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Forgetting the Genocide of the Yezidis While the international community hides behind virtue signalling. Zidan Ismail

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/genocide-yezidis-has-been-forgotten-zidan-ismail/

In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) committed genocide of the Yezidis in their largest city in Iraq and the world, Sinjar.

The Yezidis are a religious minority in the Middle East; their main center is Iraq. At the time that the genocide began, their number was no more than 550,000 people, according to the United Nations when it was evaluating the crimes committed by ISIS against the Yezidis, which were classified as genocide and crimes against humanity.

It seems clear that what happened at the time had a goal, namely to wipe out the presence of the Yezidis. While it appeared initially that the world had grasped the significance of these crimes, now the Yezidi cause is largely being neglected amid the many crises and regional wars around the world.

Iraq historically has been an area of great religious diversity; the genocide of the Yezidis was one aspect of the Islamic State’s efforts to destroy that. The captivity and rape of Yezidi women, using them as commodities and even opening slave markets in the twenty-first century, was not just mass exploitation and sexual assault; this type of attack was used as a means of ethnic cleansing.

One of those who observed these events, “Salloum,” an iraqi researcher and writer living in Baghdad and working at a Baghdad university, explains: “It was the commitment of women in war with the aim of intimidating and humiliating a religious minority and taking away their dignity, and also with the aim of influencing the ethnic composition of this religious minority, and therefore this act is part of the efforts (genocide) that tried to change the Yezidis and their beliefs and to influence the ethnic and religious composition of the region.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Rashida Tlaib and the Making of her Second Blood Libel A vile anti-Semite and spreader of blood libels lurks the halls of Congress — while her own party remains silent. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/rashida-tlaib-and-making-her-second-blood-libel-ari-lieberman/

“Tlaib’s reckless and malevolent tweets, where she instinctively blames Jews for murder and other capital crimes belies a sinister intent. Even more troubling is that Tlaib is not just some foul-mouthed B-list actor or washed-out guitar player, she is a member of the U.S. legislative branch, and her words carry weight. Yet she continues to spew blood libels with near impunity and the deafening silence from her own party should sound alarm bells.”

In January 2020, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mi) retweeted an unverified tweet by professional agitator and former Palestinian Authority diplomat Hanan Ashrawi, in which she claimed that Jews had kidnapped and killed a Palestinian boy by throwing him into a pond where he drowned. As it turns out, the boy’s death was accidental and Israeli rescue teams resorted to superhuman efforts to retrieve the boy from the pond’s cold, murky waters and revive him.

Ashrawi deleted her tweet and surprisingly apologized for citing unverified sources. Tlaib on the other hand deleted the tweet but without apology. She was quick to accuse the Jews of committing barbaric acts but offered no contrition when those accusations proved unfounded. Even the ADL’s left-leaning head, Jonathan Greenblatt, pointed out that her lie was an “example of how a blood libel works in 2020; retweets [sic] a vicious lie steeped in centuries-old accusations used to demonize Jews, then says nothing when it’s disproven. An apology is overdue.” Of course, none was forthcoming.

It appears that Tlaib did not learn her lesson concerning her propensity to engage in hasty conclusions and antisemitic blood libels. On May 11, Israeli forces carrying out a counterterror operation in the Jenin vicinity encountered violent resistance from Palestinian gunman belonging to various terror entities. They came under heavy M-16 automatic fire. This is the weapon of choice for these gunmen, though some also carry AK-47 assault rifles and Carlo-type submachine guns.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Dumbest Generation Grows Up Is One Smart Book By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-generation-grows-up-is-one-smart-book/

There is a sense abroad that generational change has placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.

I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of “predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re experiencing today.

No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s young — as well as the Boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art, Bauerlein would often find himself booed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Clownish Disinfo Czar Got The Boot, But Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Hired Monster Replacements Diana Glebova

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://dailycaller.com/2022/05/19/nina-jakowicz-jamie-gorelick-michael-chertoff-disinformation-governance-board-dhs-patriot-act/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hired the co-author of the PATRIOT Act, arguably the harshest crackdown on civil liberties in modern American history, and an official under former President Bill Clinton to head the Disinformation Governance Board during its “pause.”

The DHS shut the board down Monday after just several weeks and its head, Nina Jankowicz, wrote a resignation letter Tuesday, according to The Washington Post. Jankowicz was scrutinized for pushing disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the now-discredited Steele Dossier, which Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA officer, said was possibly “part of a Russian espionage disinformation plot.” She also called Republicans who criticize critical race theory (CRT) “disinformers.” Videos of her singing as the “Mary Poppins of disinformation,” “fucking her way to the top” and satirical, sexualized renditions of Harry Potter themes have also raised eyebrows.

The department announced Wednesday former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former U.S. Deputy Secretary General Jamie Gorelick under Clinton “will lead a thorough review and assessment” of the board that was “grossly and intentionally mischaracterized.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Is Joe Biden Still President?

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/20/why-is-joe-biden-still-president/

The U.S. recently passed the 1 million mark for COVID-19 deaths, a grim milestone recognized with the lowering of flags to half staff around the country. More than 60% of those deaths have come during the bungling tenure of President Joe Biden, who said in a late-October 2020 debate with Donald Trump that the president should be kicked out of the White House because of how many had died from the virus on his watch. Based on his own standard, Biden should be back in his Delaware basement.

When asked at that debate how he’d “lead this country out of this crisis,” Biden responded with his usual “Big Guy” pomposity:

“220,000 Americans dead. You hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this. Anyone who … is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”

About three months later, Biden was inaugurated president. By early November 2021, Biden’s death toll had exceeded 332,000. The total for his 16 months in office is now about 600,000, even though vaccines have been available throughout his term and effective treatments arrived late last year.

Compare these numbers to the Trump presidency, during which 400,000 were killed by COVID in about a year, the majority before vaccines had been rolled out.

Though the Democrats and the press ghoulishly held Trump directly responsible for COVID deaths during his last year in office, we think it’s distasteful, and careless, to blame Biden for lives lost to the virus while he’s been president. There’s only so much a White House can do during a pandemic.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba Why aid the struggling anti-American regime in Havana now?

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-strange-help-for-havana-cuba-sanctions-russia-11652909478?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Whatever the humanitarian impulse behind the Biden Administration’s Monday announcement that it will lift some sanctions on Cuba, the timing couldn’t be worse. The dictatorship is under stress, and it remains Russia’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere. Why would Team Biden take the pressure off Havana now?

Cuba’s regime may be in the most precarious state of its 63 years in power. The economy has collapsed, and hero worship of Fidel Castro is as dead as he is. The July 11 uprising last year, when tens of thousands went to the streets and shouted for freedom, exposed the contempt Cubans have for their government.

Thousands of peaceful protesters were rounded up last summer by paramilitary and secret police, and some 750 are still in jail. This week Havana declared a new law criminalizing basic liberties. Insulting a government official is now punishable with up to five years in prison. A Cuban who engages with an international aid group not authorized by the state is headed for years behind bars.

The Biden Administration’s new policy removes the cap on dollar remittances that Americans may send to Cuba, reopens air travel to cities across the island, and restores travel by so-called educational groups. The practical effect will be to supply the regime, which controls all commerce, with hard currency to keep its repression going.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

My Synagogue’s ‘Anti-Semitism Tax’ More than 5% of our budget goes to security against mass shootings and other violence. By Howard Husock

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-synagogues-anti-semitism-tax-hate-crime-shooter-shooting-attack-bigotry-judaism-security-11652992632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

“Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago. The numbers have risen in recent years.”

For the most part, serving on my synagogue’s board of trustees hasn’t involved dramatic decisions. Usually we discuss routine matters such as how to pay for repairs on the house we provide our rabbi. During the pandemic, we debated whether to open the preschool or refund parents’ payments. But over the past several years a more worrisome matter has appeared on our agenda. I call it the anti-Semitism tax.

More than 5% of our budget is now devoted to security to protect the congregation. That’s more than $150,000 a year to prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, in January. We had long used funds to hire off-duty cops for the High Holidays to direct traffic, but this is much more serious.

Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. Security spending comes at the expense of other budget items: building repairs, new books for the library, or lower tuition for preschool parents, a key source of the new members we need to thrive as a community of believers. Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.

“Congregations have had to invest both in physical infrastructure and ongoing security personnel and processes,” observes Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, who heads the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. “Synagogues would obviously rather spend on our core functions of study, worship, volunteerism and community building.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Baby Formula Shortage Was Made in Washington The politicians tacitly admit that their policies are responsible.

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/governments-baby-formula-shortage-abbott-mead-johnson-tariffs-wic-fda-perrigo-democrats-11652996346?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

““I think there might be a need for indictment,” Nancy Pelosi said this week. She means business executives, not Members of Congress, alas.”

Politicians are scrambling to pacify mothers angry about the baby formula shortage, but the one thing they won’t do is look in the mirror. Fixing the shortage requires fixing the government policies that helped to create it.

The shortage began after Abbott Laboratories shut down a plant in Michigan after four infants who consumed formula made at the facility fell seriously ill. Abbott controls about 42% of the U.S. market, and the other three large manufacturers (Perrigo, Nestle and Mead Johnson) haven’t been able to increase production fast enough to compensate. Ergo, empty shelves.

Enter President Biden, who on Wednesday invoked the Defense Production Act. The Cold War-era law lets the federal government conscript private businesses to produce goods for national defense and to reorder supply chains, putting some customers ahead of others. Progressives think government is the solution to every problem, which is why the law has become their household remedy to every product shortage.

Mr. Biden says the law will let his Administration prioritize raw ingredients for baby formula. He also plans to send government planes to fly in supply from overseas. But there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of formula ingredients. Nor is there a problem transporting it. The main barriers to increasing supply are regulatory.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He’s Collecting Unemployment. Suzy WeissBehind the fall of David Sabatini, ‘one of the greatest scientists’ of his generation. Suzy Weiss

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=r

In 2018, David Sabatini was a world-renowned molecular biologist. He was a tenured professor at MIT. He ran a major lab at the Whitehead Institute, overseeing a team of 39 researchers, postdocs and technicians. Their job was to disentangle the mystery of the mTOR signaling pathway, a protein Sabatini had discovered while still in medical school, at Johns Hopkins. The mTOR signaling pathway plays a critical role in tumor development. Figuring out how it works would go a long way toward saving countless lives. 

This was why Sabatini was predicted to win the Nobel Prize. It was how he reeled in between three and four million dollars every year for his lab from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. It is why his colleagues have described him to me with words like “genius,” “one of the best scientists alive,” and “a pillar.”

“It’s like working for Steve Jobs. He can be brutal,” said one scientist. “But why would you want to work for anyone else?” 

Today, Sabatini is unemployed and unemployable. No one wants to be associated with him. Those who do risk losing their jobs, publishing opportunities, friends, visas, and huge federal grants. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me.

The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Blog Weaponizes Sixth Grade Arithmetic Against Climate Change Fanatics The costs of combatting global warming are astronomical. by Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://spectator.org/blog-weaponizes-sixth-grade-arithmetic-against-climate-change-fanatics/

On May 9, the Wall Street Journal published an article warning that traditional power plants are being retired more quickly “than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage.” The Journal’s belated discovery that the war on fossil fuels threatens a future of rolling blackouts would come as no surprise for those who have read Francis Menton’s brilliant, deceptively simple blog, the Manhattan Contrarian.

Menton says his entire contribution to the global warming debate boils down to being one of the few people willing to do basic arithmetic. Menton dismisses the idea that his background — majoring in math and economics in college and pursuing a career at the major New York law firm Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher — prepared him for taking on the consensus that achieving zero net emissions is a workable target. Menton told The American Spectator: “The impossibility of [an all-renewable future] is really just arithmetic, the kind you learn by sixth grade. Maybe you want a spreadsheet program to help you but in terms of the math, it’s nothing you didn’t learn in elementary school.”

Menton put that math to use when he attended a public hearing May 3 called by the New York Climate Action Council. The hearing, which invited public comment, concerned the “Draft Scoping Plan,” which lays out the state’s plan for achieving the net-zero emissions target established under New York’s 2019 Climate Act.