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August 2024

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Don’t let free speech be a victim of these riots The despicable behaviour of the few must not become a pretext for silencing the many. Fraser Myers

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/05/dont-let-free-speech-be-a-victim-of-these-riots/

Here comes the crackdown. After days of rioting and disorder across England, Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to get tough – and not just on those criminal and far-right elements directly involved in the despicable violence that followed the horrendous murder of three young girls in Southport last Monday. The thuggish and racist behaviour of the few has rapidly become a pretext for constraining the liberties of the many.

The UK prime minister, in two Downing Street press conferences last week, unveiled a suite of proposals to try to quell the rioting. He vowed to impose criminal-behaviour orders on certain agitators. He threatened to roll out facial-recognition software and AI to help track people’s movements. Most striking of all, he damned the supposedly malign influence of ‘large social-media firms and those who run them’, and demanded that they get a firmer grip on the posting of misinformation. He also warned that there would be consequences for those who ‘whip up’ disorder by spreading rumours or speculation online.

The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, went further this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. She declared social-media companies to be responsible for both the ‘shocking misinformation that has escalated’ the riots, as well as ‘the deliberate organisation of violence’ on these platforms.

It is entirely possible to loathe the actions of these rioters, while also being alarmed by the government’s response and its implications for free speech. Any crackdown on so-called misinformation, or even on the ‘whipping up of hatred’, is not going to be confined to those who are directly participating in or inciting violence. It will inevitably be wielded against dissenting views more broadly. This is always what happens.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The One-Drop Rule, Transformed What the uproar over Trump’s race comments obscures

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-one-drop-rule-transformed

Donald Trump’s recent comments about Kamala Harris’s shifting racial identity were an unforced error. It was a certainty that Trump would be unable to navigate the arcane and ever-evolving taboos around race without saying something that would provide fodder for several days of front-page “Trump is a racist” coverage in the New York Times and other media outlets.

This latest episode of racism-hunting is worth examining in some detail, however, since it reveals how topsy-turvy the current definition of “racism” has become.

Trump voluntarily walked into the lion’s den last Wednesday, facing off against a panel of interviewers at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. That is to his credit; let us see if Kamala Harris would be willing to take questions at, say, a gun-owners’ convention. After a string of adversarial questions, ABC News reporter Rachel Scott asked Trump whether he thought it was acceptable for some of his supporters to label Harris a “DEI hire,” and whether he would tell them to stop doing so. Trump responded: “How do you define DEI? Go ahead.” Scott translated the acronym: “Diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

This was not, of course, what Trump was getting at. He pushed on, but as usual, failed to clarify his intent: “OK, yeah, go ahead, is that what your definition is?” Scott stood her ground: “That is literally the words.” Scott and Trump went back and forth in the same vein for a few more rounds before Scott finally articulated what DEI means in practice: “Do you believe that vice president Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a black woman?”

Trump then reframed the issue: “Well, I can say, no. I think it’s maybe a little bit different. So, uh, I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now, she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

These are the observations that have been labelled “overtly racist,” a manifestation of racial “animus,” disparagement of the vice president in “clearly racial terms,” a “lie,” and one of a “barrage of vicious attacks” on Harris. But were they any of these things?

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.N. Says Nine Employees Likely Involved in October 7 Attacks, Won’t Release ‘Confidential’ Report Jimmy Quinn

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-n-says-nine-employees-likely-involved-in-october-7-attacks-wont-release-confidential-report/

The U.N. said today that an internal investigation found that nine staffers of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East likely participated in the October 7 terrorist attacks — but that it will not release the details about what they did that day.

The organization revealed that it fired the nine staffers, some of whom it had initially terminated in January when the allegations first surfaced, and that one staffer fired that month had rejoined the scandal-plagued agency, which has used pro-terrorism textbooks in its schools.

While U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq, announcing the findings at a press briefing today, said the employees “may have been involved,” he confirmed that what the organization means is that it is likely or highly likely that the staffers joined the attacks.

After Israel initially told other governments and the U.N. that twelve UNRWA staffers had taken part in October 7, several of those countries, including the U.S., suspended their funding for the agency, and the U.N. kicked off two internal investigations.

Subsequent findings from Israeli intelligence reportedly hold that about 1,200 employees of the organization in Gaza are tied to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Headline Fail of the Week Brittany Bernstein

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The ‘Moderate’ Genocidal Madmen of Hamas By Brittany Bernstein

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at more sympathetic media reporting on Hamas and cover more media misses.

Attention Reporters: There’s Nothing Moderate about Hamas

Israel’s latest attacks on Hamas will not permanently wipe the group out, the New York Times reports. Instead, the group may gather itself and come back “more radicalized.”

“The assassinations of two Hamas leaders may be a short-term setback, analysts say, not enough to prevent the group from re-emerging intact — and possibly more radicalized,” a subheading reads.

“Israel’s decades-long targeted killing campaigns against its Palestinian and regional rivals have a contested record: Critics have long argued the tactic has simply created room for new parties or leaders to emerge as Israel’s main foes — often with ever more radical forces replacing them,” the story goes on to explain.

How, exactly, this group could become any more radical than it already is remains a mystery. It’s been just ten months since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took nearly 250 hostages during its infamous October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

But the article continues a line of rhetoric seen in several recent obituaries of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who has been described by a handful of outlets as “moderate.”

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran. While no one has claimed credit for the attack, Israel is believed to have been behind the Hamas leader’s death. A separate New York Times report suggests Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device that was “covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.” The bomb had reportedly been stashed in the guesthouse two months before its detonation.

Reuters reported, “Tough-talking Haniyeh was seen as the more moderate face of Hamas.” But after receiving backlash, it amended the headline to read: “Who was Ismail Haniyeh and why is his assassination a blow to Hamas?”

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NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

World War III Coming Soon, U.S. Military Woefully Unprepared by Gordon G. Chang

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20845/us-china-world-war-iii

“The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance… Such methods are not suited to today’s strategic environment…. The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” — Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 29, 2024.

“The Department’s usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change… The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense.” — Blaine Holt, former US Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone Institute, August 5, 2024.

Unfortunately, Biden has not addressed the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way about the greatest threat they face.

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy is clear on what must be done: “A bipartisan ‘call to arms’ is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”

It is unlikely, however, that bad actors will give America a decade more to prepare.

General Mike Minihan, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, predicted in a memorandum to his command leaked in January of last year that America would be in a war with China “in 2025.”

Xi Jinping can see the United States is starting to stir; why would he wait for his foe to get ready?

“We are closer today to World War III than we’ve been since the Second World War,” said former President Donald Trump at the Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach on July 26.

Trump hyperbole? No.

The former president is not alone in thinking this way. “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests,” states the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in its 114-page report released three days after Trump spoke. “This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris: Recycling the 2020 Democrat Campaign A remote stealth campaign. by Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-harris-recycling-the-2020-democrat-campaign/

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election through a successful tripartite subterfuge.

One, Biden never really campaigned. His handlers rightly assumed that the more the public and the media saw a debilitated Biden in the flesh, the less they would want him as president.

So, the Biden campaign used the COVID lockdowns to ensure that Biden stayed safe in his basement office.

Biden strategically distanced himself from disinterested journalists, using COVID as an excuse to avoid public appearances. It allowed him to run a 19th-century, front-porch sort of virtual campaign.

In his place, the liberal media, Democratic grandees, and the billionaire donor class served as Biden campaign surrogates—vastly outspending, out-advertising, and out-lawyering the underfunded incumbent Trump.

Second, again using COVID as a pretext, well-funded Democratic legal teams altered the voting laws during early 2020 in key swing states to encourage non-Election Day voting.

For the first time, majorities in many key states voted by mail-in/absentee ballots and during weeks of early voting.

We now know why the left was so motivated to push through radical balloting changes that were otherwise impossible prior to 2020 but have been mostly institutionalized since.

Non-Election Day ballots outnumbered Election Day ballots. They were far more likely to be cast by Democrats. And as the number of such ballots soared, the traditional rejection rate of non-Election Day ballots prior to 2020 fell—even as registrars were swamped.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Battle for Britain Finally, the UK public explodes. by Bruce Bawer

By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/battle-for-britain/

Should anyone be surprised that what has been called a “wave of violence” swept the cities of Britain this past weekend?

For years, while the mass immigration of Muslims has utterly transformed their country, the overwhelming majority of Brits have stuck to form – keeping a stiff upper lip, queuing politely for buses, and biting their tongues as they watched entire neighborhoods, such as the traditionally cockney East End of London, converted to Muslim enclaves. In the months since October 7, they sat home and sipped their tea while armies of Muslims filled their streets weekend after weekend, screaming their support for anti-Western terrorism and shouting their plans to turn Britain into an Islamic caliphate. Those decent Britishers even tended to stay quiet while the few heroic members of their race who protested these outrages – men like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox – were abused, insulted, and unjustly arrested by a police force that has strayed far from the civilized rules of police behavior set down two centuries ago by Sir Robert Peel and has practiced “two-tier policing” – turning a blind eye to actual Muslim violence while imprisoning ethnic Englishmen who dare to criticize that violence online.

Well, eventually something’s got to give. This weekend, according to the Guardian, “bricks were hurled at police officers in Stoke-on-Trent, fireworks were thrown amid tense exchanges between an anti-Islamic group and an anti-racism rally in Belfast, and windows of a hotel which has been used to house migrants were smashed in Hull, where three police officers were injured and four people arrested. Several officers were also injured during ‘serious disorder’ in Liverpool city centre, where bricks, bottles and a flare were thrown and one officer hit on the head with a chair. Greater Manchester police said a dispersal notice had been authorised for the city centre and scuffles broke out as opposing groups faced each other in Nottingham’s Old Market Square with bottles and other items thrown from both sides.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris Has A Serious ‘Project 2025’ Problem Of Her Own

By on August 6th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/06/kamala-harris-has-a-serious-project-2025-problem-of-her-own/

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Kamala Harris was running against some guy named “Project 2025.” She brings it up in every speech. Her campaign has said that “Project 2025” is on the ballot.

But it’s not the lies she and the media are spreading about Project 2025. It’s the fact that Harris doesn’t have one herself that should trouble voters most.

In case you don’t know, Project 2025 is an alliance of more than 100 conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, which got together to compile a 900-page list of policy proposals called “Mandate for Leadership.” (Heritage has published this volume every four years since 1980.)

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly made it clear that this isn’t his agenda. And, indeed, he has detailed plans posted on his campaign website – not to mention a track record of success as president.

But Harris? She has no policy agenda whatsoever. None.

Aside from fundraising pitches and ads for childish merch, her official campaign website is comprised of just a “Meet Kamala Harris” page, with 11 paragraphs of text that unintentionally showcase her rice-paper-thin resume.

Here’s the entire list of her “big” accomplishments:

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