ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s appeasement of Islamists has got to stop The Berlin police chief says Jews and gay people should hide their identities. What has become of Germany?Sabine Beppler-Spahl

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/05/germanys-appeasement-of-islamists-has-got-to-stop/

What was Berlin’s chief of police thinking, when she warned Jews and gay people to hide their identities in certain parts of the city?

In an interview last month in the Berliner Zeitung, Barbara Slowik said: ‘There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay or lesbian to be more careful.’ She also said that while she didn’t want to blame any one group for this, ‘there are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups… and are openly hostile towards Jews’.

The interview has since caused a huge stir in Germany. Sigmount A Königsberg, a leading Jewish-community activist, praised Slowik for ‘so correctly and clearly’ naming the main perpetrators of anti-Semitism in modern Germany. Berlin’s CDU mayor, Kai Wegner, also backed his police chief: ‘She addresses the problems openly, as I expect from her.’ But there has been plenty of outrage, too. The left-liberal Taz newspaper slammed Slowik’s ‘alarmism’ as a gift to right-wingers and conservatives. There is nothing ‘brave’, it argued, in giving voice to what it characterised as anti-Muslim prejudice.

Slowik’s intervention echoes a similarly bleak warning, made several years ago, by the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, Felix Klein. In 2019, he said that he wouldn’t advise Jews to wear the kippah ‘everywhere, all the time’ when out in public. His remarks caused widespread shock and outrage, with many arguing that Germans must never allow there to be ‘no-go areas’ for Jews.

It’s a damning indictment of the German state that now, five years later, the woman whose primary task it is to ensure the safety of Berlin’s streets, is also advising Jews – and now gay people, too – to hide who they are.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

DEI is Deflating The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion mania is ebbing and may be on its way out. By Larry Sand

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/dei-is-deflating/

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has, over the past several years, become part of the fabric of American institutions, notably businesses and schools. In a nutshell, DEI pays no mind to quality but, instead, is a system whereby racial bean counting is the sine qua non of our culture. While this has already been a disastrous policy for all concerned, a recent study delves into the serious damage it has done.

On November 25, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released “Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias.” The study examines whether the themes and materials common in DEI training foster inclusion or exacerbate conflicts and whether such materials promote empathy or increase hostility towards groups labeled as oppressors. The study consists of three experiments—one that focused on race, one on religion, and the other on caste.

As noted by National Review’s Abigail Anthony, although proponents of DEI training claim that they are designed to educate individuals about bias and reduce discrimination, “the study found that participants primed with DEI materials were more likely to perceive prejudice where none existed and were more willing to punish the perceived perpetrators.”

In the experiment that focused on race, the researchers randomly assigned 423 Rutgers University undergraduates into two groups: one control group exposed to a neutral essay about U.S. corn production and the other exposed to an essay that combined material from Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility. After exposure to the essays, participants were presented with the following race-neutral scenario: “A student applied to an elite East Coast university in Fall 2024. During the application process, he was interviewed by an admissions officer. Ultimately, the student’s application was rejected.”

The results showed that participants who were primed with Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s books perceived more discrimination from the admissions officer, despite the absence of any racial identification and evidence of discrimination. Those participants also believed that the admissions officer was more unfair to the applicant, had caused more harm to the applicant, and had committed more “microaggressions.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What the Trump nominees Have Not Done—And Will Not Do The current crew, not their proposed Trump replacements, prompted the sick and tired American people to demand different people. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/05/what-the-trump-nominees-have-not-done-and-will-not-do/

Deflated by the resounding November defeat, the left now believes it can magically rebound by destroying Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees.

Many of Trump’s picks are well outside the usual Washington, DC/New York political, media, and corporate nexus.

But that is precisely the point—to insert reformers into a bloated, incompetent, and weaponized government who are not part of it.

Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, is already drawing severe criticism.

His furious enemies cannot go after his resume, since he has spent a lifetime in private, congressional, and executive billets, both in investigations and intelligence.

Instead, they claim he is too vindictive and does not reflect the ethos of the FBI.

But what will Patel not do as the new director?

He will not serially lie under oath to federal investigators as did interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a current Patel critic.

He will not forge an FBI court affidavit, as did convicted felon and agency lawyer Kevin Clinesmith.

He will not claim amnesia 245 times under congressional oath to evade embarrassing admissions as did former Director James Comey.

He will not partner with a foreign national to collect dirt and subvert a presidential campaign as the FBI did with Christopher Steele in 2016.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump to Hamas: If Hostages Aren’t Released, ‘There Will Be ALL HELL TO PAY’ There’s a new sheriff in town. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-to-hamas-if-hostages-arent-released-there-will-be-all-hell-to-pay/

The President-elect has sent his message urbi et orbi: Hamas must free all the hostages it holds before Trump takes office on January 20, or THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY. More on his warning can be found here: “Trump warns ‘all hell to pay’ if Gaza hostages not released by Inauguration Day,” by Hannah Sarisohn, Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2024:

President-elect Donald Trump took to his platform Truth Social on Monday afternoon following the IDF’s confirmation that Hamas killed American-Israeli Omer Neutra on October 7 and has held his body hostage since.

Trump did not mention Neutra by name but wrote that “everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But it’s all talk and no action!”

Trump continued, saying, “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity.”

Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the “long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump wrote.

“RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!” he said.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Canada’s Cops Stand on Guard – for Hamas Bye Bye, Canada. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/canadas-cops-stand-on-guard-for-hamas/

Montreal. In the 1980s and 90s, when I lived in New York, I made several summertime trips to the Canadian metropolis. It was a beautiful city, pleasant and safe, with a great art museum, plenty of terrific restaurants, and fun nightlife along Rue St. Catherine. If the clerks and cabbies and waiters in Paris responded rudely to my entreaties, invariably delivered in my imperfect but earnest French, their counterparts in Montreal were as genial as could be, at least once it had been established that I was not that dreaded thing, an English-speaking Canadian, but rather an American whose French somehow came out sounding more like their distinctive dialect than like the original version of the language that was the pride of the City of Lights.

Speaking of language, I especially enjoyed walking around Westmount, Montreal’s upscale English-speaking neighborhood, where (as we all recently discovered) Kamala Harris lived when she was in high school. From there – this became an annual routine (or should I say ritual?) – I would walk up a forested slope to the immense St. Joseph’s Oratory, which loomed over the city from the top of Mount Royal. Inside the church, the air was always dense with the scent of hundreds of lighted candles. Nailed to a high wall and lit by candlelight were hundreds of crutches that had been left there over the decades by handicapped people who claimed to have been cured thanks to the prayers they had sent up from this sacred place. Leaving the church by descending its front steps, 283 in all, I would always encounter a sea of people, all of them at the ends of their pilgrimages, and all of them climbing slowly on their knees up to the great church doors, their hearts filled with faith and hope.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Green Energy Apocalypse Plunging ourselves into extinction. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-energy-apocalypse/

Someday our descendants will look back on the Age of Climate Change and marvel how a civilization with so much wealth, scientific knowledge, and sophisticated technologies could have willfully wrecked their economies and plunged themselves into poverty or extinction.

More astonishing to them, this civilizational suicide had been based on an unproven hypothesis like Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming––the idea that human-produced atmospheric CO2 emissions would destroy their civilization unless fossil fuels, the cheap, abundant energy that created the modern world, were abandoned.

Moreover, the portents of that future apocalypse are relentlessly multiplying across the rich Western nations, despite the ever-growing evidence that the hypothesis radically simplifies how a complex global climate works over space and time. More troubling, the proposed solution for lowering emissions enough to stave off the alleged disaster cannot be realized by eliminating fossil-fuels.

Thankfully, the election of Donald Trump offers hope that the suicidal “renewable” energy programs and policies will be rolled back.

For now, resistance to the zero net carbon narrative is growing. Even at the U.N.’s grand climate powwow held in Dubai in January, the UAE’s Minister of Industry, Dr. Sultan Al-Jaber, made the classic gaffe of speaking that truth out loud in front of the conclave of true believers. The Paris Accords’ goal to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 was a chimera: “‘There is no science out there, or no scenario out there that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5,’ Al-Jaber said at an online event on Nov. 21, “adding a pointed barb to the hosts that it would be impossible to stop burning fossil fuels and sustain economic development, ‘unless you want to take the world back into caves.’”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The End of a Scam Rich Lowry

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/the-end-of-a-scam/

Biden was never a wonderful guy, and definitely not the savior of democracy, no matter what his media supporters said.

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen.

Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son Hunter Biden is just the latest evidence.

No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing.

The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling business that was at the root of Hunter’s tax evasion — the president’s son wouldn’t have had any money to evade taxes on if it weren’t for all the foreign largesse.

Every politician ends up shading the truth somewhere along the line, and it was going to be awkward for President Biden to admit that he might pardon his son. When asked about the possibility, though, the president could have said “No comment” or “I’m not going to discuss a hypothetical.”

Instead, he flatly denied it, and his allies wove his denial into a narrative about Biden’s abiding commitment to our system of justice. He was “a president living the rule of law” (MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann) and “a true American who believes in democracy and the way the system is supposed to work” (Joy Behar of The View). Etc., etc.

Now Biden has made all the people who issued these stirring testimonials look like naïfs and hacks.

Their mistake was attributing any grandeur to Joe Biden. He has made a long, undistinguished career of being a middling politician from a small Democratic state and had just enough staying power to become president when he was already a has-been.

In sizing up Biden and Trump, the Democrat’s media supporters could have paraphrased the famous bumper sticker from a 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election featuring two unpalatable choices: “Vote for the unimpressive hack — it’s important.”

Instead, they felt compelled to create an illusory Biden, an epic figure whose amazing personal qualities made him an indispensable buttress of our institutions and norms.

Biden was puffed up into a world-historical figure who had saved American democracy by winning one election against Donald Trump, who, of course, simply came right back to win another against Biden’s chosen successor, Kamala Harris.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer Michigan’s Radical Faculty Program The university’s Collegiate Fellows initiative hires left-wing extremists as professors.

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/michigans-radical-faculty-program

At the University of Michigan (UM), professor Jessica Kenyatta Walker specializes in “critical food studies” and helped develop “in-class activities” on the “racialization of food in the United States.” Professor Adi Saleem’s recent book, Queer Jews, Queer Muslims: Race, Religion, and Representation, focuses on “triangulating the Jewish-Muslim dyad with a third variable: queerness.” Jennifer Dominique Jones, meantime, teaches courses in “Black Queer Histories” and “Black Intimacies.”

These scholars share more than an affinity for critical theory: each was hired through the university’s Collegiate Fellows Program. Established in 2016, the CFP hires postdoctoral fellows who show a “commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The fellows are guaranteed a tenure-track position after two years, bypassing the rigors of a normal competitive job search.

Michigan has previously touted CFP as a success. But after the New York Times published a critical feature on the university’s DEI bureaucracy, UM quietly removed its web directory of faculty hired through program. That directory, accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, lists a total of 44 faculty members. (The UM faculty claim the program has now recruited 55 scholars.) A close look at these scholars and their areas of research demonstrates the perils of screening faculty for their commitment to “diversity.”

Unsurprisingly, CFP administrators heavily favored scholars who conduct their research through the lens of race and gender. Former fellow Rovel Sequiera, now an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, specializes in “global feminist, queer, and trans studies.” Jonathan Cho-Polizzi, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literature, lists “Activism & Radical Diversity” as an area of interest. Margo Mahan, assistant professor of sociology, focuses on the “racial and nativist origins of US domestic violence law.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Biden Cloaks His Legacy in Infamy With the Hunter Biden Pardon Jonathan Turley

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://jonathanturley.org/2024/12/02/liar-in-chief-president-biden-cloaks-his-legacy-in-infamy-with-the-hunter-biden-pardon/

President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.

Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.

In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.”

In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Sinister’ Oxford Union debate on Israel broke law, dons tell Hague Open letter to chancellor calls out ‘failure on all counts’ to protect Jewish students from ‘antisemitism’ for ‘apartheid state’ motion

Posted By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/03/israel-gaza-apartheid-state-genocide-oxford-union-debate/

An Oxford Union debate on Israel in which a speaker described the Oct 7 attacks as “heroism” broke the law, dons have told Lord Hague, the university’s newly elected chancellor.

Baroness Deech, Prof Sir Vernon Bogdanor and the philosopher Prof Peter Hacker are among 300 signatories of an open letter decrying the “inflammatory rhetoric, aggressive behaviour and intimidation” witnessed during the event last Thursday.

The Oxford Union debated the motion: “This house believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide.”

It came after Jonathan Sacerdoti, the son of a Holocaust survivor who was the opposing speaker, wrote a piece for The Spectator accusing the Oxford Union of “disgracing itself” by allowing “the forces of bigotry, hatred and mob rule” to breach a “once proud institution”.

In the letter, the signatories said: “We unequivocally condemn the incendiary remarks made by some speakers in support of Hamas and terrorist violence. Such statements are not only morally reprehensible but also in clear violation of the law.”