Saudi Shocker: Temple Mount is Jewish, Muslims Should Pray Toward Mecca By Yakir Benzion

https://unitedwithisrael.org/saudi-campaign-hints-that-temple-mount-is-jewish-muslims-should-pray-toward-mecca/

Saudi Twitter users are playing down the importance of Jerusalem for Muslims, insinuating that the Jews should control the Temple Mount.

Saudi Twitter users have recently been pushing a new line of thought that plays up the importance of Muslims praying towards the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, while downplaying the importance of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Israel National News(INN) reported Sunday.

The controversial campaign appears to be designed to push the message emphasizing the importance of the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina as the holy places of Islam, and to eliminate the importance of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount for Muslims, thereby decreasing any Islamic authority the Palestinians have over the site.

One of the messages reportedly comes from well-known Saudi cartoonist Fahd al-Jabiri, who tweeted that “the direction of the prayers of the Jews is not important to us, what is important to us is only our homeland.”

Another English-language tweet is by a Moroccan user named Ibtissam Zegiga whose profile says he studies Hebrew and wants peace, and calls on “dear brothers and sisters” to join in the movement.

“This recent Saudi twitter movement believes that there is no importance of the temple mount to Muslims, and the waiting for the [Jewish] third temple. A new era, one of peace.”

According to the report, the Saudi campaign is in response to the Palestinian insults online and chants against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia heard at at demonstrations at the Temple Mount after prayers on Fridays. The Saudis have quietly supported the recent Abraham Accords the established peace between four Arab countries and Israel, and that has infuriated the Palestinians.

The reaction of the Saudis is to emphasize that the Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem is simply a mosque like all mosques, but the direction of prayer for all Muslims no matter where they are on the planet is only towards to the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Is America at Risk from Domestic Terrorists? By Philip Carl Salzman

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2021/03/07/is-america-at-risk-from-domestic-terrorists-n1430573

Seriously, can we possibly believe anything that Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats say? Has anything that they have said during the past four years been true?

The collusion in the Russian collusion scandal was between the Hillary Clinton Campaign, the Democrat leadership, the entire Democrat press, networks, and cable news, and our own intelligence and security agencies. Nor was there any predicate for the accusations against President Trump, but rather it was a rationalization of “The Resistance” that Democrats proudly announced, as if it were not a violation of the most basic principle of democracy: a peaceful transition of power. From 2016 through 2018 there were enthusiastic daily reports confirming President Trump’s collusion with the Russians, him being an agent of Putin, and claims that the definitive evidence was about to be revealed. Of course, as we know, there never was any evidence, in spite of two years of investigation by a special prosecutor and a platoon of partisan Democrat lawyers. Since 2018, there have only been sporadic outbursts claiming that Trump was doing Putin’s bidding by Pelosi and her minions, for why let a good lie die? 

Then there were the two—two!—impeachments of Trump, for entirely imaginary offenses, one being a telephone call with the leader of Ukraine, and the other for urging his followers to express their concerns “peacefully and patriotically.” The impeachments of course were really for Trump having beaten the female Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, and having pro-America policies that clashed with Democrat pro-Chinese and pro-United Nations policies from which Democrats have gotten rich, e.g. the Biden crime family. In other words, the impeachments were just the next initiatives in the unconstitutional “Resistance.” 

For the 2020 presidential election, the Democrats activated a wide array of dirty tricks, many unconstitutional in the states where they were carried out, which undermined election security and opened many opportunities for manipulation of the vote. Was the election stolen from Trump? We cannot know for certain, because the substantial evidence has not been considered and adjudicated. Rather than take up the challenge to protect American democracy, courts, including the Supreme Court, flinched and dodged. And now the Democrats are hoping to pass H.R.1, a bill that would put control of elections into the hands of the Democrats in perpetuity, so that there would never be an honest election in America. 

The COVID Hypochondriacs Think They’re Saving the World, But They’re Actually Destroying It Scott Morefield

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2021/03/08/the-covid-hypochondriacs-think-theyre-saving-the-world-but-theyre-actually-destroying-it-n2585854

The United States recently passed a grim “milestone” of sorts with over 500,000 deaths being attributed in some way to COVID-19. What this really means, of course, is that more than 500,000 mostly super-old and/or mostly super-sick people have died who, at some point prior to or at their deaths, discovered COVID-19 in their systems thanks to super-sensitive PCR testing that may or may not have been correct. Sadly, that’s the extent of what we know for sure at this point, though our overlords pretend they know everything while consistently being proven wrong weeks later.

Half a million is a big number, for sure, but around 3 million people die in this country every year, to the tune of well over 7,000 every single day. Yes, there have been excess deaths caused by COVID, but those are probably two-thirds of that grim number we constantly see on the TV ticker. Further, overall deaths over the coming years are likely to be significantly lower as we find that COVID-19 took many people weeks and months earlier than they otherwise would have gone.

I don’t point these things out to be insensitive or disrespectful of the dead, but I do think society has lost all sense of perspective. All death is tragic and sad, especially for those who lose loved ones, and my intention is not to minimize any of it. It is, however, my responsibility to point out that, as absurd as it sounds, a significant proportion of the population of this country seems to have forgotten that we are all, at some point, going to die. Indeed, even as 500,000 were dying of or with COVID-19, 660,000 others were dying of heart disease, and 600,000 were dying of cancer. Where, pray tell, is the national memorial for them?

Democrats And Corporate Media Are Starting To Admit ‘There’s A Real Big Problem At The Border’ By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/08/democrats-and-corporate-media-are-starting-to-admit-theres-a-real-big-problem-at-the-border/

While the Biden administration continues to deny that there is a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, concerns over safety, national security, and even health grow among Democrats and the corrupt corporate media.

One Democratic representative in Texas said it doesn’t matter if the current administration labels it a challenge or a crisis, those in charge of the situation now are responsible for handling the large and unmanageable influx of migrants.

“Look, we can play with words, is it a challenge or is it a crisis,” Rep. Henry Cuellar said. “Let’s look at the numbers. Since August of last year, the numbers have been increasing. And especially October, November, and December we were hitting 70,000. In January we had 78,000. And this is, again, under the Trump administration, now moving into the Biden administration.”

He also suggested that the administration is purposefully hiding how many people, potentially infected with COVID-19, are being released from holding centers into the U.S.

“I don’t care what we call it, but I can tell you this — those numbers of people being released, they’re purposefully withholding that information. They’ve been told not to withhold that information. I now know that they’re bringing people from McAllen over to Laredo, processing them in Laredo, and they’re going to release them in my community,” Cuellar said.

Shelby Steele Debunks Critical Race Theory As First Guest On Fox News Podcast With Ben Domenech By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/08/shelby-steele-talks-race-relations-on-new-fox-news-podcast-with-ben-domenech/

Renowned author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Shelby Steele sat down as the first guest on the new Fox News podcast hosted by Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech.

On “Shelby Steele & The Consequences of Courage,” the public intellectual broke down the nation’s latest cultural revolution on race, decrying the social justice movement as one based on the pressure to prove white innocence exploited by the left.

“Critical race theory is bogus,” Steele says. “To me as a minority, demeaning, de-humanizing, I mean, you could go on forever. But it is a currency with which whites can buy innocence in the marketplace. It’s a currency which blacks and other minorities can exercise power in the political arena.”

Steele, who is black, said Americans need to find courage to reject the totalitarian impulses of the social justice movement that demonizes the population as exhaustively racist for exclusive benefits.

“White America has to find a way to restore its moral confidence,” Steele said, emphasizing it requires the courage to “say ‘look, I’m not a racist and I don’t care what you say, whether it agrees with your or doesn’t.’”

For Steele, the consequences of such courage have been far more personal.

PIERS MORGAN: Meghan and Harry’s nauseating two-hour Oprah whine-athon was a disgraceful diatribe of cynical race-baiting propaganda designed to damage the Queen as her husband lies in hospital – and destroy the Monarchy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9338343/PIERS-MORGAN-Meghan-Harrys-nauseating-two-hour-Oprah-whine-athon-disgraceful-diatribe.html?ito=social-twitter_dailymailUK

Salacious.Scandalous.Sanctimonious.Spectacularly self-serving.

Those were just my initial thoughts after ten minutes of the Oprah whine-athon with Meghan and Harry, and while restricting myself to only using words beginning with the letter ‘s’.

By the time I’d finished the whole two-hour orgy of pious, self-indulgent, score-settling twaddle, the steam was erupting out of my ears like an exploding geyser, and my lexicon of rageful epithets extended to the full range of the alphabet.

Never have I watched a more repulsively disingenuous interview.Nor one more horrendously hypocritical or contradictory.

Here we had the Duke and Duchess of Privacy flinging out the filthy family laundry for the delectation of tens of millions of people all over the world, whilst simultaneously bleating about press intrusion.

They moaned about the terrible pain of their royal titles but were also outraged their son Archie wasn’t allowed to be a Prince.

They told of their constant trauma from nasty newspaper stories, but repeatedly insisted they never read any of them.

They claimed they were forced to sign gazillion-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify because Prince Charles cut off their allowance, despite Harry inheriting millions from his late mother Princess Diana and having his entire life bankrolled by the Royal Family.

And so, it went nauseatingly on.

In the middle of a pandemic that has already taken over 2.5 million lives, a staggeringly rich and entitled couple living in a $14 million sun-kissed California mansion wanted us all to know that THEY are the real victims around here.

And then they came for ON BEYOND ZEBRA! Racist imagery is one thing, but we must also beware performance art masquerading as enlightenment. John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-on-beyond

Last week I learned that the copy of Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra that I and my daughters have so enjoyed for years is now officially a collector’s item. The Seuss estate has decided to no longer publish it and five other Seuss books because of their racist imagery.

I get that we might not want to be showing kids some of the images in the other books, where the only black people depicted are exotic, subservient “natives,” or the only East Asian is a Chinese person who “eats with sticks” in To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

However, I was at first perplexed as to just what was now offensive in On Beyond Zebra and had to page through it carefully. I assume that the problem is with one, or perhaps two, pictures in it that could be interpreted as “Orientalist.”

Here – and frankly, perhaps in this response to pictures in the other books as well – I can’t help seeing something more about gesture and virtue signalling than about genuine concern for shaping young minds.

* * *

Like most of the now discontinued books, Zebra is not one of the better-known Seuss titles, but it has always been one of my favorites and has long been a staple at reading time in my home. It proposes an extra twenty “letters” of the alphabet, each shown as “spelling” the name of some classically Seussian weird animal or object. The book is a wordfest, and an utter delight to read. I have especially enjoyed watching my older daughter. gradually learn to read out the passages themselves:

Clarence Thomas Delivers Decisive Ruling in Religious-Free-Speech Case By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/clarence-thomas-delivers-decisive-ruling-in-religious-free-speech-case/

The case, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, centered on how to address violations of civil rights that cause no economic damage.

  W hat could be more American than a religious-free-speech lawsuit with the name Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski? At issue in the case is state-funded Georgia Gwinnett College’s “free speech zone” policy, which Stanley Kurtz has aptly summarized elsewhere on this site:

Georgia Gwinnett’s two tiny speech zones occupy less than 0.0015 percent of the campus, and are open only 18 hours a week. If you want to speak in public or leaflet about politics or religion anywhere on campus on a Friday, for example, it had better be in those tiny zones between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. or you’re out of luck — and even then you’ll have to get authorization three business days in advance.

Student Chike Uzuegbunam, an Evangelical Christian, was told that if he wanted to evangelize his faith to his fellow students, he would have to apply three days in advance for a permit, and then confine his activities to one of the two free-speech zones. After receiving the permit, he was told by campus cops that he could not share his faith even in one of the speech zones, because doing so violated a campus ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s).” (Of course, these days, almost any opinion, especially on matters of faith, will make someone on campus uncomfortable.) So he sued, represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom and supported by Jeff Sessions and the Trump Justice Department. In response, the college changed the policy and tried to get the lawsuit dismissed as moot. Eventually, the issue reached the Supreme Court. And today, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a clear victory for the plaintiffs.

A bit of background: Courts of law do not exist to issue pronouncements in the abstract about constitutional rights and wrongs; federal courts are restricted to deciding “cases or controversies” in which some particular person, entity, or group has suffered a particular injury and that injury can be relieved by the judiciary. Standing to sue is commonly described as having three elements: (1) injury, (2) traceability, and (3) redressability. Injury means that the plaintiff has suffered a concrete, proven harm. Traceability means that the plaintiff’s injury can fairly be said to have been caused by the defendant’s acts. Redressability means that the kind of relief the plaintiff seeks — e.g. money, an injunction, a declaratory judgment — is within the court’s power to provide.

Sarah Taylor: New medication to treat COVID-19 could quickly turn pandemic on its head: ‘It may be the holy grail’

https://www.theblaze.com/news/new-medication-treat-covid-holy-grail?utm_source=theblaze-breaking&utm_medium=email&utm_

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel said over the weekend that experimental drug molnupiravir could “be the future” of coronavirus treatment, according to a Monday report from Fox News.

Siegel predicted the at-home therapeutic, which could hit the U.S. market in four to five months, could be enough to turn the pandemic on its head and prove to be the “holy grail” of COVID-19 treatment.

On Sunday’s “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Siegel said, “It may be the holy grail on this because it was just studied in phase two trials and it literally stopped the virus in its tracks. And there wasn’t any virus found in the patients that were studied.”

First-stage testing on the drug, which is from Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, showed “promising signs of effectiveness in reducing the virus in patients,” the outlet noted.

The drug, according to Fox, would be used at home as a five-day treatment, not unlike how Tamiflu is prescribed to combat the effects of influenza.

Dragon Ships: China’s Naval Threat by Peter Schweizer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17159/china-naval-threat

China’s navy is now the world’s largest. It has been for some time. The U.S. Navy may still rule the oceans, but the Chinese rule the vital trade routes in the South China Sea.

China means to threaten the economic security of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and others. America must remain resolute in the face of this build-up in order to maintain freedom of commerce in the Asian seas.

They would say their naval buildup is “for defensive purposes,” but their neighbors do not buy that for a minute…. [China’s] clear intention, for now at least, is to overwhelm anything in its vicinity that threatens its expansion and domination of the Asian sea lanes.

As the Pentagon also noted in its report, the Chinese Communist Party does not intend for its navy to be merely “a showpiece of China’s modernity or to keep it focused solely on regional threats.” It will grow with China’s ambitions.

Its fourth aircraft carrier, however, is expected to be China’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, and its first to use advanced launching and landing systems…. Thus, China intends to have a blue-water navy to challenge the U.S. in several years.

All the force investments in the world won’t matter if the US fails to impose enough diplomatic and economic costs to alter Chinese behavior.” — Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Deutsche Welle, October 21, 2020.

For Americans used to having the biggest and most modern military forces in the world, it is humbling to realize that China’s Navy is now the world’s largest. It has been for some time. The U.S. Navy may still rule the oceans, but China rules the vital trade routes in the South China Sea.

Pentagon planners know this and have called out China’s work on building both capital ships and the swarms of smaller escort vessels that will project the dragon’s breath across those critical trade routes for years to come. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is building their capability to control and possibly interdict shipping from other Asian nations, mostly as an economic and political lever. China means to threaten the economic security of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and others. America must remain resolute in the face of this build-up in order to maintain freedom of commerce in the Asian seas.