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November 2023

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Keeps the Billions Flowing to Iran Choosing not to enforce oil sanctions finances Tehran’s terrorism.

By on November 11th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-iran-oil-hamas-israel-gaza-df192c53?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

You’d think the Biden Administration would have realized by now that enriching the Iranian regime is a dangerous mistake. You’d be wrong. Relaxed U.S. enforcement of oil sanctions continued through October, refilling Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s coffers even after the Oct. 7 slaughter and the more than 40 attacks on U.S. troops by Iran’s proxies in the weeks since.

Iran exported nearly 1.4 million barrels of oil per day in October, sustaining its average for 2023. This is up 80% from the 775,000 barrels per day Iran averaged under the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy, according to United Against Nuclear Iran, the group of former U.S. Ambassador Mark Wallace and Sen. Joe Lieberman, whose Tanker Tracker generates the best public data we have.

The Iranian surge in oil exports since President Biden took over has brought Iran an additional $32 billion to $35 billion, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The calculations are tricky, but the cause of the Iranian windfall is clear: As part of Mr. Biden’s quiet diplomacy with Iran, the U.S. has curtailed sanctions enforcement. Customers and middlemen have concluded the risk is low and the discount on Iran’s oil is too good to pass up.

This transfer of funds to Iran is cumulatively more significant than the President’s recent $6 billion ransom payment in return for five hostages. And it keeps growing, even as the money fails to moderate Iranian behavior. Instead it finances Iran’s aggression abroad via proxies such as Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the front groups in Iraq and Syria that shoot at American bases almost daily.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jianli Yang Hong Kong’s Deteriorating Academic Freedom A call to action for international academia

By on November 11th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hong-kongs-deteriorating-academic-freedom

Hong Kong’s once-vibrant academic environment, known for its commitment to free thought, critical discourse, and intellectual inquiry, has experienced a troubling erosion of academic freedom in recent years, as Beijing tightens its grip on the city’s autonomy. The recent case of Rowena He, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) known for her research on the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, illustrates the growing restrictions on Hong Kong’s academic institutions. The scholar was fired from her professorship after Hong Kong authorities rejected her visa renewal application, preventing her from returning there from the U.S., where she was on an academic fellowship.

He’s scholarly contributions include her book Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China and numerous articles on China’s democracy movement. Her work exemplifies the rich intellectual tradition that Hong Kong once represented.

The persecution of academics in Hong Kong is not new. Benny Tai, a former law professor at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), is a well-known activist and scholar who played a prominent role in the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which called for universal suffrage and fair elections in Hong Kong. In July 2020, HKU’s governing council voted to dismiss him after the Hong Kong government convicted him of charges related to his involvement in the Umbrella Movement. Unlike with He, however, the charges against Tai stemmed from his role in organizing and participating in pro-democracy protests, not from what he taught or researched as a professor. He’s case thus signals Beijing’s growing censorship of, and control over, academic output in Hong Kong.

He’s dismissal also fits into the broader context of the rapid erosion of freedom in Hong Kong. Just a few weeks earlier, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee delivered his annual policy address, in which he vowed to enact Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law by the end of 2024. This bill is Hong Kong’s version of the Beijing-imposed Hong Kong National Security Law of China, enacted in 2020, which has been used to destroy freedom of speech, press, and expression in the bustling city.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

It Is Time Biden Publicly Acknowledged This Is Iran’s Mullahs’ War Against Israel and the United States by Majid Rafizadeh

By on November 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20133/iran-war-against-israel-us

Sadly, the Biden administration has yet to come out and publicly acknowledge Iran’s role in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, in which the terrorist group murdered over 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, and wounded over 4,500 Israelis. Hamas also abducted more than 240 people and took them back to Gaza, where they are being held as hostages.

Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah.

Iran and its proxies have clearly been waging a war against Israel, Jews and the United States. It is incumbent upon the Biden administration at least to publicly acknowledge this fact. Or is the US still hoping for some disastrous “nuclear deal” in which the Iranian regime would promise not to use its imminent nuclear weapons — “on my watch” — during just the Democrats’ time in office?

The Biden administration continues to turn a blind eye to Iran’s involvement in the war against Israel, the Jews and in fact all “infidels” — not least of which is “the Great Satan,” the United States.

In recent weeks, Iranian proxies have attacked not only Israel and the Jews, but also at least 41 strikes against US forces in Syria and Iraq, during which 46 US servicemen were wounded and one was killed by a drone; and with more than 83 attacks on US troops since Biden became president.

These assaults came in addition to an attempted assassination on US soil by the Iranian regime of a foreign diplomat in 2012, and threats to assassinate former US officials, complete with a $1 million bounty, in 2022.

The US responded to these attacks by cancelling sanctions on Iran, thereby enabling it to reap close to $60 billion by exporting its oil and gas – and comfortably to finance its terrorist proxy war on Israel and attacks on US forces in the Middle East.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Houthis have become a dangerous rogue nation. The US Navy could crush them Marines, SEALs and hundreds of thousands of tons of haze gray steel are in the Red Sea Tom Sharpe

By on November 11th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/10/iran-houthis-red-sea-missiles-israel-hamas-us-navy-carriers/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-onward-journey

Six days ago, the US aircraft carrier Dwight D Eisenhower – Ike – transited the Suez Canal southbound and headed into the Red Sea as part of her pre-planned but accelerated deployment to the Gulf Region. En route she joined USS Ford and her carrier battle group in the Eastern Med for some interoperability training and the obligatory formation photo. 

It is impossible to say for certain that this overt display of around two hundred thousand tons of nuclear-powered naval firepower – to say nothing of all the escorts – is what has kept Hezbollah relatively quiet over the last few weeks but it’s bound to have influenced their thinking. It is also risky to say that this effect will endure, but for now, it appears to be a win for carrier-based deterrence. Given how many predicted a region-wide escalation by now, this is one piece of good news alongside the horror of Gaza.

Aside from sporadic attacks on US troops inland in Iraq and Syria, there is one other Iranian-backed terrorist group in the region which hasn’t got the memo yet, and that’s the Houthis. They overthrew the legitimate government of Yemen in 2014, and Saudi Arabia and her allies have been engaged ever since trying to restore some semblance of order there with varying degrees of success. That the Saudis are often painted as the villain of this piece baffles me, although that is an article for another time. This year at least has seen fighting in Yemen slowing with talks between Saudi and Iran, mediated by the Chinese, apparently making some progress despite al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)’s best efforts to derail them. 

However, as one would expect of Iranian proxies who see disruption and fear as endstates in themselves, the Houthis didn’t wait long after the Hamas incursion to start firing missiles up the Red Sea at Israel. USS Carney intercepted four in one go but there have been more since, forcing the US and Israeli navies to station destroyers and corvettes to intercept further firings. 

What is clear is that Saudi and US efforts to prevent Iranian-supplied arms from entering Yemen over the last few years haven’t entirely worked and that the Houthis are still able to move and fire them without being detected and destroyed prior to launch.

But it’s possible that this might be about to change.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Intolerant bigots have seized control of our universities Jewish students are under attack. It’s time for donors to demand action Charles Lipson

By on November 11th, 2023

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2023/11/10/university-college-campus-culture-war-anti-semitism/

The surge of open hatred of Jews on college campuses is unprecedented in modern American life. We saw it outside universities in the 1930s, when it was openly preached by Detroit’s Father Coughlin and published by Henry Ford. We saw it from the KKK during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The Klan targeted Jews, as a marginal group, as allies of black equality, and as vehicles to build solidarity in their target audience: poor, angry, Christian whites.

At universities we saw a different kind of prejudice. That bigotry was exemplified by quiet restrictions on Jewish students and faculty, referred to as “Gentleman’s Agreements”. Those agreements excluded Jews from fraternities and sororities at most schools. Harvard began the practise and stated their goal openly, while others followed in secret. This practice changed only when it was prohibited by civil rights laws.

These practices were obviously prejudiced, but they were a far cry from the open hatred, intimidation, and speech suppression we now see on campus. Some of that is an old mask stripped away, some is an increase in underlying hatred, and some is a collapse of any restraints on its public expression. The old mask was emblazoned with the coda, “We don’t hate Jews. We don’t hate Israel. We just oppose Israeli policies and support Palestinian rights.”

Well, if recent demonstrations are any guide, it turns out they do hate Israel. They want to see it wiped off the map. That’s the meaning of their constant chant, “From the river to the sea.” A Palestinian state that occupies all that territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean would extinguish Israel. That’s their “final solution” for the Jewish state.

Chilling as that goal is, the activists don’t stop there. They extend their hatred to all Jews, and they say so openly in campus meetings and demonstrations. That is led by extremist Muslims, who are part of the dominant coalition on campus. But it is embraced by their political allies. More on that coalition in a moment.

Decent Americans know something has gone badly wrong at our universities. This wider public recognises, quite accurately, that the attacks on Jews are only the latest, most visible examples of a more pervasive problem: the rise of intolerant, illiberal ideology on the far-Left. That has always been a problem on the far-Right, but they were never major players on campus or in elite media. The Left is.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ceasefires Will Only Hinder Getting the Hostages Released by Con Coughlin

By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20134/ceasefires-gaza-hostages

[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] argued that the more that 240 Israelis held hostage by Hamas should be released first. Letting up the military pressure on Hamas, rather than forcing Hamas to concede, will only delay the hostages’ release by enabling the terrorists to keep moving them around and re-hiding them.

The other important consideration the Biden administration has failed to grasp is that, by ensuring Israel achieves its goal of destroying Hamas, Washington would be sending a strong signal to hostile states such as Iran, Russia and China that any attack against the US and its allies would receive a similarly robust response.

At the very least the Biden administration should be urgently reviewing its Iran policy and, instead of obsessing about the prospects of reviving the “nuclear deal” with Tehran… concentrating its efforts on targeting top IRGC commanders, as well as imposing tough banking sanctions against Tehran to limit its ability to fund terrorist groups such as Hamas.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Time to Pull the Plug on Forced Electric Vehicles by Pete Hoekstra

By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20127/forced-electric-vehicles

[O]ur federal and state governments are investing huge sums of money into projects that will benefit a foreign government [Chinese Communist China] one that might not have America’s best interests in mind.

The harshest reality check may come in the form of expensive inventory build-up of unsold EVs that Ford thought customers would buy but is now finding out that customers do not want.

Another red flag for EVs is the lack of profitability for Ford and GM’s models. Ford lost $32,000 on every EV it sold in 2023 and expects its EV business to lose $4.5 billion on the year. GM saw its quarterly profits cut by $1.5 billion due to EV losses.

It is time for our policy makers to stop and seriously evaluate if we as a nation are prepared to make these gigantic investments in unproven technologies that risk our nation’s energy and transportation leadership.

Now is not the time for communist-style “central planning,” or to let ideologues drive America’s policy and its future over the proverbial cliff.

The recent headlines regarding the forced transition from gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles to electrical vehicles (EVs) are screaming “Slow down!” even as federal and state governments are barreling along trying to regulate and mandate them.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Threats to the United States now at a Whole New Level By Scott S. Powell

By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/threats_to_the_united_states_now_at_a_whole_new_level.html

It turns out that nations do not stumble into wars and conflict. Wars are generally the result of globalist forces with ulterior motives or political leaders who seek to shore up and protect their political position by demonizing a target, like Russia, and then rallying the people’s support around the enemy of that target, like Ukraine, in the name of patriotism and American interests.

The American people are wising up after spending $8 trillion over some twenty years in the so-called war against terror in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan — protracted engagements that cost lives and ended in failure, often creating resentment from the native people we were purportedly trying to help. In 2001, the year of 9/11 that triggered the war on terror, total U.S. national debt stood at about $3.4 trillion. Today U.S. national debt has grown by 10-fold to $34 trillion.

The permanent elite in Washington recently assured the American people (with no discussion or accounting for costs) that the U.S. military could fund and prevail in a two-front war — one against Russia in the European theater to defend Ukraine; and the second against China in the Pacific theater to defend Taiwan.

That was until the Middle East blew up on October 7th, thrusting the United States into a new kind of war with multiple fronts. Radical Muslim jihadis never conceded that 9/11 would be the final attack on the United States. In fact, the Iranian mullahs and Hezb’allah have stated repeatedly that they seek to inflict death and destruction on both Israel and America on a mass-casualty scale never seen before.

The American people are also finally wising up about the harm that globalists at the U.N., the international banking cabal and the World Economic Forum have already wrought in Europe with their replacement migration policies that induced European nations to open the doors to immigration from Middle Eastern and North African countries. As a result, the population of Muslims increased 16-fold — to about 30 million, spread out across most European and Scandinavian countries with disastrous social costs — bringing cultural and political division, riots, and crime.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Concealed Foreign Money to US Universities Linked to Campus Antisemitism, Erosion of Liberal Norms: Report By Dion J. Pierre

By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/09/concealed-foreign-money-us-universities-linked-campus-antisemitism-erosion-liberal-norms-report/

Billions of dollars in concealed and undocumented donations from foreign governments — many of which are authoritarian — to US institutions of higher education are strongly correlated with an erosion of liberal democratic norms and increased antisemitism on college campuses, according to a new report.

“Over the last decade, institutions of higher education across the United States of America received billions of dollars from foreign donors that were not reported to the US Department of Education, as required,” said the report, titled “The Corruption of the American Mind.” “In its totality, these findings described how a lack of transparency in funding reporting occurred in tandem with antidemocratic norms and antisemitism across American institutions of higher education.”

The report — produced by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) — presented several key findings, going through concealed and undocumented funds to universities uncovered by the US Department of Education.

The ISGAP’s findings included that at an estimated 100 US colleges received $13 billion in “undocumented” contributions from foreign governments, many of which were Middle Eastern and authoritarian. Schools that received this money were found to be home to prevalent campaigns to silence professors and experienced higher levels of antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents on campus.

From 2015-2020, the report noted, schools that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300 percent more antisemitic incidents than schools that did not accept such donations.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Left’s Cheerleading for Hamas’ Terror A product of our education system. by Ian Prior

By on November 10th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lefts-cheerleading-for-hamas-terror/

One would have to be living under a rock to ignore the sickening carnage of October 7, the latest outrage in a horrific terrorism campaign that Hamas has been waging against innocent civilians in Israel for over thirty years. In 1993, all but a tiny sliver of American society, the containing its most radical and foreign elements, recognized Hamas as a monumental evil that must be eradicated without equivocation or regret.

But thanks to the toxic brew of mass immigration and K-12 indoctrination, the America of 2023 is a very different place.  Now, college professors applaud bestial acts of rape, murder, kidnapping as  “de-colonization,” students rally in support of inhuman aggression, and elected officials in Congress  advocate for “Palestine” and for Israel to stand down and then disappear. As a Stanford University student named Julia Steinberg put it in The Free Press, “I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead.”

Years of indoctrination in the name of “critical theory” lies at the heart of this genocidal blood lust. “Critical theory” and “social justice” were sold as tools to combat “systemic racism.” But as these teacher training slides from Loudoun County Public Schools and Tredyffrin/Easttown Public Schools demonstrate, the real goal has always been about identifying, shaming, and overthrowing the so-called “oppressors.”

Thus, our children are taught that every white person is a racist, all men are evil, and American is a uniquely despicable nation. “Privileged” girls in elementary, junior, and high school must share bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic fields with biological males because “trans” people are “oppressed. Even people who are “average/thin” and people that “[a]dhere to rigid time schedules” are despised because, by their very existence, they are “oppressors” of the obese and the indolent.

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