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Mounting Evidence Points to Hezbollah Culpability in Beirut Blast Hezbollah’s central role in Lebanon’s affairs precludes any conclusion but guilt. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/mounting-evidence-points-hezbollah-culpability-ari-lieberman/

Within an hour of the massive explosion that rocked Beirut on August 4, Hezbollah denied any culpability. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, considered a close Hezbollah ally, immediately attributed the blast to the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that ignited after a nearby warehouse housing fireworks caught fire. Lebanese authorities claim that the ammonium nitrate was confiscated from a Russian cargo vessel in 2013 after the ship took a detour from its original destination and docked at the port.

The ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make explosives, was stored at the port for seven years before it blew up with catastrophic consequences. There is ample reason to believe that Hezbollah was responsible for the blast and resulting carnage. The collective evidence is in fact, damning.

First, one must understand that in Lebanon, Hezbollah controls all ports of entry, either directly through force of arms or indirectly, through graft. The obvious purpose is to control the flow of weapons, money and narcotics that pass through these ports of entry. Therefore, it is logical to assume that Hezbollah was aware of the presence of the ammonium nitrate.

In 2008 the Lebanese cabinet headed by the Western-backed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, attempted to remove security cameras installed by Hezbollah at Beirut International Airport. The cabinet also attempted to remove Brigadier General Wafiq Shkeir, widely regarded as a Hezbollah stooge, from his post as airport security chief. Finally, the government attempted to close separate telecommunication infrastructure that Hezbollah was installing throughout the country.

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Austria Must Grapple With Its Past Holocaust education for young Austrians is essential.Joseph Puder

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/austria-must-grapple-its-past-joseph-puder/

Austria today is one of the friendlier members of the European Union (EU) towards the Jewish state. In fact, the current Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz has been particularly friendly toward Israel, and he regularly speaks out against antisemitism. He has also been the one EU leader to convey Benjamin Netanyahu’s fair charges regarding EU policies toward Israel. Kurz’s Austria is the only West European nation whose government is actively shielding the Jewish state from EU sanctions. This year Austria’s parliament passed a resolution calling the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel a form of antisemitism. It also labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Now, Chancellor Kurz has eased conditions for Israeli citizens to receive Austrian citizenship. Unfortunately, like his predecessors, he has thus far failed to confront Austria’s dark past, specifically Austrians behavior during the Holocaust.  Austria has done very little about educating its young people on the Holocaust or prosecuting its many living Nazi criminals.

Austria conducted two trials of Nazi criminals, both in the 1960’s. The first was the trial of Franz Murer, the SS-Oberscharfuhrer, also known as the “butcher of Vilnius.” Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor Nazi hunter, managed to get him prosecuted in 1963. The trial took place in Graz, Austria, lasting a week, and ended with the Austrians acquitting Murer. The second trial was that of Franz Novak, a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. He stood trial on October 12, 1964, in Vienna, charged with participating in the deportation of 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camps in Poland. Convicted and imprisoned, he was pardoned by Austria’s President Rudolf Kirchschlager. Austrians have not bothered to grapple with their role in the Holocaust crimes. The one-time Austria was forced to face reality was in 1986, when Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the former UN Secretary-General, was running for the Austrian presidency. Press inquiries into his past revealed his role in the Nazi regime. Nevertheless, Austrians elected him as their president. Embarrassed by these revelations concerning Waldheim’s past, in 1991, Austria’s Chancellor Franz Vranitzky declared his nation’s responsibility for Nazi crimes. Austrians, however, were still unable to face up to their sordid history. They went from denial of their role in the Holocaust to historical revisionism.

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For the Democrats’ sake, I hope the DNC viewership is low Organizing a virtual event is a challenge, not to say an exercise in surrealistic self-expression Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://spectator.us/democrats-sake-dnc-viewership-wednesday/

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’ as a collage of kneeling athletes in ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was…special.

I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was ‘the moment Trump won reelection’ was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.

I want to minute another perspicacious tweet about the mincing batman-For-What-It’s-Worth performance from my friend Roger L. Simon: ‘Stop, hey, what’s that sound…of the Democratic party’s brains falling out of their heads.’ Anyway, I looked it up: the bat fellow with the PoMo Liberace bat duds is called Billy Porter and the geezer playing the guitar was…Stephen Stills. Wow. Nearly 60 years ago he wrote that anti-war anthem. And here he was again, still. Old rockers never die: they just refuse to fade away.

Let’s admit frankly that the DNC was laboring under extraordinary duress. No, I am not thinking of the fact that their nominee is a senile basement dweller who cannot put two sentences together. That is a liability, true, but it is self-chosen. I am thinking rather of the pressure of coronavirus hysteria, which has shut down most of the country and certainly shut down the conventions of both parties. It will be interesting to see if the RNC handles things any better from a technical point of view. I hope they forgo the Zoom clips of people at home clapping: they are just pathetic.

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Conformity to a Lie Academia’s monolithic belief in systemic racism will further erode American institutions and the principles of our civilization. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/academia-systemic-racism

The lethal arrest of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May triggered widespread riots and a torrent of contempt for America from virtually every institution in the country. Businesses large and small, the education establishment, and the press rushed to condemn the country’s purportedly endemic racism, implicitly accusing the majority of Americans of destroying “black lives.” Banks and law firms pledged that hiring and promotions would now be even more race-conscious than before. Hundreds of millions of dollars poured forth from corporate coffers into activist groups; the corporate benefactors hoped to dismantle America’s white supremacy, they announced.

Colleges and universities also promised increased diversity spending, though in amounts dwarfed by those corporate outpourings. Nevertheless, the academic response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing violence will have the greatest impact on the nation’s future. Academia was the ideological seedbed for that violence and for its elite justifications; it will prove just as critical in the accelerated transformation of the country.

Fealty to “diversity” and denunciations of white privilege have been a unifying theme in academia for decades, of course. What’s different this time is the sheer venom of the denunciations. College presidents and deans competed for the most sweeping indictment of the American polity, rooted in the claim that blacks are everywhere and at all times under threat.

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The White House Prepared for a Pandemic A September 2019 report laid the groundwork for Operation Warp Speed.By Joel M. Zinberg and  Tomas J. Philipson

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-white-house-prepared-for-a-pandemic-11597792593

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched the Democrats’ broadside against the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response. “Our current federal government is dysfunctional and incompetent,” he told virtual conventioneers Monday in a recorded speech. “It couldn’t fight off the virus. In fact, it didn’t even see it coming.”

The report was produced by the Council of Economic Advisers at the behest of the National Security Council’s biodefense team. It detailed the large health and economic losses that could happen from flu pandemic in the U.S. The report discussed how the lack of private market incentives had led to underinvestment in developing and using innovative technologies that can quickly produce vaccines for a new virus.

Influenza vaccines have primarily been manufactured in chicken eggs for the past 70 years. The process is too slow to produce a new vaccine for a novel, unexpected virus and impairs the vaccines’ efficacy against the flu. Public-private partnerships created under a 2006 statute led to the development of newer, faster manufacturing techniques. But these vaccines are more expensive and haven’t been widely adopted.

The main issue is that vaccine developers aren’t rewarded for innovation. Their research-and-development and investment costs for improved vaccines are recovered only through sales that occur in the unlikely event that a pandemic occurs—there have only been four flu pandemics the past 100 years—even though vaccine innovation provides benefits from risk-reduction before any pandemic. Vaccines have insurance value today that provides protection against possible future damage, regardless of whether a pandemic occurs. That means the social return from innovative vaccines is greater than their private return to developers.

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‘She Has No Role’: Biden Condemns Ousted Women’s March Organizer Linda Sarsour after Her DNC Appearance By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on August 19th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/she-has-no-role-biden-condemns-ousted-womens-march-organizer-linda-sarsour-after-her-dnc-appearance/

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the views of former Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour, who has been repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism, after she participated in a Democratic National Convention council meeting on Tuesday.

Sarsour, a Muslim activist who endorsed Biden after he announced Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) as his running mate last week, spoke at the DNC’s “Muslim Delegates and Allies Assembly” on Tuesday, sparking disapproval in light of her history of controversial comments on Jews and Israel. 

“Joe Biden has been a strong supporter of Israel and a vehement opponent of anti-Semitism his entire life, and he obviously condemns her views and opposes BDS, as does the Democratic platform,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said, according to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “She has no role in the Biden campaign whatsoever.”

Bates then pointed out that the official Democratic platform says, “We oppose any effort to unfairly single out and delegitimize Israel, including at the United Nations or through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.”

The march’s co-president Tamika Mallory, who was similarly ousted over anti-Semitic controversy, also spoke at the DNC at a virtual meeting of the Democratic Black Caucus on Monday.

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History Keeps Proving John Kerry Wrong By David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 19th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/history-keeps-proving-john-kerry-wrong/

The former secretary of state continues peddling foreign-policy falsehoods.

I t took approximately 20 seconds for former secretary of state John Kerry to drop the first flagrant lie in his Democratic National Convention speech on Tuesday, when he claimed that the Obama administration’s so-called Iran deal had “eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.” It didn’t get any better from there.

Kerry knows well that sunset provisions in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) provided Iran’s government with a pathway to building nuclear weapons in a few years. He knows well that Israel uncovered a giant cache of documents with instructions on how to jumpstart a program to build a nuclear arsenal, which undermined both the spirit and the rationale of the nonproliferation agreement Iran signed. He knows that Iran was developing ballistic-missile programs meant to deliver nuclear weapons.

Kerry’s big accomplishment was to destroy a sanctions program that was working, thereby saving the Islamic Republic from economic ruin. This allowed the Islamist government to strengthen its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, and Iraq.

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DOJ Says More Than 200 Face Federal Charges Under Operation Legend

Posted By on August 19th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/more-than-200-charged-with-federal-crimes-under-operation-legend-doj_3466551.html

More than 200 people have been charged with federal crimes among the nearly 1,500 people arrested as part of an initiative aimed to stem violent crime in major inner cities, the Justice Department (DOJ) stated on Aug. 19.

The figures represent the latest numbers of law enforcement actions taken since the start of Operation Legend in early July, which has since been expanded to numerous cities around the country, Attorney General William Barr said.

As part of the operation, about 217 people were charged with federal crimes and nearly 400 firearms have been seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Barr said. The nearly 1,500 people arrested were mostly arrested for violent state crimes, which include more than 90 homicides.

Numbers from Indianapolis, which was added to the program just last week, aren’t included, the DOJ stated.

Over the past few weeks, the DOJ announced several moves to show its commitment to cracking down on violent crime across the country. That led to Operation Legend, a law enforcement program in which federal resources are surged to inner U.S. cities to assist local and state law enforcement officials to tackle violent crime and restore public safety.

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Ex-FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleads guilty in Durham investigation by Jerry Dunleavy, Justice Department Reporter

Posted By on August 19th, 2020

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ex-fbi-lawyer-kevin-clinesmith-pleads-guilty-in-durham-investigation

The former FBI lawyer charged in U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the investigators pleaded guilty Wednesday to a false statements charge for fraudulently altering a CIA email to obtain surveillance against a former Trump campaign associate.

Clinesmith, who worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server as well as on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane inquiry and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team during the Trump-Russia inquiry, admitted that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap Carter Page, who had been a foreign policy adviser to now-President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Judge James Boasberg, the presiding judge in the criminal case against Clinesmith (and also the presiding judge for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court), accepted the plea during the hearing conducted by phone before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Clinesmith, 38, claimed in early 2017 that Page was “not a source” for the CIA when the CIA had actually told the bureau on multiple occasions that Page was indeed an operational contact for them. Durham submitted a five-page filing to the federal court on Friday, noting Clinesmith was being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(3) for “False Statements.”

Anthony Scarpelli, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a Durham team member, appeared for the Justice Department. Clinesmith’s lawyer, Justin Shur, was representing him on the call.

The judge asked Clinesmith if he agreed everything outlined in Durham’s criminal information court filed Friday against Clinesmith was true, and he replied, “Yes, your honor.”

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‘Winning Has Come Through Revolts’: A Black Lives Matter Activist On Why She Supports Looting By Rob Wildeboer, Chip Mitchell

Posted By on August 19th, 2020

https://www.wbez.org/stories/winning-has-come-through-revolts-a-black-lives-matter-activist-on-why-she-supports-looting/398d0f3f-73d0-4f2e-ae32-04cceba0d322

The Sunday afternoon shooting by police of Latrell Allen, 20, in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood led to a standoff in that community between residents and officers. By evening the tension had eased, but overnight and into the early morning hours Monday, looters hit Chicago’s wealthiest shopping district on North Michigan Avenue.

Looting earlier this summer grew out of large protest marches downtown. This most recent looting was different, and it’s exact genesis remains unclear. Mayor Lori Lightfoot said,“This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech. … This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct,” but some activists disagree. WBEZ talked with Black Lives Matter organizer Ariel Atkins on why she supports people looting and looting as protest.

What’s your take on the police shooting in Englewood and the subsequent looting downtown?

Ariel Atkins: A lot of people are really attacking our pages. They’re like, ‘Oh, you support the looters.’ And yeah, we do, 100%. That’s reparations. And like however people choose to protest, especially if it was definitely in line with what happened with the shooting, which would be powerful to see people reacting … without organizers just being like, ‘We’re angry and this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna take the power back.’

I feel like these stores, these Macy’s, these Guccis, the PNC Banks, they’re not here for us. The city puts way more money and investment into spending time and protecting their spaces and making sure that they exist. And yet our people are constantly being pushed out of the city. … Unemployment is incredibly high, like we are in an incredible situation, and the fact that anybody gives a s*** about these businesses over what is happening in this city right now and the pain that people are in and the suffering that is taking place, I don’t care. I will support the looters ‘till the end of the day. If that’s what they need to do in order to eat, then that’s what you’ve got to do to eat.