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July 2020

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump and Netanyahu Face their Rendezvous with Destiny The next few weeks boils down to a historic moment of truth. Caroline Glick

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/trump-and-netanyahu-face-their-rendezvous-destiny-caroline-glick/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needn’t take heed of the “friendly advice” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proffered on Wednesday. As UAE Ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba did earlier this month, Johnson published an article in Yediot Ahronot threatening Israel with various disasters if Netanyahu implements his plan to apply Israeli sovereignty in areas of Judea and Samaria in conformance with President Donald Trump’s peace plan.

Johnson’s “friendly” threats should surprise no one. Since 2017, when he began serving as Britain’s foreign minister under then-Prime Minister Theresa May, Johnson, demonstrated amply that he is no great friend of Israel, or of anyone else.

After leading the fight for Brexit as Mayor of London, as foreign minister Johnson was quick to align all of Britain’s foreign policies with the European Union, as if he were its most obedient member. He did so not only at Israel’s expense, but at the expense of Anglo-American ties.

When the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the council’s structural anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, not only did Johnson not follow suit, he sped off to Geneva, appeared before the UNHRC and pledged Britain’s undying allegiance to the body.

When the Trump administration abandoned the nuclear deal with Iran, which enriched the terrorist regime, enabling it to expand its terrorist campaigns on multiple fronts and gave Tehran an open road to a nuclear arsenal within a decade, Johnson didn’t merely oppose the move. He worked with his French and German counterparts to develop a financial exchange to bypass U.S. economic sanctions on Iran.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Convicted Terrorist Susan Rosenberg Raising Funds for “Marxist” Black Lives Matter A reminder of leftist affection for murder and mayhem. Lloyd Billingsley

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/convicted-terrorist-susan-rosenberg-raising-funds-lloyd-billingsley/

“There’s no way you can do any homework on Black Lives Matter and not see that it’s a Marxist political organization,” and the move to substitute a “black” nation anthem was “a communist political move.”  That was sports journalist Jason Whitlock in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News this week, when more obscure information about BLM emerged.

Convicted terrorist Susan Rosenberg (pictured above) is vice chair of Thousand Currents, a California-based charity that handles fundraising for Black Lives Matter. Rosenberg is a veteran of the May 19 Communist Organization that carried out a bombings in the early 1980s to counter President Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. Rosenberg landed on the FBI most wanted list and was arrested with stolen explosives in 1984.

The terrorist drew 58 years but served only 16 because in 2001 President Bill Clinton commuted Rosenberg’s sentence. Since 2016, Rosenberg has been involved with Black Lives Matter, now openly recognized as a Marxist organization making communist political moves. One of those moves, supported by prominent Democrats is to defund the police, but BLM Philadelphia boss YahNé Ndgo is taking that to a new level. “One of the things that we are demanding over five years is the complete abolition,” she told Fox News Tuesday. “We don’t want to see any police in our community.”

Black Lives Matter has made a hero of Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) who murdered a New Jersey state trooper, escaped prison and fled to Cuba. As Atlanta and Chicago confirm, murder is becoming more common in communities where Black Lives Matter operates, and the abolition of police would make it more so. As it happens, in Communist doctrine and practice, murder is necessary for social progress.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Libya’s Foul Foretaste of the Post-American World Amid the chaos, the EU, NATO and the Arab world are all divided over which warlords to support. By Walter Russell Mead

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/libyas-foul-foretaste-of-the-post-american-world-11594228201?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

Does Libya show us the future of world politics?

U.S. engagement there has been minimal since a 2012 terrorist attack killed four Americans, including the ambassador, and traumatized the Obama administration. In America’s absence, over half a dozen powers are struggling to control Libya’s future, carving up its territory, and subsidizing militias and warlords as they compete for control over its oil and gas. No end to the war is in sight.

On one side Turkey and Qatar, with some discreet Italian cheerleading, back the Tripoli-based warlords and affiliated tribal leaders whom the United Nations has anointed the “legitimate” government of Libya, the so-called Government of National Accord, or GNA. On the side of the challenger coalition of tribal leaders and warlords stand France, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. The latter coalition is led most visibly by Khalifa Haftar, a rogue field marshal who heads what he calls the Libyan National Army.

No higher principles are at stake. Neither side stands for anything more noble than its own security and power. The GNA isn’t fighting for freedom, Islam, U.N. legitimacy or any cause greater than its right to make as much money as possible selling hydrocarbons while taxing the human traffickers and arms smugglers operating in the country’s chaos. The rebels want pretty much the same thing.

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Ukraine’s ‘Holocaust Disneyland’ A memorial would re-create the aesthetics of Nazi terror at the site of an atrocity. By Vladislav Davidzon

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-holocaust-disneyland-11594336467?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_4&cx_artPos=3#cxrecs_s

The territory of Ukraine was the site of countless horrors committed against the Jewish people under Nazi occupation. Yet the resource-strapped country lacks a major museum and memorial dedicated to the Holocaust. While an international initiative to create one began in 2016, the ambitious project is in disarray, with one critic calling it “Holocaust Disneyland.”

For centuries Ukraine has constituted the historical homeland for much of European Jewry, and more than half of American Jews have roots in the region. An estimated 1.5 million Jews were killed on its territory during the “Holocaust by bullets,” with some 90% of the killings carried out directly by German forces. Babyn Yar—a ravine outside of Kyiv, where some 34,000 Jews were rounded up and shot Sept. 29-30, 1941—has come to symbolize the killing fields across Eastern Europe.

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center initiative, launched in 2016, likely will be the last major Holocaust memorial built during the lifetimes of survivors. Costs are projected to surpass $100 million. Most funding has come from four Jewish billionaires, some of whose families perished at Babyn Yar. Yet three of the billionaires are Russian citizens. The leading role played by Russians has been controversial, given that the country has occupied and annexed swaths of Ukrainian territory and waged a war that has cost at least 14,000 Ukrainian lives since 2014.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supreme Loser: Pelosi’s House The justices make it harder for lawmakers to justify subpoenas for the president. by Kimberley Strassel

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-loser-pelosis-house-11594336504?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Supreme Court on Thursday punted in two cases concerning subpoenas for President Trump’s financial records, sending them back to lower courts to resolve a host of legal questions. Yet if the cases had no clear winner, one of the rulings did produce an outright loser: Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s overzealous House.

Since the moment Mrs. Pelosi retook the gavel in January 2019, she’s operated as if her institution is the only branch in town, with limitless power. Within days of the 2018 election, an unnamed House Democrat bragged that the incoming majority was loading a “subpoena cannon,” aimed at more than 80 different areas of Trump investigation. The president’s tax returns, his firing of former FBI Director James Comey, his discussions with foreign leaders, security clearances, the Trump family business, Stormy Daniels, the reassignment of executive branch employees, the Mueller report. Ad nauseam.

No one disputes the House has oversight authority. But courts have always made clear that this power must be firmly tethered to a “legislative purpose.” Prior Congresses at least attempted to hew to the spirit of that phrase. Mrs. Pelosi’s committee chairmen—driven by fury over the Trump presidency—embarked on an extended fishing expedition. In doing so, they exposed how easy it is to abuse the legislative-purpose doctrine.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supreme Court blocks funding for Soros-backed NGOs over absence of anti-prostitution pledge

By on July 10th, 2020

https://www.rt.com/usa/493394-soros-ngos-blocked-supreme-court/

The US Supreme Court has denied federal funding to billionaire financier George Soros’ international anti-AIDS organizations, ruling that in order to access the federal cash, the groups must explicitly oppose prostitution.

The court’s five conservative-leaning justices overruled three of their liberal colleagues on Monday, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivering the majority verdict. The fourth liberal justice, Elena Kagan, sat out the case.

The Alliance for Open Society International, a US-based subsidiary of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, hoped to distribute federal funds earmarked for the fight against HIV/AIDS to its foreign sister organizations. However, these organizations refused to comply with a 2003 Congressional requirement that they adopt “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking,” which Congress at the time described as “additional causes of… the HIV/AIDS epidemic.” 

VIDEO:  “Soros & Steyer exposed as backers of ‘paramilitary’ lieft-wing group in undercover Project Veritas”

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that this policy requirement violated the First Amendment rights of the Soros-funded groups. However, the court on Monday ruled that the groups’ foreign affiliates are not afforded the same protection under the Constitution.

“In sum, plaintiffs’ foreign affiliates are foreign organizations, and foreign organizations operating abroad possess no rights under the US Constitution,” Kavanaugh concluded.

Open Society Foundations President Patrick Gaspard described the anti-prostitution pledge as part of “the US government’s quest to impose its harmful ideological agenda,” adding that it “compromises the fight against HIV by impeding and stigmatizing efforts to deliver health services.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring with Kavanaugh, was unsympathetic in his ruling. An anti-prostitution pledge is “the reasonable price of admission to a limited government-spending program,” he wrote, adding that the Soros-supported organizations remain “free to accept or reject” it at their choosing.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Declaration of Independence by a Princeton Professor written by Joshua T. Katz

By on July 10th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/07/08/a-declaration-of-independence-by-a-princeton-professor/

In Congress, on July 4th, 1776, came the “unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” Signed by 56 men, many of whom were considered national heroes just a few minutes ago, it opens with a long and elegant sentence whose first words every American child knows, or used to: “When in the Course of human events…” In Princeton, New Jersey, on July 4th, 2020, just two hours after my family and I sat around the festive table and read the Declaration aloud in celebration, a group of signatories now in the hundreds published a “Faculty Letter” to the president and other senior administrators at Princeton University.

This letter begins with the following blunt sentence: “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.” One important difference between the two documents might wrongly be dismissed as merely cosmetic. In 1776 there were “united States” but there was not yet the “United States”; in these past two months, by contrast, at a time when we are increasingly un-united, “black” has become “Black” while “white” remains “white.”

I am friends with many people who signed the Princeton letter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzying array of changes, and I support their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embarrassed for them. To judge from conversations with friends and all too much online scouting, there are two camps: those cheering them on and those who wouldn’t dream of being associated with such a document. No one is in the middle. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now. Be warned: it is long.

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Penn State Retracts Statement Saying Conservative Voices Are Important By Jonah Gottschalk

By on July 9th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/09/penn-state-retracts-statement-saying-conservative-voices-are-important/

Penn State University recently made a surprising statement about intellectual diversity, only to retract it after outrage from left-wing students.

“Dear conservative students. Your viewpoints are important,” the announcement read, referencing the isolation and self-censorship many conservative students experience on left-wing campuses. According to the schools Director of Strategic Communications, it was part of a statement aimed at creating a supporting and inclusive environment for students.

A survey conducted at the University of North Carolina found that over two-thirds of conservative students self-censor themselves in the classroom.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The danger of denigrating America’s ‘founding f**kers’ – opinion The goal of these radicals is not to achieve a “better America” – as they pretend – but the “end of America.” By Ruthie Blum

By on July 9th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-danger-of-denigrating-americas-founding-fkers-opinion-634565

The fifth season of the hit HBO comedy series Veep opens with the fictional US president, Selina Meyer – played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus – panicking about the electoral tie of the previous day, which could result in her not being able to remain in the Oval Office for a second term.

Aptly titled “The Morning After,” the premier episode of the season highlights what happens in America when a candidate wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College. Addressing the nation, Meyer insists that she is in “barefaced awe of the majesty of our democratic system,” while also saying that the “electoral college is a somewhat arcane institution that many scholars say we should do away with.”

Talk about prescience.

The episode aired on April 24, 2016, nearly seven months before the election in which Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump beat his Democratic Party rival, Hillary Clinton, by garnering an electoral college majority – even though she had won the popular vote. Unlike Clinton, however, the protagonist of Veep ultimately obtained the electoral college coup that she needed to keep her coveted seat in the White House.

But before it was clear to Meyer that this was the case, she told her staffers sardonically that she had forgotten in her speech to “thank the voters for making our country look like a high-school Spanish

She added bitterly, “Didn’t those founding f**kers ever hear of an odd number?”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Donald Trump teaches history The president fights for the survival of the republic in his Mount Rushmore speech Douglas Murray

By on July 9th, 2020

https://spectator.us/trump-mount-rushmore-1619-statues-speech/

Ahead of Independence Day last week, CNN went live to their correspondent Leyla Santiago. Here is how she described the upcoming celebrations: ‘Kicking off the Independence Day weekend, President Trump will be at Mount Rushmore, where he’ll be standing in front of a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.’ She went on to report that the President was expected to focus on efforts to ‘Quote “Tear down our country’s history”.’ And where might the President have acquired such an idea?

Even a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for a major network like CNN to have described Mount Rushmore in such nakedly hostile terms. America still had its agreed-upon holy sites, people and ideas – revered as unifying points of the nation’s past and necessary for any conceivable future.

Not anymore. Today every element of the American past is up for grabs, and the intensity of the campaign may well provide the likeliest means for Donald Trump to remain in the White House.

It is stunning to watch, this unweaving of a nation. While going on for decades, the latest orgy of iconoclasm has seen crowds assail statues of the Founding Fathers with equal ferocity to that aimed at Confederates. A statue of George Washington pulled down in Portland, Oregon had ‘genocidal colonist’ spray-painted on it. A statue of Thomas Jefferson, pulled down outside a high school bearing his name, was graffitied with ‘slave owner’, as well as the name of George Floyd.

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