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October 2024

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangerous and Disastrous by Majid Rafizadeh

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20985/us-foreign-policy-dangerous-and-disastrous

The permissive environment created for Iran by the Biden administration’s foreign policy of not just granting it impunity, but actually funding it through sanctions waivers and direct payments, appears to have financed the Iranian regime into acting with increasing aggression.

This week, just as Israel, in of one of the most breathtaking campaigns in military history, sent the terror-master regime of Iran on the defensive, the US administration is calling — now — for a ceasefire. “I’m comfortable with them [the Israelis] stopping,” President Joe Biden told reporters in on September 30. “We should have a ceasefire now.”

The Biden administration’s shaping of US foreign policy had led the world into a state of unprecedented instability. There are conflicts raging in the Middle East and Eastern Europe; China is threatening the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan, and we all are facing the looming threat of Iranian nuclear weapons. The trajectory of the Biden administration’s foreign policy is not hard to see.

During the last four years since the Biden-Harris administration assumed office, the world has been marked by escalating global crises. One of the most significant has been the war against Israel, in which, a year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas, a proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, launched a brutal attack on Israel. The assault consisted of massacres, rapes, torture, beheadings, burnings-alive, kidnapping and other crimes against humanity.

Possibly emboldened by the perceived weakness of the US, since its surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2021, and its constant appeasement of China, Iran, for the first time, took direct military action on April 13, 2024 by launching hundreds of attack drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at Israel.

Iran’s relentless escalation did not stop there. Its other proxies, including Hezbollah and the Houthis, also stepped up their hostilities, not only against Israel but also against the United States. Since last October, they have attacked US troops in the region more than 160 times and effectively blocked most commercial shipping in the Red Sea. These moves have massively destabilized the region — all with virtually no adverse consequences for Iran.

The permissive environment created for Iran by the Biden administration’s foreign policy of not just granting it impunity, but actually funding it through sanctions waivers and direct payments, appears to have financed the Iranian regime into acting with increasing aggression.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

Jewish Lives Matter So-called progressives have abandoned the Jewish people in their hour of need. Brendan O’Neill

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/05/jewish-lives-matter/

This is an extract from Brendan O’Neill’s new book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

Imagine if the Battle of Cable Street took place in 2024. Imagine if this celebrated clash between Jews and their working-class allies on one side, and a fascist movement on the other, were to blow up in 21st-century Britain. What would happen?

The actual Battle of Cable Street took place in the East End of London in 1936 – 88 years ago this week. It was a revolutionary uprising by Jews, leftists and workers against the threat posed by the British Union of Fascists. The BUF was founded by Oswald Mosley in 1932. Mosley had been a Conservative MP before crossing the floor of the House of Commons to join the Labour Party. At the start of the 1930s, following a trip to Italy to meet Mussolini, he converted to the cause of fascism. And he won over many in high society. Leading journalists, a peer, friends of royalty and, notoriously, two of the aristocratic Mitford sisters joined his fascist crusade. One of the Mitfords – Diana – went the whole hog and married him, at the home of Joseph Goebbels in Berlin, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour.

The people of the East End were rather less taken with Mosley’s Mussolini tribute act. And they let it be known when the BUF announced its intention to march through the East End on 4 October 1936. The East End had a large Jewish population then. The BUF’s planned parade, in which thousands of its backers would be on the streets in their Blackshirts, was viewed by many East Enders as an intolerable anti-Semitic provocation. So they decided to take action. Against the advice of both the Metropolitan Police and the Labour Party, who were concerned that a counter-demonstration to Mosley’s march would give rise to lawlessness, the workers of east London plotted their fightback.

Their slogan was ‘They shall not pass’, an echo of the cry of the Spanish republicans who had risen up against Franco’s nationalist coup earlier that year. The East End rebels set up barricades on Cable Street. They used an overturned bus, tables, chairs and paving stones to block the fascists’ access. They gathered together makeshift weaponry – rocks, chair legs, rotten vegetables and even the contents of their chamber pots – to wield against both the fascists and the Met police officers who tried to dismantle the barricades and clear the street. Children were sent out to roll marbles under the hooves of police horses. An entire community had prepared itself for all-out battle against fascism, and in defence of Jews.

When the battle came, it was intense. Mosley marshalled around 5,000 Blackshirts. On the other side, behind the barricades, there were thousands: Jews, Irish dock workers, communists, anarchists, trade unionists. There followed some of the most ferocious hand-to-hand combat ever seen on the streets of Britain. Bricks were hurled at Mosley’s car, sticks were wielded against his Blackshirts, stones were thrown at the police who supported the Mosley mob’s right to parade down Cable Street. Hundreds were injured, many arrested. And the anti-fascists won. In the face of baton charges by horse-mounted officers and the violent menace of the Blackshirts themselves, the Jews and their allies were victorious. Mosley abandoned his plans and scurried back to central London.

The Battle of Cable Street is rightly celebrated as one of the great people’s uprisings of the early 20th century. There is a mural of it in east London today. There are books, films, even a musical. Many Britons are proud that in the 1930s, Jews in east London who had fled the anti-Semitic pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s did not suffer the same violence and indignity at the hands of Mosley’s mob. (Although, on the weekend after the Battle of Cable Street, east London was rocked by the Pogrom of Mile End, when 200 Blackshirts smashed the windows of Jewish shops and homes.) The Battle of Cable Street is seen by many as the street fight that foretold Britain’s war on Nazi Germany, as the trailblazer of our future showdown with fascism, as early proof that this racist, inhuman ideology then moving through Europe might just come unstuck against Britain.

And yet, what if it were today? What if a fascist mob marched through a Jewish area of London in 2024? Would we see an uprising of resistance, a taking to the streets to see off the fascists and rally around their targets? I fear we would not. I fear such solidarity is all but impossible in the era of identity politics, intersectionality and progressive suspicion of ‘Jewish privilege’. I fear today the Jews might be on their own – though hopefully joined by that smattering of the population that still appreciates that when anti-Semitism rears its head, society is in deep trouble.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Cheney Hurts Her Own Cause By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/liz-cheney-hurts-her-own-cause/

Her shift from arguing that Kamala Harris is a grave threat to our country to actively campaigning for Harris is the kind of thing that breeds cynicism.

As is invariably the case when a conservative of any stripe elects to publicly endorse a Democrat, Liz Cheney’s decision to actively campaign in support of Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy has yielded a host of emotional paeans, a crush of sycophantic encomia, and a flock of confident-if-hollow assertions that, because she has now been endorsed by a scattering of right-wingers, the Democrats have at long last responded to the threat of Donald Trump by engaging in “Republican outreach.” I must report, alas, that all of these reactions are unsound. Insofar as Cheney’s wholehearted recommendation is likely to have any material effect on our present predicament, it will be to increase the supply of distrust in the political class, and thus to make our underlying problems worse. This, as the kids these days like to say, ain’t it.

I do not begrudge Liz Cheney her decision to endorse Kamala Harris. I do not question her sincerity in doing so, either. If, as she claims, Cheney believes that Donald Trump has not merely disqualified himself from consideration but represents a tangible threat to the U.S. Constitution, then the course she has chosen is the rational one. My issue is with Cheney’s strategic judgment. In the past, Cheney has described Harris as a “radical liberal” who “sounds just like Karl Marx”; as an outré ideologue who wants to reserve “absentee ballots for al-Qaeda”; and as an extremist who “would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t,” and “recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle.” Logically, there is nothing that prevents Cheney from continuing to believe all of these things while voting for Harris nevertheless. Cheney has already said that, “because of the danger that Donald Trump poses,” she “will be voting for Kamala Harris,” and, while it is not my own, this position is wholly defensible. But, by actively campaigning with Harris, Cheney has both undercut her authority and hurt the very cause that she is trying to serve.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

CNN: Say, a Whole Lot of Scandals Happened in Minnesota Government under Tim Walz By Jim Geraghty

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnn-say-a-whole-lot-of-scandals-happened-in-minnesota-government-under-tim-walz/

Today’s pleasant surprise for the Trump campaign and everyone who’s not a fan of Tim Walz: A bit more than a month before Election Day, CNN does a long, detailed, and damning report about the scandals in Minnesota’s state government while Tim Walz has been governor:

A CNN review of audits – and the responses they prompted – as well as interviews with statewide politicians and pundits, found that Walz has been a hands-off leader when it comes to seeking accountability for episodes of fraud and mismanagement on his watch. What’s more, some state agencies headed by his appointees have responded defensively in recent months to the audits – a dynamic that Randall, who has worked in the department for 26 years, has found surprising.

Randall told a local media outlet this summer that the responses of some agencies to her audits have had a “shoot the messenger” feel of late. CNN reviewed more than a dozen reports from her office that held specific agencies responsible for allowing fraud, waste or mismanagement on their watch during the Walz administration. 

Some addressed high-profile scandals such as the pandemic fraud allegations and a troubled light-rail project – whose genesis predates Walz but is currently monitored by 17 Walz appointees – that has suffered from more than $1.5 billion in cost overruns. Randall’s office faulted that agency last year for a lack of transparency about rising costs and failure to ensure contractors’ ballooning price tags were justified. Others found holes in safeguards to waste or raised more targeted conflict-of-interest concerns, such as a state Department of Public Safety employee who received payments from the recipient of a grant that the employee oversees.

Randall told CNN that she knows of no personnel changes linked to any audit by her office since 2019, when Walz was sworn in.

Critics say that is on Walz, now the Democratic candidate for vice president.

CNN notes that not only have these scandals occurred on Walz’s watch, there’s little to no sign that Walz and his administration took much action to discipline those responsible:

Willie Jett, a member of Walz’s cabinet, seemed to feed into this perception when being grilled by state lawmakers this summer on the alleged meals-for-needy-kids scam, which revolved around a now-defunct nonprofit called Feeding Our Future.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The USAF goes woke By Mike McDaniel

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_usaf_goes_woke.html

Who is General Charles “CQ” Brown? He’s the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So what? What does that have to do with anything? He’s also arguably more woke and dangerous to America’s national security than thankfully retired General “White Rage” Milley.  

Brown disgraced himself and his uniform during, and in support of, the Black Lives Matter race riots by releasing a video in which he ‘seemed to barely contain his rage’ while ranting ‘that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ‘that I’ve sworn my adult life to support and defend’ have not always delivered ‘liberty and equality’ to all.’

Serving military members, particularly general officers, aren’t supposed to support rioters or engage in politics. A white servicemember doing that—Brown is black—would have been dishonorably discharged. Brown was promoted. Under Democrats/socialist/communists (D/s/cs), useful functionaries fail upwards.

Brown is one of the foremost proponents of DEI, which he has imposed on the USAF with a vengeance. His policies are paying dividends beyond diversity, equity and inclusion, like running the Air Force short of thousands of pilots. That’s only a part of the serious recruiting problems our military is experiencing.

Our civilian and military “leaders” blame the recruiting crisis on any and everything but their DEI lunacy. That’s necessary for officers seeking promotion.

Traditionally, our military academies and ROTC programs seek the finest scholar-athletes they can find. Particularly for pilots, candidates highly proficient in STEM disciplines are highly sought after. DEI ensures the USAF won’t get those kinds of candidates.

The Center To Advance Security in America filed a FOIA request with the Air Force in 2023, seeking documents to prove Brown’s DEI focus, but as one might imagine, was stonewalled until recently. 

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

‘The Biden/Harris Doctrine’ Has Brought the World Closer to World War III Despite claims of success, the Biden administration’s national security policy, marked by incompetence and misguided strategies, has increased global instability and the risk of major conflicts. Fred Fleitz

By on October 5th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/04/the-biden-harris-doctrine-has-brought-the-world-closer-to-world-war-iii/

By a strange turn of fate, on October 1, 2024, the day that Iran launched the largest ballistic missile attack ever against Israel, Foreign Affairs magazine published an article by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in which he claimed “the Biden administration’s strategy has put the United States in a much stronger geopolitical position today than it was four years ago” and that Iran is being held in check.

A year earlier, Foreign Affairs published another tragically erroneous article by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, which said, “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.” Six days after this article was posted, Hamas launched a sneak attack against Israel, massacring more than 1,200 people and maiming and injuring many more. In a stunning violation of journalistic ethics, Foreign Affairs allowed Sullivan to revise his article after the Hamas terrorist attack. Here is a link to the original version.

In these articles, Biden officials are trying to rewrite history by manufacturing false narratives of a successful Biden national security doctrine that they claim has enhanced U.S. and global security.

This is, of course, preposterous. Not only has there been a huge increase in global instability since Donald Trump left office in January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has brought the world closer to World War III because of an increased chance Russia could use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the real prospect of an Israel-Iran War, a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea Axis, a growing chance that China will attack Taiwan, and other current and potential crises.

Several Biden allies have tried to invent a so-called Biden Doctrine since 2021. Most made fatuous claims that Biden was reversing the damage done by President Trump to the country’s alliances, deterrence, and global leadership despite clear evidence that Trump strengthened alliances and had a successful foreign policy that brought global stability and kept U.S. troops out of new wars. Others asserted that Biden “restored trust abroad for the U.S.,” a claim that many U.S. allies would dispute. Several experts, including Blinken and Sullivan, wrote that President Biden enhanced American foreign policy by strengthening the American economy. The huge advantage that Donald Trump currently has in the polls over Kamala Harris on the economy proves this isn’t true either.

In January 2024, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an article titled, “A Biden Doctrine for the Middle East Is Forming. And It’s Big” on a supposed new Biden Middle East peace initiative to quickly end the Hamas/Israel war. Under this plan, the Biden administration would bring peace to the Middle East with a tough stand on Iran, push for recognition of a Palestinian state, and greatly scale up the U.S. security alliance with Saudi Arabia. None of these things happened. Instead, Middle East security has deteriorated in 2024 to the worst level in decades.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Rachel Maddow Smears Vance as a Fascist Speech-Squasher Is what the MSNBC host does really “news”? by Tim Graham

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rachel-maddow-smears-vance-as-a-fascist-speech-squasher/

The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to only do her show one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%?

For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable “news” host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today’s politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today’s Republicans. It’s like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it’s not.

On Sept. 30, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.

Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?

We’re supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that “Harvard hates America” has been around for decades, and it’s been true for decades.

As Vance put it, “You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Solveig Lucia Gold Political, or Politicized? Institutional neutrality isn’t just desirable for universities. It’s essential for carrying out their civic missions.

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-should-be-political-but-not-politicized

Wesleyan University’s campus was abuzz last week after student protesters, demanding divestment from the “U.S.–Israeli Empire,” occupied an administrative building and refused to leave until the police arrived and threatened arrest. This was a new development for Wesleyan, whose president Michael Roth had boasted about not calling the police during the past year’s protests. His leniency didn’t earn him many friends among the demonstrators: in an Instagram video posted by the student group Beyond Empire, students shout “shame on you” at Roth as he walks away—under the floating text, “f— michael roth.”

It’s hard to feel sorry for Roth, though. As my colleague at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) Steve McGuire was quick to point out, he published a New York Times op-ed at the beginning of September titled “I’m a College President, and I Hope My Campus Is Even More Political This Year.”

Clickbait headline aside, much of what Roth says in the op-ed would be unobjectionable were it not for the deplorable occurrences on American campuses over the past year. He decries the vision of a college education as merely a means to make a better living, arguing instead that colleges should lean into their “civic mission” of preparing students to be better citizens, capable of respectful and productive disagreement. In pursuit of this mission, he says, professors should use the classroom not to indoctrinate students but rather to challenge them to think deeply about how we ought to live in a community.

If a campus being “political” means that its professors are educating students with an eye toward responsible citizenship, then many of us at ACTA and elsewhere would also like to see campuses be more political. Students are woefully ignorant of American history and government. Colleges would do well to mandate basic civics lessons to teach students how to think critically about America’s past and to form well-reasoned arguments about shaping America’s future.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Douglas Murray: A Time of War The West is ‘drunk on peace.’ What will it take to wake them up?By Bari Weiss

By on October 5th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-a-time-of-war?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When we planned this episode of Honestly, I thought we would be looking back at the past year from a slightly quieter vantage point. We were going to release it on October 7. But quiet is the last thing happening in the Middle East right now. The war that Iran outsourced to its proxies since October 7, 2023 has now become a war explicitly between Iran and Israel.

Hours before I sat down with Douglas Murray in New York City, Iran launched over 100 ballistic missiles toward Israel. As Israel’s 9 million citizens huddled in bomb shelters, a handful of them made a direct impact. For a lot of Americans, it still feels like a faraway war. But it is not.

There are not many bright lines that divide good and evil. This is one of them. This is a war between Israel and Iran. But it’s also a war between civilization and barbarism. That was true some 360 days ago. And it’s even more true today. And yet this testing moment has been met with alarming moral confusion.

Consider a few examples from the last week. At the United Nations, 12 countries, including the U.S., presented a plan for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon without mentioning the word Hezbollah. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “Our country is funding this bloodbath,” minutes after Israel assassinated the leader of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet, Hassan Nasrallah, who, The New York Times described as “beloved,” “a towering figure” and “a powerful orator.” Here in New York, students chanted for an intifada moments after the Jewish community memorialized six civilian hostages murdered by Hamas. At Yale this week, students chanted, “From Gaza to Beirut, all martyrs we salute.” That’s just a few examples from the past week.

No one I know understands the moral urgency of this moment better than Douglas Murray. Douglas isn’t Jewish. He has no Israeli family members, although I know a lot of Israeli families who consider him an adoptive family member. And it is Douglas, more than almost anyone in the world, who has articulated the stakes of this war with the moral clarity it requires.

Douglas’s work as a reporter has taken him to Iraq, North Korea, northern Nigeria, Ukraine, and most recently, of course, to Israel, where he has become a celebrity. When you walk down the streets of Tel Aviv with Douglas Murray, it’s like being with The Beatles. He’s also the best-selling author of seven books, a regular contributor at the New York Post, National Review, and most importantly, at The Free Press, where he writes the beloved Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering. There is just no one I would rather be sitting with as we watch the Middle East and, really, the world transformed before our eyes.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tim Walz’s Very Bad Answer on Social Media Censorship The would-be vice president is wrong to say that misinformation lacks First Amendment protection. Robby Soave

By on October 5th, 2024

https://reason.com/2024/10/03/tim-walz-jd-vance-free-speech-censorship-debate-veep/

Toward the end of Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) argued with Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to remain in power following his 2020 election loss. Trump’s conduct was indefensible, and thus Vance did not do a very good job defending it. Rather, he attempted to turn the tables on Walz, accusing the Democratic ticket of disrespecting the most important democratic norm of all: free speech.

“You guys attack us for not believing in democracy,” said Vance. “The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment.”

Vance went on to accuse Walz of wanting to criminalize misinformation, referencing previous, inaccurate comments the governor made about exceptions to the First Amendment. At that point, Walz actually interrupted Vance, and claimed that the First Amendment does not protect misinformation or “threatening or hate speech.”

In other words, misinformation, threats, and hate speech are all unprotected categories of speech, according to Walz.

But the governor is mostly, very wrong. He’s correct to note that true threats of violence lack First Amendment protection if they are specific enough. Misinformation and hate speech are absolutely protected by the First Amendment, however. And while the former is a relatively new category of expression facing explicit calls for censorship, the latter category—hate speech—has been exhaustively litigated before the Supreme Court.

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