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December 2022

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Bibi’s Back: A Conversation With Israel’s New Prime Minister Bari Weiss

By on December 1st, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/bibis-back-a-conversation-with-israels?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPTS:

BW: Supporters and critics of yours describe you the same way, which is having a real sense not just of duty but really of destiny in your service to Israel. In a way, you view yourself as the leader that can save the Jewish state and therefore the Jewish people. There’s a line in the introduction to your book where you talk about how you wish to be remembered. It’s a simple and short line. You say, “that I helped secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.” But the whole idea behind Zionism—the political movement for Jewish self-determination, Jews being able to live in their own land, not dependent on anyone else, and able to protect themselves—is that the Jews no longer need to be saved. Who do you see Israel as needing to be saved from right now and do you imagine a day when Israel or the Jewish people will ever not need to be saved?

BN: I think life is a constant battle and the life of nations is no different. Nations come; nations go. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. The Jewish people have broken the so-called iron laws of history. There was a great Italian philosopher, in the 16th century, who said that all nations are born, they flower, then they wilt, and then they die. You can’t escape it. Well, the Jewish people have escaped that. We died 100 deaths and we came back to life.

BW: The Jews are the ever-dying people.

BN: Well, we decided to stop dying. The birth of Zionism said that the way to rescue the Jewish people from the final death, which our modern Moses—Theodor Herzl—saw very clearly 120 years ago, he said we’d be destroyed if we don’t have a way to save the Jews from the fires of violent antisemitism. We would die and we would be erased. My father, 33 years after Herzel in 1933, at all of 23 years old, said we are facing a Holocaust. That’s his word. The Holocaust of Hitlerism, which would destroy the Jewish people. The only way to save the Jewish people, to save the Jewish future, was to have a Jewish state which would be a haven for the millions that would otherwise be trapped in Europe. He devoted his life, before my brother fell in Entebbe, to found the Jewish state.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden mute as protests demand freedom around the world

By on December 1st, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-mute-protests-demand-freedom-world

What does the United States stand for? With Joe Biden in the White House, absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we don’t stand for freedom. As brave citizens in China desperately protest that country’s heinous lockdowns and censorship, a spokesman for the Biden administration says that the White House is “going to watch this closely.”  

We don’t stand against human rights abusers. As crippling energy prices threaten the president’s approval ratings, Biden’s emissaries travel to Venezuela, allowing an easing of sanctions and resumed oil exports from a murderous regime that happens to have the world’s largest oil reserves. 

Amnesty International has called out the Maduro government for “extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and torture and other ill-treatment against those perceived as critical of the government” but the Biden government needs oil. 

We don’t stand for peace in the Middle East. Too small-minded to accept the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump, which created new alliances in the region and ring-fenced Iran, the Biden team continues its pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran. The Biden White House resolutely ignores Iran’s past history of cheating on its nuclear commitments; astonishingly, it allows Russia to act as an intermediary.

We also seemingly don’t stand with women’s rights. Violent and widespread protests in Iran over the killing of a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab have reportedly resulted in hundreds of deaths and the blinding of hundreds more by rubber bullets and metal pellets fired by security forces. 

The White House, other than issuing the usual supportive pablum, has been largely AWOL. Biden inadvertently boasted on the campaign trail that “We’re going to free Iran” but his team soon walked back the comment, saying that we merely “stood in solidarity” with the protesters. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Leftwing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 1st, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/

What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.

The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.

Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.

So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.

Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.

And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.

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ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Shimon Peres: Dreams of peace became Israel’s nightmare – opinion Moshe Dann

By on December 1st, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-723757

Shimon Peres, an iconic Israeli leader until his death in 2016 at the age of 93, was the subject of a recent documentary sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A prominent figure in the Labor Party, Peres held the positions of prime minister, foreign minister and president of Israel. He was best known for his role in developing Israel’s nuclear facility, as well as what was known as “the peace process” that became the basis for the Oslo Accords, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

The film and plans to name the International Convention Center in Jerusalem in his memory, however, have stirred controversy and criticism for what many believe to be a publicity campaign that ignores Peres’s true legacy: the Oslo Accords, and his failure to understand the PLO’s agenda to destroy Israel.

Shimon Peres’s legacy

In 1985, as prime minister, Peres arranged the release of over 1,000 convicted terrorists in what was called the “Ahmed Jabril deal,” named after the terrorist leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Less than three years later in December 1987, many of the terrorists led a surge of violence, known as the First Intifada, and others joined terrorist organizations.

Before the 1992 elections, Peres’s deputy Yossi Beilin concluded secret deals with the PLO in which the Israeli leaders pledged to grant it self-rule and quasi-state status. This became the basis of the Oslo Accords. The secret content of these negotiations has never been revealed.

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