Why I am Suing CNN by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures.

So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment.

So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment.

Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest.

I love the First Amendment, I support the First Amendment, I have litigated cases defending the First Amendment. I have written and taught about the First Amendment. And I was a law clerk for the Supreme Court when it rendered its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which “protects media even when they print false statements about public figures, as long as the media did not act with ‘actual malice.'”

But I also understand the limitations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. Here is what CNN did.

Two Campaign Workers for GOP Opponent of Minn. Rep. Ilhan Omar Shot, One Fatally, Amid Deadly Crime Wave By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/17/two-campaign-workers-for-gop-opponent-of-minn-rep-ilhan-omar-shot-one-fatally-amid-deadly-crime-wave/

Two campaign staffers for the Republican congressional candidate running against Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar were shot in Minneapolis on Monday, one of them fatally.

A teenager and another individual who worked on Republican Lacy Johnson’s campaign were both shot outside of a gas station on Minneapolis’ north side. Andre Conley, a 17-year-old outreach coordinator for Johnson’s campaign, was killed in the attack. The other outreach coordinator was taken to the hospital in serious condition and is expected to survive.

Minneapolis has seen homicides spike 87 per cent in the wake of the George Floyd riots and the city council’s efforts to “dismantle the police.”

The staffers were not performing campaign duties at the time of the incident, the Johnson campaign said. According to police, one or more assailants opened fire on a group of people standing in front of the gas station and then fled on foot.

The Left’s Moral Compass Isn’t Broken In order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass. Dennis Prager

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/lefts-moral-compass-isnt-broken-dennis-prager/

All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken.

And all of my life, I was wrong.

Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.

I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.

This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms — what we call “Judeo-Christian” — that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.

But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”

It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class — worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.

Social Media is Not the Cause of our Social Dilemmas Exposing the character rot of social media users. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/social-media-not-cause-our-social-dilemmas-jason-d-hill/

Jeff Orlowski’s documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix is an interesting panoptic exploration of ways in which human minds are allegedly twisted, manipulated, and directed by social media to produce outcomes by programmed algorithms whose creators, in the end, must have had nefarious  motives. On the surface, we may cast them as players in a medieval morality play between good and evil. The evil operatives are the gnomic know-it-alls who somehow must have known that with the invention of the “Like” button on various social media pages and media outlets, they could send recipients into waves of euphoria — while those receiving a “thumbs down” could be sent into paroxysms of rage or, more commonly, paralyzing depression. The social media creators in the film, however, claim that they only wanted to “spread positivity and love in the world.”

The basic thematic thrust of the documentary is predicated on a dubious premise: the idea of an addictive media, the manipulative machinations of its architects and their unwillingness to confront their culpability in creating an addictive social media culture, and the latter’s contribution to the polarization of our society and the proliferation of “fake news.”

This film, which purports to gain some philosophical respectability by an identification with the anti-conceptual moniker, “surveillance capitalism,” presupposes a world of mindless victims; automatons in need of global marketplace regulation from “data extraction” invisible vectors that somehow predict our behaviors and, well, coerce us to do things that we would not do had our brains not been improperly hijacked by the artificially-driven analytics.

Hell hath no fury like peaceniks who get upstaged Though it’s hard to keep track of their disparate gripes, their response to the Abraham Accords makes it easy to spot their hypocrisy.  By  Ruthie Blum

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/hell-hath-no-fury-like-peaceniks-upstaged/

Israeli protesters gathered on Sunday night along the highway to Ben-Gurion International Airport, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to board a flight to the United States.

With their usual chants of “crime minister” and other trite anti-Bibi mantras, these self-anointed guardians of freedom and democracy – members of the so-called “peace camp” – were livid that the premier was on his way to Washington, DC.

That the purpose of his trip was to sign the U.-brokered Abraham Accords – a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates and declaration of peace with Bahrain – didn’t matter to them. On the contrary, it became another excuse for their outrage.

A mere two or so hours earlier, Netanyahu had announced that the steep and steady rise in coronavirus morbidity made a three-week countrywide lockdown necessary. As if this weren’t sufficient cause for exasperation, even among his supporters, his detractors took the opportunity to rail against him for going off to a “cocktail party” at the White House, leaving Israelis ill in every sense of the word, thanks to his government’s failed COVID-19 policies.

Yes, they insist, he is responsible simultaneously for the increasing mortality rate and disintegrating workforce – for opening up the economy too soon on the one hand and for not “having a proper plan” to prevent the spread of the virus on the other.

Who is the ‘oppressed minority’? Police officers! Gamaliel Isaac

https://www.wnd.com/2020/09/oppressed-minority-police-officers/

Exclusive: Gamaliel Isaac notes most cops’ actions are ‘driven by crime and not by race’

Since the Black Lives Matter riots, corporate and academic indoctrination of staff into believing that they are unconsciously racist, that blacks can’t be racist and that police and the system is racist, has been increasing. Employers such as my own list alleged black victims of police racism to justify their indoctrination training. A typical list might consist of the following names: Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Dion Johnson, Michael Brown, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Tamir Rice and George Floyd. These institutions don’t explain why a racist act by a policeman implies anything about whether or not their employees are racist. In addition, if we examine the tragic stories of the people in these lists we discover that they are generally cases of self defense and not racism.

In the tragic case of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend shot a policeman before he and his fellow officers shot back. Tony McDade pointed his gun at a policeman before the policeman shot back. Dion Johnson tried to grab a policeman’s weapon, and in the struggle that followed he was shot. Rayshard Brooks fired a taser at a policeman before he was shot. Atatiana Jefferson pointed a gun at a policeman before he shot her. Tamir Rice pointed a toy gun, whose orange barrel had been removed so that it looked like a real gun, at officer Loehmann who then shot Tamir. Officer Loehmann explained his actions with: “I knew it was a gun, and I knew it was coming out.” Michael Brown ran toward Officer Darren Wilson and wouldn’t stop despite repeated commands to get down on the ground.

Arab-Interest-Based Peace with Israel Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/3kqHaj3

The Saudi position

A brief expose’ of the Saudi position on the Israel-UAE and Israel-Bahrain peace treaties is provided by Salman Al-Dossary, the former editor-in-chief of the influential Saudi daily, Asharq al-Awsat, which reflects the worldview of the Saudi royal family:

“The angry [Palestinian] reaction has confirmed that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was right in its sovereign decision to search for its vision of peace in the Middle East…. The feverish [Palestinian] attack on the new Bahrain-Israel peace agreement confirms not just to Bahrain, but to the rest of the Gulf that the support for the [Palestinian] cause for long decades has resulted in nothing but [Palestinian] aggression, attack and ingratitude…. There is more than one door to peace, not necessarily through the Palestinian Authority….

“In 2011, when Bahrain [a generous supporter of the Palestinians] faced the most dangerous threat [attempted coup] in its modern history… Iran stood behind that coup attempt… while the leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian components continued to strengthen their relationship with Tehran…. Not a single Palestinian demonstration in support of Bahrain too place….  

“The relations with Tel Aviv… are a necessity in light of the current circumstances and the search for peace and stability….”

Current circumstances in the Middle East

While political correctness has been preoccupied and infatuated with the Palestinian issue, the recent peace agreements have shed light on the following Middle East reality:

1. The more lethal the threats of Iran’s Ayatollahs, the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s Erdogan to every pro-US Arab regime, the more realistic is the Arab order of priorities, which increasingly focuses on threats, that transcend the Palestinian issue and disagreements with Israel.

Trumping Palestinian lies and Tehran’s agenda In one fell swoop, Trump set the record straight about Israel and its neighbors. By Ruthie Blum 

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/trumping-palestinian-lies-and-tehrans-agenda-642714

One of the most noteworthy avowals that US President Donald Trump made during his speech on Tuesday, prior to the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords, went by virtually unnoticed by champions and critics alike.
Perhaps this had to do with the fact that he said it early in his address, which was ground-breaking as a whole.

Or maybe it was because his words preceded equally significant statements by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif Al-Zayani.

After opening remarks that included thanking all those who made Jerusalem’s peace treaty with Abu Dhabi and normalization declaration with Manama possible, Trump declared, “For generations, the people of the Middle East have been held back by old conflicts, hostilities, lies, treacheries… lies that the Jews and Arabs were enemies, and that al-Aqsa Mosque was under attack.”

These falsehoods, he said “passed down from generation to generation [and] fueled a vicious cycle of terror and violence that spread across the region and all over the world.”

Yes, the DOJ Should Charge Violent Anti-American Radicals with Seditious Conspiracy By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/2020-election-democrats-promise-to-be-sore-violent-losers/

Attorney General Bill Barr’s critics rehash failed 1990s arguments.

In a conference call last week, Attorney General Bill Barr urged federal prosecutors to be aggressive in filing charges against violent anti-American radicals who are rioting in various cities, attacking government buildings, and targeting law-enforcement officers. The AG reportedly recommended a range of offenses, including seditious conspiracy.

Instantly, according to the Wall Street Journal, “legal experts” warned that the “rarely used statute could be difficult to prove in court and potentially run up against First Amendment protections.”

These are the same arguments that legal experts posited when I charged terrorists with seditious conspiracy for bombing the World Trade Center and plotting to bomb other New York City landmarks in 1993. The experts were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The seditious-conspiracy statute, which is codified by Section 2384 of the modern federal penal code, was actually enacted by Congress during the Civil War — mainly to deal with Confederate sympathizers in free states who were violently sabotaging the Union war effort. As the Journal’s experts observe, it is rarely used. That is not because the crime is especially difficult to prove; it is much more straightforward than many federal crimes. Rather, it is because the conduct at issue — dangerous conspiracies to levy war against the United States, to violently overthrow our government, or to violently oppose the government’s legitimate authority — is historically unusual.

Democrats Promise to Be Sore (and Violent) Losers By Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/2020-election-democrats-promise-to-be-sore-violent-losers/

They know that the media, corporations, schools, and even churches will cheer them on.

W riting in The Atlantic recently, the sober-minded commentator Shadi Hamid says, “I struggle to imagine how, beyond utter shock, millions of Democrats will process a Trump victory.” For Democrats, having failed to cope with the 2016 election, and believing the polls that show a solid Joe Biden lead, another shock Trump win would “provoke mass disillusion with electoral politics as a means of change — at a time when disillusion is already dangerously high.” And it would lead decent folks astray. They would seek remedies “outside the political process, including through nonpeaceful means,” though, “not necessarily out of hope but out of despair.”

Don’t notice the gleam in the arsonist’s eye, he’s really just heartbroken over the fate of the Biden-Harris ticket!

Given Hamid’s premises, why bother even having the election? Why not find a peaceful but extralegal procedure to make Joe Biden president right this second? We could relieve the whole nation of the suspense of what Democrats will do if once again they’ve nominated someone who can’t beat one of the most broadly unpopular political figures of modern times.

For what it’s worth, like Hamid, I’m worried about post-election violence. But my view of the causes is slightly different. Hamid says, “Losers of elections need to believe that they can win the next time around. Otherwise their incentives to play the spoiler increase.” Okay, true enough.

He also says that “the anxiety gripping the two parties is asymmetric.” Joe Biden is a moderate Democrat, he says, and therefore theoretically more acceptable to Republicans, whereas Donald Trump “represents the nativist wing of an already nativist Republican Party.” His conclusion: Biden should win for reasons of civic peace.Now leave aside the claims of leftists, including Obama, that Joe Biden has become much more progressive in his current campaign. And let’s leave aside the question of whether Donald Trump is actually a moderate or liberal Republican on issues such as federal welfare spending. Hamid fails in his analysis because he is unwilling or unable to see things from the other side. Maybe it’s time to practice empathy.