ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Ramadan intifada? Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 6th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-ramadan-intifada/

(April 5, 2022 / JNS) The Muslim month of Ramadan, which began on Friday night, is already proving to be the challenge that Israeli authorities had anticipated. Palestinians and radicalized Arab Israelis swarming the Old City of Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate on Saturday and Sunday attacked police, who were stationed at site to keep the peace.
The irony is inescapable. Ramadan, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, is marked by fasting and serious prayer. The 29- to 30-day period is when Muslims are supposed to focus on faith, spiritual contemplation and self-discipline. In Israel, however, the holy days are a source of potential—and often realized—peril for citizens and tourists of all religions. The proximity of Passover and Easter, rather than cause for monotheistic celebration, only serves to make the security situation more precarious for residents and visitors alike.

In a futile attempt to keep the imminent chaos at bay, Israeli and American leaders, along with counterparts in the Arab world, made a point last month of warning against the unrest that all knew was inevitable. Unfortunately, none aimed the admonition at the actual culprits—Palestinians and those among their Israeli brethren planning and carrying out mass murder.
At a press conference on March 27 following a meeting with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that he and the Israeli premier had “discussed ways to foster a peaceful Passover, Ramadan and Easter across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in Jerusalem, a city of such profound importance to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Justin Trudeau (and Canada) Differ From Joe Biden (and the U.S.) By David Solway

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/04/04/how-justin-trudeau-and-canada-differ-from-joe-biden-and-the-u-s-n1586861

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau has been much in the news of late, vying for attention with the American president. Although both have earned widespread disrespect, Biden for his costly gaffes and Trudeau for his native hypocrisy, a blunderer like Biden is obviously a far more significant figure on the world stage than a dandiprat like Trudeau. But there are disproportionate differences in their national effectiveness that favor Trudeau.

Biden is a loose cannon; Trudeau is a Black Ops sniper. Biden is doddering and obviously cognitively impaired; Trudeau is relatively young and fit and knows what he is doing. Biden’s tenure as president is increasingly shaky as the specter of the 25th Amendment hovers over his political longevity. After signing a concordat with the NDP’s conniving Jagmeet Singh to create a coalition government, Trudeau has guaranteed his ascendancy until at least 2025.

Biden’s legislative initiatives are vigorously contested by Republican states and innumerable court filings. Trudeau’s forays into totalitarian territory are regularly approved in the Commons and meet with only sporadic resistance by patriot organizations and individuals. Biden is addicted to the incontinent deployment of Executive Privilege, which cannot feasibly go on forever without serious pushback. Trudeau can with impunity invoke the Emergencies Act (aka the War Measures Act), arrest people at will, suspend professional licenses, and exert centralized control over people’s lives by freezing personal assets and bank accounts.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

For Midterms, Biden Races to the Center — And Trips Over His Own Feet By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/04/05/for-midterms-biden-races-to-the-center-and-trips-over-his-own-feet-n1587094

The last two Democratic presidents — Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — began their presidencies with grandiose plans to make America into a social-democratic paradise. Both presidents came crashing back to reality when their polling numbers went south very quickly. They began to emphasize decidedly conservative issues like the deficit, defense spending, and law and order.

Joe Biden now finds himself in exactly the same position as Obama and Clinton were in coming up to their first midterm election — dismal approval numbers and Republicans surging. He too will now look to emphasize less radical, more moderate issues.

But the difference for Biden is the party he leads compared to the party Obama and Clinton led.

The party Biden leads is the most radical, left-wing political party in American history. It can fairly be said that the kind of “transformation” desired by Democrats would leave the country unrecognizable to all but the most committed leftists.

Does anyone believe Biden’s lurch to the center is anything but an electoral two-step?

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

US pressuring Israel – reality testing Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinge

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://bit.ly/3J98u1i

According to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, reality testing is the ability to see a situation for what it really is, rather than what one hopes or fears it might be.

The Ben Gurion doctrine

Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, pressures Israel to refrain from sharing with the co-equal US Congress its own concerns about the adverse impact of the US policy toward Iran on the national security of the US and Israel.

Secretary Blinken is, also, pressuring Israel to refrain from acting unilaterally, in order to avert the regional and global wrath of a nuclear Iran.

In addition, the chief architect of President Biden’s foreign and national security policy is pressuring Israel to freeze Jewish construction – while encouraging Arab construction – in Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem, re-divide Jerusalem and to withdraw to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, which were defined as “The Auschwitz Lines” by Abba Eban, Israel’s former Foreign Minister, who was a leading Dove.

Israel’s Prime Minister is advised to follow in the footsteps of Israel’s Founding Fathers – from Prime Minister David Ben Gurion through Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir – who considered the defiance of US pressure to make reckless concessions as a central factor in their national security policy. While it triggered short term confrontations, it produced strategic long term US respect for Israel. The US appreciates principle-driven allies, who do not sacrifice their national security and cradle of history on the altar of diplomatic and economic convenience, even when it entails defiance of US pressure.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Gavin Mortimer Was another tragic Jewish death covered up in France?

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/was-another-tragic-jewish-death-covered-up-in-france-

Not for the first time in France the death of a Jew is dominating the news, and not for the first time there are whispers of an attempted cover-up.

Several candidates in Sunday’s election have paused from their campaigning to air their views on the death of Jeremy Cohen, a 31-year-old who was struck by a tram in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. The candidates portrayed by the commentariat as ‘extreme right’ were the most direct. ‘Did he die because he was a Jew?’ tweeted Eric Zemmour, himself a Jew. ‘Why is this case hushed up?’ Marine Le Pen also wondered on social media if ‘what was presented as an accident could be an anti-Semitic murder’. Then she tweeted what many Jews in France will be thinking ‘How to explain the silence on this affair and its motivations?’ The Gaullist Nicolas Dupont-Aignan claimed the ‘violence was hidden for pre-electoral reasons’.

When Cohen, who according to his family suffered from a non-visible handicap, was killed on the night of 16 February the police investigation concluded that his death was an accident. On Monday evening his family released video footage in which some of Jeremy’s last moments are seen. They are disturbing. Surrounded and jostled by a 15-strong mob, Cohen is then seen running away towards the oncoming tram.

Cohen wore a kippah and his family claim he was targeted because of his faith. ‘Jeremy’s death is linked to an attack of which he was the victim – by a gang of young people immediately before being hit,’ said Gerald Cohen, in an interview with Radio Shalom, a French-Jewish radio station.

Cohen’s brother has criticised the police for closing the case too quickly. ‘A few days after my brother died, we were told that the case was being looked at as a traffic accident rather than an attack before they even watched video footage from the train and other evidentiary material,’ he is quoted as saying.

Had it not been for the determination of the Cohen family to investigate the exact circumstances of Jeremy’s death it would probably have remained an ‘accident’. They handed out leaflets and asked for information and eventually someone sent them the video footage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Feckless in Seattle In the Pacific Northwest hub, Amazon is moving employees out, city police are demoralized, and political leadership is in short supply. Thomas Hogan

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/feckless-in-seattle

Citing persistent violence, including a homicide directly in front of its main building, Amazon recently announced that it was temporarily relocating its Seattle staff to a new location. The quirky but beautiful Pacific Northwest city—boasting houseboats, good coffee, and great jazz—is following a familiar formula for urban decline.

The first step in that process is to elect a mayor who cares less about the nuts and bolts of governing a city than about an ideological agenda. The last Seattle mayor who paid attention to details and had a vision for improving everyday life was Paul Schell, who served from 1998 to 2002. Under Schell’s no-nonsense leadership, Seattle built a new City Hall and several libraries, parks, and community centers, while rebuilding its opera house and symphony hall.

Then the city drifted into progressive fantasy. Greg Nickels, mayor from 2002 to 2009, decided that he should lead the charge in environmental activism but couldn’t manage the city’s own environment—a 2008 snowstorm hurt his reelection bid, while homeless tent cities (derisively named “Nickelsvilles”) cropped up downtown. Self-proclaimed progressive outsider Mike McGinn, who served as mayor from 2010 to 2013, demanded higher taxes and marijuana legalization while making clear, amid violent riots, that Seattle had no place for police officers who did not share his views on social justice. Ed Murray, Seattle’s first openly gay mayor, began his term in 2014, but resigned in disgrace in 2017 following multiple allegations of child sex abuse. In 2017, the city elected Jenny Durkan, who distinguished herself mainly by criticizing Donald Trump and allowing the formation of the lawless Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in downtown Seattle in June 2020. (Asked how long the occupation could last, Durkan said: “I don’t know. We could have another Summer of Love!”) Following a series of political blunders and recall efforts, Durkan and Seattle decided that one term was enough. Residents can only hope that newly elected mayor Bruce Harrell, who bluntly stated that he “inherited a mess,” will break the streak of ineffective leadership.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here’s Some Of The Garbage Democrats Funded As ‘Covid Relief’ By: Christopher Jacobs

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/04/heres-some-of-the-garbage-democrats-funded-as-covid-relief/

Now, his administration continues to deliver on his 2009 promise. As the nation’s debt has passed $30 trillion and inflation continues to skyrocket, federal funds are being used to fund…four-star hotels and bailouts for deadbeat dads.

An Associated Press investigation discovered that the $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” package Democrats rammed through Congress last March has resulted in all manner of pork-barrel and wasteful spending programs—most of which have very little to do with the coronavirus, and all of which should outrage taxpayers forced to fund this nonsense.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

The spending spree Democrats passed in March 2021 included more than $500 billion in bailouts to state and local governments—on top of more than $400 billion in funds distributed to states in prior spending packages during 2020. These additional bailout funds, many of which have yet to get disbursed, came even though state and local government coffers were already flush by last spring, as lockdowns ended and the stock market boomed.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Woke Medicine’s Got a Tricky Operation Coming Up: Grafting ‘Systemic Racism’ Onto Hard Science By John Murawski

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/04/05/woke_medicines_got_a_tricky_operation_coming_up_grafting_systemic_racism_onto_hard_science_824726.html

Just a few years ago, concepts such as “white supremacy,” “systemic racism,” and “structural intersectionality” were not the standard fare of prestigious medical journals. These are now the guiding ideas in a February special issue of “Health Affairs” that focuses on medicine and race.

Featuring nearly two dozen articles with titles such as “Racism Runs Through It” and “Sick and Tired of Being Excluded,” as well as a poem called “Identity,” the Washington, D.C.-based, peer-reviewed journal analyzes racial health disparities not through biology, behavior, or culture, but through the lens of  “whiteness,” along with concepts such as power, systems of oppression, state-sanctioned violence, and critical race praxis – a sampling of terms that come up in the February issue.

Health Affairs, dubbed by a Washington Post columnist as “the bible of health policy,” represents something much more ambitious than woke virtue signaling. Its February issue reflects the effort of newly empowered “anti-racist” scholars to transform concepts that are still considered speculative and controversial – and some say unprovable – into scientific fact. This growing effort to document, measure, and quantify racism is being advanced by other high-profile publications, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Scientific American, which last year ran articles entitled “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy.”

But this scientific aspiration faces major challenges. Science demands verification, testability, and replicability, whereas race is a social construct that can be difficult to separate from factors like class or culture, and explaining the data often remains dependent on academic theories about systemic racism. The articles in Health Affairs indicate that elevating the concept of systemic racism from moral certitude to scientific fact will require developing new tools and methods – and even more theories – in the face of skepticism and resistance from dissenters who view this direction in research as unscientific and ideological.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

New Variant of the “CRT-virus”: “Social-Emotional Learning” Shane Harris

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://amac.us/new-variant-of-the-crt-virus-social-emotional-learning/

Amid the national backlash over Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other radical political and social doctrines being peddled in K-12 classrooms, parents are sounding the alarm over a new “variant” of left-wing instructional dogma: “social-emotional learning,” or SEL. While the term sounds innocuous enough, mounting evidence suggests that SEL curriculum is often simply a rebranding of the same dangerous and divisive ideologies that have dominated education headlines in recent months.

If you ask proponents of the concept, they’ll tell you that SEL is all about helping students grow into well-rounded adults who can manage their emotions and interpersonal relationships. Casel, one of the leading organizations that sells SEL programming to schools, defines it as “the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”

Much of the terminology that advocates of the doctrine use to promote SEL is drawn from the mental health field. The assertion is that when students are confident in themselves and their identities, they perform better in the classroom. As the Washington Post explained in a recent feature piece on SEL, “social-emotional learning seeks to treat children as human beings with feelings, life goals and even traumas, not just students learning to write essays and solve math problems.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will the U.S. Lead or Continue to ‘Lose Ground’? by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on April 5th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18398/us-lead-lose-ground

Today, Russia in Ukraine is the focus, but the aspirations of China and Iran must not be ignored.

The US must — in the best interests of the United States — immediately deliver the weapons Ukraine needs to forestall future predators such as China, Iran and North Korea. What happens in Ukraine does not stay in Ukraine.

The longer the US shilly-shallies, the longer urgently needed weapons fail to reach Ukraine, the more it invites other predators.

Ukraine must have — now – not only the weapons it needs to combat Russia’s carnage, weapons to “close the skies,” …such as S-300s and S-400s and Migs that the Ukrainians could pull over the border; it must also have heavy weapons — planes, tanks and long-range anti-ship munitions — that Zelenskyy is requesting to repel Russia’s assault to sever Ukraine from the Black Sea, and landlocking the country to suffocate all means of commerce.

One wonders, as Kasparov suggests, if the Biden administration secretly wants Putin, “the devil you know,” to win.

“Everything I hear from other NATO members is that the U.S. has become the obstacle, and an explanation is required. Allowing Mr. Putin to keep an inch of Ukrainian soil after bombing civilians should be unimaginable. Conceding large areas of eastern Ukraine to the invader in exchange for a cease-fire would only give Mr. Putin time to consolidate and rearm for next time—and there will always be a next time.” – Garry Kasparov, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2022

Kazakhstan, too, had an inspirational leader, Serikzhan Bilash, willing to fight for freedom. Many in the media and the Biden administration have completely ignored him and the struggle of the people of Kazakstan.

Another rising voice of freedom is that of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the opposition in Belarus, who is fighting to keep her country on the side of freedom. She, along with Zelenskyy, and Bilash represent the dreams and aspirations of thousands, likely millions, of people within their homelands. They are risking everything for the ideals that America and the West claim to hold dear.

[S]upporting those leaders who are out front should be easy. Why is America not supporting them further? Why are Russia’s generals and military leaders not being threatened? Why are America’s attempts at sanctioning Russian energy and all of Russia’s oligarchs, their families and their businesses so incomplete and half-hearted?

There is no diplomatic way out of this war.

The U.S. not only needs to recognize the power of these defiant leaders, but do more—much, much more — to help them. That is what is in the strategic interests of the United States.

The world is seeing Vladimir Putin’s clear plan to reestablish the Russian Empire. It also is hearing rumblings from Asia about restoration of a Chinese dynasty, and in the Middle East, a return to when Persia — now an extremely different Iran — dominated the region.

For any of these empires to expand, they need to take control of other states or groups of people. Those states can either be overrun and annexed, or they can be controlled and remain smaller, more manageable political units. Today, Russia in Ukraine is the focus, but the aspirations of China and Iran must not be ignored.