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January 2023

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An Israel Prize laureate’s anti-government stance reveals a sinister view of the Jewish state By Ruthie Blum

By on January 11th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/an-israel-prize-laureates-anti-government-stance-reveals-a-sinister-view-of-the-jewish-state/

Anyone still puzzled by the outcome of the Nov. 1 Knesset elections should listen to professor Asa Kasher’s interview on Sunday with Kan radio. A fierce opponent of the new government in Jerusalem, the Israel Prize laureate, author of the Israel Defense Forces’ Code of Conduct, inadvertently did more to explain the victory of the right than most of its own champions.

Though not a jurist, the esteemed philosopher and linguist was invited by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation to discuss (i.e. bash) Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan, unveiled last week, to reform the judicial system.

Clipping the wings of the overly interventionist, politically biased Supreme Court—to restore the power vested in the legislature—was among the campaign vows that drew voters. Nevertheless, oppositionists have been decrying it as the beginning of the end of Israeli democracy. The opposite is the case, of course. Yet that’s of little concern to the naysayers engaged in literal and figurative demonstrations against their loss at the ballot box.

Kasher, famous for crafting the IDF’s “purity of arms” credo—and criticized in the past for backing the targeted assassination of terrorists—is a particularly noteworthy protester. It’s not that his false claims are more original than those of his colleagues in academia, like-minded members of the media or politicians in the “anybody but Bibi” camp who failed to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners. On the contrary, they’ve all been invoking the same platitudes.

But Kasher used his microphone to rattle off the tired talking points in a way that reveals just how dim a view he and his cohorts have of Israel.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Orwellian Obsession with Israel By Phyllis Chesler

By on January 11th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-new-york-times-orwellian-obsession-with-israel/

Are things really as bad as I think they are regarding propaganda against Israel and Jews, a subject I began closely tracking in 2001?

Recently, I asked five educated pro-Israel people: “How many first-section, hardcopy articles about Israel and Judaism do you think The New York Times published in the last six months of 2022?”

They answered, “Probably around 30 or 40, maybe less.”

Shockingly, the answer is at least 127. Yes, I carefully counted them. This averages five negative articles every week in just one section. Given that Israel is the size of the state of New Jersey, the Times seems pathologically obsessed with it. Although they very occasionally publish a neutral or positive piece, at least 95% of their first section articles fixate on Israel’s alleged imperfections and falsely magnify them into “atrocities.”

These anti-Israel pieces also tend to be much longer than other articles. According to a 2012 study published in Sociology Mind, most Times articles are an average of 622 words. The Times’ 127 anti-Israel articles seem to average approximately 1,700 words each, often appear on the front page, continue on one or two inside pages and feature many photos. This past August alone, these articles totaled more than 43,000 words.

The Times also makes extensive use of its Twitter account, posting up to a hundred times a day to its 54.8 million followers. An Oct. 24 article on Hasidic schools and financial fraud garnered 3,687 likes and was retweeted 1,728 times. Also in October, the allegation that Israel was driving Palestinians to live in caves drew 6,111 likes and 3,432 retweets.

Imagine the psychological effect of being barraged with so much propaganda every day, month and year. And that’s from just one newspaper.

Moreover, the Times consistently runs headlines that are blatantly biased if not cunningly deceptive.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel-Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian issue Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on January 11th, 2023

http://theettingerreport.com/cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi

Saudi order of priorities

*The State Department and the Western foreign policy establishment have contended that the Palestinian issue features prominently on the Saudi order of national priorities. Therefore, they have maintained that a substantial enhancement of Israel-Saudi cooperation – and certainly, the attainment of an Israel-Saudi Arabia peace treaty – would be preconditioned upon substantial Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, including the establishment of a Palestinian state.

*However, contrary to the State Department’s worldview, Saudi Arabia’s strong man, the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), does not consider the Palestinian issue a top priority.

*Moreover, conversely to State Department assessments, MBS is aware that the Palestinian issue is not the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict, neither a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, nor a core cause of regional turbulence.

*Furthermore, unlike the State Department, MBS accords critical weight to the Palestinian intra-Arab track record, which is low on moderation but, top heavy on subversion, terrorism, treachery and ingratitude (especially the Palestinian collaboration with Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait); as well as, the deeply-rooted Palestinian collaboration with international terror organizations, Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and Iran’s Ayatollahs’ regime (which constitute lethal threats to the House of Saud), North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

*Simultaneously, MBS is absorbed with the strategic goal of evolving Saudi Arabia into a modern regional/global superpower, by reinforcing regional stability, minimizing the threat of existing rogue entities (e.g., Iran’s Ayatollahs and Muslim Brotherhood terrorists), preventing the rise of additional rogue entities (e.g., the domestic Shiite subversion in the oil region in eastern Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s Houthis, the proposed Palestinian state and Hezbollah), and bolstering investment, infrastructure development and economic diversification (e.g., hightech).

*Irrespective of MBS’ deep Islamic beliefs, and notwithstanding the 280-year-old alliance between the House of Saud and the fundamentalist Wahhabi establishment in central and southwestern Saudi Arabia, MBS has recognized the value of Israel’s military, technological capabilities, and Israel’s special standing among most US voters and Capitol Hill legislators, as well as Israel’s reliability and effectiveness in the pursuit of MBS’ game-changing strategic goal.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Shameful Exploitation of Brian Sicknick’s Death Unfortunately, few seem interested in honoring who Sicknick was or allowing him to rest in peace. Shame on them all. By Julie Kelly

By on January 10th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/09/the-shameful-exploitation-of-brian-sicknicks-death/

The second anniversary of the events of January 6, 2021 came and went last week, fortunately, without a copycat attempt by behorned furries and selfie-taking Indiana meemaws to “overthrow democracy” and whatnot.

While most people somehow have managed to move on with their lives, official Washington remains fixated on the four-hour disturbance that took place two years ago. What can only be described as “insurrection psychosis” continues to grip the Biden regime, congressional Democrats, and the national news media in yet another example of the vast differences between the priorities of the ruling class and the American public.

Joe Biden held a solemn ceremony at the White House to commemorate January 6 and present more presidential awards to some of the day’s “heroes”—recipients just happened to include several individuals who participated in the January 6 select committee’s televised performances. It was the first time Biden bestowed the Presidential Citizens’ Medal, an honor reserved for those “who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country,” Biden said.

The ceremony in reality served as an opportunity for Biden to again perpetuate one of the biggest lies about January 6: that numerous police officers, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, died as a result of the Capitol protest. 

As a military officer read a brief summary of Sicknick’s military and law enforcement career, Biden held hands with Sicknick’s mother, Gladys, in attendance with Sicknick’s father to receive a posthumous award on behalf of their son. 

“He lost his life protecting our elected representatives, upholding the will of the American people, and defending our Constitution,” a military aide said from the podium in the East Room on Friday. “For his service and his ultimate sacrifice, we the people honor U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick.”

But that isn’t what happened. Sicknick suffered two strokes caused by a blood clot near his brain stem; the D.C. coroner concluded Sicknick died of natural causes on January 7, 2021 at the age of 42. Rather than allow his family the chance to grieve with dignity and in privacy, the media immediately seized on his untimely passing to portray Trump supporters as cop killers.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Now, Brown Cow: Israel’s Bovine Spies In the annals of animal absurdity, the Palestinians are determined to leave their mark. by Hugh Fitzgerald

By on January 10th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-now-brown-cow-israels-bovine-spies/

In the annals of animal absurdity, the Palestinians are determined to leave their mark. Recently they were alarmed that Israel was setting loose wild boars that had somehow been trained to uproot Palestinian crops but leave Israeli crops alone. Never mind that the increase in the wild boar population is even worse in Israel proper than in the West Bank, the result of more garbage being available because of the residential spread. And now they have charged that Israeli cows have been spying on Palestinian villagers. A preliminary Jihad Watch report is here, and more on this craziness can be found here: “Palestinians accuse Israel of training spy cows – report,” Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2023:

A Palestinian villager encountered Israeli cattle and fabricated a story about how Israel has been secretly training the cattle to spy on Palestinians, according to Palestinian Media Watch, citing the official Palestinian Authority daily news outlet Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.

These are recruited and trained cattle, Palestinian villager Rushd Morrar reportedly told the daily. “On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

He also reportedly claimed that “the settlers release herds of wild boars” as a way to destroy any and all Palestinian crops. “The settlers’ crimes are diversifying and becoming sophisticated and the means they employ in their war are unlimited,” he alleged. “Starting with direct acts of murder and ending with incidents of car ramming on the roads; starting with burning agricultural crops, uprooting trees and stripping lands and ending with releasing boars towards the farmer’s lands.”

The only “acts of murder” involving “settlers” are those committed by Palestinian terrorists; the settlers are victims, not perpetrators, of murder. Not a single car-ramming incident has been caused by Israelis; they have been the victims of such attacks, which take place especially at checkpoints, where Palestinian drivers suddenly swerve to hit the IDF soldiers on duty.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Soviet Union: A Primer Michael Malice’s new book is the perfect gift for anyone who thinks Communism is cool. by Bruce Bawer

By on January 10th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-soviet-union-a-primer/

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the Soviet Union. For most of my life, it was the other superpower, the villain to our hero, the anti-matter to our matter. We had freedom and prosperity; they had neither. It loomed large in our imaginations but was, as Churchill famously put it, a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” We held their lives in our hands, and they held ours in theirs. During my teens, I read everything about the place that I could get my hands on.

In 1976, paperback editions were issued of both Russia: The People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser, who’d been the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, and The Russians by Hedrick Smith, who’d held the same position at the New York Times. I read both books avidly. At around the same time, probably on the 19-cent used-book tables at the legendary Barnes & Noble annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, I came across a paperback entitled The Soviet Union: The First Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. Published in 1967, it contained twenty-odd essays by New York Times staffers on different aspects of contemporary Soviet life and culture.

I still have my copies of these books. I paged through them just now. In all three, what stands out most is the authors’ readiness to normalize life under totalitarianism – to emphasize the good, to minimize the bad, to make Soviet life relatable to Americans by portraying it as something that, just like our own life, has its pluses and minuses. Smith warns in his foreword that readers shouldn’t “misinterpret my criticisms of certain features of the Russian way of life as constituting approval of corresponding aspects of Western society.” Similarly, Kaiser, in his introduction, writes that “when I criticize some aspect of Soviet life, implicitly or explicitly, I hope it is clear that I am not simultaneously trying to endorse the corresponding feature of Western life.” I only just now noticed the striking similarity between those two sentences. Remarkable, no?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Let’s Find Out What The Democrats Have Been Up To

By on January 10th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/10/lets-find-out-what-the-democrats-have-been-up-to/

The 15-round vote to finally elect a speaker of the House was, we were told by the political left, an embarrassment and evidence that the Republicans are untrustworthy. It was in reality our system in action and it produced at least two important outcomes, both of which will cause discomfort for the Democrats and their communications wing known as the mainstream media.

Over the weekend, we learned that in order for Rep. Kevin McCarthy to earn their votes, the 20 holdout GOP lawmakers got a promise from the California moderate that two special investigative panels would be created. One would look into “the origins of the COVID-19 virus,” the other at the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement agencies, such as the Justice Department and FBI, Just The News reported. The panels will be select subcommittees, one in the House Judiciary Committee, the other in the House Oversight Committee.

As important as both of those subcommittees will be, there is great need for more probes. There are decades of Democratic corruption and malfeasance that need to be exposed to the public, untangled and then removed.

Look at the IRS again, this time at the agency’s targeted harassment of the poorest taxpayers who cannot defend themselves from the leviathan, and do it in light of the 87,000 new IRS employees that will be hired through the Democrats’ ​​Inflation Reduction Act passed in August.

Dig not just into the origin of COVID-19 but also the lockdowns, and vaccine and mask mandates. Such egregious violations of liberty should never happen again in this country. But they will, the next time likely in an effort to protect the climate, if the Republicans don’t start making a hard stand against government encroachment, and hold the lockdown-mask-up maniacs accountable.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

NPR Promotes Pornography for Kids By Matt Margolis

By on January 9th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/01/09/npr-promotes-pornography-for-kids-n1659974

Conservatives have been calling for the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR) for years now because of its blatant political bias, but now they have a new reason to deprive the news outlet of its federal funding.

This week, NPR published a misleading and disturbing essay by Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, a controversial graphic memoir documenting Kobabe’s journey to coming out as “nonbinary.” In addition to being “nonbinary,” Kobabe has nonsensical “preferred pronouns.”

Kobabe laments in her NPR essay that Gender Queer has become the most challenged book in public school libraries. “Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns,” she wrote. “There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all.”

Related: NPR Releases Hardcore Abortion Porn Audio to Savor on Your Morning Commute

By Kobabe’s telling, the book is challenged because of discrimination. “I was obviously already aware that queer, trans, and nonbinary narratives often receive pushback.” But this is incredibly misleading. In fact, Gender Queer is most often challenged because it contains graphic depictions of minors participating in sex acts — a detail Kobabe conveniently omits in her essay.

She was, however, questioned about the graphic nature of some of the illustrations in an interview with NPR. “Let me ask you this. Some of the criticism is about how explicit the book is. There are some graphic panels where you’re describing some of your sexual encounters. Did you consider doing less graphic versions of those scenes?” NPR’s Claire Murashima asked.

“You know, I really didn’t,” Kobabe said. “I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make.”

Kobabe insists that her book could have been even more explicit. Opponents of the book say it is pornographic — and having seen screenshots of the illustrations, I can say this characterization is correct — which means it has no business in public libraries or school libraries. That NPR is promoting this book and giving a platform to the author, who is clearly a groomer, is disturbing. So, yes, NPR is promoting pornography aimed at grooming young children.

Last year, NPR also broadcasted a segment about “queer” sex education, which, among other things, denounced the “terrible lie” that STDs make one “dirty.”

It’s long overdue for NPR to lose its federal funding. Promoting pornography that targets kids should be the last straw.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Wokeism Goes Global: Biden’s Foreign Policy John O’Sullivan

By on January 9th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/wokeism-goes-global-bidens-foreign-policy/

There are broadly two ways of conducting a foreign policy. The first is responding intelligently to events abroad as they occur, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or as Harold Macmillan once said: “Events, dear boy, events.”

The second way, sometimes called a Grand Strategy, prescribes the general direction in which you want your country to go and the policies needed to get there. Thus, Brexit was intended to transform Britain from “a country at the heart of Europe” (John Major’s formulation) into Global Britain.

But since the policies needed to achieve Global Britain were never pursued or even devised because they were opposed by people in government and major British institutions, that grand strategy was stillborn. A successful grand strategy requires the government to know roughly how it wants each crisis to turn out without having to work out its responses from scratch.

President Biden has so far had a mixed record on responding to events: he did badly in Afghanistan but well over Ukraine, where his policy has rallied the Western alliance and frustrated Putin’s Russia. What explains his success in one case and failure in the other?

The answer lies in part in the unusual reality that US progressive Left—which currently dominates the Biden administration—sees America as a racist, sexist, homophobic and white supremacist country. That makes it ambivalent about America’s national interest. Even if it sees the necessity for some purposeful action in a crisis, it can’t want the outcome to benefit the US. At the very least that mindset must weaken and confuse the US even when it follows a prudent course.

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The New McCarthyism Expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker of the House. By Roger Kimball

By on January 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/07/the-new-mccarthyism/

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House!

The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work.

I am of two minds about that. My own take is that McCarthy is an unreliable ally for those on the Right. He was only too happy to shovel billions of your and your children’s money to Ukraine while doing little to secure our southern border. McCarthy is from California, so, naturally, he likes to spend money. He even got behind such improvident and mendacious schemes as raiding Medicare to pay for the U.S. Postal Service. He was happy to fund the January 6 kangaroo court, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and support mandates for the useless—indeed, dangerous—COVID vaccine for the military. In plain terms, his voting record is only intermittently conservative.

Kevin McCarthy, in short, is a swamp creature masquerading as a swamp critic. The Swamp loves its own, and so it was no surprise that McCarthy eventually prevailed, just barely. He did so at considerable cost to the power of the speaker’s office but also considerable benefit to people who care about accountability.

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