tolerated and even supported (tacitly or worse) writing programs and literacy teaching, particularly writing instruction, that accede to linguistic racism, to white linguistic supremacy, a supremacy that has kneed the necks of Black speech and Black writing forms through such pedagogies as code-switching or contrastive analysis or write-this-way-here and yo-own-way-there.

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Cultural Marxism is Real, Despite What the Left Says L.S. Bergin

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

ttps://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/07-08/cultural-marxism-is-real-despite-what-the-left-says/

Alex Antic, a Liberal Party senator for South Australia, recently gave a speech to parliament in which he detailed his reasons for entering public life, declaring: “I was tired of watching the political class, including some polyester conservatives, allow the tide of cultural Marxism to wash over us.” To most people these would seem unexceptional sentiments, but online these simple words created a stir. Within the hour a former ABC journalist, a current Guardian journalist and a professor at ACU took to Twitter to proclaim that in using the term “Cultural Marxism” Senator Antic was spreading an anti-Jewish “right-wing conspiracy theory”—a bizarre accusation considering that Antic had immediately followed these comments by praising Judeo-Christian values.

These knee-jerk responses reveal an interesting truth: we really aren’t supposed to talk about Cultural Marxism. And I do mean really. The wider Left and especially those residing in newsrooms or the halls of academia really, really don’t want you to talk about it. They’ve gone so far as to edit the Wikipedia page for the term so that it is now titled “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory” and the first line declares that even mentioning the term is “far-right” and “anti-Semitic”. Search for the term on the Guardian Australia website and you will see the spittle-flecked denunciation the term evokes from amongst our betters.

Yet as far as one can tell, none of the facts around the theory itself seem to be in much doubt. In fact you can find almost the exact same theory referencing mostly the same thinkers under the Wikipedia entry for “Western Marxism”. It seems that this is one of those (ever more common) things that it’s acceptable for the Left to talk about but suddenly becomes unacceptable when the rest of us notice it.

So where did the term “Cultural Marxism” come from? Moreover, what is it? And why don’t they want you talking about it?

Back around the turn of the twenty-first century, an American, William S. Lind, began giving a series of speeches to respectable conservative audiences on the topic of what he called “The Origins of Political Correctness”. Lind had spent a large proportion of his life in Washington analysing defence policy for the United States Senate Committee on the Armed Services. Despite never joining the military himself Lind had served as a mentor for generations of young American officers and was one of the original proponents of the massively influential “fourth-generation war” theory.

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Biden Gets More Aggressive with the Confiscation of Capital By Daniel J. Pilla

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/biden-gets-more-aggressive-with-the-confiscation-of-capital/

The progressive war on wealth spreads to trusts.

The Biden administration is waging and all-out war on wealth. We already know about the plans to:

Raise the top individual income tax rate to 39.6 percent 43.4 percent if the 3.8 percent tax on net investment income is included,
Raise the top corporate tax rate to 28 percent,
Tax capital gains and dividend income as if they were ordinary income (above a certain percentage) and,
Eliminate the stepped-up basis accorded to assets transferred to heirs upon the death of the owner, something that will (effectively) bring many more people into the death tax, and subject others to a double death tax.

What hasn’t been discussed is a provision that’s buried in the 114-page document released by the U.S. Treasury in May. The document, General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal year 2022 Revenue Proposals (the so-called Green Book), broadly explains President Biden’s plan to confiscate vast amounts of wealth from citizens.

I’m referring to the use of trusts as vehicles to preserve family wealth over generations.

That portion of the plan was not discussed at all by Biden during his campaign, nor was it mentioned when he released his plans to “tax the rich” in April. If this element of the plan becomes law, there will be a great deal of consternation among people who have used an estate-planning strategy regularly for many generations — and not just by the richest 1 percent.

A Primer on Trusts

A trust is an entity created by a contract between the grantor (the person setting up the trust) and the trustee (the person who controls the income and assets of the trust). The trustee controls the trust’s assets for the benefit of beneficiaries, the people who ultimately receive the income and assets from the trust.

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America’s ‘Re-Education’ Camps By William Choslovsky

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

 https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/04/americas_re-education_camps_788419.html

We rightly criticize and condemn China for sending more than one million Uighurs – Muslims – to “re-education” camps. At the “camps” the Uighurs are “educated” in a process their Chinese elders describe as “washing brains, cleansing hearts, strengthening righteousness and eliminating evil.”

Again, this is sick and wrong, a human rights abuse, something that should disgust us all.

But we have our own, milder, version of “re-education” camps that indoctrinate, all for a supposed good, evolved cause. We call our re-education camps public schools.

Here is one example, from Evanston, right outside of Chicago, of what first and second graders are now “taught” in school:

DEEMAR V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE CITY OF EVANSTON/SKOKIE

This is not a one-off or a rogue teacher. This is the curriculum, endorsed by the superintendent and school board. 

Likewise, teachers are forced to acknowledge that “white identity is inherently racist.” They are actually separated by race during training. And if teachers object or question the practice, the district brands them “racists.”

Students are also separated at times by race. During “Black Lives Matter Week,” the science department is required to teach a lesson called, “Black Women and Unapologetically Black.” Fifth grade teachers are even required to indoctrinate – I mean “teach” – that “color blindness helps racism.”

Teachers are instructed “to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamic as the proper way to have a family” and instead to promote the “Black Village,” which is a “collective village that takes care of each other.”

Again, this is the curriculum for teaching seven year olds. It covers more than 7,000 kindergarteners through eighth graders attending 15 schools.

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Why the Media is Drawn To Israel Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/analysis/why-the-media-is-drawn-is-to-israel/2021/08/04/

Have you ever wondered why the international media is drawn to Israel?

Arab/Israeli Conflict Offers a Compelling War Story

The late Tamar Liebes, a professor of communication at the Hebrew University, opined that the Israeli-Arab conflict offers a compelling war story in which the front lines are frequently shifting, the front and rear boundaries are not clearly defined, they cannot be excluded, there is often no clear winner, and the media’s focus is on “the unexpected within the expected.” The ongoing nature of the war has created a longstanding infrastructure of foreign correspondents, facilitating the opportunity for other reporters to file stories once they arrive on the scene.

The best method to evaluate the significance of a story to a news organization is to count the number of staff assigned to the country asserts Israeli Journalist Matti Friedman. When Friedman was a correspondent at the Associated Press, the agency hired more than 40 staffers to cover Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. This was considerably more than the AP employed in China, Russia, India, or in all the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was even greater than the entire number in the nations where the “Arab Spring” ultimately broke out.

According to the Foreign Press Association in Israel, there are currently 380 members representing TV, radio, photojournalists, print and web media from 32 countries in the country. Journalist Stephanie Gutmann said this comparatively large number of permanently assigned journalists, which at times included a hundred or more free-lance journalists, writers, photographers, and film makers who were in search of a new angle on the conflict or an exposé.

Danny Seaman, who for approximately 10 years served as director of the Israel Government Press Office (GPO), which is part of the Office of the Prime Minister and responsible for the foreign media in Israel, is concerned that the large number of reporters come to Israel instead of other countries where there is a conflict, because Israel makes it very easy for them.  Israel is a modern, open, democratic state and in terms of size quite manageable. Though there are no new approaches to understanding the Arab/Israeli conflict, this does not stop the reporters from trying to find new ones in the hope of winning a Pulitzer Prize.  It is “like there’s nothing else going on in the world,” Seaman said.

He is also disturbed they come to Israel without the slightest notion of what is happening in the country. They meet Arabs and Israelis from the same socio-economic background, and the journalists “live off” what they learn from their colleagues and Haaretz, Israel’s oldest, most influential daily newspaper and the newspaper most critical of Israeli government policies.

Israel No Longer “Enjoys the Benefit of the Doubt”

Zev Chafets, a former director of the Israel Government Press Office (GPO) and a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, said there was a period in the Middle East, when American journalists and editorial writers favored Israel over the Arab states because Israel is an open society. Once reassessing Israel’s policies became in vogue, many editors and correspondents adopted a “neutral” and an “even handed” approach in their reporting. Israel no longer enjoyed “the benefit of the doubt.” those with “little or no ideological bent” relished in debunking “myths” about the Jewish state. In their quest for a new slant on the conflict, they found one. “Arabs biting Jews had long ceased to be news; but Jews biting Arabs—that was a story.”

Systematic Effort to Manipulate The Media

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When Confidence in Our Institutions Collapses By Charles Lipson

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/08/04/when_confidence_in_our_institutions_collapses_146188.html

Sometimes, stories that appear unrelated share common foundations and have cumulative effects, far more serious than any one does individually. Highlighting these common features tells us something profound about our society and its troubles. That’s the case with four stories over the past few days.

The first two involve police. One concerns a New York City gang member who attacked multiple officers and shot one of them. The suspect had more than 25 prior arrests for guns, drug offenses, and other crimes. He was known to be part of a gang affiliated with the “Bloods.” Yet Jerome Roman was roaming the streets, gun in hand, out on bail. It is a story repeated dozens of times each week across the country. The second story involves the inability of Portland, Ore., to recruit police to fight the city’s stunning murder epidemic. For some reason, Portland just can’t find people willing to join the special unit designed to stop the killings.

The next two stories involve a subject that seems far removed from violent crime: COVID masks. One is a news report with photographs of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser celebrating maskless at an indoor party just hours after she had imposed a comprehensive mask mandate on her city, prohibiting exactly her kind of behavior. This was just the latest in a spate of “rules are for thee, not me” actions by Democratic mayors and governors. One of them, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is facing a recall effort. The rest continue along their merry way.

Finally, the ubiquitous Dr. Anthony Fauci, our nation’s top official for infectious diseases, told ABC News this past weekend that wearing masks should not be an individual choice. That statement goes beyond saying masks are desirable, based on public health data. It portends a new round of mandates. President Biden also indicated new, stricter rules are coming.

Is there any connection among these stories about police, murder, hypocrisy, and public health advice? Yes, and it is a connection that illuminates our country’s deepest problems.

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Adam Andrzejewski: Nearly 300 Billion in Foreign Aid Spent by US Government

Posted By on August 4th, 2021

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/08/04/new-report-nearly-300-billion-in-foreign-aid-spent-by-us-government/?sh=6d9463214374

Many Americans would rather spend their hard-earned money elsewhere, according to polling.

The American taxpayer has been generous to foreign countries. Between the years 2013 and 2018, nearly $300 billion in U.S. taxpayer money flowed as “aid” to countries outside the United States.

Each year, the U.S. spent about $47 billion. Half the aid went to Africa and the Middle East in FY2018, the latest year available for these statistics. Interestingly, despite President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda, aid to foreign countries remained virtually unchanged in the first two years of his administration.

This week, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com published an oversight report, U.S. Foreign Aid – How And Where The U.S. Spent $282.6 Billion, Plus Updated COVID-19 Aid & Payments To The UN And Other Agencies. Sinclair Broadcast launched the report on their National Desk and 190 local affiliates with ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX.

Our auditors found that U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.