BOOKS Comments turned off

Book Review by Mark Durie: The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research

Posted By on March 12th, 2023

https://markdurie.substack.com/p/book-review-by-mark-durie-the-critical?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Qur’an is not an easy read, even in translation: its chapters are out of order, and its contents often obscure; verses do not follow logically one upon another, and some contradict each other. Additionally, while Muhammad’s biography provides the context for understanding particular passages, the Qur’an does not provide that information. Many English translations use antiquated King-James-style language, and translators typically translate what commentators think the text means, not what the text actually says.

For English readers, things improved in 2013 with the publication of Arthur J. Droge’s The Qur’an: A New Annotated Translation.[1] There is also a scholarly 2020 English commentary by Gordon D. Nickel, which uses Droge’s text.[2] To these resources has now been added Spencer’s The Critical Qur’an, “critical” in the sense that it exposes the reader to the opinions of Muslim commentators, medieval and modern.

Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, does not spare the reader problematic passages, as his discussion of the wife-beating verse, Sura 4:34, exemplifies. Spencer also draws readers’ attention to internal contradictions in the text and to manuscript variants.

The Critical Qur’an has some limitations. Page headers do not provide sura (verse) numbers. The index is patchy: for example, “idolater” and “associate” are not to be found. A glossary would help. The lack of paragraphs in the Qur’anic text makes it hard to follow. Some scholarship, such as relying on Richard Bell’s idiosyncratic work from the 1930s,[3] is not up to date.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

China’s War Warnings by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on March 12th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19475/china-war-warnings

The world needs to look at what the Chinese leadership is in fact doing. Xi Jinping appointed what is now known as his “war cabinet” in October, at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress; he is implementing the largest military buildup since the Second World War; he has been trying to sanctions-proof his regime; and he is mobilizing the civilian population for war. Communist Party cadres, for example, are taking over privately owned factories and converting them from civilian to military production.

In the latest move, China’s regime is establishing National Defense Mobilization Offices across the country. The Reservists Law went into effect the first of this month.

Whatever China intends, its intended victims need to match its preparations. There has never been a time when it has been more important to deter the People’s Republic of China.

Even if all this is the biggest bluff in history, the Chinese military is provoking incidents that could lead to war, especially in the tense climate Xi Jinping has created. In December… a Chinese fighter jet dangerously intercepted a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the South China Sea.

Moreover, beginning January 28, China’s large spy balloon intruded into American airspace, then proceeded to surveil nuclear weapons sites, including Malmstrom, F. E. Warren, and Minot Air Force Bases, which house all of America’s Minutemen III intercontinental ballistic missiles….. This path suggests China is gathering intelligence for a nuclear strike on America’s strategic weapons — and shows Beijing’s utter disrespect for the United States.

Whatever China’s intentions… this cannot end well. The problem is complacency. Xi Jinping and Qin Gang, whatever they are doing, are establishing a justification to strike America — and they are making preparations to do so.

“If the U.S. doesn’t hit the brakes and continues to barrel down the wrong track,” China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang said on March 7, “no amount of guardrails can prevent the carriage from derailing and crashing, and there will surely be conflict and confrontation.” He also spoke of “catastrophic consequences.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden State Department giving funds to anti-government protests in Israel

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.israel365news.com/368136/biden-state-department-giving-funds-to-anti-government-protests-in-israel/?

Police clashed with anti-government protesters who attempted to shut down the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv on Thursday. As some recent reports have highlighted, some of the funding for the protests and the organizations behind them comes from foreign sources, including the US State Department. 

One of the major organizations behind the protests is the Movement for Quality Government (MQG). The organization, which  has received over $38,000 in funding from the US State Department, public Israeli records show.

The group describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan, grassroots, non-profit organization that has been defending Israeli democracy since 1990.” The group however, has brought numerous court cases against Prime Minister Netanyahu, including a petition to the Supreme Court that called for declaring him unfit to hold public office. In addition, MQG is primarily funded by the New Israel Fund, a US NGO that funds many anti-Israel organizations that promote a narrative portraying Israel as an apartheid state.

“The State Department should never fund foreign partisan organizations in allied democracies,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Washingoton Free Beacon, which published a report on the issue. “If the shoe was on the other foot, the Biden administration would accuse Israel of interfering in our elections. Congress should absolutely review the State Department’s potential funding of partisan politics in Israel.”

While acknowledging to the Free Beacon that they had provided the funding, the State Department refused to comment on what the funding was used for. 

“The State Department has provided small grants to the Movement for Quality Government, including a grant signed in 2020 during the previous administration and continued under the Biden administration that focused on teaching civic education and supporting good governance,” a State Department official said.

Grant information shows that MQG received grants of around $10,000 to $15,000 dollars in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In each of those years, the State Department under President Biden was listed as the group’s sole foreign donor. The grant information does not show State Department funding before 2020.

The last tranche of funding was awarded in September 2022. The money was meant to be used for democracy training programs in the Israeli school system.

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Triumph and Tragedy of Abba Eban Eban’s meteoric rise and dramatic fall was a classic tragedy—and one that extended beyond his personal political career. It holds a lesson for today. By Rick Richman

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/10/the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-abba-eban/

This essay is adapted from And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, by Rick Richman (Encounter, 388 pages, $33.99.)

Abba Eban was a key member of Israel’s government for more than a quarter century—from 1948 to 1974. In Israel’s first decade, he served for nine years as its U.S. ambassador in Washington and simultaneously as its U.N. ambassador in New York. Then he was education minister for three years; after that, deputy prime minister for three years; and finally, foreign minister for eight years. In 2002, his obituary in the New York Times ran 2,800 words, saying that he: 

[sent] his supremely cultured voice using the King’s English into forensic combat. His orations, fierce in their defense of his country, were also marked by rich appeals to history, soaring visions of a peaceful Middle East and withering scorn for Israel’s enemies.

Eban’s speeches were a record of eloquence unequaled by any diplomat during that period. Conor Cruise O’Brien, representing Ireland in the U.N. (sitting next to Eban in the General Assembly), called him “the most brilliant diplomatist of the second half of the 20th century.” 

In 1974, however, Yitzhak Rabin left Eban out of his new Israeli government, and Eban never again held a ministerial job. By 1988, he was so low on the Labor Party electoral slate that he was not reelected to the Knesset. Humiliated, he retired from political life, relocated to New York, and spent the rest of his life teaching, writing, and speaking.

Eban’s meteoric rise and dramatic fall was a classic tragedy—and one that extended beyond his personal political career. It holds a lesson for today.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Unrepentant US health agencies issue more bizarre directives

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/3893118-unrepentant-us-health-agencies-issue-more-bizarre-directives/

You might think U.S. health authorities would be embarrassed. After all, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies oversaw policies that produced more COVID-19 deaths per capita than nearly any other developed country.

More humiliating, they earned that distinction while dictating draconian shutdowns and school closures that profoundly damaged our economy and our children’s educations. And even though Americans had early access to the world’s best vaccines.

You would be wrong. Instead of adopting a humbler or more cautious approach to managing the waning virus, the CDC and the Biden administration are more truculent – and incomprehensible – than ever.

Most recently, the Biden White House has doubled down on not allowing Novak Djokovic into our country because the world’s top tennis player is not vaccinated. The tennis star was similarly prevented from coming to the U.S. last year, causing him to miss out on playing in the prestigious U.S. Open and for a brief period leading to his losing his number one status.

At the same time, the White House is set to announce that people coming to the U.S. from China will no longer need a negative COVID test to gain entry. Neither policy makes sense.

The Djokovic decision seems bizarre, especially given what we know about the vaccines and their impact over time. The vaccines’ efficacy declines rapidly, meaning that booster shots are needed to revive its protections and to address today’s most prevalent variants.

One study of veterans showed that the protection derived from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (admittedly, the worst) dropped from 86 percent in March 2021 to 13 percent in September, just six months later.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

American suppression of fossil fuels courts a national security disaster By Ronald Stein

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.cfact.org/2023/03/08/american-suppression-of-fossil-fuels-courts-a-national-security-disaster/

The capacity of a modern economy to produce food and products for its citizens, and weapons and fuels for its military to project power, are the undeniable twin pillars of global power. Both depend on reasonably priced and readily available products made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. In other words, American literally runs and fights on products from fossil fuels.

The renewables of wind and solar only generate occasional electricity, but manufacture nothing for society.

Take for example the medical industry that did not exist just a few hundred years ago, that is now maintaining the health and well-being of the 8 billion now on this planet. Today, as an exercise in energy literacy, try to identify something, anything, in your doctor’s office, or the hospital, or the pharmacy, which was not made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.

President Biden has been campaigning for years for the elimination of fossil fuels. But ridding the world of oil, without a replacement in mind, would be immoral and evil, as extreme shortages of the products manufactured from fossil fuels will result in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths. Shortages of fossil fuel products would necessitate lifestyles being mandated back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800’s, and could be the greatest threat to the planet’s eight billion residents.

The ruling class in wealthy countries are not cognizant that the planet populated from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years, and that population explosion began right after the discovery of oil. That growth in the population was not just based on crude oil by itself, as crude oil is useless until it can be manufactured into something useable. Today, through human ingenuity, we have more than 6,000 products  currently benefiting society and fuels for the 50,000 jets moving people and products, and more than 50,000 merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space programs.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

America’s Crisis is the Universities Crime, treason, riots, open borders and our other threats are coming out of campuses. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-crisis-is-the-universities/

“The source of our current ills – the  lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our borders, the racist ‘equity’ policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke” derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural Marxism.”
–David Horowitz, ‘De-Fund the Universities!’

The Duke of Wellington reportedly stated that the battle of Waterloo was won on the fields of Eton College. George Orwell countered that, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

America’s battles against foreign and domestic enemies have been lost in our ‘Etons’, our schools and universities which have turned their graduates against the country and its values.

The source of our social and political crises is the destruction of our educational institutions through a successful fifty-year effort by radical activists to purge conservatives and patriots from American academic faculties. This was followed by a massive reconstruction of the academic curriculum and the transformation of universities into one-party indoctrination and recruitment centers for the anti-American left.

We at the David Horowitz Freedom Center were among the first to confront the problem and take the battle to campuses across the country, but as the last conservative faculty are purged and conservative students are silenced, the old remedies of adversarial dialogue and debate are no longer available. Conservative speakers are violently assaulted on campuses and events are shut down. College administrators are finding ways to force out even tenured conservative faculty while mandatory anti-white, anti-Jewish, anti-Asian and anti-patriotic “diversity” measures keep the doors firmly closed to conservatives and patriots.

It’s time to recognize that this is an existential threat to America and to take action against it. That’s why we’re calling for the defunding of universities.

A Survey of the Problem

Universities have become efficient indoctrination centers that couldn’t be any more destructive if they were being run by China and Russia.

HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

Another Pulitzer Prize discredited as propaganda By Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/another_pulitzer_prize_discredited_as_propaganda.html

Remember all that political hay the far left and its media allies made during the Vietnam War about the wickedness of America’s South Vietnamese ally and the importance of abandoning that country to the communists?

Here’s the Pulitzer Prize–winning AP photo that was supposed to prick our consciences and make us turn against that “immoral” war against a communist takeover:

There’s no doubt about it, the photo is hard to look at. It’s crude, rough, wartime justice, a picture of South Vietnamese Police Captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan coldly executing Viet Cong Captain Nguyễn Văn Lém. The film is even harder to look at.

It ran on the front page of the New York Times, cropped from the original to fill the space and make its impact even more immediate.

And it got the results the anti-war left wanted: public sentiment abruptly turned against the war as a result of this photo.  The Vietnamese people were abandoned by the Americans, whose cut-and-run evacuation from the Saigon embassy rooftop was only recently bested by Joe Biden’s Afghanistan pullout.  After that, the re-education camps rolled in, the boat people launched into the high seas, and the killing fields of Cambodia began.

Jane Fonda must have been so proud of herself.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Winning Technological War: Biden Administration Allowing It by Judith Bergman

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19451/china-winning-technological-race

China has made no secret of its ambition to become, by 2049, the world’s greatest power, surpassing the US as the economic, technological, political and military leader of the world. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been planning and operating in line with those ambitions for decades.

In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that Chinese theft of US intellectual and other property is happening on “a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”

A particularly disturbing technological lead is the leap China has made in the military and space sectors… China’s research interests and performance in military and space sectors are particularly notable, including an advanced hypersonic missile that China tested, to the US military’s surprise. China, it turns out, houses seven of the world’s top 10 research institutions focused on the field of hypersonics.

The overriding importance of technology for the Chinese Communist Party is reflected in the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping has filled 40% of the CCP Central Committee –- the institution that decides China’s major policies — with officials who have backgrounds and experience in aerospace, artificial intelligence and other critical technological areas.

If the US and other Western countries wish to check China’s rise, they will have to make a far more serious effort to prioritize and invest in research and technology, not to mention doubling down on preventing more theft of technology and intellectual property.

Without urgent action on the part of the West, the world will soon be run by China.

China is winning the technological race with the West, and is well on its way to becoming the world’s leading technology superpower, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Administration Allowing Iran’s Mullahs to Join the “Nuclear Club” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on March 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19473/iran-nuclear-club

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

In the meantime, the Biden administration does not appear even slightly concerned that a regime which has frequently threatened to wipe two entire countries, America and Israel, off the map, is closer than ever to possessing nuclear weapons.

General Hossein Salami, the commander-in-chief of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has made the Iranian regime’s plans vehemently clear. “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map,” he announced on Iran’s state-controlled Channel 2 TV in 2019. Khamenei has also published a 416-page book, “Palestine,” about destroying Israel.

Thanks to the Biden Administration’s weakness, Iran’s anti-American, genocidal mullah regime, which is still calling for “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”, is about to join the “nuclear club.”

This — along with the surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the many green lights offered to the Chinese Communist Party — will be the disastrous legacy of the Biden Administration.

Ever since the Biden Administration shifted Washington’s Iran policy from maximum pressure to total appeasement, the ruling mullahs’ nuclear advances have been remarkable.

The Iranian regime is rapidly forging ahead with uranium enrichment. Inspectors from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), recently found uranium particles in Iran that were enriched up to 83.7%, just shy of the 90% needed for nuclear weapons. The enrichment has been taking place in Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear site. Before the Biden Administration, the regime was enriching uranium at 3.5%. This is a remarkable nuclear escalation in just two years.