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A PROSECUTION IN SEARCH OF A CRIME: JOHN HINDERAKER

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/a-prosecution-in-search-of-a-crime.php

Donald Trump is undergoing a criminal trial in Manhattan. He is charged with filing corporate records that included a false statement; namely, that payments to Michael Cohen that were described as being for legal services were, in fact, to reimburse Cohen for making one or more payments to Stormy Daniels in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. But those payments to Daniels were perfectly legal, and filing a false corporate document is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has passed.

So in order to charge Trump, District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to allege that the false documents were filed in order to cover up another crime. That would make it a felony. But what is that other crime? Bragg has been coy about it. In truth, there was no other crime, and Bragg’s prosecution is election interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, plain and simple.

One would think that this case could not have gone to trial without a clear specification of that other crime and evidence in support of it. But that appears to be what has happened, courtesy of trial judge Juan Merchan, who is in on the scam.

Byron York points out this classic of obfuscation from the prosecutor’s opening statement:

Which means what, exactly? I suppose the translation is that Trump didn’t want voters to know about his fling with Daniels. But an “illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election” does not define a crime.

EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

‘Pedagogical Malpractice’: Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class

Posted By on April 25th, 2024

https://freebeacon.com/campus/pedagogical-malpractice-inside-ucla-medical-schools-mandatory-health-equity-class/

Top physicians, including former Harvard dean, say required course is riddled with dangerous falsehoods.

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

One required reading lists “anti-capitalist politics” as a principle of “disability justice” and attacks the evils of “ableist heteropatriarchal capitalism.” Others decry “racial capitalism,” attack “growth-centered economic theories,” and call for “moving beyond capitalism for our health.”

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Qatar, ‘Leading Sponsor of Terrorism in the World, More than Iran,’ Is Not an Impartial Mediator by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20598/qatar-mediator

The idea that Qatar has been acting as a mediator in the negotiations between Israel and Hamas is nothing short of laughable. Qatar has actually long been staunchly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood organization, of which Hamas is an offshoot.

The Muslim Brotherhood — according to a hearing at the U.S. House Subcommittee on National Security on July 11, 2018 — is a militant Islamist organization with affiliates in over 70 countries, including groups designated as terrorist organizations by the US.

“”Qatar has huge influence over the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas…. For too long, Doha has danced between its Islamist allies and its Western and Arab partners.” — Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, The Atlantic, October 20, 2023

Qatar has a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its radical terrorist offshoots…. Qatar has also provided political and financial support to Hamas. In 2008, Doha reportedly pledged $250 million to Hamas, one year after the terror group violently seized control of the Gaza Strip. In 2012, Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani became the first head of state to visit Gaza, pledging $400 million to Hamas. Since then, the Qatari government has continued to send money to Hamas.

Qatar’s goal is to keep Hamas in power. Qatar has no reason to care if thousands of Palestinians die in the Gaza Strip, so long as Hamas is permitted to continue ruling the coastal enclave.

Recently, the rulers of Qatar demonstrated that they not only serve as gracious hosts to the leaders of the Palestinian Hamas terror group, but that they also have a sense of humor.

The Gulf state’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani announced during a press conference in Doha that his country is reassessing its role as a mediator between Israel and Hamas after facing criticism.

“Qatar is in the process of a complete re-evaluation of its role,” al-Thani said. “There is exploitation and abuse of the Qatari role,” he said, adding that Qatar had been the victim of “point-scoring” by “politicians who are trying to conduct election campaigns by slighting the State of Qatar.”

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‘The House That I Live In’* by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20597/the-house-that-i-live-in

Before Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941, there were Nazis marching in our streets as Americans.

Today, at college campuses across our nation, there are Americans marching as Nazis and terrorist-supporters, shouting, “We’re all Hamas.”

Make no mistake about it. When student protestors burn the American flag and chant “Death to America” it has little to do with the Israeli military response to the murderous rampage by Hamas on October 7th and much to do with Iran’s grand strategy of bringing death to the “Great Satan” through “useful idiots.”

Clearly, the protestors are outraged that Israelis have refused to be the mute, mutilated victims of the last Hamas outrage. After all, violent acts of anti-Semitism and Jew-killing are not supposed to come with a cost to its perpetrators. The “Death to America” crowd must be asking, “When did the Israelis change the rules?”

So these Iranian foot soldiers with student loans have taken to college campuses, where places like Columbia University have been forced to implement virtual learning and Jewish students are warned to stay away for their own safety. Would the universities have responded the same way if the protests had been, say, anti-Black?

There should be little confusion as to what is occurring as police confront and arrest students and their organizers. These are individuals waging a coordinated, lavishly-funded campaign (exact funding has been meticulously researched and published by NGO Monitor) to demonize Jews, Israel, and those who stand against anti-Semitism, and the United States.

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Is Biden taking lessons from ‘lady’ AOC? Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/is-biden-taking-lessons-from-lady-aoc/

U.S. President Joe Biden began his Earth Day speech at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia on Monday by singling out a few prominent climate-change figures in attendance. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced him, was one of them.

“You know, I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady; listen to that lady,” he said. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too, real quickly.”

It doesn’t take a genius to guess what region he had in mind. AOC—as the member of his party’s radical “Squad” is familiarly known—has been vocal in her demand that Biden suspend all aid to Israel over the “genocide” it’s committing in Gaza.

When the president said that he and she would be discussing this topic “real quickly,” he was hinting at a meeting that was to take place after the event. Indeed, when it was over, he, AOC and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) flew together to the White House, where the four buddies who share an aversion to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were seen entering the Oval Office.

Before they hopped on the Marine One helicopter and headed to D.C., Biden was stopped by reporters. “Do you condemn the antisemitic protests on college campuses?” one asked.

Echoing the question in his answer, he replied, “I condemn the antisemitic protests; that’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and how they’re being …”

It’s not unusual for Biden to trail off, mid-sentence. But in this case, he may have decided against completing his outrageous statement.

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Useless Biden Can’t Help but Botch His Response to Campus Antisemitism By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/useless-biden-cant-help-but-botch-his-response-to-campus-antisemitism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=first

EXCERPT

When asked about antisemitic protests on college campuses, Biden just had to add a condemnation of “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being—” and of course he couldn’t finish the sentence. Sure, Biden doesn’t like the harassment of Jewish students, but he feels obligated, in the same breath, to offer a parallel and equally strong denunciation of “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” You see, not understanding the plight of the Palestinians is every bit as bad as attempting to stab a young Jewish woman in the eye with a flagpole.

Heaven forbid that anyone listening conclude that the explosion of antisemitism on college campuses in this country is a uniquely insidious and dangerous problem that must be addressed immediately. No, no, the president of the United States must announce, at every opportunity, that the Palestinians have it just as bad, too.

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A howl of rage against civilisation The orgy of bigotry at Columbia University heaps shame on America. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/22/a-howl-of-rage-against-civilisation/

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Jonathan Pidluzny Stop the Mideast Money Fueling Campus Anti-Semitism Multimillion-dollar donations to Middle East studies centers and departments have advanced Islamist ideology and fostered Jew-hatred at U.S. universities.

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/stop-the-mideast-money-fueling-campus-anti-semitism

Combating the anti-Semitism radiating from U.S. college campuses will require work on many fronts. Some of the drivers could take enormous effort to uproot—for example, the DEI culture that has reshaped K–12 and postsecondary institutions. A less frequently discussed factor is easier to address: U.S. universities should stop letting foreign entities shape campus intellectual life.

Centers dedicated to the study of the Middle East, many receiving lavish foreign financial support, do more to promote anti-Zionist and pro-Hamas narratives than virtually any other force on campus. Even a small number of biased faculty can have an outsize influence because the dominant intersectional ideologies leave students primed to embrace anti-Semitic attitudes.

In effect, U.S. campuses have been importing anti-Semitic propaganda for almost 50 years. As the New York Times reported in 1978, “Oil wealth from the Middle East is starting to flow onto college and university campuses throughout the country, bringing a bonanza of endowed chairs and new programs.” That initial flood of money—and specific concerns about gifts to Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—led to the establishment of foreign gift-reporting requirements in 1986. To this day, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to report foreign gifts above $250,000.

Unfortunately, weak enforcement by the Department of Education allowed many universities to ignore the requirement. That changed in 2019, when Secretary Betsy DeVos initiated noncompliance investigations at several top schools. In 2023 congressional testimony, Paul Moore, chief investigative council at the Department of Education during the Trump administration, described the sea change that followed: “enhanced enforcement . . . produced dramatic results,” including the “disclosure of more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign gifts and contributions.” The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which analyzed the updated disclosures for 2014–19, found that over $2.7 billion in gifts came from Qatari sources, $1.2 billion from Chinese entities, and over $1 billion originated in Saudi Arabia.

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Liel Leibovitz Columbia Is Beyond Reform It’s time we approached our elite universities not as critical institutions we must repair but as national security threats.

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbia-is-beyond-reform

Last week, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify before Congress and explain how Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Semitic vitriol. She delivered the Ivy League equivalent of the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove a thing. The smart set praised Shafik for her evasiveness—the presidents of Harvard and Penn were far less astute—and considered the case against Columbia closed.

The kids had other ideas.

No sooner had Shafik left Washington than hundreds of students—about 800, by the latest count, or one-fifth of the undergraduate student body—put up dozens of shiny new camping tents and renamed the Morningside Heights campus the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas. Students with loudspeakers chanted slogans like “There’s no God but Allah, and Allah loves martyrs.” An Israeli-Arab who stopped by to explain, in Arabic, why cheering on murderous terrorists was a bad idea was punched in the face and left with his mouth dripping blood. Jewish students were told to “go back to Europe“ or were greeted by a kaffiyeh-clad classmate holding a sign saying “al-Qassam’s next targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Things eventually deteriorated so badly that the university had to cancel in-person classes. As of this writing, the situation is still unfolding, not only in Columbia but also at Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye; in Michigan, where students are handing out pamphlets advocating “death to America”; and elsewhere.

Two urgent questions, both obvious, suggest themselves. The first: How did we get here? The second: What do we do now?

Answering the first question fully would require a comprehensive analysis, but for brevity’s sake, a simple reminder is in order: What we’re seeing on college campuses these days isn’t an aberration, some strange phenomenon that emerged, like a monster from the deep, with little or no warning. It’s the result of decades of deliberate planning by a complex network of administrators, lawmakers, NGOs, and media outlets, eager to convert our universities from seats of learning and inquiry to beachheads in the war for absolute political power.

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‘Jew-Hating’ Asian American Studies Program Exposed at Northwestern University Defending Hamas’ butchery and partnering with Students for Justice in Palestine. by Sara Dogan

Posted By on April 24th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jew-hating-asian-american-studies-program-exposed-at-northwestern-university/

The Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University has repeatedly used university resources and official communications channels to promote Jew hatred and condone Hamas’s actions against Israel and its Jewish citizens.

Roughly a week after the barbaric October 7th Hamas massacre of over 1200 Israeli civilians, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) published a statement on the official department website and reproduced it on the official department Instagram page. Rather than condemning Hamas’s brutality and the innocent loss of Jewish lives in Israel, AASP instead decried “Islamophobia” on campus and chastised the Northwestern University administration for their “silence at the loss of life in Palestine.”

The statement blatantly whitewashed the atrocious actions of Hamas, claiming that “On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the political group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, attacked Israel. Israel subsequently declared war, marking the latest in a long line of armed struggles between the two nations since their formation in 1947-48.”  No mention was made of the sheer brutality of Hamas’s actions—raping women, slaughtering children, mutilating civilians both before and after death. In fact, AASP mocked reports that Hamas beheaded babies as “baseless claims [that] are meant to incite hate against Palestine and equate supporting Palestinian civilians with antisemitism.”

Showing almost no concern for the Israeli victims of October 7th, and the citizens of Israel threatened by Hamas’s intended genocide, AASP instead chose to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state, referring to Gaza as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and blaming the “civilian death toll” in Gaza solely on Israel—rather than on Hamas who started the war by attacking civilians and taking hostages and who then used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The Asian American Studies Program also critiqued the “visible Islamophobia expressed in pro-Israel posters on NU’s campus falsely claiming that ‘Hamas is ISIS.’”  Notably, the Program did not explain why they felt that comparison to be inaccurate or Islamophobic. Both organizations are Islamist terrorist groups known for their brutal treatment of women and ethnic minorities. The comparison seems apt.