Hard Evidence Warranting the Impeachment of Joe Biden James D. Agresti

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/13/hard-evidence-warranting-the-impeachment-of-joe-biden/

In a staggering act of journalistic deceit, the New York Times is reporting that Republicans launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden without any “evidence of financial wrongdoing or corruption by the president.” Similar statements have been made by a massive array of media outlets and Democrat politicians.

In reality, overwhelming proof of Joe Biden’s corruption and wrongdoing has been found, including hard evidence like written records and corroborated testimonies from first-hand witnesses. Collectively, at least 12 sets of documented facts leave no reasonable doubt that Biden participated in his son’s illicit business deals, bribed foreign officials, and obstructed justice.

Moreover, no less than three major defenses of Biden are demonstrably false.

1) “Don’t Mention Joe”

Joe Biden claimed at least eight times that he had nothing to do with his son Hunter’s business dealings and never even spoke to Hunter about them. For example, he told a group of reporters on August 28, 2019:

I have never discussed with my son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses, period.

In May 2017, two of Hunter’s business partners exchanged several WhatsApp messages about the Biden family’s involvement in their dealings, and one of the partners wrote to the other:

Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.

2) “A Chairman’s Role”

In 2023, the business partner who was on the receiving end of the “Don’t mention Joe” message stated:

The American people don’t fully appreciate yet the key role Joe Biden played in the Biden family global influence-peddling… I would equate it to a chairman’s role in a traditional business structure.

3) “The Big Guy”

In May 2017, the same partner who wrote “Don’t mention Joe” sent an email to Hunter and two of their other partners in which he proposed how the “equity” of a joint venture with a Chinese energy company named CEFC would be “distributed.”

Ben Sasse’s Letter on Israel to Jewish Gators A model of moral clarity, compared with the mush from the Ivy League.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ben-sasse-statement-israel-university-of-florida-hamas-gaza-3cd633e2?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

In the face of Hamas’s atrocities, some U.S. college administrators at first said little or issued equivocating mush, such as what Dartmouth College put out Tuesday in its “Statement on the Israel-Gaza War.” A notable exception: University of Florida President Ben Sasse.

Here’s what Mr. Sasse wrote Tuesday in an email addressed to “Jewish Gator Alums,” which deserves to be quoted at length:

“I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

“This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans. I am thankful to say I haven’t seen examples of that here at UF, either from our faculty or our student body. . . .

“In the coming days, it is possible that anti-Israel protests will come to UF’s campus. I have told our police chief and administration that this university always has two foundational commitments: We will protect our students and we will protect speech. This is always true: Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. . . .

“When evil raises its head, as it has in recent days, it is up to men and women of conscience and courage to draw strength from truth and commit ourselves to the work of building something better—to the work of pursuing justice and pursuing peace. That is what we aim to do through education, compassion, and truth here at the University of Florida.”

Unique Hatred For Jews And Israel Among The Trendy Western Left Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-10-11-unique-hatred-for-jews-and-israel-among-the-trendy-western-left

“I won’t try to justify everything that Israel has done, but I think there is no doubt that Israel needs to take aggressive steps to control ongoing violence and atrocities against their citizens. The steps taken by Israel are not remotely comparable to the real genocides and ethnic cleansings regularly carried out by Muslims against members of all other religions in their midst. Why the trendy Left never criticizes any of this, and reserves its ire uniquely for Israel, I cannot explain.”

Among the trendy Left, and particularly on elite academic campuses, hatred of Israel, and by association of all Jews, has long been on the ascendant. The Anti-Defamation League traces the origins of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement against Israel to the early 2000s. By the time we get to the most recent ten years, every elite academic institution has multiple student groups and scores of faculty members advocating for delegitimizing Israel as oppressors of the Palestinians, or even as an “apartheid state.”

And thus the current wave of atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israel has brought out statements of support from some 30+ student groups at Harvard, from the Student Bar Association at NYU, from a group of students at Stanford, and many other such around the country.

In the bigger picture, the treatment of Israel and Israeli Jews by Muslims is not at all unique. Around the world, the fact is that the Islamic religion and its members are not tolerant of members of other religions. And by “not tolerant,” I mean, absolutely willing to kill to force the non-believers to conform. I’m not saying that all adherents to the Muslim faith are so intolerant; but many are, and the rest support the intolerant ones, either explicitly or implicitly. The world is full of news — very sparsely reported by our dominant press — of persecution and killings of members of any and all other religions by Muslims when they are in a dominant position. Although our press systematically suppresses information on this subject — as they do with almost everything that it is important to know about — this activity is sufficiently widespread that it is inexcusable for well-informed people not to know about it.

YORAM ETTINGER: WHAT WENT WRONG?

https://bit.ly/46Mg5PK

No common-sense-observer of the volcanic Middle East and Islamic terrorism, in general, and Hamas/Palestinian terrorism, in particular, should be shocked by the October 2023 Hamas’ atrocities, which are not driven by the size of Israel and its policy, but by the aim to uproot the “infidel” Jewish State from the “abode of Islam.”

Ignoring the nature of Hamas

*Significant elements in Israeli, the US and Western policy-making and national security and the intelligence establishment have been in denial of the nature of Palestinian terrorism, as the Western establishment has been in denial of the megalomaniacally rogue nature of Iran’s Ayatollahs regime since its ascension to power in February 1979.

*They have eagerly attempted to pacify Hamas. However, they failed to realize the pivotal role of the 1,400-year-old fanatic, anti-Western ideology of Hamas, which views Israel as the beachhead of the “infidel” Western culture in the Middle East.  

*Their eagerness to advance the cause of peace has led them to sacrifice the frustratingly complex Middle East reality on the altar of a convenient, virtual reality, as was the case in the Israeli-initiated (and Western embraced) 1993 Oslo Accord and the 2005 Gaza Disengagement, which catapulted Palestinian terrorism to unprecedented intensity, paving the road to the 2023 atrocities of Hamas.

*They have based their approach to Hamas – as the Western policy has approached Iran’s Ayatollahs – on the assumption that generous financial benefits would induce Hamas to alter its order of priorities, and prefer standard of living considerations over its core, zealot ideology. They believed that dramatic economic gestures could lead Hamas to eventually comply with agreements, accept a reality of a manageable low-intensity conflict, or even peaceful-coexistence with Israel.

The centrality of the Hamas covenant

Young Jews Brace for ‘A Day of Global Jihad’ At our institutions of higher education, the quads are alive with hate. By Maya Sulkin

https://www.thefp.com/p/young-jews-brace-for-a-day-of-global-jihad?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was a deeply unpopular student at Columbia for a simple reason: I was a Zionist. When I posted photos on Instagram of swastikas graffitied across campus, I received private messages telling me I was “attention-seeking.” When I hosted pro-Israel events, commenters online accused me of blood libel. 

I left Columbia earlier this year in part because of this bullying. And now, after more than 1,300 Jews were slaughtered by Hamas in Israel, the hatred that once hid behind my Instagram DMs is appearing in broad daylight right at my alma mater, an Ivy League bastion that has educated politicians, CEOs, and Nobel Prize winners. 

On Wednesday, female Columbia student Maxwell Friedman, 19, was arrested and charged with assault after she beat an Israeli student with a stick outside the school’s main library. 

The following day, hundreds of students gathered outside Columbia’s Alma Mater statue to cheer on the mass genocide of Jews. (In this, they were merely echoing the views published by tenured professor Joseph Massad, who described the scene of “Palestinian fighters from Gaza breaking through Israel’s prison fence” as “awesome.”) 

For hours, students encircled the quad, waving Palestinian flags and chanting the ten rally cries sanctioned by on-campus activists, including “End the Zionist occupation” and “Stop defending apartheid.” 

Many covered their faces, pulling sweatshirts over their heads in the face of cameras. A few wore N95 masks, sunglasses, and hats all at once. Earlier, one of the student groups behind the event, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, encouraged participants to cover their faces “for safety from doxxing.” 

MY SAY: STANDBY ANTI-SEMITISM

The world is full of horror: Tribal wars in African nations such as Congo with millions of victims, which Nicholas Kristoff, to his credit, revealed in columns and a documentary, just don’t capture the high dudgeon of those who sanction the violence and arson occasioned by the death of one individual George Floyd.

However, when it comes to the world’s only Jewish state, a freewheeling democracy, attacked by monsters, does moral equivalence grip the hypocritical critics of Israel’s response in the media and academia. Those who decry “blame the victim” in every other scenario, real or perceived, indulge in it endlessly when it comes to Israel.

And what I call “standby antisemitism”is instantly deployed. rsk

Juliana Geran Pilon Immoral Equivalence The efforts of mainstream media, government officials, and elite universities to avoid outright condemnation of Hamas reveal a West at war with itself.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/western-medias-moral-equivalence

The horror of the events that took place in Israel this past weekend is still sinking in. Such atrocities, deliberately videoed and broadcast for the world to see, reveal a pathological mindset. It is also a harbinger of far worse to come unless we face the truth: far from constituting a clash of civilizations, these attacks repudiate civilization.

Sponsored by Iran, Hamas has little ideology beyond hatred, but hatred is ideology enough when your adversary fails to understand the multifaceted war being waged against it. For decades, Islamists, trained first by the Nazis and later by the KGB, learned how to manipulate the instruments of political warfare. By coopting naïve Western elites to embrace anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic memes, they’ve gradually succeeded beyond their wildest initial expectations.

True to form, the mainstream media in the West covered the attacks with soulless rhetoric. The New York Times, for example, refused to apply the word “terrorists” to the murderers, even as images of the atrocities flooded social media. The Washington Post, PBS, NPR, and Reuters all opted for the far milder “militants.”

An antiseptic moral equivalence infuses mainstream media coverage in the West. Reports routinely take pains to emphasize that there are victims on both sides. Hours after the invasion, PBS’s NewsHour announced, “In an unprecedented surprise attack, the militant Hamas rulers of Gaza sent dozens of fighters into Israel by land, sea, and air,” but then followed with this laconic statement: “Hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians are reported dead between the attack and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza cities.” Similarly, the Washington Post noted that “[t]he death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 370 were killed and 2,200 injured in Gaza.” On October 9, too, the New York Times and the Washington Post duly reported death totals on both sides.

In a New York Times editorial, “The Global Context of the Hamas–Israel War,” we see two photos: one of a boy running against a background of unidentified burning buildings far in the distance, from Ashkelon in Israel; the other, with no location provided, shows “a Palestinian mother [crying] next to the body of her son.” The asymmetry of pity on display in the pairing is clear. From these contrasting photos, are we meant to understand that the greater fault lies with Israel and, ultimately, America?

Acts of courage: Amid horror, Israelis rise to occasion: David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/acts-of-courage-amid-horror-israelis-rise-to-occasion/

Israelis caught in the murderous rampage by Hamas terrorists demonstrated heroism, determination and fortitude.

As Hamas terrorists made their savage way through Israel’s south, slaughtering more than 1,300 people and displaying the worst humanity has to offer, Israeli men and women carried out countless acts of courage.

For some it was their final act. Kibbutz Be’eri’s 22-year-old paramedic insisted on staying and helping the wounded, then hid for six hours in the clinic’s kitchenette grasping a knife, waiting (like so many) for help that never came. As the terrorists closed in, she texted her last words to her sister, “I love you.”

There was the young couple from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who hid their 10-month-old twins in their safe room before engaging in a hopeless fight with the well-armed terrorists.

Or the old-timers, former IDF officers, now grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who sped south to engage the enemy, killing dozens.

Doubtless many more acts of bravery went unseen and unheralded

Here are a few that have made it to the headlines:

1. The heroine of Nir Am

Inbal Liberman, 25, saved her entire kibbutz from the gruesome fate of many other kibbutzim in the region.

Serving as military security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am since December 2022, Liberman heard explosions on Saturday morning, the day of Hamas’s sneak attack.

Inbal realized that the explosions were different from the rocket attacks that she had become accustomed to. With little time to spare—Kibbutz Nir Am is located just a stone’s throw from the Gaza Strip, just over a half mile—she rushed to open the kibbutz armory.

She distributed weapons to her 12-man security team, made up of other kibbutz members, arranged them along the kibbutz fence and set ambushes for the terrorists.

When the bloodthirsty killers arrived, expecting another easy slaughter, they got the surprise of their lives. The security team gunned down 20—Liberman herself killed five—as the Hamas murderers encountered a wall of fire.

Paul du Quenoy Harvard’s Horror The statement from student groups blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks will further erode the university’s stature, and deservedly so.

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FHarvards-Horror.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” tweeted Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers on October 9, when he learned that 34 Harvard student organizations had signed a statement saying that they “hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence” in the Middle East and added that Israel “is the only one to blame.” The students’ statement was a direct response to Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians the day before, which has claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives, injured many more, and saw some 150 Israeli hostages carried off into captivity.

Presumably, Summers felt even worse than he did on February 21, 2006, when he was literally “alienated” from his post as Harvard’s president, resigning amid criticism for having suggested that women inherently might have less scientific aptitude than men. Summers apologized for those remarks, which he made based on empirical data that he said he hoped would be disproved. That did not save him from Harvard’s social-justice warriors, including a majority of Harvard’s faculty, who voted no confidence in his leadership. Instead, Summers’ downfall emboldened his critics, and led him and his successors to make identity politics central to Harvard’s mission.

More than a decade and a half later, only Summers can say whether he is truly surprised that hundreds of Harvard students would blame Israeli children, babies, grandmothers, and hundreds of others—among them at least 14 Americans now confirmed dead—for their own murders, injuries, and kidnappings. Despite his stated outrage, Summers has shown no interest in ending his affiliation with Harvard, as a principled person with such sentiments and bearing some responsibility for the climate at the school might have done.

Current Harvard president Claudine Gay confirmed that such statements are acceptable at what supposedly is the nation’s most prestigious university. Writing after 48 hours of silence, she declared that “our students have the right to speak for themselves,” even if “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

After massive public criticism, including from many Harvard affiliates, Gay amended her statement to declare, “I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” She nevertheless qualified her condemnation of Hamas’s “abhorrent” actions, leaving space and consideration for “whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the [Middle East] region” might be. Harvard’s best purpose, Gay continued, would “be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame. . . . I appeal to all of us in this community of learning to keep this in mind as our conversations continue.”

Matthew Continetti: The Shame of Academe

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-shame-of-academe/

As Israel mourns some 1,200 dead, prays for the release of more than 100 captives, reels from the worst day in its history, and mobilizes some 360,000 reservists, student activists and the international Left have mobilized to defend, apologize for, and appease evil.

Protests, marches, and statements of solidarity for Palestinian “resistance” have bloomed on city streets throughout the developed world and within America’s institutions of higher learning. The actions of these young people, and of the elites who run the schools, are more than appalling. They are evidence of Western confusion and decadence.

Who could have predicted that within 24 hours of a pogrom, crowds would appear in New York, Ft. Lauderdale, Toronto, London, and Sydney denouncing Jews and calling for an end to the Jewish State? Who might have anticipated that the message from academe would be, in so many words, that Israel had it coming?

Amid a backdrop of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs, a New Yorker waved a cellphone displaying the image of a swastika. Londoners chanted “From the River to the Sea,” demanding the elimination of Jews from the Holy Land. A kosher restaurant was vandalized in the same city. Down under, in front of the Sydney Opera House, masked men lit flares and called out “Gas the Jews.”

After the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, similar scenes of denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now, after Israel’s 9/11, they take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West.

Whatever this is, it is not progress. The grotesque tableaux represent social fracture, dissolution, ideological sorting, and weakening of confidence. They are a bad omen. Many of the protesters are young males asking for a fight. The last war with Hamas, in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic violence in the United States. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash when Israel launches its ground campaign to destroy Hamas.