Displaying posts published in

May 2024

ISRAEL Comments turned off

AMERICANS FOR PEACE NOW BROKE ITS PROMISES By Moshe Phillips

By on May 16th, 2024

https://jewishwebsite.com/opinion/americans-for-peace-now-broke-its-promises/98703/

The decision by Americans for Peace Now to publicly endorse suspending U.S. military aid to Israel directly violates the promises it made in order to gain admittance to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. It’s time for the Conference to reconsider Peace Now’s status.

When Americans for Peace Now (APN) applied for membership in the Conference of Presidents in 1993, some Jewish organizations were wary. They wondered whether the controversial group would be loyal to the pro-Israel consensus that the Conference represents.

Every member-organization in the Conference is entitled to its own opinions, on Israel and everything else. At the same time, the Conference stands for certain bedrock principles that all its members must support. 

 

That’s why extreme anti-Israel groups have never been admitted. J Street’s application was rejected. The anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace would never be welcomed. Neither would the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta.

Three of the Conference’s core principles are rejection of all Arab violence against Israel; support for an undivided Jerusalem under Israel’s sole control; and complete, unequivocal support for U.S. aid to Israel.

In their appeals to be admitted to the Conference, APN spokespeople repeatedly pledged that they would adhere to those positions.

 

“We are revolted by terrorism,” APN executive committee chair Shifra Bronznick insisted in a widely-circulated op-ed in March 1993. 

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Watch: “Israel Undiplomatic” on JNS-TV, with Ruthie Blum and Mark Regev

By on May 16th, 2024

PREMIERE: Are the hostages in Gaza doomed after Rafah? – JNS.org

Episode 2: https://www.jns.org/is-israel-being-prevented-from-winning-the-war/

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Trials Like Trump’s Must Be Televised by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20639/televise-trump-trials

The result of making us rely on partisan secondary sources rather than our own direct observations is inevitable distrust in the justice system. If “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” lack of visibility is a major source of distrust.

The framers of the Constitution intended all judicial proceedings to be public – no secret trials. At the time of the framing, public meant open to print journalists. Today, public means audio and video publication.

The New York trial of Trump is a national scandal. There is no real crime. The judge has allowed testimony that is highly prejudicial and irrelevant. He has made numerous unfair rulings, of which the prosecution has taken advantage. The public has the right to see this abuse… so that we all can judge for ourselves and not allow possibly biased reporters to judge for us.

If you were flipping between CNN and Fox News following the cross-examination of Stormy Daniels in the New York criminal case against former President Donald Trump, you would have had the impression that the CNN commentator, who professed to be reporting what happened in the courtroom, described a completely different event from what the Fox News reporter, who was also in the courtroom, described. It was as if they had seen two different witnesses and two different lawyers.

The CNN commentator reported that Daniels had done a great job holding up against the incompetent cross-examination of Trump’s lawyer. The Fox News commentator reported that the extraordinarily effective Trump lawyer had totally destroyed Daniels’ credibility. Who were you to believe? The CNN commentator was an experienced lawyer who was purporting to describe accurately what had happened without bias or subjectivity. The Fox News commentator was a former judge and prosecutor with vast experience, who also claimed to be describing the cross-examination without bias. Neither of the commentators even pretended to paint a gray picture. One was starkly black, the other unambiguously white. No nuance in either account.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Over Half of Illegal Aliens in U.S. Are Unemployed: Report By Eric Lendrum

By on May 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/14/over-half-of-illegal-aliens-in-u-s-are-unemployed-report/

A new report reveals that over half of the population of illegal aliens that have come into the United States under Joe Biden’s watch are unemployed, thus creating an even greater strain on the country.

As reported by Breitbart, the report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released on Monday revealed that only 46% of illegals who came to the U.S. “in 2022 or later” were employed at the start of 2024.

“Immigration clearly adds workers to the country, but it just as clearly adds non-workers who need to be supported by the labor of others,” said CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler in the report. “This was the case in the past, it is true today, and it will surely be the case for immigrants who arrive in the future. Those who simply see immigration as a source of labor need to understand it is also a source of school children, retirees, and many other non-workers.”

The numbers in CIS’s report appear to debunk one of the most common arguments used by advocates of mass migration and open borders, who claim that illegals must be brought into the country to fill jobs that American citizens will not do.

Furthermore, CIS reported that the population of illegals in the U.S. has risen by at least 6.6 million since Joe Biden first took power in January of 2021. As of March of this year, there are over 51.6 million foreign-born illegals in the country, an increase of approximately 5.1 million since 2022. This accounts for at least 15.6% of the entire population of the United States.

“Many advocates for the unauthorized argue they should be given work permits so they can support themselves while they await a court date,” the report noted. “Of course, others worry that this would only incentivize more illegal immigration. In 2024, a larger share of new arrivals were unauthorized relative to prior years due to the ongoing border crisis.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bambie Thug has exposed the rottenness of the new Ireland Ireland’s hostility to Israel is a grotesque betrayal of its own liberatory history. Brendan O’Neill

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/13/bambie-thug-has-exposed-the-rottenness-of-the-new-ireland/

What a thing of beauty that Israel beat Ireland in Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. That Israel’s serene songstress, Eden Golan, got more points than Ireland’s warbling, gurning, pseudo-Satanic they / them, Bambie Thug. That an actually decent song trumped the caterwauling of a fake punk who mistakes having tattoos, identifying as ‘nonbinary’ and saying ‘I’m queer!’ for a personality. More importantly, that a singer who was harangued by baying mobs of Hamas fanboys did better than the ‘singer’ who helped to whip up this orgy of cruelty by saying she cried when she heard Israel had made it to the final. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bet you’re crying even more now, Ms Thug.

This is the news – the beautiful news – that Israel came fifth and Ireland sixth in the Eurovision Song Contest. Of course – because they are racist and mentally unstable – Israel haters on social media are saying the Zionist octopus helped to bump up Israel’s points. One pictures Mossad agents taking a break from hunting down the anti-Semites who slaughtered a thousand of their compatriots to post memes on Facebook saying ‘Screw Bambie, Vote Eden!’. In truth, the reason Israel did so well in the public vote – getting the maximum ‘douze points’ from no fewer than 14 of the 37 nations eligible to vote in Eurovision – is because normal people don’t share the Euro-bourgeoisie’s feverish loathing for the Jewish State. It wasn’t only the emotionally incontinent Israelophobe Bambie Thug who took a beating last night – so did the entire anti-Israel middle class whose cries for a boycott of Eurovision clearly fell on deaf ears.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, of course, given it’s only Eurovision, and given that some people (me, for example) were highly motivated to vote for Israel in order to wind up the wankers of Europe. But it is undeniably delicious that, despite the pompous pleas of drag queens and other paragons of morality for everyone to switch off Eurovision this year, millions watched. Around 7.6million Brits tuned in. Yes, that’s lower than last year – when we were the hosts – but it’s higher than every year between 2015 and 2021. It will be a source of mirth for me for some time that while the LGBTQ lobby was self-importantly putting away the glitter, locking the drinks cabinet and doing their very best not to check X for Eurovision updates, the general public were watching and enjoying the daftness of it all. Rarely has the moral gulf between us and our preening cultural overlords been so starkly exposed.

Then there were the votes for Israel. It felt like a tiny rebellion against the hysteria of the elites. Brits gave Israel 12 points. So did France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and others. This was people saying ‘We don’t agree with your bullying of a young woman and your obsessive hatred for her homeland’.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden can’t be trusted to take on anti-Semitism The same identitarian worldview that is driving campus anti-Semitism is rife within Joe Biden’s White House. Heather MacDonald

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/15/biden-cant-be-trusted-to-take-on-anti-semitism/

On 7 May, Joe Biden condemned the ‘anti-Semitic posters’, the ‘slogans calling for the annihilation of Israel’ and the ‘rationalising’ of 7 October on colleges across the US. Such practices ‘must stop’, he said in a speech marking the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet where does the US president think that campus anti-Semitism comes from?

Pro-Hamas hysteria is the foreseeable outcome of a belief system dominant not only in academia, but also in Biden’s own administration – a belief system in which the West is damned as ‘systemically racist’, and the world divided between ‘marginalised groups’ and the white, male, heterosexual power structure that oppresses them. Campus anti-Semitism will not stop until the university is transformed and the Democratic Party rejects identity politics.

The stunningly incoherent alliances that have sprung up since the 7 October terror attacks on Israel can only be understood in the context of academic theory. Queers and radical feminists for Palestine would seem to be logical impossibilities but for the dominance of such concepts as anti-whiteness and intersectionality. A sampling of Columbia University’s anti-whiteness offerings includes an ‘uprooting whiteness’ group, ‘deconstructing whiteness’ workshops and an ‘unlearning whiteness’ research award from the dean. Other colleges no doubt provide a similar menu.

According to the university worldview, whites and the West (the two categories are interchangeable) are responsible for everything wrong with the world, from inequality to poverty. ‘Persons of colour’ are the antidote. Heterosexuality and maleness are subcategories of whiteness, against which the intersectional coalition of queers, radical feminists and members of the Global South must mobilise. Israel today is hated as the embodiment of Western civilisation. Its modernity and economic success in a region where both are largely absent mark it out as hegemonic and illegitimate.

Of course, the ‘enemy of my enemy’ logic only works in one direction. Queers may be for Palestine, but despite their common nemesis, it is unlikely that Palestine is for queers.

What is being called anti-Semitism on college campuses today has little to do with traditional anti-Semitism. Had the university not taken its anti-white, anti-Western turn in the 1980s, students who know nothing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would not be baying for ‘intifada’. The exception comes from Muslim and black students, whose anti-Semitism has longer and more conventional roots.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A President Who Cannot Conceive of Victory By Noah Rothman

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-president-who-cannot-conceive-of-victory/

Yesterday, I wrote of President Joe Biden and his administration’s extraordinary facility for self-sabotage that this White House “cannot envision victory, either for America or its allies.” Indeed, “it sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to which it can muster the contribution of only half measures.” It was only hours later that one ranking administration official proved the observation correct.

Israel and the United States are “struggling over what the theory of victory is,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN reporter Kylie Atwood on Monday. “They talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory,” he said of his Israeli counterparts. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

As CNN’s Alex Marquardt observed, Cam’s comments dovetail with Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s befuddling remarks on Sunday. Then, Blinken insisted that Israel’s small-footprint strategy in Gaza — the very strategy the U.S. lobbied Israel to adopt — was failing because it had allowed Hamas to reconstitute itself in areas the Israeli Defense Forces had already cleared. Since that calibrated approach had been unable to achieve its tactical goals, Israel should abandon its strategic objectives entirely. Victory over Hamas is unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah,” Blinken said, “or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Must the Jury Be Thinking about Why Trump Is on Trial? Andrew McCarthy

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-must-the-jury-be-thinking-about-why-trump-is-on-trial/

With former president Trump’s criminal trial now in its fourth week of testimony, I wonder what the Manhattan jury must be thinking about the resources the elected Democratic district attorney is devoting to it.

The majority of crime goes unreported. Of that which is reported, the number of crime cases that are “solved” — what police call the “clearance rate” — is alarmingly low. That is especially the case in Manhattan. Last week, the Manhattan Institute’s Tim Rosenberger noted in the City Journal that less than three in ten cases (29.8 percent) are cleared.

In New York City in 2022 (the last year for which there are complete annual stats), there were over 156,000 arrests. A little less than half of them, about 72,000, were felony arrests — nearly 29,000 categorized as violent felonies. All of these arrests resulted in less than 12,000 indictments. More disturbing, still, is the bottom line: Those 156,000 arrests yielded a grand total of just 4,375 prison sentences — i.e., sentences of incarceration were imposed in less than 3 percent of arrest cases.

As you think about that, bear in mind that many attacks that normal people would consider violent are deemed non-violent in New York if no serious injuries result. Consequently, many forcible attacks that result in arrests are charged by prosecutors as misdemeanor assaults. The Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers points out on X/Twitter that many misdemeanor assault cases are “disposed” by simply being dismissed: Last year, the dismissal rate in New York City was 66 percent, having surged from 45 percent a decade ago.

Meyers further reports that recidivism is at its highest level in seven years — a fact acknowledged by NYPD Crime Control Strategies Chief Michael Lipetri, correcting false claims of improvement by public advocate and gubernatorial hopeful Jumaane Williams, one of the city’s many progressive champions of criminal-justice “reform.” An extraordinary amount of crime is committed by repeat offenders, who are on the streets rather than behind bars because of Democratic-dominated New York’s hostility to prosecution and imprisonment.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Congress Must Act to Stop Noncitizens from Voting Action is long overdue.Rebecca Weber

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/congress-must-act-to-stop-noncitizens-from-voting/

With less than six months to go until Election Day, Americans have ample reason to be concerned that a wave of non-citizens casting ballots could undermine the integrity of our elections. Urgent federal action is needed to address this threat before it is too late.

Many in the corporate media and the political establishment have assured Americans that they need not worry because non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote in federal elections is already illegal – and indeed, this is the case. But this prohibition has been effectively neutralized by caveats and special carve-outs in dozens of states’ laws which create ample opportunity to violate federal election law.

One of the biggest glaring weak points in U.S. election law is the voter registration process itself. Under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, every state must use a common voter registration form which only asks applicants to check a box stating that they are an American citizen.

In other words, states must take someone’s word for it that they are eligible to vote in federal elections – effectively eliminating all structural barriers to non-citizens registering to vote.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Colleges Side With Radicals Their students be damned. Betsy McCaughey

By on May 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/colleges-side-with-radicals/

The Left and their media allies want you to believe the protests roiling college campuses are spontaneous uprisings of morally fervent students worried about Gaza war victims. Don’t fall for that claim. It’s a scam. These protesters don’t represent most students or the American public.

Yet recently, Columbia University canceled graduation ceremonies, kowtowing to the radical fringe, with whom they largely agree. Students and their families be damned.

Here are the facts: A miniscule 2% of people ages 18 to 29 polled by Harvard’s Kennedy School named the Israel-Hamas conflict as their top political concern, compared with double digits who were concerned about the economy. Students couldn’t care less about this issue.

Claims that today’s campus riots are reminiscent of 1968, when students closed down campuses to protest the Vietnam War, are nonsense. Back then, Gallup found 46% of respondents in that age group considered the Vietnam War the nation’s biggest problem. Not 2%.

Ray Kelly, former New York Police commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil “looks like a conspiracy. … We need the federal government’s investigative capacity to look at this whole situation.”

Organized outside groups are behind much of the campus violence. Hours before the storming of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, an outside organization called The People’s Forum — known for its anti-Israel activities and links to the Chinese Communist Party — started gearing up for its Hamilton Hall invasion. In a meeting, TPF’s leader spewed invectives against Columbia.

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