RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/19/why-does-the-left-hate-israel/

As over 3,000 rockets are fired into Israel by Hamas, the establishment of the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war. 

It is not just that they fear that the squad, Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and the woke institutions such as professional sports, academia, and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. 

They are in terror also that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon the Democratic Party will end up disdained as much as was the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. 

The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and often has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants. 

The Left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust, while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II? 

It was not just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise—whether the infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim or Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 

The Left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strong man ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days. 

If history and democratic values cannot explain fully the hatred of Israel on the Left, perhaps human rights violations do. But here too there is another radical asymmetry. Arab Israeli citizens enjoy far greater constitutional protections than do Arabs living under either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. 

Is the Left bothered by the allies of Hamas? After all, most are autocracies such as Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia. 

We return then to other reasons for the woke furor directed toward Israel. 

President Joe Biden praised Michigan Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib during his latest trip to the Midwestern state this week, as the member of “the squad” demands divestment from Israel during conflict with Hamas.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/19/biden-praises-rashida-tlaib-as-she-pushes-antisemitic-bds-movement-during-conflict/

“I want to say to you that I admire your intellect, I admire your passion, and I admire your concern for so many other people,” Biden said at a Ford plant in Dearborn. “You’re a fighter, and God thank you for being a fighter.”

On the same trip, Tlaib confronted Biden on the airport tarmac in Detroit and reportedly demanded the president condemn Israel and support the Palestinians. Biden’s approach as Israel faces its worst attacks in years from the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has remained largely muted, with the president only saying he hopes the conflict comes to a quick end while professing the Jewish state’s right to self-defense.

On Wednesday, Biden told Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the White House expected “a significant de-escalation today” to reach a ceasefire.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/censorship-personal-story-bill-warner/

I find the biggest shift of thought in my 80 years of life is censorship. I want to share with you my personal experiences.

I have spoken as an expert on Political Islam in the US, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovakia, Kosovo, Poland, and Israel. I have spoken in the Danish Parliament and the German Bundestag. I have advised European Parliament members, politicians, heads of intelligence agencies and a future prime minister. I prepared white papers on Political Islam for the FBI.

Let me clarify my methodology. All Islamic political and religious doctrine is found in 3 texts – Koran, traditions of Mohammed (Hadith) and life of Mohammed (the Sira). The only ideas that I speak about come from Allah and Mohammed. Political Islam is the part of Islamic doctrine that deals with the non-Muslim, the Kafir. Oddly enough, more Islamic doctrinal text is devoted to politics than religion.

My books sold like crazy. I was selling books by the tens of thousands.  My Sharia Law for Non-Muslims was a #1 best seller on Islamic law on Amazon. My video “Why We Are Afraid” had millions of views on YouTube. YouTube contacted me and assigned a staff member to me to teach me how to make better videos. When you Googled “political Islam” my work filled the first 4 screens. It is impossible to dominate a topic to that degree, but I did it. What made it possible was the fact that I defined and popularized the term “Political Islam.”  Offers to lecture and for print and internet interviews poured in.

But a storm cloud appeared on the horizon. The Tennessean newspaper put out a Sunday front page article which said that I was an anti-Muslim bigot and a hater. This was followed by several other attack pieces. An organization called the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center, (the SPLC is not a civil rights group, is not southern, is not poor and is not a law center) declared that I was one of the biggest bigots in the US. Indeed, the SPLC said Nashville was a hate city because I live here.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/100-days-failure-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration took over the government with the wind at its back thanks to Donald Trump. With the COVID vaccines reining in the pandemic and things getting back to normal, all Biden had to do was not get in the way of success. But a lingering Trump Derangement Syndrome, and a leftwing, noisy base eager to complete Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the U.S., have led at home and abroad to actions and policies seemingly calculated to compromise our interests and security and erode our political freedom.

We can start with our southern border. Trump’s initiatives such as building a wall, stepping-up deportations, and striking a deal that kept asylum seekers in Mexico had slowed considerably the number of illegal crossings, leading to a reduction in violence from gangsters like MS-13 that flourished in so-called sanctuary cities; the end of the catch-and-release policy that dumped unvetted aliens into the country’s interior; and limiting the cruel deaths of children on the trek north.

But these successful policies interfered with the bipartisan need for de facto open borders to provide cheap labor for Wall Street, and more voters for the DNC. More important, no matter how successful, such polices were tainted by the “wicked” Donald Trump, the populist bull that wrecked the political establishment’s remunerative china shop. So they had to go.

The result has been a return to the Obama era’s spectacle of children and teens packed into squalid holding pens, increased infestations of cartel traffickers in people and drugs, and two consecutive months of about 175,000 apprehensions of border-crossers each month––the highest in two decades. All reports from those on the ground––from border patrol agents to residents to local government agencies––indicate a serious crisis that will insidiously spread across the country. But president Joe Biden is instructed to say that such influxes happen every year at this time, that Donald Trump left a “Godawful mess,” and that “We’ve now got control” over the ongoing stampede of border-crossers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/chicago-mayor-refusing-to-accept-interview-requests-from-white-journalists/

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot is only accepting interview requests from “black and brown journalists” as a matter of policy, according to a spokesman.

“As @chicagosmayor reaches her two year midway point as mayor, her spokeswoman says Lightfoot is granting 1 on 1 interviews-only to Black or Brown journalists,” local political journalist Mary Ann Ahern tweeted.

On Twitter, Lightfoot defended the policy, writing that she “ran [for mayor] to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall. It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.”

“This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city” Lightfoot added, before noting that “we must be intentional about doing better.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Most Republicans do not want to denigrate President Trump, but neither do they want to elevate him. Benign neglect is the preferred path. The good of what he did – freeing up the economy from restrictive regulations and confining taxes, repatriating more than a trillion dollars in corporate cash, raising wages for the lowest income workers, and creating the most jobs ever for Black and Hispanic; taking real steps to resolve the border crisis; addressing the bureaucratic morass in Washington; calling out international governmental bodies for their undemocratic ways; getting NATO nations to pay a greater share of their defense; confronting enemies of freedom like Communist China, Russia and North Korea; signing the Abraham Accords and instigating Operation Warp Speed to get a COVOD-19 vaccine out in record time – was overshadowed by a supersized ego and mean-spirited, feckless Tweets.

Democrats, on the other hand, would like to keep the spirit of Donald Trump front and center. While it is true that his ardent Republican supporters do not want to give up on him, neither do Democrat leaders who see him as someone around whom they can rally their troops. Trump Derangement Syndrome helped Mr. Trump with the public when he was President because complaints about him were so outrageous. But it hurts the Republican Party and their chances today when anti-Trump opinions are voiced by other Republicans. “Prudent Republicans,” wrote Andrew McCarthy in the May 15th issue of National Review, “perceive that the best way to move on from Trump is to stop talking about him.” I agree.

If Republicans want to take control of the House and Senate in 2022, they will have to focus on issues, not on the personality of the former President. Single issue politicians detract from legitimate policy debates. In refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has done no more than what Al Gore did in 2000 and Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In all three cases (2000, 2016, 2020), there were certainly electoral irregularities, but there always have been. However, from what we now know, none of those elections would have been reversed. “If questioning the results of a particular election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath,” writes Mollie Hemingway in her forthcoming book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, “nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated following the 2016 election.” It is not that Mr. Trump’s character should be ignored, but that it must be kept in perspective.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/jeffrey_epstein_took_

What sort of goals would make it worthwhile to hang out with a convicted child sex offender if you are a megalomaniac billionaire?  The curious case of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates just got curiouser.  Anonymous sources, denials, millions of dollars in donations, and claims of lies surround a 2013 visit of Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein to the Strasbourg home of the then-chairman of Norway’s Nobel Committee, which awards the Peace Prize.  The visit was uncovered by Norwegian business daily DN, whose sister publication describes in English the visit and its denial:

Former Nobel Committee chair Thorbjørn Jagland denied having met Jeffrey Epstein when asked by the current chairperson. An investigation by Norwegian business newspaper DN reveals Jagland hosted Epstein and Bill Gates in his Strasbourg residence in 2013.

These uncredited photos via the U.K. Daily Mail allegedly show Epstein and Gates together in Strasbourg and reveal that Jagland, a career politician who was at the time serving as secretary general of the Council of Europe as well as chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, lived in a spectacular home in Strasbourg.  While E.U. positions pay very well, and even though he held two jobs, this house looks suspiciously lavish to me:

It might be worth noting that the first Nobel Peace Prize awarded after Jagland assumed the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (whose five members are appointed by that nation’s parliament, where Jagland has previously served, including as a prime minister) was to Barack Obama — shortly after his inauguration as POTUS, before he had accomplished anything remotely worthy of the honor.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-overhyped-story-on-new-yorks-trump-probe/

Despite all the clamor since news broke last night of a purportedly big development in the state of New York’s criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump’s real-estate organization, nothing very meaningful has happened. The development here has to do, merely, with who is investigating. Nothing has changed regarding what is being investigated.

For years, multiple New York state authorities have been eying the Trump organization and the former president himself. As I’ve previously outlined (see, e.g., here), the DA has homed in on suspicions of bank, insurance, and tax fraud, based on what has been reported (particularly by the New York Times) to be a decades-old pattern of inflating or deflating estimates of the value of Trump assets to seek financial advantage (e.g., higher values help with borrowing and real-estate coverage, lower values with tax obligations, and insurance premiums). Meanwhile, the Empire State’s attorney general, Letitia James, has been probing the same subject matter, in anticipation of using her authority to bring civil actions — the AG’s criminal-enforcement authority is more limited than the DA’s.

Last night’s news is that the two offices are now joining forces on the criminal aspect of the investigation. That’s all.

This is not surprising. As I explained back in February (in the column linked above), the DA’s office — which litigated the case all the way to the Supreme Court twice in order to get access to former president Trump’s financial records — has been staffing the probe up. Joining forces with the AG’s office means the DA’s criminal probe will have additional resources, including lawyers experienced in corporate-financial investigations.

James is an ambitious progressive politician who is frequently touted as a future gubernatorial candidate (maybe the not-too-distant future). It makes political sense that she would want a more prominent role in a probe of Trump, who is unpopular in New York (which President Biden carried by 2 million votes in 2020, and Hillary Clinton by 1.7 million in 2016). So the latest shuffling of the prosecutorial deck will add fodder to Trump’s claims that he, his family, and his organization are being subjected to an abusive political vendetta by New York Democrats. Nevertheless, the announcement that James and Vance will be working together, rather than pursuing the case on parallel tracks, does not change the subject matter under investigation.

It is worth adding, as I have noted before, that though the investigation has been going on for a long time, no one has been accused of a crime or sued civilly at this point.