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Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pakistan Deporting Afghans Who Seek Asylum from Taliban by Uzay Bulut

By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20263/pakistan-deporting-afghans

“Those at particular risk are civil society activists, journalists, human rights defenders, former government officials and security force members, and of course women and girls as a whole, who, as a result of the abhorrent policies currently in place in Afghanistan, are banned from secondary and tertiary education, working in many sectors and other aspects of daily and public life.” — UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 27, 2023.

“Asad and his family fled Afghanistan in 2021 when his friends and colleagues were murdered after the Taliban came to power. ‘I am on several lists maintained by the Taliban and I am certain I will be killed if I go back…'” — Amnesty International, November 10, 2023.

The terrorism that Pakistan complains about comes from the Taliban in Afghanistan — that Pakistan supported for decades — not from the Afghan asylum seekers in Pakistan.

What Pakistan has done… is to counter terrorists that challenge its own authority while actively supporting other terrorists who challenge other governments — particularly in India and the West.

There are no “good jihadist terrorists.”

What has caused an increase in terrorism in Pakistan is not Afghan refugees trying to survive there, but Pakistan’s own policies that, for decades, have empowered jihadist terrorists both domestically and abroad.

Pakistan has started the mass deportation of “unregistered” Afghans in the country. The move sends back hundreds of thousands of people who fled the Taliban when they took over in 2021 after American troops withdrew, and violates principles of refugee non-refoulement. If forcibly returned, these refugees are at risk of persecution.

Pakistan claims its mass deportations of these Afghans is due to “increased terrorism” in the country — but it was the government of Pakistan that for decades supported the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ever since they took over the country in 2021, Afghanistan has just become a safe haven for terrorist groups.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academic Bias and Censorship Are Huge Problems, and We Can Prove It Wilfred Reilly

By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/academic-bias-and-censorship-are-huge-problems-and-we-can-prove-it/

A team of researchers measured contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth.

Academic censorship just got accurately measured.

For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.

Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.

First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.

This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”

Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”

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IMMIGRATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Leprosy, Polio, Malaria, TB, Measles … and Massive Unscreened Illegal Immigration James Varney

By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/12/27/leprosy_polio_malaria_tb_measles__and_massive_unscreened_illegal_immigration_1000817.html

Successful public health campaigns and medical advances have enabled the United States to conquer a range of disfiguring and damaging diseases. Polio, which paralyzed thousands of Americans annually, was wiped out by widespread vaccinations. In 1999 the nation’s last hospital for lepers closed its doors in Louisiana. A global campaign eradicated smallpox, while lethal tuberculosis, the “consumption” that stalked characters in decades of literature, seemed beaten by antibiotics. Measles outbreaks still occur from time to time, but they are small, local, and easily contained.

Vaccination in Pakistan, one of two countries where polio is still endemic. The other is Afghanistan, source of an estimated 90,000 taken into the U.S. since America’s chaotic 2021 withdrawal. 

Recently, however, some of these forgotten but still formidable infectious diseases have begun to reappear in the U.S. For two years running, polio has been detected in some New York water samples, and this fall, leprosy re-emerged in Florida, where cases of malaria have also been recorded.

Health officials say they are not sure why these and other infectious diseases are resurfacing. One distinct possibility, which officials are loath to discuss, is that the millions of migrants who have crossed into the country in recent years could be bringing the scourges with them, since many are from countries where such rare diseases persist and vaccination programs are not robust.

“The recent polio and leprosy cases are almost certainly imports to the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, one of the most outspoken critics of official COVID-19 narratives in the last pandemic that later proved flawed.

And the Biden administration, an aggressive promoter of often mandatory vaccination last time, now is offering little public comment on the connection between disease and the porous borders with which its immigration policy has become widely identified.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

THE TRUMP AGENDA IF HE RETURNS TO OFFICE-

By on December 29th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/newsmaker-interview-trump-puts-iran-europeans-and-antisemites

Newsmaker Interview: Trump puts Iran, Europeans and antisemites on notice, dispels Nikki rumors: John Solomon

In an extensive interview, the former president lays out an expansive vision to Just the News if he is elected to a second White House term ranging from Ukraine War to the southern border crisis.

Former President Donald Trump is sending some pointed messages to friends and foes alike: No, Nikki Haley is not on his vice presidential list because there isn’t one right now. Yes, if he returns to the White House European countries had better get ready to pay more for the Ukraine war. And both federal agencies and nonprofits that espouse antisemitic views and threaten Jews should prepare to lose federal funding or even their tax-exempt status.

In a wide-ranging interview with Just the News, the 45th president surveyed the sort of policies he’ll pursue if voters return him to office next November as the nation’s 47th president. He made clear securing the U.S. southern border is a top priority as is cutting off the sources of income from oil sales and reclaiming the unfrozen funds that he says has revived Iran’s terrorism activities across the globe on Joe Biden’s watch. Those activities include recent rocket and drone attacks from proxy groups targeting U.S. troops. The United States said Tuesday that it had shot down 12 attack drones and five missiles launched by the Iran-backed Houthis.

“Iran was allowed to get rich because Joe Biden allowed them to,” Trump told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show on Real America’s Voice. “So he could say whatever he wants. But he’s the reason for this. He’s an incompetent president. He’s a compromised president, totally compromised. But he allowed them to get rich.”

“But worse than being rich, because of the money, because of what they have, they will have within a short period of time nuclear weapons,” Trump added. “And that is never something that can be allowed to happen.”

Trump made clear he plans to return U.S.-Iran policy to a strict regimen of sanctions to choke off any funding for Tehran to use on weapons or terrorism support.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Chinese Communists are organizing political thuggery in America By Jimmy Quinn

By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/02/xi-jinpings-goon-squads/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

At a ritzy gala at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco on November 15, a crowd that included America’s top business leaders twice gave Xi Jinping a standing ovation as he delivered a speech full of reassurances about his fine intentions and the state of the ailing Sino–U.S. relationship.

Next door, from the fourth floor of a parking garage, a group of masked thugs came close to killing five Tibetan activists. “Before the secret entities and the clearly pro-CCP — and what looked like a bunch of trained — men, before they came in and ambushed us and stole our banner from the fifth floor, they actually started from the fourth floor and started pulling on the banner,” said Chemi Lhamo, an activist with the group Students for a Free Tibet. She told me that she and others lost their balance and almost fell off the side of the garage. Fifteen masked men who “really marched like a unit” then came up to the fifth floor and attacked them.

That was not an isolated incident. Outside the hotel that night, and throughout the week, pro-Beijing gangs stalked and assaulted opponents of Xi, most of them pro-democracy Chinese, Uyghurs, Hong Kongers, and Tibetans, who had flocked to the city to protest his attendance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. Estimates vary, but it appears that at least 1,000 pro-CCP demonstrators from across America were involved. The anti-Xi crowd was around 100 people, if that.

The harassment started upon Xi’s arrival at the airport on November 14 and didn’t let up until after his departure on November 17, Allen Chen, a lawyer and leader in the pro-democracy Chinese community, told me.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Peace Processors Return Elliott Abrams

By on December 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/the-peace-processors-return/

The true believers in a ‘peace-minded Palestinian state’ are clapping their hands, but no one in Israel believes in this Tinker Bell.

Middle East peace processing is a great career, or has been for a small but resolute group. Never successful but never daunted, immune to reality, unaffected by wars or elections, they never flag. That means they never stop going to nice conferences and writing articles about “the two-state solution.” Not even now.

The slaughter of Israelis by Hamas on October 7 has greatly affected Israeli opinion. Israelis on the left, including some of those living in the kibbutzim that were attacked, have understood the meaning of the event: A Palestinian state today is simply too dangerous. A couple of weeks ago, President Isaac Herzog of Israel, a former head of the Labor Party, called upon the United States to stop talking about this:

What I want to urge is against just saying ‘two-state solution’. Why? Because there is an emotional chapter here that must be dealt with. My nation is bereaving. My nation is in trauma. In order to get back to the idea of dividing the land, of negotiating peace or talking to the Palestinians, etc., one has to deal first and foremost with the emotional trauma that we are going through and the need and demand for a full sense of security for all people.

Dismissing Herzog’s appeal, two of the longest-serving peace processors, former State Department officials Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, are at it again. In an article in Foreign Affairs dated December 22, Kurtzer and Miller want to “create an independent Palestinian state” as the only solution to conflict in the Middle East.

Here’s how: Their plan “would require the PA to run fair and free elections in the West Bank and Gaza and to convince voters that it really will aim to end Israel’s occupation and create an independent Palestinian state. Should it succeed, Israel would also need to demonstrate its commitment — in words and actions on the ground — to advancing a two-state outcome.”

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

A Health Care Checkup On Justin Trudeau’s Canada

By on December 29th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/29/a-health-care-checkup-on-justin-trudeaus-canada/

For decades, Americans have been told that the only humane, decent health care system is one run by the government. The oft-uttered complaint is that it’s a shame that the richest country in the world doesn’t have universal medical care. The reality is that the universal systems in other wealthy nations are cruel, cold bureaucracies.

If there are any doubts that this is true, look northward, to Canada, where waiting lists for treatment are leaving “patients frozen in line,” Pacific Research Institute President and Chief Executive Officer Sally Pipes recently wrote in Forbes.

“When everyone within a country is trapped in a public health insurance system,” says Pipes, patients suffer through a median waiting time “for medically necessary treatment from a specialist after being referred by a general practitioner” for an average of 27.7 weeks.

“That’s over six months – the longest ever recorded,” she adds.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gay Will Go Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 28th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/gay-will-go/

Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tenure is on life-support. Why, then, would a woke black woman likely soon be asked to resign at one of the most leftwing institutions in America, especially when the Harvard Corporation board hired her precisely for her DEI credentials?

Here are several reasons why ultimately she will have to go. If she does not, daily the Harvard reputation, such as it still remains, will go full Disney, Bud Lite, and Target.

Under oath, Gay misled or lied to Congress when she claimed “context” determines whether Harvard under her direction punishes “hate speech”. We know that if the target of “hate speech”, however one defines it, is black, Latino, gay, or trans, then all hell breaks loose. In contrast, if the perpetrator is a leftwing black, Latino, gay, or trans person, exemption is accorded along the First Amendment “free speech” reasoning. In the past Gay has both disciplined any white male or conservative minority supposed perpetrator and shrugged indifference when the target is the same. But in the case of targeting Jews with physical harassment, and genocidal chants and calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, Gay suddenly, but predictably, becomes inert.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill, a white woman, was forced to resign after her similar testimony, on grounds that her plea of “context” seems to have been used only in the case of anti-Semitic hate speech rather than in all cases of “hate speech”. And while she is not a scholarly heavy weight, McGill has considerably more and better journal publications than does Gay. So Gay and her supporters claiming “racism” won’t work—not when Gay outlasted McGill, a white woman and a far better scholar with far more administrative experience.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Razor’s Edge Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 28th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/28/our-razors-edge/

At the end of the year, we are on the razor’s edge of many things that soon may blow up.

Americans are far beyond President Joe Biden’s serial untruths of some eight years that he never discussed Hunter Biden’s various get-rich-quick schemes.

All were predicated on the perception of foreign interests purchasing from the Biden family the influence of then-senator, vice president, and possibly soon-to-be President Joe Biden.

The Bidens now risk exposure to criminal charges of multimillion-dollar tax fraud, perjury, influence selling, and bribery as congressional committees and a special prosecutor unravel years of tangled-up quid pro quos.

A newly indicted Hunter remains reckless and unpredictable. He continues to publicly blame his mounting legal problems on everyone and everything other than his own selfish excesses.

Hunter deliberately involves his family and may even bring down his own father. His tax lawyers have previously threatened to call President Joe Biden to testify on his behalf under oath.

He continues to court public scandal by hawking amateurish “representational” paintings to the quid-pro-quo wealthy and wannabes wishing clout with the White House.

His laptop messages reveal a prodigal son angry that his bagman services were never fully appreciated by his familial beneficiaries.

Hunter’s wayward laptop is a felonious trove of drug-addled, illicit Petronian excess and sex, interspliced with his self-incriminating family communications on the distributions of pay-for-play payoffs.

Hunter’s business aides will be called back to elaborate on their already incriminating testimonies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Red Cross finds little sympathy among Israelis amid accusations of ineptitude, bias By David Isaac

By on December 28th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/red-cross-finds-little-sympathy-among-israelis-amid-accusations-of-ineptitude-bias/

(December 27, 2023) “Humanitarianism,” “compassion,” “neutrality”—these are the words the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would like linked to its name. In Israel, the word more commonly associated with the organization is “mud.”

The ICRC has come in for criticism from the Israeli premier on down, with the public consensus being that the ICRC is at best a glorified taxi service, and at worst the most prominent of the consistently anti-Israel and biased so-called “humanitarian” groups.

Israelis blame the ICRC for failing to reach the hostages held by Hamas. Eighty-one days into the war, the Red Cross still hasn’t managed to gain access to the remaining captives held by the terror group.

Israeli anger has intensified as reports emerge of the grim situation of the abductees, with reports of torture, sexual abuse, lack of food and medical care. Some hostages have been killed in captivity.

The ICRC didn’t help its cause when on Dec. 23 its president, Mirjana Spoljaric, blamed Israel, telling Channel 12 that “both” Hamas and Israel were responsible for the ICRC’s failure to reach the hostages. (Yehonatan Sabban, former ICRC spokesman in Israel, said he had to watch the interview four times because he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.)

The ICRC’s main defense is that it can’t force its way in to see the hostages. It also says that its modus operandi is to work behind the scenes, the downside being that the public can’t see its efforts.

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