NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Could Our Politics Be Even More Childish?

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/03/could-our-politics-be-even-more-childish/

Turn on the television, listen to the radio, or take a stroll through the internet. Democrats and their media confederates are busy dishing out the nonsense in helpings large enough to choke a giant. Either they are intentionally trying to deceive, or they are extraordinarily puerile. Or both.

There are no other possibilities.

To listen to the Democrats as they go begging for votes, to consume the tripe that their helpers in the press are putting out, one would think the Republicans are fascist white supremacists who will kill democracy while setting up themselves in a permanent position of unchallengeable power.

Says Keisha Lance Bottoms, a presidential senior adviser and former Atlanta mayor: “This MAGA Republican agenda is an effort to disrupt our democracy. So, whether it be through November and beyond November, I think it will always be important to call out any effort there is to destroy – essentially, destroy the United States of America.”

The president himself said over the summer that “those of you who love this country, Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans, we must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.”

Last week, Joe Biden’s former boss urged voters “to elect good people up and down the ballot,” because “across the country, some of the folks who tried to undermine our democracy are running for offices that will oversee the next election. And if they win, there’s no telling what might happen.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Decisive Win for Netanyahu in Israel The right surges in the Jewish state, leaving behind political paralysis and a rump left.

Posted By on November 3rd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-decisive-win-for-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-election-prime-minister-11667427456?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The vote means Mr. Netanyahu will have a mandate he lacked in the final years of his previous turn as Prime Minister. That should make Israel more confident in meeting regional threats, as it remains America’s most valuable ally in the region.”

Benjamin Netanyahu has been around long enough to have done something to rankle almost every Israeli. But as his victory in Tuesday’s election shows, Israelis still trust him for the job of Prime Minister he has held twice before. In a rough neighborhood, with enemies that seek Israel’s destruction, that’s no small vote of confidence.

With nearly 90% of ballots counted, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party is set to win 32 seats, up from 30 in 2021, with a path to a coalition government as large as 65. Barring a late swing, this would be a larger majority for the right in the Knesset than anyone saw coming, ending the political paralysis that has plagued the country since 2019.

This reflects important realities in Israeli politics. Mr. Netanyahu is still considered the Israeli leader best able to deal with great powers. With Russian troops in Syria, the poisoned chalice of Chinese economic engagement and an America that is hot and cold, Israel needs a strategic vision. Mr. Netanyahu has one, as he laid out recently in these pages, whereby economic and military strength lead to diplomatic success, not the other way around. The Abraham Accords with the Gulf Arabs are a vindication of that vision.

Mr. Netanyahu also benefits from keeping his eye on the threat from Iran amid the distractions, and from his record of free-market reform. As finance minister from 2003-05, Mr. Netanyahu led Israel’s transformation from a socialist economy to the “start-up nation” it is today.

Meanwhile, the Israeli left has collapsed. Its two parties, including the Labor Party that dominated for decades, received less than 7% of the vote—combined. Far-left Meretz is now likely to win no seats. The left lost credibility after the Palestinians refused to accept a state when it was offered and pocketed Gaza only to use the territory for attacks on Israeli civilians.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Thoughts (or Hopes?) Sydney Williams

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

Otto von Bismarck reputedly said: “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” Never having gone hunting or been in combat, I assume that the “Iron Chancellor” was correct about those events. However, having watched elections for seventy years, I know he is right about politicians who give speeches that exaggerate past accomplishments, denigrate opponents, and fabricate plans for the future. But, as the author-poet Benét is quoted in the rubric above, doing so is “an American custom, like eating corn on the cob.” The difference today, though, is that elections don’t end on election day: witness Hillary Clinton in 2016, Stacy Abrams in 2018, and Donald Trump in 2020. 

While there are issues that concern us all, we have politicians today, as one pundit put it, who have even bigger issues – ones of excessive egos and acute sensitivity to criticism. Nevertheless, issues are plentiful: abortion and a woman’s right to choose; inflation, which is hitting the pocket books of everyone; the economy – while third quarter preliminary GDP (+2.6%) was a welcome relief after two quarters of negative growth, rapid inflation and escalating interest rates portend stagflation; a surfeit of jobs and a decline in labor participation rates suggest a dearth of willing workers; education, where the drop in test scores accelerated during Covid, but the decline began earlier; immigration, where a needed increase in legal immigration is being held hostage to a flood of illegal immigrants; crime, which has increased across the country, but disproportionately in inner cities; discrimination against Asians and Jews, reminiscent of the anti-Semitism of the 1920s, scare mongering over climate change by radicals with little understanding of history and climatology; and the teaching of a false narrative regarding the founding of the United States, along with the cancellation of ideas that do not conform to progressive ideology.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Martha Gellhorn Loved Hemingway and Israel (MAY 1921)by Rachel Shteir

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/considering-martha-gellhorn

In 1959, Martha Gellhorn wrote that her first marriage, to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940 until 1945, was “a distant dream, not very true, and curiously embarrassing.” More than 60 years later, you would think that she deserves more than to be cast as Hemingway’s third wife. But that is exactly what the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary Hemingway does.

Born in St. Louis in 1908, Martha bore witness to most of the wars of the 20th century, with her insights captured in 21 books. She believed that writing was in the service of fighting injustice, and her work demonstrated bracing honesty, unfathomable courage, and a strict code of right and wrong. Yet her old-fashioned virtues make her difficult to approach. Add this to her fierce, late-in-life defense of Israel and the fact that she killed herself in 1998 rather than lose her eyesight, and she becomes, as my students would say, less relatable. Never mind that she continued to travel and file stories into her 80s, defying the common wisdom that war correspondent is a job reserved for young people. Or that her lean, arresting style can make you weep. Too often written off as adjunct to Hemingway, she once said that she wanted her journalism to “eliminate the sound of me screaming.”

Meanwhile, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway is the queer victim of toxic masculinity (he liked to dress as a woman in bed with his fourth wife). B & N are too smart to paint Gellhorn as the “bitch” that some of Papa’s friends viewed her as, but they do introduce her as a writer who “had a crush” on him; Meryl Streep reads her letters in mid-Atlantic tones. Their Gellhorn, while sympathetic, shows too little of the brave, charming, bullying, vain, daring, mythmaking female writer and too much of a #MeToo heroine chafing at her husband’s tyranny.

Unlike Hemingway, Gellhorn loved her mother, Edna, a beautiful suffragist who married George Gellhorn, a gynecologist. Both were half Jewish. Martha, their third child, grew up assimilated. In her largely excellent biography, Carolyn Moorhead only reports one incident of antisemitism in Gellhorn’s childhood, when her friend, Johnny Stix, was not invited to a dance because she was Jewish and Gellhorn also refused to go in solidarity.

If the Gellhorns—especially the impressive George—worshipped anything in the Jewish tradition, it was education. After Gellhorn came home from school with female genitalia missing from the drawings in her biology textbook, her parents started their own progressive school. Gellhorn attended, and there she began to cultivate friendships with men and women she admired. It was this need that may have resulted in her marriage to Hemingway, which the documentary series does not explore. She needed heroes to model herself after, and she understood early on that there would be a cost. As she later wrote, she needed “my desperate faith in the human spirit … revived and rewarded.” She did not find that at Bryn Mawr, where she went in 1926 and where she read Knut Hamsun and edited the college newspaper.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN Sides with China Despite Its Own Report Condemning Xinjiang Abuses by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18969/china-uyghurs-un

The recent United Nations Human Rights Council vote — rejecting the West’s proposal to debate China’s possible “crimes against humanity” in its treatment of its Muslim minority in Xinjiang — covered up Beijing’s gruesome treatment of its Uyghur Population. This vote, saving face for the Chinese Communist Party at its recently concluded 20th National Congress, shields the Chinese regime’s true nature and indicates its increasing influence in international affairs.

Most significant for the United States were the abstentions cast by several of the largest Latin American members of the UNHRC, which were part of a pattern reflecting the waning of US diplomatic clout in the Western Hemisphere. The tally also underscores China’s rising influence in the region, which campaigned hard opposing the resolution. Only Honduras and Paraguay voted with the West.

In response to increased international criticism, Chen Quanguo, the Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary of Xinjiang, claimed that the re-education centers had closed because the students had graduated. Although satellite imagery indicates that Chen was technically correct in saying that some “re-education centers” have been closed, subsequent reporting by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute determined that the overall number of detention facilities and prisons has markedly increased and that the security gulag system in Xinjiang has not been phased out.

The [Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights] report painted a darker picture of what actually goes on inside Xinjiang’s VETCs. Interviews of dozens of former VETC inmates reveal that the camps are lined with external and internal fencing, and armed guards stationed on watchtowers with orders to shoot to kill anyone attempting to escape. Former prisoners relate that there are no home visits, and prisoners receive no knowledge of the length of their enforced detention.

The CCP abolished the right to family privacy, by forcibly quartering ethnic Han Communist agents inside the homes of Xinjiang’s Muslim citizens. The regime calls this invasive policy “Becoming Family.” These “visitors,” often quartered in Muslim homes for a month at a time, report on family religious practices or signs of political dissidence.

China’s Communist regime still insists that its overall policy in Xinjiang is designed to improve security, lift indigenous peoples out of poverty and improve their quality of life by encouraging lifestyle changes such as family planning practices, learning new skills, and moving into urban environments.

President Xi justifies CCP policies in Xinjiang by the necessity to combat the “Three Evils” of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism. Subduing Xinjiang also facilitates Communist China’s broad economic plans to increase its influence in Central Asia while using the region as a thoroughfare to implement Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative projects in Africa, the Near East and Europe.

The recent United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) vote — rejecting the West’s proposal to debate China’s possible “crimes against humanity” in its treatment of its Muslim minority in Xinjiang — covered up Beijing’s gruesome treatment of its Uyghur Population. This vote, saving face for the Chinese Communist Party at its recently concluded 20th National Congress, shields the Chinese regime’s true nature and indicates its increasing influence in international affairs.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

MARTHA GELLHORN ON THE ARABS OF PALESTINE OCTOBER 1961

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

MARTHA GELLHORN, novelist, journalist, and former war correspondent, has recently returned from a journey to the Middle East, where she went to see the “Palestinian Refugee Problem” in terms of real life, real people. Here she reports how the Arab refugees and the Arab Israelis live, and what they say about themselves, their past and their future.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1961/10/the-arabs-of-palestine/304203/

The Palestinian refugees are unfortunate victims of a brief moment in history. It is forgotten that Jews are also victims in the same manner, of the same moment. The Arab-Israel war and its continuous aftermath produced a two-way flight of peoples. Nearly half a million Jews, leaving behind everything they owned, escaped from the Arab countries where they lived to start life again as refugees in Israel. Within one generation, if civilization lasts, Palestinian refugees will merge into the Arab nations, because the young will insist on real lives instead of endless waiting. If we can keep the peace, however troubled, the children of Palestinian refugees will make themselves at home among their own kind, in their ancestral lands. For the Jews there is no other ancestral land than Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What you might not know about Lucianne Goldberg By Alicia Colon

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/what_you_might_not_know_about_lucianne_goldberg.html

Lucianne would have laughed uproariously at what is happening in San Francisco and at what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter. I can hear her say, “It’s over for the coverups.”

The media will still try and   bamboozle us with its version of the Mr. Pelosi incident just as it did for every Dem attack on Trump, but it won’t work now that the richest man in the world who is also a tech genius can and will uncover the truth.

Since Lucianne’s passing at age 87 on Oct, 26th, there have been numerous essays both laudatory and a downright snarky one by the Washington Post. One headline in particular caught my eye – The Indiscreet Charm of Lucianne Goldberg by Andrew Ferguson in Time magazine.

What struck me the most about that headline was the word, ‘indiscreet’ because the Lucianne I knew for the past 27 years was probably the most discreet person in public life. She knew just about everybody in politics and the media. She knew lots of the nitty gritty embarrassing details in the lives of the rich and famous but she never publicized them. She had a bawdy sense of humor and might have been outspoken in private discussions with friends whom she trusted to keep our own counsel, but she was not a malicious gossip. Only the Clintons brought out her knives.

She’d always say, “my loathing for the Clintons requires medication.”  The Clintons tried to destroy her, she told me. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Lucianne was a literary agent whose clientele, including Mark Fuhrman, was persuaded to leave her company because of pressure from the president on the media outlets that Fuhrman and the other authors needed to promote their books. 

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Kanye West, Anti-Semitism, and Candace Owens “When a friend makes a mistake, he remains a friend, but the mistake remains a mistake.” By Dennis Prager *********

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/01/kanye-west-anti-semitism-and-candace-owens/

Let’s begin with an indisputable fact. What Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, is saying about Jews is anti-Semitic. Why? Because “the Jews run everything” is pure libel. That’s why Jews are not paranoid about being deeply troubled by such sentiments. If widely believed, they will almost inevitably lead to the persecution of Jews.

Now, let’s turn to the matter of Candace Owens. For the few who do not know who she is, Candace is a brilliant and charismatic black woman with a very large following. The Left hates her because she is a black conservative and, even worse, a supporter of former President Donald Trump. In the eyes of the Left, Trump supporters (often referred to as “MAGA people”) are either out-and-out fascists or, as Joe Biden put it, “semi-fascists.” 

Owens started BLEXIT, “a movement to encourage black people to leave far-left, progressive policies behind.” She believes the Democratic Party has used blacks to gain and retain power, not to help them. 

By virtually every metric, Trump did more to help black America than the entire Democratic Party in living memory, not to mention nonliving memory. The Democrats began as the pro-slavery party and morphed after the Civil War into the pro-Jim Crow party and the home of white racists. Later, with its social policies, the Democratic Party was instrumental in breaking down the black family, which, before Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” consisted overwhelmingly of a mother, father, and children living in the same home. To be precise, in 1960, 78 percent of black children lived in intact homes. Today, nearly three-quarters of black children do not.

In her attempt to lead blacks away from the Democrats, Owens befriended Kanye West, the best-known black rapper in the country. And indeed, Ye, as he is now known, became a Trump supporter.

Needless to say, the Democrats and the rest of the Left hate Candace. Democrats loathe every black individual who isn’t a Democrat, but blacks who convince other blacks to leave the Democratic Party are held in special contempt. And as with all those whom leftists hate, they do not debate, they smear. 

In addition to “racist,” “homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” “xenophobe,” “transphobe,” “fascist,” and “sexist,” “anti-Semite” is often used to smear opponents of the Left.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Taxpayer and Donor-Funded Systemic Anti-Semitism at Berkeley Jewish donors gave UC Berkeley over $450M in one year. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/taxpayer-and-donor-funded-systemic-anti-semitism-at-berkeley/

Berkeley’s $3 billion budget comes from taxpayers through tuition paid for by government scholarships, state, local and federal grants, state funding and tax deductible contributions. While the University of California school insists that “the state provides just 14 percent of the university’s revenue”, taxpayers actually fund or underwrite much of its operation.

And that operation is systemically antisemitic.

When nine campus groups at the UC Berkeley School of Law announced that they wouldn’t host the vast majority of Jewish speakers (as Dean Erwin Chemerinksy admitted that it “would exclude about, I don’t know, 90 percent or more of our Jewish students”), it made headlines around the world. It was also in violation of federal and state not-discrimination laws.

The University of California is a 501(c)(3) and the UC Berkeley Foundation is the college’s own nonprofit. And UC Berkeley Law is eager to accept everything from gifts of stocks to cryptocurrency. Taxpayers subsidize this system even though the UC Berkeley Foundation which has assets approaching $3 billion. That money helps fund its systemic antisemitism.

Systemic antisemitism at the UC Berkeley School of Law is not just a private policy. The creation of “Jewish-Free Zones” at the law school are being subsidized by taxpayers.

And by Jewish donors.

In ’21, Scott Shenker, a computer scientist, wrote UC Berkeley a $25 million check. That same year the Wertheim Family Foundation pledged $100 million to UC Berkeley Optometry. A year earlier, Bob Haas injected yet another $24 million into UC Berkeley. And they are not alone.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Should Convicts Have to Earn Their Keep in Prison? Why doing time shouldn’t absolve you of your fiscal responsibility. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/should-convicts-have-to-earn-their-keep-in-prison/

“Let’s clean up the language of the 13th Amendment if such a feat is required. Agreed. And then let us remind criminals entering the penal system: There are no free lunches. You will pay as you go.”

The recent Red Scare by the Left in declaring that slavery is still legal in five of the United States needs some cautious reflection and analysis on at least one question it raises. Allegedly, the landmark 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on December 16, 1865, saw the official abolishment of slavery. It is said, however, that it was allowed to continue as a punishment in prison against convicted felons.

Semantic interpretations of the 13th Amendment aside, and of how it has been and will continue to be applied, there is one moral question that frames the issue and gives it moral heft, so to speak: whether convicted felons ought to be paid for their labor while in prison. These felons include, but are not limited to, wider groups of individuals. They are rapists, murderers, armed robbers, pedophiles, carjackers, child-sex traffickers, and terrorists.

In being incarcerated, such individuals are not simply being punished for their crimes; they are also removed from society as they often pose incalculable harm to individuals and to public safety. They have violated the individual rights of others and have, in some respects, ejected themselves from the ambit of certain rights.

Society pays for their physical, psychological, and medical upkeep through taxation. Taxpayers pay a lot for private prisons. Various reports claim that in the 2018 fiscal year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spent over $800 million of taxpayer money on privately-owned or -operated detention facilities.