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August 2022

A New Iron Curtain Descends on Russia’s Jews Putin was supposed to be the Good Tsar. Instead he has closed the Jewish Agency. And now tens of thousands of Jews fear being trapped in Russia.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-new-iron-curtain-descends-on-russias?utm_source=email&triedSigningIn=true

Vladimir Putin was supposed to be The Good Tsar—the Russian president who, his KGB past notwithstanding, was a friend of the Jews. In Putin’s Russia, we could be billionaires and presidential advisers. We could go to shul. We could come and go as we pleased.

My in-laws, Chief Rabbi Pinchas and Rebbetzin Dara Goldschmidt, were evidence of that. From 1993 until this year, my father-in-law was the chief rabbi of Moscow; my mother-in-law founded a Jewish school there.

Since the Soviet collapse, in 1991, synagogues, schools, youth groups, and Jewish-owned businesses in Moscow had flourished. In 2007, Putin famously donated a month’s salary to the glitzy Moscow Museum of Tolerance, and the FSB (formerly the KGB) offered its support to the museum by providing documents from its archives. In recent years, a Jew wearing a yarmulke would have felt more comfortable walking in Moscow than in Paris.

Perhaps most importantly, young Jews had been able to do what Jews in pretty much every generation before would have found unimaginable: They could move to Israel. 

The symbol of this freedom of movement was a pale, yellow building on a little street called Bolshoy Spasoglinishchevskiy Pereulok, just across the street from Moscow’s famous Choral Synagogue. Inside was the Jewish Agency for Israel. 

The Soviets didn’t allow the Jewish Agency—which has outposts all over the world and is tasked with helping Jews immigrate to Israel—to open in Russia until 1989, just two years before the communist regime collapsed. Its opening in the very center of Moscow was a sign of a great and long awaited moment in Russian society. 

The Jewish Agency quickly became something of a magnet for young Russian Jews who would come to learn Hebrew, attend cultural events, and interview for a variety of programs that enabled them to go to Israel for high school or college.

The Limits of Radical Protest Those fighting for social change today would do well to heed Bayard Rustin’s advice about how to build sustainable and effective political movements. Matt Johnson

https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/the-limits-of-radical-protest/

Bayard Rustin was one of the towering figures in the American civil rights movement. A democratic socialist and a lead organizer of the March on Washington, Rustin was also among the most forceful and compelling advocates for a sweeping set of social and economic changes intended to bring about what he described as “full racial equality.”

In February 1965—a year and a half after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and just seven months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act—Rustin published an essay in Commentary titled “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” This title captured a theme of Rustin’s work in the years to follow—he was a radical pragmatist who believed the campaign for civil rights was the starting point for a much larger struggle: the fight to build a fairer and more just society for all.

Rustin had just witnessed tectonic legal and political changes in the United States when he urged his fellow Americans to embark on this project. As he put it at the beginning of his essay, the “elaborate legal structure of segregation and discrimination, particularly in relation to public accommodations, has virtually collapsed.” But he argued that this merely marked the transition from one phase of economic and social mobilization to the next: “What is the value of winning access to public accommodations for those who lack money to use them? The minute the movement faced this question, it was compelled to expand its vision beyond race relations to economic relations, including the role of education in modern society.”

Walkout at Milton Academy When high-school students can’t tolerate hearing the name of a book title, we know there’s a problem in education. Randall Kennedy and Harvey Silverglate Randall Kennedy and Harvey Silverglate

https://quillette.com/2022/08/08/walkout-at-milton-academy/

One of us, Harvey Silverglate, recently got “cancelled,” in a sense, for publicly mentioning a notorious term, often used as a slur. In one of those great ironies that characterize our historical moment, the impugned utterance was contained in a lecture on the importance of free speech in academia.

The situation unfolded on April 27th at Milton Academy, a prestigious private high school in Massachusetts. A student group, the Public Issues Board, had sponsored a multi-day series of panels and lectures on subjects of the students’ choosing. Silverglate was invited to give a talk on free speech and academic freedom, a subject in which he specializes.

Approximately two-thirds of the way into the lecture, Silverglate held up before the audience two books. One was entitled The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, which Silverglate co-authored in 1998. The book focused largely on the struggles to protect free speech in higher education. The other book was authored by a Harvard Law School professor, Randall Kennedy (the co-author of this article). The title of that book is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, published in 2002 and recently updated.

End of the Republic With the FBI raid on Trump’s home, America has fallen into the abyss. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/end-republic-robert-spencer/

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal.

The MSM Suddenly Decides Elections Can Be Stolen… But Only by Republicans By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/08/08/the-msm-suddenly-decides-elections-can-be-stolen-but-only-by-republicans-n1619144

The mainstream media gladly colluded with Democrats to insist that the 2020 election was the safest, fairest, and most secure election in the history of the world, the universe, and all dimensions in the multiverse. If you dare suggest that Biden stole the 2020 election, you are immediately declared a fringe conspiracy theorist and banned on social media.

But it looks like the media is starting to change its tune on the theory that our elections are secure and can’t be stolen. There’s just a tiny caveat: only Republicans can steal elections.

Bloomberg sought to find out which states are “most vulnerable to political election interference” and “what it means for elections this fall and in 2024, when the White House will once again be at stake.” I’ll save you all the details because the criteria were ridiculously biased. But, according to the exposé, reporters Ryan Teague Beckwith and Bill Allison looked at all the states, scrutinized election laws, consulted with experts, and while they claim the 2022 vote “should be fine” because election integrity laws in various states have stalled, Beckwith and Allison nevertheless insist that the 2024 vote could potentially be “stolen” should Trump loyalists win gubernatorial elections Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, and possibly Pennsylvania.

Why? Because these Trump loyalists questioned the results of the 2020 election and would probably steal the election for Trump in 2024.

As I’ve previously pointed out, despite the left’s insistence that the 2020 election was so secure and fair, many election irregularities have been discovered.

The FBI And DOJ Criminalizing Opposition To The Regime Is How The Republic Ends By: Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/08/criminalizing-opposition-to-the-regime-is-how-the-republic-ends/

A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control.

On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.

“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.

Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.

Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does

Mark Tapson :Inside the Horror of Islamic Sex Slavery – and the Real War on Women Bringing attention to the forgotten victims.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/shining-spotlight-real-war-women-mark-tapson/

Last week marked the seventh annual commemoration of the Yazidi genocide, though you wouldn’t know it from watching establishment media. Nor would you know that there is an ongoing genocide of Christians taking place in Nigeria, nor that throughout the Islamic world countless women and girls are enduring kidnapping, forced marriages, forced conversions of Christians to Islam, genocidal rape, and/or widespread sex trafficking even in countries that are supposedly our allies in the War on Terror.

To keep abreast of these crises, one needs to seek out the work of such concerned journalists as the Freedom Center’s own Raymond Ibrahim or Dutch journalist Sonja Dahlmans, who work desperately to bring international attention to the plight of the victims of an actual war on women.

I recently interviewed Ms. Dahlmans about these issues. She currently writes (in Dutch only) for the conservative political news site PAL NWS, and is studying Islam at the Melbourne School of Theology, where she will be starting her thesis.

For those readers who would like to help make a change – and to participate in the effort to protecting and liberating the victims of Islamic Jihad, sex slavery and rape, please contact Sonja on her Twitter at: @SonjaDahlmans.

Mark Tapson: Sonja, please tell us what the focus of your journalistic work has been in recent years, and why you’re passionate about it.

Sonja Dahlmans: I focus mainly on Christian persecution, but I have also written about persecution of the Yazidis in Iraq and Syria and of Hindu girls in Pakistan. Women and girls from these groups are often targeted in Islamic countries or regions. The abduction, rape, forced marriage and forced conversion (to Islam) of non-Muslim women and girls is a widespread problem. This is the subject I write about the most, because I am afraid it is still underestimated, although lately there has been more attention to it. Unfortunately not often in the mainstream media, the subject is almost only discussed on Christian (or other religious minority) pages or reports.

The Scandal of the Secret Service’s Deleted Texts Why the subterfuge? What might those texts reveal? By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/08/the-scandal-of-the-secret-services-deleted-texts/

Before and during Donald Trump’s time in the White House, powerful federal agencies aligned to sabotage his candidacy and then his presidency. Once-trusted entities such as the FBI, the intelligence community, and even parts of the U.S. military have burned their credibility by abandoning their missions to instead try to end Trump’s political career.

Does this include the Secret Service?

Unfortunately, the scandal over deleted texts related to January 6 demands the question. 

Last month, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that houses the Secret Service, officially informed Congress that text messages the office sought as part of its investigation into the Capitol protest were gone. 

“The Department notified us that many U.S. Secret Service (USS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021, were erased as part of a device-replacement program,” Dr. Joseph Cuffari wrote on July 13. “The USS erased those text messages after OIG requested records of electronic communications from the USS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6,” an investigation Cuffari launched in February 2021.

Cuffari, a Trump appointee, addressed his letter to the Senate and House Homeland Security committees; the chair of the House Homeland Security committee is Representative Bennie Thomspon (D-Miss.) who also heads the January 6 select committee. On January 16, 2021, Congressional Democrats instructed DHS and other key federal agencies to retain all records involving the events of January 6.

Eleven days later, texts on cell phones used by multiple Secret Service officials and agents on duty on January 6 were erased.

A weaponized FBI raids Mar-a-Lago in search of a crime By Olivia Murray

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/a_weaponized_fbi_raids_maralago_in_search_of_a_crime.html

Joseph Stalin’s reputation as a ruthless despot rests on many factors, but particularly upon his persecution of political opponents. Under Stalin, the gulags swelled in size, and continued to do so until his death in 1953. Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s most notorious secret police commander of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), boasted about his weaponized law enforcement agency, and his ability to “prove” guilt, even in the absence of a crime. His words were, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” First, Beria would identify a target (“the man”) before he concocted charges based upon falsified evidence—the victims were guilty until proven innocent. Justice was jettisoned in favor of kangaroo courts.

In contrast, the American federal government established with the ratification of the Constitution, rooted our justice system upon Judeo-Christian ethics and morality. In fact, five of the ten amendments which comprise the Bill of Rights explicitly address governmental limitations in an effort to secure justice; but now, we moved past the tipping into the wasteland of no return.

The rule of law is no more—the Department of Justice is now the NKVD, and Merrick Garland is Beria. Yesterday, FBI stormtroopers kicked in the doors of President Donald J. Trump’s private residence, executing a search warrant.

The complete Sovietization of the Democrat party By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/the_complete_sovietization_of_the_democrat_party.html

“Under Biden, the criminalization of political opponents has become the order of the day.  We are officially a third-world banana republic without any legitimate leadership.”

With the wholly illegal and unconstitutional FBI raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, in search of documents the FBI has long had access to, there can no longer be any doubt about the full communization of the American left.

The thorough weaponization and politicization of each of our law enforcement institutions is now undeniable.  The left has crossed Caesar’s Rubicon.

The Democrats are so determined to destroy Trump that they are willing to reveal their true colors: they are all Stalinist communists now.

They’ve just rammed through a nearly $800-billion bill that will obviously exacerbate inflation and will transform the IRS into a Gestapo-like agency, armed and dangerous to all Americans but the very wealthy.

Small businesses that survived the lockdowns will now be stamped out by the higher taxes, audits, and regulations within this destructive bill.

The billions of green agenda requirements in the bill will force us all into energy deficits that will further devastate our already ruined economy and our quality of life.

That is their goal, their endgame. “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws,” as Tacitus once said.

The globalists have captured every Democrat in Congress, every single one of them.  Chances are that each and every one of them has been bought…by China.  There is not one of them who has put or will put the American people before their own personal power and wealth. 

Every Democrat voted against prohibiting China from buying U.S. farmland.  Every Democrat voted against a ban on selling our gasoline reserves to China; Biden has slashed our strategic reserves.  Every Democrat voted against a bill stating that pregnancy is unique to biological females.  Every Democrat is on board the for the sexualization of very young children, the authorization of pornography in elementary school libraries, and the pharmaceutical and surgical intervention of “gender transition” even for children under twelve.  Democrat-run states seek to mandate gender-identity education for young children.  Biden has made his support of gender “transition” abundantly clear.  They all support unrestricted abortion up to and just after birth; they are in favor of infanticide.