FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Negotiations With The Mullahs By Bruce Thornton Let’s hope this isn’t another Western fool’s errand.

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trumps-negotiations-with-the-mullahs/

Recently an important report about President Trump and Iran was drowned out by the weeping and wailing over the president’s Liberation Day increases on tariffs. According to Park MacDougald on The Scroll, Axios reported that the president is “seriously considering an Iranian proposal for indirect nuclear talks” . . . and “the administration is now exploring next steps in order to begin conversations and trust building with the Iranians.”

More troubling, MacDougald writes, “Phillip Smyth emphasized that the Iranians, despite holding an extraordinarily weak hand, are effectively offering the White House nothing: no direct talks, no negotiation over ballistic missiles or the regime’s support for its regional proxies, and nuclear negotiation only within the framework of the 2015 nuclear deal.”

We shouldn’t underestimate the president’s commitment to deterrence, or doubt his will to follow through on his pledge to prevent Iran from going nuclear. He has brought back “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran, and deployed six long-range B2 stealth bombers to the joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean––the only bomber able to drop “bunker buster” MOPS, “Massive Ordnance Penetrators,” 30,000-pound, precision-guided bombs capable of penetrating Iran’s underground hardened nuclear production facilities.

Also, as Smyth points out, Iran is the weakest it has been since its 1980-88 war with Iraq. Its proxies in the region have been neutralized, its economy is on the brink of collapse, its currency is approaching Weimar Germany levels of inflation, and its people are boldly disgruntled and increasingly restless. Now may be the best opportunity to end Iran’s nuclear ambition to destroy, Israel, which it mocks as a “one-bomb state.” Nor should we assume that self-preservation from a threatened repayment in nuclear kind will restrain the mullahs.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Renu Mukherjee Why Did a Star Columbia Student Join an Anti-Semitic Mob? Yunseo Chung’s descent into pro-Hamas activism reveals a tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood.

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.

Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Not to Deal with the Student Mob The line between free speech and violence is clear University leaders & public officials must uphold it; too few are trying Charles Lipson

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://thespectator.com/topic/deal-student-mob-campus-protest/

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West.

At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages.

Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.  “I don’t think this is a prison case,” he said.

The violent protests are Stanford are hardly the only ones on campus, and the spring protest season is just getting started. At Case Western University in Ohio, students caused over $400,000 in damage by smearing buildings with red paint. Expect more to come at universities where the violence goes unpunished and prosecutors are as weak-kneed as the one in Santa Clara.

Campus violence, destruction, harassment and intimidation are more than criminal. They are also direct attacks on the basic purpose of our educational institutions. They undermine our nation’s core value of free, non-violent speech and assembly, encoded in the First Amendment.

If university leaders and local law enforcement are unwilling to protect those rights, if they are unwilling to sanction those who violate them, then they are opening the door for others who will act to protect those values and those endangered students.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shapiro v. Clooney: Two Democrat Parties The Harrisburg attack on the Pennsylvania governor.

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/shapiro-v-clooney-two-democrat-parties/

EXCERPT

The current occupant is Governor Josh Shapiro. The governor, a Democrat, is, like a couple of his predecessors, also Jewish. 

Did that last fact launch the 2:00 in the morning attack on the governor this past Sunday? In which attacker Cody Balmer, 38, managed to squeeze through the black iron fence surrounding the Mansion, break a window, and toss two Molotov cocktails inside, setting the building on fire while the governor and family were sound asleep inside. A fire that did serious damage to a section of the history-laden building. (RELATED: The Left Loves Political Violence)

At this moment, Balmer’s motives beyond an expressed dislike for Shapiro are not known. There is, without doubt, a belief by many — the governor included (and I’m one as well) — that this attack was indeed motivated by antisemitism.

The governor was awakened by state police guards pounding on his door who quickly evacuated the governor and his family, which included four children, two dogs, and a visiting family member.

On Monday, Shapiro faced the TV cameras and read a statement that said, in part:

This type of violence is not okay. I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, one particular person or another, it is not okay, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.

Well, amen to that. The governor has it exactly right.

Now. Let’s contrast this statement to a new Broadway play from another Democrat altogether — left-wing movie star George Clooney.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Inflation Cools Off: Media Hardest Hit They are losing the voters, who have finally decided to end an abusive relationship. David Catron

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/inflation-cools-off-media-hardest-hit/

The general consensus among informed political analysts is that the Republicans emerged from last November’s election in control of the White House and Congress due to the border crisis and persistent inflation. The Trump administration curtailed the influx of illegal immigrants with remarkable speed and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March suggests that inflation is also returning to the modest levels that prevailed throughout President Trump’s first term. The CPI declined by .01 percent last month, a year-over-year rate of 2.4 percent, while core inflation sank to a four-year low.

The cure for inflation required no legislative crackdown on price-gouging. All we really needed was a new president.

Moreover, wholesale prices also decreased in March. According to the Producer Price Index (PPI) report, an important indicator of future inflation pressure, “Prices for final demand goods moved down 0.9 percent in March, the largest decrease since falling 1.4 percent in October 2023.” These PPI statistics, combined with the CPI numbers, clearly portend a brighter future for long suffering consumers and the nation’s economy in general. But the legacy media are loathe to report good news if it reflects well on the new Trump administration. Instead, they search for some black cloud to tarnish every silver lining, and subject the electorate to the kind of fear mongering that pervades the following passage from a story published by the Washington Post:

As consumers and businesses face widespread uncertainty around the Trump administration’s whipsawing trade policies, a widely followed survey from the University of Michigan found that consumers’ expectations for the next year’s inflation jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981. It’s the fourth consecutive month that consumer sentiment has worsened, as people across demographics say they believe unemployment and inflation will get substantially worse.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can Trump Fix His FUBAR Tariff Rollout?

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/15/can-trump-fix-his-fubar-tariff-rollout/

So far, President Donald Trump has been piloting his second term like Maverick from “Top Gun.” With one exception. The tariff rollout has been FUBAR, which is troubling since it’s Trump’s signature economic policy issue.

There have been glaring missteps along the way, repeated pauses, confused and conflicting messaging, turf wars. It’s draining public support and causing real economic problems as businesses can’t make plans while all this is in flux.

We aren’t privy to insider gossip to speculate why this is. But we can say that Trump needs to get his tariff act together, and fast.

Consider what has transpired in just the past two weeks:

Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement turned out to be a disaster. Not just because an island inhabited only by penguins was listed as a trade abuser, but because it quickly became apparent that the math used to set tariff rates made no sense.

While Trump called the tariffs reciprocal, they weren’t. They were instead based on trade imbalances with other nations, which even Trump supporters pointed out is a flawed metric.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The FBI Knew All Along By Jack Cashill

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_fbi_knew_all_along.html

You do not have to wade far into the recently declassified Crossfire Hurricane documents to be shocked.  I had only read three pages of the FBI’s December 19, 2016 interview with the DoJ’s Bruce Ohr before learning just how early in the game the FBI brass knew that the Steele dossier was worthless.

In the way of background, on July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”  FBI agent Peter Strzok was assigned to head it up.

If the goal was to cripple Trump regardless of the evidence, Strzok was the man for the job.  “Damn this feels momentous,” he texted his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, upon getting the assignment.  Two weeks later he explained to Page his motives.  “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted her.  “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

Ohr played a curious role in the whole affair.  He served as unofficial DoJ contact with the notorious Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous Steele dossier.  According to Ohr, the two met for breakfast on the same day the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane.  Steele wanted to discuss some “serious stuff” involving low-level Trump adviser Carter Page.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Fast-Growing Jewish Population May Hold Off Israel’s “Demographic Time Bomb”

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

http://bit.ly/4jmZ6cP

“Israel’s Jewish women are unusual among industrialized nations for their high birth rate, while modernizing Arab women have fewer babies than in the past.

Israelis have wondered at times whether they would be outnumbered by Palestinians and become a minority in the world’s only Jewish homeland.

The fear of a “demographic time bomb” has often been cited by those who support the two-state solution, in which Palestinians would get an independent state alongside the Jewish state. An independent Palestinian state, they say, is the only way for Israel to remain majority Jewish.

The fear may be unwarranted. A 2025 demographic study by an Israeli-American group shows the Jewish population growing more rapidly than the Arab Muslim population, particularly in Judea and Samaria—Israel’s historical names for what other nations refer to as the West Bank.

The study, which has traced the population question for two decades, found that the number of annual Jewish births increased by 73 percent from 1995 to 2024, while those among Arabs in Israel increased by only 18 percent.

Jewish births in 2024, about 139,000, were 76 percent of about 182,000 total births, compared with 69 percent of total births in 1995, according to the study, titled “2025 Israel’s Demographic Update Defies Conventional Wisdom.”

Study co-leader Yoram Ettinger, a retired ambassador who published the study in his online “The Ettinger Report,” told The Epoch Times that his group does not accept the statements of either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority at face value. It takes hard looks at as many figures as possible to audit the official numbers, he said.

BOOKS Comments turned off

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CULTURE BY DIANA WEST

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

If one were to look for a unifying theme in the books and journalism of Diana West, one would quickly discover that West, by turn, is provoked, curious and relentless when it comes to campaigns of deception continuously run in media, politics, culture and academia to influence and manipulate. Such deceptions depend on twisting or, worse, omitting key facts or, almost worse than that, the lazy journalism that is no better than deception’s echo chamber.

In Wake Up and Smell the Culture and other selected essays, West skewers numerous counter-narratives and episodes of “court history,” shining a light on lost context and hidden facts. With characteristic verve, West delves, for example, into the pre-WWII origins of “America First” (no, it was not pro Nazi); examines the very real clues to “Pizzagate” (no, it was not “fake news”); and proves how conservatives to this day have been duped into carrying on Josef Stalin’s assault on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who, as readers of American Betrayal (2013) will recall, is one of West’s historical heroes.

Indeed, in the tradition of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2019), West newly unspools communist associations in the pasts of Judge Tanya Chutkan and Victoria Nuland. In the spirit of bi-partisan targeting, West also exposes the shocking conservative crack-up, circa 2016, over the candidacy of Donald Trump in the must-see-it-to-believe-it compendium, “The Right’s Anti-Trump Lexicon.” West also turns her sprightly pen to popular culture in a series of magazine essays she wrote on the way to The Death of the Grown-Up (2007). In all, an invaluable collection from one of our most provocative writers.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Slaughtering Jews While Falsely Using Al-Aqsa Mosque as a Pretext by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21549/palestinians-slaughtering-jews-al-aqsa-pretext

Peaceful and permitted outdoor tours to the grounds around the Al-Aqsa Mosque are regularly described by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas as violent incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It is time for the US and other Western countries to impose consequences on Palestinian leaders, especially Mahmoud Abbas and his senior representatives, for spreading falsehoods and libels against Israel and Jews. It is precisely this type of rhetoric that incentivizes Palestinians to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews. The message to Palestinian leaders should read: “Stop using the Al-Aqsa Mosque as an excuse to slaughter Jews. The mosque remains intact, and is not facing any threat, despite Palestinian libels and lies.” Failure to comply would result in international donors imposing financial sanctions on the Palestinian leadership.

If anyone is desecrating the mosque, it is those who exploit it to encourage their people to carry out terrorist attacks.

As the Hamas-Israel war continues in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has resumed its false claim – first propagated in 1929 by Adolf Hitler’s subsequent ally, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, and again and again after that — that that Jews are violently “storming” the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and planning to divide it in time and space between Jewish and Muslim worshipers.

Such claims were also used by the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group to justify the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which Gazan terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis and wounded of thousands. On that day, another 251 Israelis were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 59 -alive and dead – remain in captivity. It is worth noting that Hamas called its invasion of Israel “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Shortly after the October 7 massacre, Hamas published a report highlighting the motives behind the cross-border attack on Israel. According to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, the report, titled “Our Narrative, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” said that:

“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a necessary step and a natural reaction against Israel’s plans to eliminate the Palestinian cause, seize lands, Judaize the Palestinian lands, and establish complete control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and holy sites.”