Displaying posts published in

November 2023

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Curious Case of Rob Malley by Peter Schweizer

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20166/rob-malley

More bad news for Malley emerged recently when a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails was revealed by Semafor and Iran International. In email exchanges between Iranian Foreign Ministry officials working under the supposedly moderate then President Hassan Rouhani, they congratulate each other for the public success of what they called the “Iran Experts Initiative (IEI),” a propaganda effort they created back in 2014, and reportedly “funded and directed by an IRGC official…

The IEI cultivated a network of sympathetic academics and intellectuals “with the aim of shaping political and public opinion as the Iranian government, then led by Hassan Rouhani, pursued a nuclear deal with the U.S.”

Other former officials told the Daily Caller that Malley and a previous advisor of his, Ariane Tabatabai, who holds a senior, security clearance level job at the Defense Department, are “compromised” and had no place running Washington’s Iran policy.

Tabatabai is still employed at the Pentagon where, noted the investigative reporter Lee Smith, “she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier… Tabatabai’s emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic.”

“The contents of the emails,” wrote Lee Smith, “are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime….

Tabatabai still has high-level security clearance and access to classified information. The FBI has reportedly “refused to remove her.” So, while Israel fights for its existence, a genocidal Iran is using three of its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen — Tabatabai, who according to Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), “had the mission of influencing U.S. policymakers to agree with what the Iranian government wanted,” may be sending classified information about planned U.S. and Israeli military moves back to Iran…. What could possibly go wrong?

[The] use of the term “cosmopolitan” here hits on a core tenet of New Left ideology, where concern for one’s own country is seen as jingoism, and the welfare of other nations, even those openly hostile to the US, occupies the highest priority.

How was [Ms. Tabatabai’s] “top level security clearance” approved and why is she still employed in a senior position at the Pentagon?

[T]he case of Rob Malley indicates a deeper rot in our politics…. [Malley] is far closer to those Ivy League professors currently tweeting gleefully in favor of… the terrorist group Hamas, just to cite the most current example.

It is a wonder Malley ever passed a background check in the first place.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

DECEPTION- BY RAND PAUL

By on November 21st, 2023

Senator Rand Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding previously unimaginable power, Fauci misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

One of the few leaders who dared to challenge “America’s Doctor” was Senator Rand Paul, himself a physician. Deception is his indictment of the catastrophic failures of the public health bureaucracy during the pandemic.

Senator Paul presents the evidence that:

The Covid virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China—research funded in part by the U.S. government.
Taxpayer dollars for that research were deceptively funneled to Wuhan without the required regulatory review.
Fauci and his scientific yes-men knew from day one about Covid’s origin and tried to cover it up.
Fauci and his allies ruthlessly attacked everyone—including highly qualified scientists—who threatened to reveal the truth about the pandemic.

Why? Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants and unreported royalties were at stake, and heads would roll if the truth got out.

It almost worked. At Fauci’s insistence, the government imposed needlessly extreme lockdowns on Americans at the cost of immense personal and economic destruction.

Covid-19 was deadly, but the real killer was the coverup, led by America’s most durable medical bureaucrat—a man for whom the truth was too often expendable.

Senator Paul makes a powerful case that funding dangerous bioengineering in a totalitarian country is madness. If we don’t heed this warning, the next pandemic could be far worse.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

More anti-Semitism from Columbia U. By Bill Levinson

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/more_antisemitism_from_columbia_u.html

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has issued a statement that reads:

“Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” Good, please have your female and LGBT members go over to Gaza and see just how “liberated” they are in that environment.
“Israel is bombing hospitals, schools, and homes while cutting off food, water, medicine, and electricity to the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, half of whom are children.” Hospitals, schools, and homes lose their protected status under the Geneva and Hague Conventions when used for military purposes. This means that Apartheid Divest is intentionally trying to obfuscate Hamas’ war crimes.
“We have previously refused to focus on concerns pertaining to free speech, academic freedom, and student safety on campus, as they distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.” This is an application of Joseph Goebbels’ advice to accuse the other side of that which your own side is guilty, as the only genocide was the one attempted by Hamas on October 7.

Here is the list of student organizations that signed this material. Although the names of the student officers are not available, those of the faculty advisors are. If those advisors are not comfortable with the content of this letter, they are free to distance themselves from the organizations in question.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald at Restoration: When Race Trumps Merit What Critical Race Theory has done to the West – while China rises on merit.

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/heather-macdonald-at-restoration-when-race-trumps-merit/

If anybody’s surprised by the depravity, the moral depravity that’s been coming out of American institutions, educational institutions for the last three weeks, may I say, on behalf of David Horowitz, I told you so. For decades, David has warned that the universities had become the purveyor of lies, not the seeker of truth. David has warned that Islamism and its intersectional variants was becoming as ingrained in academic life as the classical canon once was. And that was a very long time ago in a golden era. The lie currently before us is that it is Israel that is the rights violator in the Middle East. Well, we can test this easily enough. Try holding a gay pride march in Gaza.

Vast swatches of the professoriate and administrators believe that four-year-olds should be told about the fun that awaits them if they declare themselves members of the opposite sex. Well, again, try that in a madrassas and see how far you get. Timeless antisemitism plays a large role in the disgusting spectacle of pro-Hamas demonstrations that we’ve been seeing on college campuses and in city streets. But something more recent and bigger is also at play, and that is hatred towards the Judeo-Christian civilization and a will to self cancelation on the part of elite members of that civilization; that hatred towards the West has become the primary export of the American University into the world at large. This morning I’m going to speak about a key falsehood that emanates from the self-annihilation of the West, and that is the claim that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racism and white supremacy. This claim has been percolating in American universities for a long time, but after the George Floyd race riots, it became a universal charge among elite institutions from big law to big business to big stem. Museums, conservatories, orchestras, scientific journals, criminal justice leaders all loudly took up the charge that any racial disparity is the product of discrimination against blacks.

Let me give you some examples. Medicine, if any medical school does not have 13% black medical students and 13% black professors, it is by definition a racist medical school. Cancer research labs, alzheimer’s research labs—if they don’t have 13% black oncologists or black neurologists, they’re racist labs. Gifted and talented programs, those of you from the West know about shutting down, getting rid of the exams in Lowell High School. We’ve seen this in Thomas Jefferson, New York City; Stuyvesant is facing a constant charge: it’s racist because its student bodies are not 13% black. This is a long standing one coming up: the teachers licensing exam, police licensing exam, firing of fire departments. If they don’t have 13% black members, they are racist. I’ve been talking about underrepresentation. The same argument applies with overrepresentation above all else in the criminal justice system. If blacks make up more than 13% of our prison population, that’s because the criminal justice system is by definition racist. If blacks are more than 13% of students in high school and in grammar schools who are disciplined for insubordination, for violence, that is because teachers hilariously the most liberal profession in the country, are racist against black students.

So what is the solution in the eyes of the elites to these criminal and racist disparities? It is to throw out the standards, the color-blind standards that are resulting in the lack of disparities. Medical schools: after the second year of medical school students take something called Step one of the U.S. medical licensing exam. Well, step 1 did not have proportional numbers of people scoring well. Because of academic mismatch, because of racial preferences, black medical students were at the bottom of the step 1 score scale. So what do we do? We get rid of grades. We decided last year that we would no longer grade step 1 of the medical licensing exam, but go to a pass-fail basis so that residents choosing their residencies after the second year would not know where students stood on the academic curve. The MCATs, the standardized exams to get into medical school, they have already been rejiggered to try to reduce disparate impact. A quarter of the questions now deal with social issues, with psychology. It has not worked. Black college seniors are still at the absolute bottom of the MCAT scores. So what we’re doing now in many schools is that we’re waiving MCAT submissions for black college seniors applying to medical schools.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Government Deceit Will people be smarter next time around? by John Stossel

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/government-deceit/

“Experts” were confident that they knew what America should do about Covid. They were wrong about so much.

Officials pushed masks, including useless cloth ones. Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “Don’t wear masks” — then, “Do wear them.”

Some states closed playgrounds and banned motorboats and Jet Skis. Towns in New York banned using leaf-blowers. California pointlessly closed beaches and gave people citations for “watching the sunset.” The list goes on.

Sen. Rand Paul’s new book, “Deception,” argues that government experts didn’t just make mistakes; they were purposely deceitful. A few weeks ago, this column reported how Paul was correct in accusing Fauci of funding virus research in Wuhan and lying about it.

In my new video, we cover other government deceit.

Paul says, “There’s been one set of truths in private and another set of truths for the people who aren’t smart enough to make their decisions.”

He points out that Fauci, in private, told fellow bureaucrats that masking is pointless. Fauci wrote in one email: “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Hamas Nazis Became an Environmentalist and Gun Control Cause Nothing says gun control like supporting a terrorist group that massacres civilians. by Daniel Greenfield

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-hamas-became-an-environmentalist-and-gun-control-cause/

From Queers for Palestine to marchers carrying signs reading, “Palestine is a Reproductive Justice Issue”, the Hamas Nazi cause has been vertically integrated throughout the Left. Greta Thunberg was booed after injecting anti-Israel chants into environmental rallies. The BLM movement was a longtime foe of Israel, but Asian Studies departments recently joined in.

The leaders of March for Our Lives and the Sunrise Movement, a gun control group and an environmental protest group, signed a letter to Biden warning that young people wouldn’t vote for him unless he forced Israel to stop attacking Hamas Nazis.

How better to promote gun control than by defending mass murderers who used machine guns to kill innocent people and how better to champion the environment than by supporting terrorists who deliberately start fires in Israel. What does Hamas have in common with gun control advocates, environmentalists and abortion activists?

“I think something very bad is happening on the left,” Israel’s Labor leader Merav Michaeli complained. “People who consider themselves to be democratic, progressive, are supporting a totalitarian terror regime that oppresses women, the LGBTQ+ community… The more you go to the left, the more there’s a big mix-up. Something went very wrong on the way.”

The ‘something’ that went wrong is called ‘intersectionality’. That’s why abortion protesters, gay activists, environmentalists, gun control activists and the entire Left have to support Hamas. But intersectionality is also bait and switch. While gay activists have to support Hamas, the Islamic terrorist group doesn’t have to stop throwing them off buildings. Making sure Hamas has enough fuel to fire rockets at Israeli kindergartens may be a reproductive justice issue, but no one expects masked men armed with RPGs to shout, “Allahu Akbar” at a Planned Parenthood rally.

Rather than a daisy chain connecting all the leftist causes together, intersectionality is actually a hierarchy that prioritizes the worst causes. It’s how the entire gay rights movement, to the dismay of some gay men and many lesbians, was drafted into the transgender cause. It’s why the extreme wing of each individual movement, from BLM in civil rights to art vandals in the environmental movement, have come to dominate while the moderates have been shut down.

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ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jordan Peterson Nailed It: Marxism Trained Wokies to See Gaza as ‘Oppressed’ Catherine Salgado

By on November 21st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2023/11/20/jordan-peterson-nailed-it-marxism-trained-wokies-to-see-gaza-as-oppressed-n4924084

“People have bought this idiot meta-Marxism which is that the way to look at every social relationship that people ever have is through the lens of power,” said Jordan Peterson, bashing the disturbing Hamas-sympathizing protests in America.

Peterson recently silenced leftist Bill Maher and described the underlying issue of pro-terrorist “Palestinian” protests that erupted in the U.S. after the latest Hamas-Israel war began. Peterson explained that Marxism has infiltrated our universities and so brainwashed many Americans into seeing every situation as a power struggle between oppressed and oppressor that they immediately joined in the Hamas propaganda about “colonialist” Israel.

The reality, of course, is that Israel is a small Jewish state surrounded by bigger Muslim nations, and that the Arabs have always refused peace with Israel in favor of waging jihad. Sadly, the heinous Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, as egregious as they were, are only part of an endless terrorist war. Unfortunately, both in universities and in our other schools — from elementary school on up — millions of young Americans have been taught for years to view every situation in the world as a type of Marxist power struggle between an innocent oppressed group and an eeeevil oppressor.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What The Latest Attacks On Musk Are Really All About

By on November 21st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/21/what-the-latest-attacks-on-musk-are-really-all-about/

Just as Democrats were trying to downplay the rampant antisemitism in their ranks, what happens? Elon Musk, who has lately become something of a darling on the right, suddenly becomes the poster boy for antisemitism. This is how the left works.

This latest twist started when Media Matters — the George Soros-backed media “watchdog” — released a report claiming that ads for major corporations were appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content.

This is a two-fer for the left. It both attacks Musk — whom the left now hates because he stopped Twitter’s side hustle as the federal government censor — and it takes the spotlight off the left’s virulent antisemitism on display after the Hamas attacks.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter and promised to live up to the company’s “free speech wing of the free speech party” mantra, the left went into fits of hysterics.

Media Matters puts it, “Musk has opened the floodgates to hateful content.” Really? Because Twitter was pure as the driven snow before Musk?

We seem to recall that “blue check” leftists had free reign to say whatever they wanted about conservatives on Twitter, up to and including calls for their assassination. After Donald Trump took office, to cite just one example, “assassinate Trump” was showing up all over Twitter. When Twitter banned Trump before Musk bought the company, it let Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continue to incite hate and violence on its platform. Etc., etc.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

My School Doesn’t Tolerate Anti-Semitism And we are happy to work with donors who are tired of giving to colleges that do. By James S. Robbins

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-school-doesnt-tolerate-anti-semitism-hamas-ivy-league-jewish-students-protest-1a5b4d97?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

America’s elite colleges and universities are soft on terrorism and strong on anti-Semitism. Who knew?

Weak-kneed responses by academic leaders to Hamas’s attack on Israel, coupled with soaring anti-Semitism on campuses, have created a crisis. Jewish students are increasingly unsafe, while major donors are alarmed by the harmful ideas promoted by the institutions they support.

The implicit bargain in higher education is that donors support schools as an expression of good citizenship, and it’s up to the schools to produce good citizens. This bargain has frayed in recent years as schools aren’t holding up their end of the deal.

Many campuses have become echo chambers that lack intellectual diversity and promote a climate of intolerance. To avoid being “canceled” by progressives, moderate and conservative students and faculty practice self-censorship rather than discuss controversial ideas.

The response to the Oct. 7 attack exposed how schools have become incubators of radicalism. Protests, vandalism, intimidation, and assaults—mostly targeting Jewish students—are the fruits of the critical-theory educational model that stigmatizes Jews as “white oppressors” and Israelis as “Zionist colonizers.” In response to anti-Semitism, university administrators have either done nothing or issued anodyne statements deploring violence in general terms, until some were badgered into reacting more explicitly.

Many donors saw the jarring response from the academy as a betrayal of their generosity and deeply held values. Now they are voting with their feet and wallets: withdrawing or canceling donations, resigning from boards, and encouraging alumni to boycott their alma maters.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gaza Is Gen Z’s First Real War Many young people grew up believing war was passé and peace was normal. Walter Russell Mead By Walter Russell Mead

By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gaza-is-gen-zs-first-real-war-hamas-israel-social-media-world-war-ii-3111692f?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Is Israel’s war with Hamas a war crime? At a recent (entirely civil and non-confrontational) event at Bard College, a student suggested that this was the case. After all, there have been at least 11,000 casualties since the Oct. 7 terror attack that launched the war, and the majority dead have been civilians. Thousands were children. How, the Bard students and many of their peers around the country and the world ask, could all this not be a war crime? And even if Hamas’s initial attack was itself a war crime and not a “legitimate act of resistance against an occupying power,” isn’t the larger loss of civilian life in Israel’s subsequent attacks just as bad?

I could have turned the session into a debate about the underlying merits of the Palestinian and Israeli causes or a technical discussion of the laws of war. Instead, being a professor, I turned the discussion to the history of war. One night in March 1945, U.S. planes dropped incendiary bombs over Tokyo killing tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. Incomplete estimates from Japan put the total death toll from allied bombing raids as high as 500,000. All told, there were an estimated 38 million civilian deaths in World War II, more than twice the approximately 15 million deaths of soldiers in combat.

As for the treatment of enemy civilians, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference the U.S. agreed to the forcible removal of about 12 million Germans, again largely civilian and many children and elderly, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Many of the expulsions took place in winter amid terrible scenes of hunger and deprivation, all while mass rapes of German women slowly subsided across the Soviet zone of Germany.

Lawyers and legislators can debate whether these actions constitute war crimes, but as Cicero put it more than two thousand years ago, “inter arma enim silent leges.” Roughly, that translates as the “laws go silent when armies clash.” Or as William Tecumseh Sherman put it more succinctly, “War is hell.”

One reason the news from Gaza has so massively affected the younger generation is that they have grown up considering peace to be normal and natural. The war in Gaza hasn’t merely introduced young Americans to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It also has shown them the face of war.

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