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June 2020

Juneteenth and Zionist history by Moshe Phillips

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/juneteenth-and-zionist-history/

We have not only the right but the obligation to regain a very important commemoration that we have lost. That is: the annual observance of Yom Tel Chai on the 11th of Adar.

It seems to me that before June 2020, Juneteenth was a seldom known holiday for the majority of African Americans and that there was even less awareness of it outside of Black America.

Zionists should take this as a sign that in today’s politically charged environment, where others are reevaluating how to utilize the imagery of historical anniversaries to remind each other and the world about centrally important concepts, that the right thing for us to do is to realize that we can and should do likewise.

We have not only the right but the obligation to regain a very important commemoration that we have lost. That is: the annual observance of Yom Tel Chai on the 11th of Adar.

One hundred years ago a battle took place in the Upper Galilee that saw young Jewish defenders, led by the legendary Joseph Trumpeldor, attempt to protect Jewish lives and property from Arab attackers and who sought to destroy modern Zionism while it was still in its infancy. The memories of Tel Chai, Trumpeldor, and those who were slain with him, were honored, treasured, and beloved as symbols of the pioneers of Eretz Israel in the years between World War I and World War II by Zionist movements from across the gamut of political outlooks.

So much for Seattle’s ‘summer of love’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/so_much_for_seattles_summer_of_love.html

“The place has descended into a hellhole with armed warlords loaded for bear and deaths piling up. Naturally, the cops are being blamed.”

So much for Seattle’s ‘summer of love.’ That’s some ‘block party atmosphere’ they’ve got in the CHOP.

Less than two weeks after Seattle’s mayor allowed warlords to declare an autonomous zone over six blocks of Seattle in the name of ‘abolishing’ the police, the place is already starting to look like Liberia.

According to the New York Times:

One person died and another was critically injured by gunfire early Saturday morning inside a portion of a Seattle neighborhood that has been occupied by protesters for more than a week, officials said.

The shootings unfolded at a protester-run region known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area. It has been celebrated as a “no cop” zone, and the Seattle Police Department wrote in a statement that detectives were investigating the shooting “despite the challenges presented by the circumstances.”

Apparently, the cops couldn’t get in in order to clear a path to allow the first responding medics in. 

And for that, the warlords running that hole are blaming cops for their own barbaric rule. 

‘Autonomous’ indeed. Actually, it’s infantile. They take over six city blocks claiming themselves more fit to rule than the established rule of law and its Democratic rulers allowed. They vowed they’d be police-free. They’d show us all how, and then they got exactly what they wanted as Seattle’s wretched leftist officials bowed to them and cheered their becoming police-free. After that, word got out that it was going to get mighty easy to get away with killing people, because city officials had already abdicated.

The ‘gun-free zone’ talk went out the window in this dumpster-fire of autonomous rule, too. Here’s a warlord handing out weapons to anyone over 18 from the trunk of his car:

The Soviet Plan for ‘Ideological Subversion’ Describes Our Current Turmoil By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_soviet_plan_for_ideological_subversion_precisely_describes_our_current_turmoil.html

A good friend of mine who fled the Soviet Union many years ago recently sent me a most chilling interview on You Tube.  Under ten minutes long, it needs to be seen by every American who wonders why the country is unraveling before our very eyes.  The interview features Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB spy and state media propagandist who defected to Canada in 1970.  Bezmenov cogently explains how “ideological subversion” is an essential method used by communists to undermine and destabilize Western countries.  His explanation crystallizes so much of what has happened in America in the last 40 years. 

Basically there are four steps to ideological subversion or “changing the perspective of reality” — in other words a mass brainwashing.  The first step is known as demoralization and it takes 15-20 years — the span of time needed to educate one generation by exposing them to the “ideology of the enemy.”  In America we have had

Marxist-Leninist ideology pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (patriotism).

And it makes not a whit of difference if these students are exposed to true information because “a person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.”  Their minds are cemented.  Total denial is in force.  Does this not explain why statues are being destroyed and America is continually depicted as a racist country when, in fact, it is not?

In fact, it would take another few generations to change the “tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.”

The second step in ideological subversion is destabilization. This step can be accomplished in as little as five years and the focus is on “destabilizing sectors such as the economy, law enforcement, foreign relations, media, and defense systems.”

The New Truth When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence, there’s no arguing by Jacob Siegel

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/new-truth-rationalism-religion

When I think of the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, I am moved by romantic nostalgia. By that I only mean that when I think of the Waverly I feel, in some way, what it was like to be young and in the rush of the conversation. The conversation was everything. It flowed all around us, in the subways and the streets, in the diners and the high-rise apartments, and if you could master it, it could take you anywhere. You could still smoke inside of diners back then and sometimes we spent whole days around an ashtray and a plate of disco fries, getting refills on the coffee. I’m not saying all the arguments were good, but sometimes it was thrilling.

Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too; the diner-booth yapper animated by argument, one version of the big city fast talker who reflected an aspect of the national character right there alongside the taciturn cowboy, the trapper frontiersman, and the Puritan. American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

The Elites are Revolting Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/06/22/the-elites-are-revolting-n2571007?

Our Establishment is revolting – in fact, it stinks on ice. What you see out there is our alleged betters struggling mightily to hold onto the power that we Normal people dared to wrest away from them in 2016. One component of their campaign is the burning and looting information operation conducted by black-clad pawns. The other component is the soft power corporate/media/cultural conspiracy to silence dissent and enforce fearful conformity to their narrative. Usually, a revolution is conducted by the peasants to throw off a tyrannical ruling class. Here, the ruling class is waging a political and cultural war to retake and then tighten its grip on the masses. They are no longer even pretending to seek the consent of the governed. And once they retake power, that’s it – they will never give up power again.

This is about casting off the “tyranny” of you having rights and interests that get in the way of the best and the brightest doing whatever the hell they want, a continuing theme in my new book The 21 Biggest Lies about Donald Trump (and You!). And a key component of this cynical plot is systematically denying you the protection of norms and laws, all while subjecting you to them where it benefits the elite.                                   

Let’s review.

Remember free speech? That was fun while it lasted. Oh, it still exists, to the extent that you may speak freely as long as your free speech conforms to the Establishment narrative. Do you feel like you can say whatever you think freely and without restraint? Or do you experience a twinge of fear of the consequences if you get online and state that no, you do not support the Marxist goals of Black Lives Matter? If so, their plan is working. You are supposed to be afraid and intimidated – and while the endless list of people cancelled, abused, and fired from jobs because they refused to kowtow to the mob serves to outrage us, it also serves to teach us that there is a fearsome price to be paid for failing to go along and cheer the Emperor’s new duds.

WONK WORLD: EDWARD CLINE

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2020/06/wonk-world.html

Many governors and public health officials will not be satisfied with any “reopening” of small businesses and parks and restaurants unless the citizens accept without question the “tin pot dictators” as their lords and masters and are conscientious about fighting the spread of the Corona virus, and that they also take proactive actions to ensur thate their patrons and employees abide by the virus rules .See Robert Gore’s trenchent essay on the hoax of the virus”crisis.”. From my own esthetic sense I am repulsed by the daily sight of people wearing face masks and observing the 6-foot “social distincing” rule. To me the “reopening” of private or public entities is not actually a “reopening” but qualified permission to act to act in accordance with government rules.

Will wearing face masks and adhering to social distancing rules become indelible habits of Americans? Will Americans automatically defer to the judgments of their political “superiors” ?

Here us a list of the states that sill require obedience from the citizens: with all the stipulations:

John Bolton’s temper tantrum: Caroline Glick

http://carolineglick.com/john-boltons-temper-tantrum/

Former US national security adviser John Bolton’s critics routinely refer to him as a neoconservative. But they are wrong. Bolton was never part of the neoconservative clique of Bush administration officials.

Neoconservatives are messianists and American imperialism is their replacement theology.

Neoconservatives view America as the Promised Land and Americans as the Chosen People. From their perspective, the Torah was superseded by the Declaration of Independence. The Torah will not go forth from Zion, but from Washington, and the world will reach a redemptive state – what Jews refer to as “Tikkun Olam” not when the nations of the world accept God’s reign, but when the American empire brings democracy to all corners of the world.

Bolton, like President Donald Trump, disdains messianism. Like President Trump, his view of foreign policy is cut and dry. America is the good guy. It has enemies and allies. It is supposed to be good to its allies and bad to its enemies so that the people will want to be its allies and won’t want to be its enemies.

When Bolton ran a quixotic campaign in the Republican presidential primaries in 2012, many of his supporters hoped that at a minimum his run would help to position him as the Republican Party’s national security standard-bearer. And when President Trump appointed Bolton to serve as his national security adviser in 2018, many were certain that working together, the two men would take America’s superpower stature to new heights.

Alas, the two men’s common sense of the general thrust of US national security policy did not translate into a good working relationship. And truth be told, the person most responsible for their inability to work together was Bolton, not Trump.

Palestinians: The ‘Un-Islamic’ Family Protection Law by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16135/palestinians-family-law

“I understand the head of the clan, who does not want sovereignty other than the rule of the male, but what do the lawyers refuse?” Harhash asked. “This means that the woman here would not have a law that protects here or a lawyer who represents her if she is killed, beaten or assaulted.” — Nadia Essam Harhash , Palestinian journalist, raialyoum.com.

“Is preserving the Palestinian family by beating and killing the woman and denying her right to inheritance? How can a lawyer stand against a law that might do justice to an oppressed woman or person? How can a lawyer stand against a law that might do justice to an oppressed woman or person?” — Nadia Essam Harhash , Palestinian journalist, raialyoum.com.

For now, it appears that the PA government is hesitant to pass the law out of fear of alienating Islamists and conservative clan leaders. The widespread opposition to the proposed legislation is further proof of the growing popularity… of Hamas and other extremist Islamist groups among Palestinians. According to them, criminalizing the beating or murder of women is a clear-cut violation of Islamic teachings and values.

Palestinian women and human rights organizations are under attack by Hamas and other Islamic groups and figures for supporting a new family protection bill that is currently being drafted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) government.

The PA’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs says the proposed law would amend the penal code to establish a minimum age for marriage, review current legal protections for victims of domestic violence, impose harsher penalties on perpetrators, and train the police force in assisting victims.

For many Palestinians, particularly Islamists, the proposed law is like a red rag to a bull.

Trump’s Base Remains Solid As Political Tide Turns by J.T. Young

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/22/trumps-base-remains-solid-as-political-tide-turns/

Despite 2020’s tough start, Trump’s base remains solid, which bodes well for his November.  National polls have recently shown a widening Biden lead; considering the current political environment, this is not surprising.  What is surprising is how well Trump has held up, and how well it positions him as political tides turn.  

The current Real Clear Politics average of national presidential polling gives Biden a 50.1% to 41.3% lead less than five months from November’s election.  This fits conventional expectations that 2020’s rough first half is damaging the president’s re-election chances.  However, looking inside these national polls reveals a crucial shortcoming: They are not polling those most likely to vote.

Of the eleven national polls making up RCP’s average, ten sampled “registered” voters, not “likely” voters.  Registered voter polls are historically less accurate and over-represent Democrats in their results. 

One likely voter poll not included in RCP’s average is Zogby’s recent one (conducted 6/1-6/2 of 1,007 likely voters) which has Trump and Biden deadlocked at 46% apiece.  Everything in Zogby’s was not perfect for the president; his approval/disapproval rating was negative — 48% approve/51% disapprove.  However, as Zogby noted: “During this almost exact moment at the end of Barack Obama’s first term, his job approval numbers were very similar…48% approve/50% disapprove.”

One poll is not an election.  However, “registered” are not “likely” voters either, and the only ones who count will be November voters.  Zogby’s poll does indicate that Trump’s base will figure prominently among them.  The surest sign they will is that they are sticking with him during the most difficult moment of his presidency.

Will the EU Ever Stop Appeasing Iran’s Mullahs? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16143/will-iran-appeasement

Germany, Britain and France also appear to have turned a blind eye to a recent statement made by the IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, who raised serious concerns about possible clandestine and undeclared nuclear sites in Iran.

Germany, Britain and France must put a stop to their mercenary appeasement policy and corrupt loyalty to the Iranian regime. It is the equivalent of enriching the Third Reich during WWII or Soviet Russia during the Cold War. It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he crossed the Rhine. The more the EU kisses up to the ruling mullahs, the more it empowers their rogue, soon-to-be-nuclear regime.

The ruling mullahs of Iran are being handed yet another gift courtesy of the leaders of Europe. On June 19, 2020, Germany, Britain and France issued a statement that they will not support the United States’ plan to extend the United Nations arms embargo on the Iranian regime. The arms embargo is set to expire in October 2020. Germany, Britain, and France, known as E3, were members of Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which, revealingly, Iran never signed.

The foreign ministers of these three European countries pointed out in a statement that “We firmly believe that any unilateral attempt to trigger UN sanctions snapback would have serious adverse consequences in the UN Security Council”. They added, “We would not support such a decision, which would be incompatible with our current efforts to preserve the JCPOA.”

Did Germany, Britain and France fail to read the latest report from the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which highlighted that Iran is violating all the restrictions of the JCPOA?

The European Union has refrained from criticizing the Iranian regime even though, as of May 20, 2020, it has increased its total stockpile of low-enriched uranium from 1,020.9 kilograms (1.1 tons) to 1,571.6 kilograms (1.73 tons). That is approximately eight times more than what the regime was allowed to maintain under the misbegotten JCPOA “nuclear deal.” According to the terms of the JCPOA, Iran had been permitted to keep a stockpile of 202.8 kilograms (447 pounds), and enrich uranium up to 3.67%. Iran is now enriching uranium up to the purity of 4.5% and possesses far more heavy water than permitted under the nuclear agreement.

The EU has remained silent about all that, as well as the dangerous fact that Tehran regime now has enough enriched uranium to refine and build a nuclear bomb if it desired to do so. Approximately 1000kg of uranium enriched at just 5% can be further refined to create one nuclear bomb. Moreover, according to the IAEA report, Iran is still not allowing the IAEA to inspect its sites.