NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Newark, N.J. Resolution Proclaims ‘World Hijab Day’ Meanwhile, in Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/newark-n-j-resolution-proclaims-world-hijab-day-and-this-year-thats-particularly-grotesque/

Yesterday, Wednesday, Feb. 1, was No Hijab Day, a Western feminist expression of solidarity with Muslim women in the United States who are supposedly oppressed and discriminated against (by those fictional but omnipresent MAGA-hat-wearing thugs) because they wear the hijab. Accordingly, Newark, N.J. city council President LaMonica McIver is set to introduce a resolution declaring Wednesday World Hijab Day in the City of Newark. McIver, of course, has all the proper Leftist intentions: celebrating “diversity,” standing against “hatred,” and all that. But this year in particular, her gesture is nothing short of grotesque. In Iran, women are dying for the freedom not to wear the hijab. And in Newark, witless Leftists are celebrating the symbol of their oppression.

Back on Sept. 16, 2022, in Tehran, the Iranian morality police arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians charged that she had been tortured to death while in custody. All over the country, protesters took to the streets to protest not against the hijab laws, but against the repressive and brutal Islamic Republic itself. Other women, and male protesters as well, were killed as the Iranian regime ruthlessly applied the Qur’anic injunction to “strike terror in the enemies of Allah” (8:60). The protests went on for months until the regime began summarily executing protesters, and even then some indomitably courageous Iranians continued to take to the streets to demand their freedom.

It is against that backdrop that the Newark World Hijab Day resolution will be introduced. For innumerable women in Iran, the hijab is the most visible sign of their second-class status, and of the brutality of the regime that will imprison them for years or even kill them outright for daring to venture out in public without wearing it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Rise of Transgenderism Leaves Civilization Undefended The cost of ignoring the ethical dimensions of our sex identities. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-rise-of-transgenderism-leaves-civilization-undefended/

If you’re like me you’ve probably had it with being afraid of the sheer rise in power that the transgender movement has amassed in little over two years. It has many people scared, truly scared. Scared of saying (I’m going to say it): Biological men can never be real women; men cannot have babies; referring to oneself as “they” is beyond grammatically infelicitous, it renders one a nonsensical and a conceptual non-entity; the transgender affirmation of adolescents, which means agreeing to visiting a host of atrocities on a child’s body and plying it with irreversible drugs, is child abuse; trans women (biological men) have no business participating in (real) women’s sports. There I’ve said it all—at least as much as I care to for now. Why are people scared of offending trans people?

Misgendering another person, I am told, is the worst offense you can commit against another human being—as bad as rape and murder. No kidding. How did a small minority of people get to command the language, protocols, norms and framing methods of an entire culture in so short a space of time? Who handed all that power to them, and why?

The issue goes deeper if we look at the logical terminal point of radical transgenderism. It is a form of moral decadence. Why? Because ultimately it culminates in people signing up at the gender unemployment line. To unemploy yourself from your gender or, some would say, to recuse yourself from it, is to emancipate yourself from the moral dimensions that come with your sex identities. For the sake of rhetorical expediency, I shall say, yes: to unemploy oneself from one’s gender identity as well. I have heard it said often that young people are suffering from civilizational exhaustion, and that that is the reason they are relinquishing their binary sex identities. It’s my generation, however, and the ones preceding it that have a right to be exhausted. The millennials and Generation Z that have no business feeling civilizational exhaustion. It is Gen Z that has inherited a technologically advanced civilization built for them. You’d expect more adults to be coming out as trans if this were even a plausible explanation for the rise of transgenderism. This is not the case.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Newsrooms Are Now Officially Democrats’ Newsletter Operations

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/02/newsrooms-are-now-officially-democrats-newsletter-operations/

The media’s leftward bias has been obvious for decades even as “journalists” denied their alignment with the Democratic Party. No honest person took Chris Cillizza’s 2016 claim that “reporters don’t root for a side. Period” to be true. All we’ve ever asked for is an admission from the media that it worked for the Democrats. We’re a little closer to that today.

Tuesday’s headline in the Daily Caller brought the light: “Major News Outlets Say They’re Ditching Objectivity In The Name Of ‘Diversity.’” The story beneath the headline tells us that, after interviewing more than 75 ​​”media leaders to gauge how the industry views the concept of ‘objectivity,’” a couple of big names in the press offered some guidelines for their colleagues.

The pair argued, said the Daily Caller, “that journalists should include their own beliefs, biases, and experiences to convey truth, and that journalistic objectivity was either unrealistic or undesirable.”

The two men who made the recommendation? Former Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward.

Not a year ago, the nabobs of the mainstream media tacitly admitted that their coverage is slanted when Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, announced it was “scaling back its opinion pages in an effort to combat a perception of” playing favorites and following a political agenda. The company claimed it had decided “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Local Congresswoman Accidentally Spends A Decade Being An Antisemite By: David Harsanyi

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/31/local-congresswoman-accidentally-spends-a-decade-being-an-antisemite/

Poor Ilhan Omar.

“I certainly did not or was not aware that the word ‘hypnotized’ was a trope,” the congresswoman told CNN’s Dana Bash this week. “I wasn’t aware of the fact that there are tropes about Jews and money. That has been a very enlightening part of this journey.”

And what a journey it’s been. It’s merely happenstance, Omar would have you believe, that she—along with her bestie, Rashida Tlaib, a woman who gets a “calming feeling” when thinking about the Holocaust’s aftermath and believes pro-Zionist Jews exploit “regular Americans” for “their profit,” etc.—keeps tripping into old-school Jew-baiting. What are the odds?

Omar’s been living in the United States since her early teens. She graduated from high school in a major American city. She earned a BA from North Dakota State University in political science and international studies. One assumes she’s consumed plenty of American culture over the years. You’re telling me that in all this time, in all her many interactions as an academic “fellow” and a government employee, she never once heard a stereotype about Jews hypnotizing nations or being motivated by money? That’s quite an accomplishment.

Of course, Omar shouldn’t lose her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee because she believes rootless cosmopolitans are brainwashing the world for the “Benjamins.” She should lose it because she downplays 9/11 and equates the United States with theocratic terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Taliban. She is neither ideologically nor morally prepared for the job. She should be denied a seat because Nancy Pelosi created a new precedent by not only denying Kevin McCarthy his choices for the Jan. 6 committee, effectively creating a show trial, but also stripping Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor-Green of their committee appointments over ugly things they said. Republicans should unseat Omar using her standards.

When Democrats introduced a resolution to strip Lauren Boebert of all House committee assignments over a stupid bigoted joke about Omar, the congresswoman told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we should punish and sanction Boebert by stripping her of her committees, by rebuking her language, by doing everything that we can to send a clear and decisive message to the American public that, if the Republicans are not going to be adults and condone — condemn this, that we are going to do that.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis Schools the College Board The new AP course in African-American Studies cuts the CRT.

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-schools-the-college-board-ap-african-american-studies-curriculum-crt-condoleezza-rice-11675293239?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The College Board has released a serious rewrite of its framework for a new high-school advanced placement (AP) course in African-American Studies. Critical race theory is out, and Condoleezza Rice is in. The group insists that revisions were done for pedagogical reasons and completed in December, but even assuming that’s true, it’s vindication for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida rejected the last version of the curriculum, which featured topics on “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism,” and “the case for reparations.” That framework suggested teens read a text from an academic exponent of critical race theory. “We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think,” Mr. DeSantis said, “but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.”

Even as it deletes this academic theorizing, the College Board denies it’s reacting to Florida’s criticism. The other explanation is that it arrived at a similar conclusion on its own. Mr. DeSantis’s critics have accused him of trying to erase black history, though he was doing nothing of the sort. If the revised AP framework actually was drawn up in December, then the curriculum committee had already decided that none of this nonsense was needed for teaching black history to high-schoolers.

The College Board’s CEO is calling the revised course “an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African-American history.” One thing driving the changes, he said, was that students in the pilot class were engaged by primary sources, but they found the academic theories “quite dense.”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

US Mideast diplomacy isn’t advancing peace or democracy Blinken’s call for “calm” and thinly veiled swipe at Israel’s judicial-reform plan will encourage more Palestinian terror and greater unrest in Israel. Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/us-mideast-diplomacy-isnt-advancing-peace-or-democracy/

During U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Jerusalem this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did his best to act as if the U.S.-Israel relationship had never been better. Netanyahu praised Blinken and President Joe Biden with the usual boilerplate rhetoric about the strength of the alliance. He also pointed to America’s standing by Israel while it is subjected to terrorist attacks, such as the massacre last week at a Jerusalem synagogue.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant did the same, using his meeting with Blinken to emphasize what Israel hopes will be a unified policy with the United States on the Iranian nuclear threat—now that the Biden administration’s effort to revive the Obama-era appeasement policy toward Tehran has clearly failed.

The wrong message

Nevertheless, Blinken’s visit said much more about what is wrong with the alliance and American Middle East policy than what is right. Though he condemned the terror attack and argued for Israel’s right to self-defense, he also demanded “calm” from both Israel and the Palestinians. This conveyed a bad message vis-à-vis Washington’s stance on the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” policy—of providing salaries and pensions to terrorists and their families –and inability to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

Blinken’s failure to hold P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the uptick in terrorism, which he wrongly attributed to the lack of a viable peace process, made it clear that Washington wasn’t interested in addressing the real reasons for the violence.

Just as bad, his thinly veiled attack on the Netanyahu government’s judicial-reform proposals was the kind of blatant intervention in Israel’s domestic politics that the Democratic administration wouldn’t tolerate from any other country that expressed an opinion about its policies.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Secretary Blinken, Middle East reality and US interests Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://bit.ly/3Ye0qUX

Secretary Blinken’s January 29-31, 2023 visit to Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Authority was another one of his milestones, well-intentioned – but erroneous – Middle East legacies. It has backfired on vital US interests, in general, and the pursuit of regional stability and peace, in particular.

*A major issue raised by President El-Sisi, during his meeting with Secretary Blinken, was the volcanic turbulence in Libya, which has traumatized the region since 2011, fueling Muslim Brotherhood terrorism in Egypt and overall Islamic terrorism in Africa and Europe.

*This turbulence was triggered by a US-led NATO military offensive against the Gaddafi regime, and was masterminded, largely, by key policy-makers in the Obama-Biden Administration. They included Antony Blinken, then National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden, and were led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her close advisor and Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan, UN Ambassador Susan Rice and Special Assistant to President Obama Samantha Power.

*The offensive was motivated by noble values of human rights, but went astray due to an intrinsic misreading of the Middle East, in general, and Libya, in particular, where Gaddafi was not fighting innocent bystanders, but anti-US Islamic terrorists. In fact, these terrorists murdered the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, following their US-facilitated victory over Gaddafi.

*While the aim of the offensive was to prevent a massive slaughter of non-combatant Libyans by Gaddafi, the outcome of the offensive has doomed Libya to decades of chaos, plagued by an ongoing slaughter house, which has dwarfed the worst casualty assessments made by Clinton and Blinken.

*The ill-advised offensive has transformed Libya – the soft underbelly of Europe – into one of the world’s largest platforms of anti-Western Islamic terrorists, drugs and arms traffickers.  It energized a global resurgence of Islamic terrorism, and became a home base for scores of terrorist militias and an arena of civil wars with the participation of Turkey, Qatar, Italy, Russia, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and France.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrats Deepen the Washington Swamp Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech will say it’s all good in Washington. That’s true, if you believe in the tooth fairy. By Daniel Henninger

Posted By on February 2nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-deepen-the-washington-swamp-special-counsel-hearing-corruption-washington-documents-committees-11675288301?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Here’s one way to divide America’s politics. Republicans and conservatives think the Washington Swamp is real. Democrats and progressives don’t believe it exists. This division of belief matters more than the existence of UFOs because whether the Swamp is real looks likely to be an issue in the 2024 presidential election.

President Biden gives his State of the Union speech next week, and no doubt he’ll describe his Washington as a city of bounty and benevolence.

Ron DeSantis disagrees. It was hard not to notice how, in his inaugural speech last month, the Florida governor went out of his way to describe Washington differently—unaccountable, a mockery of the rule of law, dismal, floundering, a binge.

These Swamp thoughts are set in motion by what might seem two unrelated news stories this week. But for those of us who believe, the Swamp covers a lot of damp ground.

The first was about the Justice Department and director of national intelligence telling the Senate Intelligence Committee they wouldn’t talk in detail to the committee about the Trump or Biden classified documents. The reason? It would get in the way of the special counsels appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Come again? The committee’s Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.) had it exactly right about this mega-stonewall: “That just cannot stand.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

THE RIGHT TO ABOLISH DEA BEGINS CHRISTOPHER RUFO

Posted By on February 1st, 2023

Yesterday, I joined Governor Ron DeSantis in Sarasota, Florida, to support his new education reform initiative, which promises to abolish DEI bureaucracies, prohibit coercive “diversity statements,” ban mandatory critical race theory-style “diversity training,” and end identity-based preferences in all Florida public universities.

In my speech to the press, I stood with the governor and explained the Orwellian nature of DEI, which sounds well-intentioned, but in truth, divides Americans into “oppressor” and “oppressed,” actively discriminates on the basis of ancestry, and seeks to create equality of outcomes, rather than equal treatment under the law.

DeSantis’ proposal is a bold one. For decades, conservatives have ceded the universities to the most intolerant and ideological factions of the Left. We’ve been paralyzed by the fear of specious accusations of “censorship.”

No more. It’s time to restore public authority over our public institutions. I will do everything in my power to help leaders such as Governor DeSantis—who has proven to be the most ambitious and strategically-minded political figure in the United States—succeed in transforming these proposals into the law of the land.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Freedom Is Getting More Fragile What happens when “freedom” is defined as “doing whatever one likes.” by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 1st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-freedom-is-getting-more-fragile/

In January of 1967, Governor Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”  Sixty-six years later, the truth of that observation is all around us. If we don’t reject the politicians and policies that compromise our freedoms, this generation may be the one who will live through that extinction.

The erosion of our freedom is not a paranoid figment of the libertarian imagination. Recently the Cato Institution released its Human Freedom Index for 2022, and found that globally, freedom has declined. The Land of the Free has dropped seven points since last year, and now ranks 23rd of 160 nations.

Politicized and unscientific Covid mitigation protocols account for some of this decline. Such policies furthered the loss of freedom by violating “the rule of law and the freedom of movement, expression, and assembly,” which are among Cato’s criteria for measuring freedom. But here in the U.S. we have seen the degradation of our freedoms long before Covid.

The gross violations of the rule of law, for example, accelerated after the 2016 election. The accusation that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to fix the election was fomented by our intelligence, investigative, and surveillance agencies. The special prosecutor took two years to debunk the charge.

In contrast, Hillary Clinton, who patently violated the laws regulating the handling of classified documents, as well as willfully destroying evidence, was given a pass by FBI Director James Comey weeks before the election, even though Clinton’s violations were much worse than those of General Petraeus and others who were disgraced, prosecuted, and some incarcerated.

Six years later, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound was invaded by a heavily armed battalion of FBI agents, who searched his home and rifled his wife’s underwear drawer, and scattered documents on the floor for a staged photo. Trump ended up in a still ongoing investigation. A few months later, classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s think-tank office and at his home and garage. In his case, there were no raids by armed agents, no leaked staged photos for the media, and no participation by the FBI at all. Biden’s aides and personal lawyers handled the whole show, and there is still an embargo on sharing details with the voters.

Such examples could be multiplied, such as the kid-gloves used by the DOJ and FBI in handling BLM and Antifa rioters and anti-prolife vandals and arsonists, compared to the Stasi thug-tactics employed against the January 6 and prolife protestors.