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June 2020

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Black Lives Don’t Matter to Black Lives Matter Roger L. Simon

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/black-lives-dont-matter-to-black-lives-matter_3397428.html#

In case you missed it, and you could have considering the endless thumb sucking regarding just how many came or didn’t to the Trump rally in Tulsa, 60 were shot, 9 fatally, at last count, over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago.

These included a 13-year old girl in the Austin neighborhood of the West Side, Two hours earlier, in the same area, someone pulled up alongside a Blue Honda in an SUV and fired several rounds at the driver, striking and killing his three-year old son.

Similar carnage occurred in Chi-town only a couple of weeks before over Memorial Day weekend when 39 were wounded and 10 died, including a 16-year old boy.

And then of course we have Minneapolis, where most of the recent contretemps began, where last night 1 died and 11 were wounded in a shooting spree.

All of this was black on black violence of the most tragic sort.

Where was Black Lives Matter? Nowhere to be found, since the cops didn’t do any of it. BLM doesn’t seem to care about violence done to blacks if the police are not involved, even though black on black is by many multiples more lethal and more common, resulting in exponentially more black casualties.

BLM’s primary interest appears to be smashing the state, creating revolution with their pals in Antifa in order to take power themselves.

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While America Promotes Freedom and Human Rights Abroad, We Must Uphold Those Values at Home By Lawrence J. Haas

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/while-america-promotes-freedom-and-human-rights-abroad-we-must-uphold-those-values-home

Iran is hosting an “I Can’t Breathe” international cartoon exhibition, with seventy-two pieces from twenty-seven countries, mocking America for its racial unrest and portraying its leaders and police as Nazis and Klan members.

In China, officials are blasting America for its racism while the People’s Daily, the communist party’s official newspaper, ran a cartoon of a crumbling Statue of Liberty and a White House soaked in blood and tear gas. In Moscow, Russian president Vladimir Putin said on state TV that “if this fight for natural rights, legal rights, turns into mayhem and rioting, I see nothing good for the [United States].”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, for Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow are among the world’s leading human rights abusers, and they don’t even pretend to respect the freedoms that Americans take for granted.

Tehran is crushing pro-democracy demonstrations in increasingly harsh fashion, killing hundreds and arresting thousands as recently as November, while jailing and torturing journalists, human-rights lawyers, labor leaders, and other activists. Beijing is jailing lawyers, censoring the internet, holding Uighurs in concentration camps, and curtailing freedom in Hong Kong. The oligarchs, journalists, activists, and opposition leaders who challenge Putin often wind up jailed, attacked, or dead.

Nevertheless, the autocrats’ attacks on America remind us that due to the ideals we promote around the world – freedom, democracy, equality rights, pluralism-we pay a price abroad when we don’t live up to them at home. We invite attack from our autocratic adversaries, divert attention from their human rights horrors, and make ourselves a less effective advocate for human rights.

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US Researchers’ Ties to China by Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/us-research-scientists-under-fire-for-ties-to-china/

National Institutes of Health recently fired dozens of scientists, mostly Asian men, for having secret financial links to Beijing

Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was formally indicted this month on two counts of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his participation in China’s Thousand Talents program and his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology.

His arrest in January made headlines, but Lieber proved to be only a harbinger of more than 300 similar cases. All are related to US government research contract conditions and requirements, and all are now in the process of public exposure.

Even more worrisome than the number, all of the cases including Lieber were uncovered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), although Lieber held contracts from both NIH and the Department of Defense (DOD).

There is no record of similar impropriety uncovered by the DOD itself, or any broader investigation as yet by the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, State, Education, or other federal government agencies.

But if the US government looked into all contracts across all agencies it is quite likely that the number of cases could easily reach the thousands. The national security ramifications are frightening.

Lieber, the principal investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard, specialized in the highly sensitive area of nanoscience and was funded with more than $15 million in federal grants.

These grants require the disclosure of all sources of research support, potential financial conflicts of interest and all foreign collaboration.

According to the indictment, “Beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. He later became a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from at least 2012 through 2015.”

In the first count of the indictment, Lieber is alleged to have told the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Service that “he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program” and that he “’wasn’t sure’ how China categorized him.”

The second count concerned his contracts with NIH. “Lieber allegedly caused Harvard to falsely tell NIH that Lieber ‘had no formal association with WUT’ after 2012, that ‘WUT continued to falsely exaggerate’ his involvement with WUT in subsequent years, and that Lieber is not and has never been a participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan.”

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‘Theodore! With all thy faults –‘

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-with-all-thy-faults/91170/

President Trump no doubt speaks for millions of New Yorkers and other Americans when he protests the decision to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the Museum of Natural History. He calls the decision “ridiculous.” There are serious differing views. Ours is that it’s a sad day for those who thrill to the spirit of liberalism in our city and the inclusive Americanism for which Roosevelt stood during his heroic life.

The museum is trying to cast its decision as being animated by something other than disapproval for Roosevelt himself. The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, is insisting to the Times that its decision to remove the monument “is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition that’s depicted in it.” She is referring to the Native American man and African man on either side of TR and the steed on which he is mounted.

We, for one, find that distinction unconvincing, even if art is in the eye of the beholder. The protesters who forced the museum’s hand hate Roosevelt as much as his statue. The sculptor himself, James Earle Fraser, intended the two figures beside TR to symbolize “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.” Roosevelt mightn’t pass muster with today’s protesters, but in his own time, he was a progressive.

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If Fear Can Strike At University of Chicago, Imagine The Rest of Academia By Ira Stoll

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/national/if-fear-can-strike-at-university-of-chicago/91171/

In a 2017 New York Times column headlined “America’s Best University President,” Bret Stephens praised Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago as a defender of free speech.

The column quoted speeches and letters from Zimmer and other University of Chicago administrators and professors, including a committee that issued a 2015 report finding that, as Mr. Stephens quoted it, “Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

So it was surprising to see a blog post from John Cochrane, who until recently was a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Mr. Cochrane wrote on June 15, “I spent much of my last few years of teaching afraid that I would say something that could be misunderstood and thus be offensive to someone. Many of my colleagues report the same worries.”

If that level of fear accurately describes the situation at the University of Chicago, where the university administration has deservedly won national attention for coming down clearly, decisively, and publicly on the “open debate” side of the campus speech wars, imagine just how bad things are in the rest of academia.

In a moment when black Americans fear being killed by police, the concern that tenured professors might be inconvenienced might seem trivial. The worry at Chicago, as described by Mr. Cochrane, was less that university administrators would, on their own initiative, rule speech out of bounds.

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Ron Dermer: We must stop pursuing a two-state illusion and commit to a realistic two-state solution

By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/19/ron-dermer-we-must-stop-pursuing-two-state-illusion-commit-realistic-two-state-solution/

Ron Dermer is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Determined to advance a realistic solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s prime minister laid out his vision of peace in a speech to the Knesset. The Palestinians, he said, would have “less than a state,” Israel would retain security control over the Jordan Valley “in the broadest meaning of that term,” Jerusalem would remain united under Israel’s sovereignty, and settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria would become part of lsrael.

Those words were not spoken recently by Benjamin Netanyahu but by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, when he defended the Oslo peace process he had initiated two years earlier with President Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat and for which he would be assassinated one month later.

Twenty-five years later, a gulf has emerged between the positions Rabin staked out and what is increasingly believed to be the gold standard for a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace. The result has been the emergence of a two-state illusion that will never happen rather than a two-state solution that might advance peace.

The extension of Israeli sovereignty to certain territories in Judea and Samaria will not, as many critics suggest, destroy the two-state solution. But it will shatter the two-state illusion. And in doing so, it will open the door to a realistic two-state solution and get the peace process out of the cul-de-sac it has been stuck in for two decades.

Let me explain why.

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