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January 2021

Habibullah Ahmadi Escapes Mandatory Life Sentence for Savage Murder of Anne Widholm Out in less than a decade? Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/habibullah-ahmadi-escapes-mandatory-life-sentence-lloyd-billingsley/

Last November Habibullah Ahmadi, 24, was found guilty of second-degree murder in the October 8, 2017, beating of Sara Anne Widholm in Windsor, Ontario. The 75-year-old grandmother did not die until December 17, 2018, but according to Dr. Balraj Jhawar, the beating left her in a “worse state than death.” For this heinous crime, a Tuesday hearing revealed,  Habibullah will not receive the worst possible sentence.

“Second-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence,” wrote Trevor Wilhelm in the Windsor Star, but Habibullah Ahmadi would not get a life sentence. Instead the hearing focused on “when Ahmadi should become eligible for parole.” The range is 10 to 25 years, and prosecutor Renee Puskas argued that the convicted murderer “should not become eligible for parole for 14 to 17 years,” at best nearly a decade less than the possible maximum.

The Windsor Star report included no photo of murder victim Anne Widholm and no photo of Habibullah Ahmadi. Indeed, no photo of  the murderer has appeared in any report on the crime and trial. In similar style, no public statement has emerged from “Windsor man” Habibullah Ahmadi or any of his family, friends, fellow students or co-workers in the Canadian city.

According to the Star, Widholm suffered from “injuries” including skull fractures, but in a criminal proceeding these amount to “wounds” inflicted by the hand of another. The victim “fell into a coma,” but had actually been beaten into a coma by Habibullah Ahmadi, 21 at the time of the crime.

“High on marijuana and magic mushrooms,” Wilhelm wrote, “he randomly attacked Widholm” as she walked the trail. This ignored the reality that Ahmadi pleaded guilty and the defense failed to prove that marijuana and magic mushrooms played any role. As justice Bruce Thomas said in November, Ahmadi “had the intention to cause Sara Anne Widholm bodily harm” and was “likely to cause her death, and that he was clearly reckless as to whether death ensued.”

The contention that Habibullah Ahmadi “randomly attacked” the grandmother was at odds Dr. Jhawar, who did his best to keep the 75-year-old alive after she suffered the worst wounds he had ever seen. As Dr. Jhawar told the Windsor Star in 2017, it was “not just another random attack.” On Tuesday, the victim impact statements offered other enlightenment.

US Media: ‘Telling China’s Story Well’ by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16885/us-media-china

“If foreign audiences know that a piece of information comes from an official Chinese media source, they are likely to interpret it as ‘propaganda’ rather than ‘news,'” wrote China expert Anne-Marie Brady in 2015…
Fortunately for the CCP, China could rely on large segments of mainstream US media to help it….
The CCP evidently knew the West well enough to calculate that framing the debate [on the coronavirus] in terms of racism would be a highly successful strategy that would play into the divisive issue of identity politics in the US and Europe.
The CCP could not have done it, however, without the media’s lack of critical judgment of China’s behavior, as well as the media’s utter lack of interest in the CCP’s quest for global domination and, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, its willingness to achieve it “by any means necessary.”

One of the foremost tasks of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping is, at his directive, to “tell stories about China well and spread China’s voice well; enable the world to see a multidimensional and colorful China; present China as a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and an upholder of international order”.

When the coronavirus pandemic broke out in December 2019 in Wuhan and the Chinese authorities allowed it to spread to the rest of the world, “telling China’s story well” suddenly became an acute concern. It was necessary to save the regime’s face, deflect blame and seek to portray China as heroically battling the pandemic, instead of the reality of having caused it. China went into an even more energetic propaganda mode than usual, seeking to control the narrative about the virus at every turn.

Trump Signs Memo to Secure Government-Backed Research and Development Against Foreign Interference By Tom Ozimek

https://www.theepochtimes.com/

President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a presidential memorandum that seeks to secure U.S. government-supported research and development (R&D) against interference and exploitation by foreign powers.

Trump’s action seeks to enhance protections for United States R&D efforts, given their open and collaborative nature, and in light of their importance to national security and in keeping the country economically competitive, the White House Press Secretary said in a statement.

The memorandum “ensures that Government-supported research can occur in an open environment and foster new discoveries for the benefit of our Nation while also protecting intellectual capital, discouraging research misappropriation, and ensuring the responsible management of United States taxpayer dollars.”

The presidential memo reinforces the Trump administration’s efforts to maintain American leadership in the field of science and technology.

“America must remain the world’s leader in S&T [science and technology] during this era of great power competition, and today’s signing builds on the long and successful history of actions taken by President Trump to protect American technology from adversaries,” the press secretary said.

“This whole-of-government approach to R&D security will protect America’s technology and innovation advantage. Whether in trade, military cooperation, or S&T research, President Trump refuses to let other countries take advantage of America,” the statement added.

How the U.S. Could Lose to China Ben Weingarten

https://americanmind.org/salvo/how-the-u-s-could-lose-to-china/

America’s unserious political class is totally unequipped to deal with the threat.

The Chinese Communist Party is deathly serious in its pursuit of global hegemony, which, if achieved, would be a nightmare for all who believe in liberty and justice.

By contrast, can it be said of our political class that it is deathly serious about anything fundamental to preserving our way of life?

As 2021 dawns, contrast how the CCP ended last year, with how America’s leaders started this one.

The CCP should have come out of 2020 badly wounded, withering under severe isolation and punishment from a newly resolute West spurred to action over China’s primary culpability in the cover-up and spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, it rang in the new year with a diplomatic, economic, and strategic coup—all with the aid of the West.

China and the European Union agreed in principle to an investment pact that the EU’s president described as “an important landmark in our relationship with China” that would “provide unprecedented access to the Chinese market for European investors.” This was quite a reward given China’s depredations—from the coronavirus casualties on Europe’s streets, to the victims of the crackdown on Hong Kong, to the prisoners in the mushrooming Xinjiang gulags.

How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights For centuries black Americans debated how to overcome racism—but they always emphasized human agency and individual responsibility. By Robert L. Woodson Sr. and Joshua Mitchell

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-left-hijacked-civil-rights-11610748711?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. , helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.

Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.

Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course.

Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.

The 1776 Report A Trump commission tries to correct the historical record.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1776-report-11610754084?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Trump established the 1776 Commission with an executive order last year for the purpose of producing a counter-balance to the political left’s largely negative interpretation of American history.

The commission’s report, set for release Monday, won’t silence criticism of America, as liberal teachers groups feared. That isn’t in the power of the federal government, let alone an advisory commission. Instead, the 1776 Report makes the case for the American creed and a less radical way to teach history.

“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report states. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was a revolution in itself, a turning point in world history. To reduce America to its violations of that principle, as do many contemporary writers, is to miss the distinguishing part of the story that roused freedom lovers and terrified tyrants everywhere—and still does. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, could make America better by insisting it be truer to its own founding principles.

Those steeped in recent academic accounts of the U.S. may wonder how the 1776 Report can say core U.S. principles are “true” and still call itself history. That’s because it reads the Declaration not as archaeology or dissimulation, but as a live claim that demands adjudication.

Can anyone be surprised to hear that undergraduate history enrollments lately have hit new lows, facing worse drop-offs than any other department?

Fuhgeddaboudism Wait, what left-wing violence? When? Last summer? Really? by Daniel J. Flynn

https://spectator.org/capitol-riot-fuhgeddaboudism/

“People forever mired in an imaginary future when they redeem humanity through the power of their ideas naturally do not possess the time for the very real past in which the power of their ideas looted an immigrant’s American Dream, murdered a retired elderly African American policeman guarding a friend’s property, and torched businesses already burned by lockdowns — and then called it “social justice.” This happened. This happened recently. Should we all pretend it didn’t? And should people not bothered by any of that deliver gaslighting moral lectures about whataboutism to all the normal people horrified by all of it?”

“This was all orchestrated by this president who gave them their marching orders,” Al Sharpton told MSNBC viewers this week about the Unquiet Riot on Capitol Hill. Neither Freddy nor the seven customers who stayed in his “fashion mart” after closing were available for comment.

Inciting a riot does not serve as a prerequisite for gaining on-air employment at MSNBC. But it’s not a disqualifier.

Fuhgeddaboudism demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

Sharpton, who announced, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business,” before an armed man shot customers in Freddy’s Fashion Mart and torched it with people still inside in 1995, knows something about incitement (and mucking up facts, as the African American owners, not Freddy, aimed to move a black-owned record store).

“If the Jews want to get it on,” Sharpton said days before the Crown Heights Riots that led to Yankel Rosenbaum’s 1991 death, “tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” At the funeral of the black child hit by a car in a Jewish funeral procession that set off the riots, Sharpton further inflamed matters by referring to Jews as “diamond dealers” (a remark more temperate than the “Hitler Did Not Do the Job” banner displayed at the memorial service).

Any invocation of double standards regarding the Capitol Hill riot elicits calls of whataboutism, kind of a tu quoque for people who flunked Latin, from the New York Times and other redoubts of fuhgeddaboudism. This latter phenomenon seems the more relevant to the current situation. Fuhgeddaboudism, a kind of Jedi Mind Trick for people who did not watch Star Wars, demands that we collectively erase context and develop amnesia for not only history but for what happened every night last summer.

Trump Receives Morocco’s Highest Award for Middle East Work

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-receives-moroccos-highest-award-for-middle-

President Donald Trump on Friday received Morocco’s highest award for his work in advancing a normalization deal between Israel and Morocco, a senior administration official told Reuters.

In a private Oval Office ceremony, Princess Lalla Joumala Alaoui, who is Morocco’s ambassador to the United States, gave Trump the Order of Muhammad, an award given only to heads of state. It was a gift from Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Avi Berkowitz received other awards for their work on the Israel-Morocco deal, which was reached in December.

The United States in the last five months helped broker deals between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The agreements are aimed at normalizing relations and opening economic ties.

The Kushner team had been working on reaching more agreements between Israel and the Arab world. But time has run out and no more are expected before Trump leaves office on Wednesday.

By Steve Holland

Israel and the U.S.: Maintaining the Alliance Against Iran Shoshana Bryen

https://www.newsweek.com/israel-us-maintaining-alliance-against-iran-opinion-

There are three primary threads involved in Western containment of the Islamic Republic of Iran and preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities: diplomacy, economic pressure and what the Israelis call “cutting the grass.” 

Diplomacy can be harsh and can include economic pressure, as in the “maximum pressure campaign” of the outgoing administration, designed to cut off the mullahs’ funds in hopes of either collapsing the Tehran regime or forcing it to enter serious negotiations. It can also be soft, as in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal) of the Obama administration, offering positive incentives in exchange for limitations or time constraints on threatening behaviors. “Cutting the grass”—reducing or eliminating actual military threats as they emerge in real time—has been Israel’s preferred method, and can be coupled with either of the two others.

“Maximum pressure” and “cutting the grass” have worked in tandem to severely constrain Iran. Hezbollah’s budget has been cut, Iran’s formerly 80,000-strong militia in Syria, commanded by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers, has been reduced to approximately 10,000, and the people of Iran have been protesting against their government. On the other hand, Iran has found ways to spend its limited funds on its priorities—namely, ballistic missile technology and nuclear weapons capability.

While the incoming Biden administration has made clear its preference for soft American diplomacy, a continuing alliance with Israel—public or tacit—that pressures Iran on the ground can serve both countries’ interests.

Trump orders US military’s Central Command to include State of Israel

https://www.jns.org/trump-orders-us-militarys-central-command-to-now-include-israe

Michael Makovsky, president and CEO of JINSA, noted that the realignment “will strengthen strategic planning, defense cooperation and deterrence against Iran by America and its regional allies.”

 U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees the mission of the U.S. military in the Middle East, to include Israel, reported The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing U.S. officials.

Until now, Israel had been part of the U.S. European Command for the sake of America’s Arab allies that have had adversarial relationships with the Jewish state.

The development of the Abraham Accords—in which CENTCOM members the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel—has allowed for pro-Israel groups to make the case that the time is ripe for Israel to fall under CENTCOM as well. (Sudan and Morocco, the other more recent signees of the Abraham Accords, are not part of CENTCOM, as Sudan does not have military cooperation with the United States and Morocco is part of the U.S. Africa Command.)

One of the pro-Israel groups to advocate for the move was the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), whose president and CEO, Michael Makovsky, said that the realignment “will strengthen strategic planning, defense cooperation and deterrence against Iran by America and its regional allies.”

“I hope it might also smooth the way for the Pentagon to utilize Israel more for regional operations, including by prepositioning precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and other much-needed weaponry for American, Israeli, and possibly, partner Arab forces,” he continued. “PGMs are critical to Israel’s continued ability to defend U.S. interests by rolling back the military footprint of Iran and its proxies.”