FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America In Retreat: A Record 11 Embassies Evacuated Under Biden

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/21/american-in-retreat-a-record-11-embassies-have-been-evacuated-under-biden/

With the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Haiti last week, President Joe Biden extended his historic lead for fleeing embassies – a dubious distinction once held by Barack Obama.

That’s according to the Daily Signal, which dug into the records and found that as the world has slipped into chaos over the past three years, the U.S. has been forced to withdraw from embassy after embassy.

“Since Biden took office in January 2021, his State Department has partially or fully evacuated 11 U.S. embassies via what are known as authorized or ordered departure directives,” writes Tony Kinnett. The number is actually 14 if you count the fact that this is the fourth time Biden has ordered Americans to bolt from the U.S. embassy in Haiti.

Biden is now well ahead of Obama, who ran from eight embassies over his eight years in office (which included those in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan). During Donald Trump’s term, only three embassies were evacuated, Kinnett reports.

The Biden embassy evacuation timeline:

Burma, March 2021
Chad, April 2021
Afghanistan, July 2021
Ethiopia, November 2021
Ukraine, February 2022
Belarus, February 2022
Russia, February 2022
Nigeria, October 2022
Sudan, April 2023
Niger, August 2023
Haiti, November 2021, December 2022, July 2023, March 2024

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Betrayed? by Guy Millière

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20488/israel-betrayed

It seems clear that the Biden administration would like to see the rapid creation of a Palestinian state or at least a “Palestinian unity government” — unfortunately composed of the Palestinian Authority and the terrorist group Hamas — and, abracadabra, recognize it.

The Palestinian leaders have, in fact, been admirably clear: They do not want a state alongside Israel, they want a state instead of Israel.

“[W]hile Qatar is helping assemble a new ‘technocratic’ front for the terrorists, the Moscow summit made it clear that the real agenda of the new government would be terror against Israel and the U.S.” — Daniel Greenfield, journalist, March 12, 2024.

“They [families of the hostages] can raise hell for the release of their loved ones – in media, in Congress, and by demonstrating in front of the Embassy of Qatar on M Street in Washington, D.C. Qatar is extremely and incredibly sensitive to being exposed in any way as a terror-sponsoring state… A single statement by a U.S. Department of Defense official, about relocating – or even considering relocating – this base from Qatar to another country that is not a state sponsor of terrorism is all it would take to get the American hostages released. Even indicating that the U.S. has other options besides Qatar would do it.” — Yigal Carmon, Founder and President of the Middle East Media Research Institute, November 6, 2023.

Qatar is not an honest broker…. Qatar has been Hamas’s main funder… Hamas is Qatar’s pet; Qatar most likely does not want Hamas to lose the war and is sure to do all it can to secure that result.

It appears that the Biden administration would like to trade Netanyahu in for a doormat who would agree to a terrorist Palestinian state next door, a Hamas victory in Gaza and Iran having nuclear weapons.

February 15, 2024. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have a long phone conversation. The communiqué published by the White House briefing room says they spoke about humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza and Israeli military operations.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Former Amb. Friedman: Schumer’s speech ‘a desecration’ David Isaac

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.jns.org/former-amb-friedman-schumers-speech-a-desecration/

Former U.S. Ambassador David Friedman handed the Biden administration a failing grade for its steadily eroding support for Israel since the Oct. 7 atrocities, and reserved especially sharp words for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), speaking during an interview on Israeli TV on Monday.

Schumer made headlines on March 14 when, from the floor of the U.S. Senate, he called Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an obstacle to peace for not supporting a two-state solution, grouping him with the terrorist group Hamas, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas and “radical right-wing Israelis.”

Asked by Channel 14 interviewer Libi Alon what he thought of Schumer’s speech, Friedman said, “I’ll say it in the words that your audience will understand. It was a chilul Hashem [a desecration of God’s name.]”

Schumer opened his remarks with a refrain he often uses when speaking about Israel, referring to the fact that his last name derives from the Hebrew word shomer, or “guardian,” and that he thinks of himself as a guardian of the Jewish people.

Friedman said, “It was horrible for a Jewish person who claims to be, you know, the great Jewish protector in the United States government of Israel, for him to say that.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg With Guardians Like These Chuck Schumer’s recent comments about Israel exhibit arrogance and ignorance.

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-problem-with-schumers-israel-speech

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has long claimed to be a shomer—Hebrew for guardian or watchman—of Israel and the Jewish people. But his speech last Thursday on the Senate floor, in which he called for new elections in Israel, more readily brings two Yiddish words to mind.

The first word is chutzpah, which connotes arrogance-laced presumption. That perfectly describes Schumer instructing Israel—the only democracy in the entire Middle East—to jettison its elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold new elections, or else. Schumer threatened: “[i]f Prime Minister Netanyahu’s current coalition remains in power after the war begins to wind down . . . then the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy.” That is election interference, plain and simple.

The Israeli people are quite capable of deciding when to hold elections and whom to elect, notwithstanding Schumer’s insinuation to the contrary. No foreign politician—even, or especially, one who prefaces his remarks with “as a Jew” and “a life-long supporter of Israel”—has any business interfering with an ally’s democratic processes. Critics might point to Netanyahu’s 2015 address to Congress opposing the proposed Iran nuclear deal. Democrats were livid at the time. But Netanyahu was arguing against a specific agreement that many Americans, and most Israelis, believed posed an existential threat to Israel and the world. He was not advocating for President Obama’s ouster.

Schumer claimed Netanyahu is “allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.” But does anyone doubt Schumer is ditching Israel to save Joe Biden by placating his party’s radical left? Unsurprisingly, Biden praised the speech.

The second word is sechel—common sense or wisdom—something Schumer’s speech clearly lacked. The Senate majority leader claimed that the Israeli people are being “stifled by a governing vision that is stuck in the past.” But the only people stuck in the past are those, like Schumer and the foreign policy establishment, who persist in wanting to impose a two-state solution that Palestinians have never favored and that Israelis, brutalized by decades of intifadas and terrorism culminating in October 7, have given up on.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Copy and Paste Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/christina-cross-plagiarism-accusations

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article title “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

The most serious allegation is that Cross lifted an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from a paper by Stacey Bosick and Paula Fomby titled “Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood” without citing the source or placing verbatim language in quotations. Here is the paragraph from Bosick and Fomby:

We use data from the PSID and two of its supplemental studies, the Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition into Adulthood Supplement (TAS). PSID began in 1968 as a nationally representative sample of approximately 4,800 households. Original respondents and their descendants have been followed annually until 1997 and biennially since then. To maintain population representativeness, a sample refresher in 1997 added approximately 500 households headed by immigrants who had entered the United States since 1968. At each wave, the household head or the spouse or cohabiting partner of the head reports on family household composition, employment, earned and unearned income, assets, debt, educational attainment, expenditures, housing characteristics, and health and health care in the household. In 2015 (the most recent wave available), the study collected information on almost 25,000 individuals in approximately 9,000 households.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Gaza War: The Real Problem With Friends Like Chuck Schumer, Who Needs Enemies? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20507/gaza-war-israel-schumer

Rather than taking tangible steps towards peace, [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas has done nothing but bypass and evade bilateral negotiations with Israel, while taking extremely tangible steps toward terrorism – from rewarding terrorists, or the families of those who murder Jews, with “$345-$1200” a month for life, to repeating that terrorist murderers are “heroes” — all the while admitting that Palestinians are not the indigenous people there.

As for Schumer’s “two-state solution,” 64% of Palestinians said they are opposed to the idea. Those polled would like a one-state solution: a Palestinian state with no “Israel” anywhere in sight. More than 60% also expressed support for an “armed struggle” against Israel.

“[T]he only thing we should be focused on is changing the regime in Gaza, bringing down the terrorist regime of Hamas, and not the duly elected government of Israel.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Fox News, March 17, 2024,

The reason [the Palestinians] just keep “saying no” is because they do not want a Palestinian State next to Israel, they want a Palestinian State instead of Israel.

Schumer, by signaling to Hamas and other terrorists that the Americans are on their side against Netanyahu and the Israeli government, has painstakingly emboldened them.

Many Arabs understand — unlike Schumer and many in the Biden administration — that the real problem is the Iranian regime and its terror proxies.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Regime Actively Seeking to Overthrow Israeli Government to Save Hamas by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20490/biden-regime-actively-seeking-to-overthrow

One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.”

[O]ur intelligence apparatus is rotted through with Islamic terror supporters and sympathizers.

The 2024 ODNI treats Netanyahu like a leader to be overthrown and suggests that this would be a good outcome. It’s a hostile act from a hostile administration that is doing everything it can to save Islamic terrorists.

Since Oct 7, the Biden administration pivoted from backing Israel’s effort to remove Hamas, to backing the effort by Hamas allies from Dearborn to Qatar to overthrow the Israeli government in order to save Hamas.

One Israeli expert frequently consulted by American officials says, “I have been asked by a serious administration figure what it is that will force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse. They were interested in the mechanics, what can we demand which will collapse his coalition.”

“What can we demand which will collapse his coalition” is revealing as hell. The Obama administration was infamous for trying to use pressure on Israel to create splits inside its coalition government. Biden’s people are trying to do the same thing.

The report comes from Noga Tarnopolsky and calling her biased and hostile is an understatement, but this stuff is now showing up in intelligence reports.

The 2024 ODNI claims that, “Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — Part XXXII (Sea Level Rise Edition) Francis Menton

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-3-18-the-greatest-scientific-fraud-of-all-time-part-xxxii-sea-level-rise-edition

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud by which government functionaries alter data collected and previously reported in official data bases in order to support a narrative of impending catastrophic global warming. No other scientific fraud in world history comes close to this one in scope or significance. While prior frauds may have scored a crooked scientist some funding or maybe some temporary fame, this one drives trillions of dollars of worldwide government spending and seeks to transform the entire world economy. The prior 31 posts in this series are all collected for your reading enjoyment at this link. (They are in groups of six posts each, beginning with the most recent. After each six, you must go to the bottom and click the “NEXT” button to get the next six posts.)

Those prior 31 posts have all concerned alteration of one particular sort of data, namely temperature records. The posts document how, at station after station, previously-reported data have been altered to make earlier temperatures cooler and later ones warmer, and thus to show an enhanced warming trend (or in many cases to replace a cooling trend with a warming trend). The altered temperatures then form the basis for hockey-stick shaped charts of world temperatures, showing rapid recent warming, and for claims from NASA and NOAA and the media that the most recent year or month was the “warmest ever.”

But why should we really care that the earth’s atmosphere is getting a little warmer? The UN has supposedly set some kind of Maginot Line at a 1.5 deg C temperature increase from 20th century levels — an amount so small that you can barely feel it when it occurs each day. The 1.5 deg mark is just not that all that scary. So the bureaucrats and leftists need a Plan B to scare the bejeezus out of the people. Plan B is sea level rise.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Max Eden, Josh Hammer Dismantling Leftist Indoctrination on Campus How a conservative administration could use civil rights law to reshape American universities

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/dismantling-leftist-indoctrination-on-campus

Americans rightly see former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as an intellectual lightweight who ascended to her position because academia now values identity over merit. Gay was the avatar for the governing ideology of American higher education. Until Gay’s downfall began with the now-infamous congressional hearing in December 2023, campus diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) commissars saw their positions as morally and administratively unassailable. Even after her ouster, Gay’s colleagues have every right to feel secure in their posts. Sure, Americans, acting through their elected representatives, can exert enough pressure to get Harvard’s president replaced. But with so many anti-Semitic ideologues inside and outside DEI bureaucracies, whacking a mole or two won’t make a systemic difference, right?

Wrong. Americans can decide in 2024 whether to allow our universities to remain structurally anti-Semitic. Consider the case of Middlebury College. Last week, the Washington Free Beacon reported that shortly after Hamas murdered more than 1,000 Israelis, raped an untold number of women, and beheaded babies on October 7, 2023, Jewish students at Middlebury asked the college to host a vigil for the victims. Shockingly, Middlebury refused to permit the students to hold the event in the campus chapel, refused to provide police protection, asked them not to display Israeli flags, and insisted that they not identify the victims as Jewish. All in the name of “inclusivity.” (The vigil ended up being held outside.)

Shortly thereafter, Middlebury provided access to the chapel and police protection for an event titled, “Vigil for Palestine.” It began with a sectarian Islamic prayer and featured remarks from Middlebury’s vice president of equity and inclusion, Khuram Hussain, who conveniently did not attend the Jewish vigil. The director of StandWithUs’s Center for Legal Justice, the legal arm of the well-known Jewish advocacy organization, told the Free Beacon that “the Middlebury administration seems to think they’re off the radar and can get away with the disparate treatment of Jewish students because everyone is focused on Harvard.” The center filed a federal Title VI civil rights complaint, arguing that “there’s not just a hostile environment for Jewish students; the administration also seems to be directly complicit.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu returns ‘friendly’ fire The Israeli prime minister’s equanimity has its limits in the face of potshots from Washington.By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 19th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/netanyahu-returns-friendly-fire/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s angry response to recent comments emanating from Washington is as welcome as it was long in coming. For obvious reasons relating to the need for American ammo—and stemming from his deference to his country’s most important ally—Bibi has been careful to keep all discourse from his end dignified.

Despite being subjected to repeated digs from Democrats over his “extremist” coalition and renewed calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state, he has taken every opportunity to thank the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden for its support.

He has managed to keep his cool when admonished by “backers” about his execution of the war against Hamas. Rather than voicing outrage in the face of professed tough-love warnings over potential violations of international law, he has rebutted by describing the care taken by the Israel Defense Forces to avoid civilian casualties.  

He has countered accusations of causing famine in Gaza by pointing to the massive amounts of humanitarian goods entering the Strip and Israel’s efforts to prevent Hamas from stealing and selling it. He has also explained to those admonishing him not to enter Rafah why doing so is necessary, and promised that plans are underway to evacuate non-combatant residents from the area.

But even Bibi’s equanimity, no matter how tactical, has its limits. These were tested on Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose jaw-dropping chutzpah came on the heels of comparable gall spewed by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In a lengthy speech on the Senate floor, Schumer asserted that Netanyahu “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”