FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Stop Negotiating With Wolves The consequences of not learning from history and tradition. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stop-negotiating-with-wolves/

Last week an event took place that illustrates the folly of negotiating with passionate ideologues and autocrats with whom there is no common ground for a meeting of the minds necessary for a true agreement. This practical wisdom, based on human experience going back 28 centuries to Homer, has been forgotten by most modern Western leaders and foreign policy hands, who believe that negotiations, non-lethal “engagement,” and persuasion can override an autocratic adversary’s passionate interests and ambitions that by nature conflict with our own.

The occasion was a three-day, humiliating meeting that our Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, attended in China. As Gatestone Institute’s Gordon Chang reported, “China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for [Blinken’s] arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane.”

Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think-tank told Gatestone, “Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.”

So much for the “rules-based new world order” that the West thinks the Rest actually follow rather than engage tactically. But that assumption is a delusion, as Beijing has demonstrated even since George W. Bush welcomed China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, whose protocols and rules China has serially violated and gamed. And why shouldn’t it? What have been the material consequences for doing so? Or for ignoring contemptuously our diplomatic statements of  “concern,” or other finger-wagging scoldings?

For example, one of Blinken’s tasks, Matt Pottinger writes in the Journal, during his visit was to repeat Joe Biden’s warning to China two years ago not to provide Russia with materiel and resources to support its war in Ukraine. Biden had also claimed that if Xi continued to do so, “he made sure the Chinese president understood he would ‘be putting himself in significant jeopardy’ and risking China’s economic ties with the U.S. and Europe if he materially supported Russia’s war.”

Of course, nothing significant followed Biden’s stern but empty warning.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

LEE SMITH: WHY IS BIDEN SAVING HAMAS

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/saving-hamas

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army’s tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

A day after the massacre, before Israel’s campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government’s “advocacy for a cease-fire.” It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted, since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel’s vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely defensive posture.

The Biden administration has stopped Israel from entering Rafah by demanding it produce plans to protect the civilian population, piously insisting that “even one civilian death is too many.” That would be a hard task in any military scenario, but given that Hamas hides among noncombatants, the White House’s policy openly reinforces the terror group’s political and military strategy.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids? Francis Menton

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-7-the-campus-kill-the-jews-riots-paid-professional-agitators-funded-by-democratic-big-wigs-or-well-meaning-kids

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question. At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.”).

The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

Several news organizations have been doing serious digging to get to the bottom of this. In this post I’ll highlight the work of three of them:

The New York Post, which has had a story on this subject nearly every day for the past week and more. Examples include a May 1 piece by Olivia Land (“Notorious anti-Israel protester Lisa Fithian, paid $300 a day to teach activists, spotted among Columbia rioters”); a May 2 piece by Joe Marino, Craig McCarthy and Emily Crane (“Nearly half of anti-Israel protesters arrested at Columbia, City College weren’t students: police”); and a May 5 piece by Chris Nesi (“Radical anti-Israel nonprofit urged rampaging Columbia occupiers to recreate BLM ‘summer of 2020’ riots”);

Tablet, with a piece by Park MacDougald on May 6 (“The People Setting America on Fire: An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests”); and

Politico, with a piece by Shia Kapos on May 5 (“Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors”).

ISRAEL, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Israel’s Newest Security Threat – Is the US Next? by Robert Williams

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20623/israel-china-security-threat

“The Chinese are imposing a kind of sanction on us. They don’t officially declare it, but they are delaying shipments to Israel…. In electronic products, there are tens of thousands of components, but if even one component doesn’t arrive, we cannot deliver the product.” — Unnamed senior figure in a factory, Ynet, December 24, 2023.

Also immensely disturbing is that “massive” amounts of advanced Chinese military equipment were found in Gaza by the IDF during its military operations there.

“[I]f you set up systems with technology for critical infrastructure, like electricity, energy, water, transport, these are tied to one another. One can be used to bring the other down.” — Harel Manshari, Head of Cyber at the Holon Institute of Technology and research fellow at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, JNS, January 8, 2024.

China recently hosted delegations from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah faction, ostensibly to facilitate “unity” between the two factions, all the while pretending to be a neutral mediator interested in peace in the region.

Is the enemy, already inside Israel’s gates, also inside the US?

The Iranian-orchestrated Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 — which resulted in mass rapes, the murders of 1,200 men, women, children and infants; taking more than 250 hostages and firing thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities — has shown that China, which Israel might have thought was an ally, turned out to be, sadly, more of an enemy.

China refused to condemn Hamas and its terrorist invasion of Israel, choosing instead to condemn Israel just a week after the massacre and before Israel had even launched its ground operation in the Gaza Strip.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz My Kingdom for an Adult Amid the depressing dominance of childish and thuggish behavior on campuses, some public officials have emerged to show real leadership.

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-higher-educations-leadership-problem

Now that the tents have been cleared from Columbia University’s campus, now that the NYPD has liberated Hamilton Hall, now that arrests have been made and outside agitators named, it’s time to begin making sense of the Tentifada. Mysteries abound: Who paid for all that matching, high-end camping gear? How did the same violent playbook spread from one campus to the next overnight? And what must we do now that the young collegians have made it clear that there’s more mayhem coming?

Let’s hope that our more astute observers get answers to these questions. But we have a more pressing duty: that of observing how various men and women in positions of power and authority acted when the barbarians stormed the gates.

First up: Columbia president Minouche Shafik. If you knew nothing about Shafik, or Columbia, or modern universities, and wanted to ascertain how the president might meet the troubling moment, you wouldn’t have needed to look past one number: $13.64 billion. That’s the value of Columbia’s endowment as of last June; it’s also, more or less, the Gross Domestic Product of Moldova, Rwanda, and a host of other smallish nations. With so much money at stake, it’s likely that anyone in Shafik’s position would have reacted as she did, with a symphony of bluster, obfuscations, and half-truths designed to make sure that business proceeds as usual.

Testifying before Congress in April, for example, Shafik delivered sweeping, emotive statements, such as saying that “for me, personally, any discrimination against people for their Jewish faith is anti-Semitism.” But when asked whether she intended to discipline Professor Joseph Massad, who celebrated the massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 as “awesome,” Shafik merely said that the errant teacher was “spoken to.” When pressed further about Massad’s employment status, the president replied that she just wasn’t sure.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Raymond Kelly, Hannah E. Meyers Let Officers Control Unruly Protests City leaders should work to restore authority and flexibility to law enforcement.

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/let-officers-control-unruly-protests

Since October 7, New York City has seen nearly 2,000 protests—about 12 protests per day, averaging 135 people each, though bridge-blocking actions can number up to 10,000 protesters. Indeed, unruly anti-Israel demonstrators in New York City have blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, Holland Tunnel, Columbus Circle, United Nations, John F. Kennedy International Airport, the New York Public Library, and, bizarrely, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The protesters are breaking the law by obstructing traffic, resisting arrest, and committing other acts of disorderly conduct. They are also harassing Jews and Jewish institutions, contributing to the tripling of anti-Semitic hate crimes between the first three months and last three months of 2023.

Where are New York’s police and prosecutors in all this? They are hamstrung by permissive state law, new city restrictions on police, and the decriminalization of “low-level” offenses. City leadership can restore order, but so far, it’s failing to do so.

Start with Mayor Eric Adams. In September, the mayor approved a settlement in a lawsuit brought against the city and police department by 2020’s “racial justice” demonstrators, the New York Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Aid Society, and state attorney general Letitia James. Adams praised the decree as “a collaborative process” that struck a balance between public safety and protesters’ rights of free expression. It does no such thing. Instead, the settlement has crippled the NYPD’s ability to keep demonstrations under control, contributing to the anti-Semitic disorder breaking out in city streets.

The settlement reduces officer discretion by creating four “tiers” for escalating law enforcement. It institutes “red light” offenses that require senior brass to authorize any arrest, even if they’re not on the scene. It dictates the number of officers permitted at demonstrations, specifies the units they can belong to, and determines what equipment they can bring. And its “kettling” ban—to use a tendentious term for ordinary crowd-control tactics—ties officers’ hands in the event that safety demands large-scale arrests.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Don’t Let the Left Demoralize You Into Staying on the Sidelines By Albin Sadar

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/08/dont-let-the-left-demoralize-you-into-staying-on-the-sidelines/

The left wants you demoralized to keep you planted on the sidelines. But you know down deep that you need to get in the game—while you still can. Don’t let them keep you from “fighting the good fight.

When former Soviet KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov defected to the West from Russia, he set about exposing the strategies used within the KGB to spread propaganda and keep the Soviet people in line with the agenda of their political overlords. There were myriad tactics employed in this campaign of what today has been labeled mis- or dis-information.

One of the most effective tools for subjugation in the former Soviet Union was known as “demoralization,” which Bezmenov explained this way:

Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures… he will refuse to believe it. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

You can learn more about this particular method and many other tools of keeping citizens compliant by viewing an interview Bezmenov gave to Canadian television back in 1984. I also expand on the effects of demoralization in a key chapter titled “What Prevents People from Seeing the Truth?” in my new book, Obvious: Seeing the Evil That’s in Plain Sight and Doing Something About It.

As we can see, demoralization brings about an attitude of “What’s the use?” And excuses such as, “You can’t fight The Machine.” And inaction associated with, “If I stand up, will anyone join me?”

In Religionless Christianity, the new book by best-selling author Eric Metaxas, Metaxas outlines many “idols” employed by Christians to rationalize in their own hearts and minds their reasons to stay on the sidelines of the present-day fight to preserve basic tenets of America’s foundation. In a world where “evil is called good and good evil,” many people who fill church pews Sunday after Sunday are sitting this one out.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

How China Exports its Totalitarian Ideology to the Rest of the World The CCP: coming to your neighborhood very soon. by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-china-exports-its-totalitarian-ideology-to-the-rest-of-the-world/

Rev. Bob Fu was a former student leader during the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. He was a house church leader in Beijing until he and his wife, Bochun “Heidi” Cai, were imprisoned in 1996. In 1997 he was exiled to the U.S. In 2002, he founded ChinaAid in Philadelphia to promote religious freedom and rule of law in China.

Fu has since been raising awareness regarding the totalitarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how it affects the international community while striving to help persecuted minorities and prisoners of conscience in his country of birth.

In a recent interview with CBN News, Fu calls China “a real police state.” He says that facial recognition cameras are used to track every move of every individual in China. “There are two face recognition cameras following each citizen everywhere in China,” he says.

In a comprehensive report, journalist Alfred NG also confirms:

“China’s facial recognition system logs nearly every single citizen in the country, with a vast network of cameras across the country. A database leak in 2019 gave a glimpse of how pervasive China’s surveillance tools are — with more than 6.8 million records from a single day, taken from cameras positioned around hotels, parks, tourism spots and mosques, logging details on people as young as 9 days old…

Chinese officials have used surveillance tools to publicly shame people wearing sleepwear in public, calling it ‘uncivilized behavior.’

The punishing of these minor offenses is by design, surveillance experts said. The threat of public humiliation through facial recognition helps Chinese officials direct over a billion people toward what it considers acceptable behavior, from what you wear to how you cross the street.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s No Longer Cool To Be A Democrat

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/08/hey-kids-its-no-longer-cool-to-be-a-democrat/

The signs are everywhere. The nation’s youth are waking up to the fact that the Democratic left – with its preening, humorless self-righteousness, its relentless judgmentalism, its mask-wearing Hamas-cheering campus-trashing college crybabies, its hypocritical pampered elites, and its octogenarian president who thinks he can buy young people off with abortions, dope, and bailouts – is totally uncool.

It’s about time. Now we just need a national anti-smoking-like campaign to sustain it.

There are so many recent moments showing this shift in attitude that it’s hard to narrow down the list. But here’s a sampling:

A CNN poll found that 51% of 18-34-year-olds say they will vote for Donald Trump in November, compared with just 40% who say they will vote for Biden. That’s a stunning turnaround from four years ago.
James Carville, that pugilistic former Clinton adviser posted a video in which he says: “It’s horrifying our numbers among younger voters, particularly younger blacks, younger Latinos … younger people of color. Particularly males. We’re not shedding them, they’re leaving in droves.” He later proceeded to mock these same voters, collectively calling those who won’t show up to vote Democratic “you little fu***ing 26-year-old.”
New York Times correspondent Jennifer Medina says that the reason many young Latinos are leaving the Democratic plantation is that, while “many of these voters are the children of lifelong Democrats. They find Trump’s anti-establishment energy subversive and appealing.”

Meanwhile, the college protests have succeeded only in making young leftists look like racist pansies who are trashing campuses to defend …. Hamas? A certified terrorist organization whose mission statement is to destroy Israel?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Biden And Trump Neck-And Neck, But Most Americans Think Trump Will Win: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/08/biden-and-trump-neck-and-neck-but-most-americans-think-trump-will-win-ii-tipp-poll/

President Joe Biden has a tenuous lead over lawfare-challenged former President Donald Trump, but continues to show weakness among key voting groups that he needs to win a second term in office, the latest numbers from the May I&I/TIPP Poll show.

The national online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from May 1-3, included 1,264 responses to a number of questions about the upcoming 2024 presidential election. The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.8 percentage points.

Our main question was to ask registered voters about a straight, head-to-head matchup between Biden and Trump. More specifically, voters were asked to choose among Biden, Trump, “not sure” “other” and “prefer not to answer” as possible responses.

In this matchup, Biden comes out ahead 42% to Trump 40%, but remember the margin of error is greater than that, so statistically it remains a tossup. Among other answers, 10% chose “other” over either of the main candidates, while 7% said the weren’t sure.