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BOOKS

Justice Corrupted: How the Left Weaponized Our Legal System Ted Cruz

The left has corrupted the U.S. legal system. Wielding the law as a weapon, arrogant judges and lawless prosecutors are intimidating, silencing, and even imprisoning Americans who stand in the way of their radical agenda. Their “enemies list” even includes parents who dare to speak up for their children at school board meetings.

In this shocking new book, Senator Ted Cruz takes readers inside the justice system, showing how the wrong hands on the levers of power can strangle liberty, crush opposition, and wreck lives. The notion of a “Democratic” or “Republican” Department of Justice is outrageous. That institution should safeguard the Constitutional rights of all Americans. Justice Corrupted will equip patriots and lovers of liberty to hold their government accountable.

Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021 by David Baddiel

Today the Jewish population of the world is about 14.8 million, 0.2% of the 7.95 billion worldwide population and yet in discussing hate crimes and diversity we seem to count for nothing. As a reviewer describes it below, this book is essential reading for those concerned about this concerning fact…..rsk

Jews Don’t Count is a book for people who consider themselves on the right side of history. People fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia and, particularly, racism. People, possibly, like you.

It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel’s contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight. In his unique combination of close reasoning, polemic, personal experience and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don’t count as a real minority: and why they should.

The New Progressivism Makes No Room for Jews David L. Bernstein

https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2022/10/the-new-progressivism-makes-no-room-for-jews/?utm

In 2016, as “intersectionality” escaped from academia to become a progressive buzzword—and came to to signify a doctrine that all just causes are linked and complementary—David L. Bernstein began to suspect that it was apt to be used against the Jews. As he pointed out in an article published that year, activists argued under the banner of intersectionality that anyone opposed to racism in the U.S. should also oppose the existence of Israel. He thought, however, that there was hope:

While I didn’t say so explicitly, I’d come to believe that the mainstream Jewish community needed to find a way to include the Jewish narrative in the intersectional matrix—to complicate it—so that Jews and Israel were not viewed as the perennial oppressors and Palestinians the perennial victims. Concerned about the growing backlash to my article, I used the opportunity [to participate in a panel discussion with some of my critics] to soften my stance on the topic, stating “I still have much to learn,” and that “intersectionality is a complex, interesting, and nuanced phenomenon that we need to understand, not just from the perspective of the pro-Israel community, but from its own perspective as well.”

Bernstein, at the time still president of the left-leaning Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), soon learned that there was little room for such a compromise position:

[In 2020], the JCPA pulled together a Zoom meeting for a coalition called Jews for Criminal Justice Reform, which included top Jewish criminal-justice activists from around the country. After an inspiring talk by Paul Fishman—a former federal attorney from New Jersey—on the need to end mass incarceration, we broke up into smaller groups to discuss next steps. A lawyer named Jared, the group facilitator for my breakout session, asked, “What do you all think our criminal-justice reform priorities ought to be?” Ariella, a young professional staffer from a Jewish civil-rights organization, interjected, “Before we talk about strategy, there’s a lot of internal work we have to do in the Jewish community. We need to recognize our complicity in white supremacy and ensure we have black Jews at the forefront of these efforts.”

America’s Troubled Middle Eastern Ivory Towers Andrew Harrod

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2022/10/americas-troubled-middle-eastern-ivory-towers

“Since the earliest days of Americans’ engagement with the Middle East, U.S. officials have looked to Americans associated with the region’s universities to advance U.S. interests,” writes commentator and political veteran Pratik Chougule. His recent, intriguing book, American Universities in the Middle Fast and U.S. Foreign Policy: Intersections with American Interests, details how such policies “have yielded mixed results” amidst the greater Middle East’s conflicted politics.  

As Chougule discussed in a recent interview, his case studies of American universities established in the Middle East begin with nineteenth-century Christian missionaries. They saw American academic excellence as a means of introducing Muslim societies to the Bible. Such evangelicals founded in 1866 the Syrian Protestant College, forerunner to the American University of Beirut (AUB), and in 1919 the American University of Cairo (AUC).

Until World War II, the private universities AUB and AUC remained isolated American presences in the Middle East, but American government aloofness from the region changed dramatically during the Cold War. At AUB, the “U.S. government came to view the university as a strategic asset,” particularly as, among other reasons, AUB “administrators had developed close ties to regional governments with oil reserves,” Chougule observes. Meanwhile, since AUC’s founding president Charles Watson, “six of AUC’s eleven presidents previously served in the U.S. government in diplomatic and military roles.” By 1978, AUC was the “only America higher education institution to receive more than half of its funds” from the United States government, Chougule notes.  

Growing American interest in the Middle East came with a price, particularly given American support for the state of Israel, a deeply unpopular move at AUB, AUC, and in the wider region. “Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, AUB administrators expended political capital to lobby Washington against the Zionist movement,” Chougule writes. Similarly, AUC faculty members have endorsed university resolutions denouncing Egypt’s 1979 peace agreement with Israel, both in 1979 and 2008.

“Regional leaders had to pay a greater political price to welcome an American higher education presence in their countries” after American recognition of Israel in 1948, Chougule notes. Conflict with Israel often made campus peace impossible. “By the 1970s, protests related to the Arab-Israeli conflict overwhelmed AUB,” he observes.  

From Oslo to Abraham REVIEW: ‘In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East—and How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It ‘Eli Lake

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/from-oslo-to-abraham/

There are few things Americans love more than a story that exposes the folly of snobs and experts. It explains the initial appeal of Donald Trump and the enduring appeal of Michael Crichton novels. We need specialists to make our complex economy work, but every now and again the eggheads are blinded by group think and can’t see what’s in front of their nose.

This is a theme of Jason Greenblatt’s memoir of his time as former president Trump’s envoy for the Middle East, In the Path of Abraham. As he writes in the introduction, “Most books like this are written by professional politicians or longtime Washington insiders. I am neither of those.” Greenblatt instead is a real-estate lawyer who worked for years with the Trump administration, an observant Jew, and a strong supporter of Israel. In other words, he is the opposite of the typical American diplomat who has managed a stagnant Arab-Israeli peace process for the last 30 years.

Greenblatt, together with David Friedman, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Israel, and Jared Kushner, the former president’s son-in-law, oversaw the diplomacy that led to the Abraham Accords in 2020. These were bilateral agreements between Israel and four Arab states, establishing unprecedented diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world. The countries that normalized relations through the Abraham Accords include Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.

To appreciate how groundbreaking these agreements are, consider that it was Israeli foreign policy doctrine for its first 30 years to seek diplomatic ties with states on the periphery of the Arab world—countries like Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia—because the opposition of the Arab monarchies to the very existence of Israel was so implacable. Things began to change in the 1990s after the Oslo Accords, which established the first direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

‘The Sassoons’ Review: Hazards of Fortune The rise and fall of an international business empire—from shipping to banking and opium.By Norman Lebrecht

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sassoons-book-review-hazards-of-fortune-11666360783?mod=article_inline

The Jewish makers of modern finance have not gone unchronicled. Bookshelves creak beneath Rothschild tomes. The Lehman brothers have their story in lights on Broadway, and the ancient union of Goldman and Sachs has just made headlines again with mass staff layoffs. There is plenty of life left in these oligarchies.

The founders liked to keep wealth within the family, or at least within their circle. Jacob Schiff, John Pierpont Morgan’s chief adversary, gave his daughter in marriage to a Warburg. When in 1878 Hannah de Rothschild, England’s richest heiress, broke ranks by marrying the Earl of Rosebery, a future prime minister, no male Rothschild attended her wedding. Upon Hannah’s early death, however, they reclaimed her body for burial in a Jewish cemetery. Such habits die hard.

Tales of the super-rich never cease to fascinate. Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York” (1967) spent dozens of weeks on the bestseller list. “The Lehman Trilogy” has been staged in 24 languages. It’s not just the rags-to-riches fable that keeps the audience engrossed. There is a much deeper curiosity in those who made mountains of money and somehow managed to keep it.

The present story is one of a family that lost it all.

Grab a Copy

39 Years after Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut And the killers have still not been brought to justice. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/39-years-after-marine-barracks-bombing-in-beirut/

Ken Timmerman’s 12th book of non-fiction, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, was recently released by Post Hill Press. Timmerman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and has covered the Middle East for 40 years.

This Sunday is the 39th anniversary of the Iranian attack on the US Marines barracks in Beirut, which took the life of 241 US Marines. It was the single largest loss of life in the history of the US Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.

Every year on this date families gather for memorial services around the country to commemorate the lives of these first American victims of Islamic Iran’s vicious, relentless, and still unending war on America.

The attack on the US Marines followed on the heels of the April 18, 1983, attack on the US Embassy in Beirut. In my new book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, I call these attacks the “first blood” in Iran’s unending war on America.

For years we have known the names of the main perpetrators. Until now, only one has been brought to justice: Imad Fayez Mughniyeh.

Prior to 9/11, he was the terrorist with the most U.S. blood on his hands. A Lebanese-born Shiite Muslim who worked in Yasser Arafat’s elite Force 17, he was hired by Iran as their chief overseas terrorist once Arafat was forced out of Beirut in September 1982.

Mughniyeh was quick to prove his worth to his new masters with a series of massive car bombs in Lebanon. The first, on Nov. 11, 1982, took down the seven-story Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, killing 67 IDF personnel and Border Guards.

Next was the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. embassy on the Beirut corniche, which I witnessed first-hand. Sixty-three people perished in that blast, including seventeen Americans. Among them were Kenneth Haas and Robert Ames, the CIA’s top spies in the Middle East. Indeed. Mugniyeh’s target was a top secret meeting of CIA station chiefs from around the region. In a single blow, Iran decapitated the Agency’s intelligence apparatus in the region.

The Left’s Motto: I Feel, Therefore I am Right Kevin Donnelly

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/10/the-lefts-motto-i-feel-therefore-i-am-right/

While justified as a request for greater civility and the avoidance of unjustified discrimination over the last 40 years,l political correctness has morphed into an Orwellian nightmare of distorted language and mind control. Orwell observed in his essay, Politics and the English Language, ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’ and there is no doubt we are now living in a world where reason and rationality no longer prevail and where words, phrases and concepts have been weaponised by the cultural Left in the campaign to impose its ideological agenda.

Best illustrated by the slogan “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”, the strategy is to force citizens to accept two or more conflicting concepts, thus, ensuring compliance by determining how people conceptualise and think. Orwell writes doublethink involves the ability “…to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic”.

Such is the bizarre and irrational world of woke. Babies are no longer born girls or boys, rather they are “assigned” a gender at birth, with some parents waiting months before they decide where their newborn infant sits on the LGBTIQ+ spectrum. In maternity hospitals breast feeding is described as ‘chest feeding’, mothers renamed ‘birthing parents’ and fathers as ‘non-gestational persons’. Woke language is also used as a weapon to vilify and attack those who refuse to conform or who dare to question what has become the new orthodoxy.

Men arguing that not all males are sexual predators and cautioning that women should be aware of the dangers involved in walking alone through a dark and deserted park at 3am, are condemned as misogynist and sexist. Any who suggest not all cultures are equal and new arrivals should make some attempt to assimilate are attacked as racist and xenophobic. To argue it is wrong that schools and universities always portray Western civilisation as classist, sexist, homophobic, racist and guilty of oppressing ‘the other’ is to be guilty of white supremacism.

Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the Mentally Ill August 31, 1990 by Rael Jean Isaac (Author), Virginia C. Armat (Author)

Residents of every major city in America are confronted daily by the growing number of homeless in the streets. Among them are the mentally ill who are often thrown into jails or shelters instead of hospitals. The authors describe the results of the de institutionalization policies that created this madness in our streets.

It is a prophetic book that deserves a serious appraisal. rsk

The Pandemic was a Grand Rehearsal for the Great Reset By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_pandemic_was_a_grand_rehearsal_for_the_great_reset.html

Fear is the key to obtaining compliance.  And by obtaining mass compliance during the pandemic, the global elite — operating through political leaders, international bodies, NGOs, and a vast network of “experts” and bureaucrats — audaciously tested ground for the Great Reset.  “Populations have overwhelmingly shown a willingness to make sacrifices,” said Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF).  “The changes we have seen in response to COVID-19 prove that a reset of our economic and social foundations is possible.”

In his new book The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown, Marc Morano lays bare how “15 days to slow the spread” was actually “15 days to begin your conditioning to accept a new level of tyranny.”  He shows how the agenda was set decades before the pandemic and was given momentum during the post-9/11 War on Terror.  The signs of long preparation for the Great Reset are now quite evident.  Morano lists them, connecting the dots.

The goal was global governance, carbon taxes, the empowerment of unelected bureaucrats, and the stringent regulation of all human endeavors.  The gospel according to the WEF promises people that “you will own nothing, and you will be happy.”  In Schwab’s characterization of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, our physical, digital, and biological identities will fuse into one.  And in the interest of equity and inclusivity, we will sacrifice property, privacy, and liberty, remaining dependent on and therefore under the control of governments.  Meanwhile, the global elite will wrest ownership of, and power over, everything.  Hundreds of billionaire businessmen, influential financiers, and world leaders are on board with this project.