IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DHS head Mayorkas spars with House GOP and blames Trump for border troubles by Virginia Aabram,

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-head-mayorkas-spars-with-house-gop-and-blames-trump-for-border-troubles

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sparred with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee over the crisis at the southern border, while he and the Democratic lawmakers blamed the Trump administration for his department’s troubles.

While the GOP members pressed Mayorkas on migration statistics at the Thursday oversight hearing, Democrats acknowledged that he “inherited something of a mess,” as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said.

“One of the greatest obstacles we have, Mr. Chairman, is to overcome the distrust that was sown by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. “Through its global policies, many still feel fearful, given what trauma they experienced and continue to experience.”

Nadler said that “the previous administration did all it could to break our immigration system” by enforcing family separation policies in which “children were literally kidnapped from their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them” and doing everything in its “power to block legal pathways.”

Mayorkas, in response to Lofgren’s lamentation of the state of the immigration system left by former President Donald Trump, agreed that “the prior administration decimated the legal immigration system, leaving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers our nation’s legal immigration system, on the brink of bankruptcy.”

EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

Harvard, Slavery and Judaism What the story of Judah Monis tells us about America and the children of Israel. By Ira Stoll

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-slavery-and-judaism-slaveholder-judah-monis-hebrew-professor-founders-11651172214?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Mr. Stoll is managing editor of Education Next, based at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The first Jew at Harvard was a slaveholder. That’s the bombshell, so far as I can tell, buried in the appendix of the new report “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” released by the university this week.

The report’s “list of human beings enslaved by prominent Harvard affiliates” includes the “enslaved persons” Cuffy and Cicely, owned by Judah Monis. Monis lived from 1683 to 1764 and was an instructor in Hebrew at Harvard College from 1722 to 1760. In researching this article, I discovered a third possible slave, “my Negro child Moreah,” mentioned in Monis’s 1760 will.

I first encountered Monis’s name more than a decade ago while working on a biography of the American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755 was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Monis. That might seem like an obscure detail, but it’s of historical significance because Harvard students in that era included Samuel Adams, his cousin and the future President John Adams, and their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, William Williams, and William Ellery.

Monis had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. In a 2018 article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jon D. Levenson writes that the conversion had been a condition of hiring. The baptism took place in Harvard Yard. “Although doubts about Monis’s sincerity in converting have long been raised, I am certain that he was absolutely sincere in his desire for a Harvard professorship,” Mr. Levenson writes.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Anti-Israel Past of NYT Jerusalem Bureau’s Latest Hire Alana Goodman

Posted By on April 29th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-anti-israel-past-of-nyt-jerusalem-bureaus-latest-hire/

The latest hire in the New York Times‘s Jerusalem Bureau doesn’t exactly have a history of scrupulous objectivity when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hiba Yazbek, a former intern for Israeli-bashing Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), called herself a victim of Israel’s “mental occupation” and said Palestinians are a “minority in our own land” in a 2020 speech.

Yazbek, who joined the Times as a news assistant last week, deleted similar comments she had posted on Twitter, as well as posts in which she condemned Israel for killing terrorists, according to the media watchdog group Honest Reporting.

Although Yazbek deleted a number of her politically charged posts, she still has a photo of her sitting next to squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) as her Twitter background. Another photo posted on Twitter shows Yazbek posing with Tlaib. Yazbek interned in 2019 for Tlaib—one of the most vocal anti-Israel members of Congress who has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid.”

The hire is likely to fuel concerns about Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, which pro-Israel watchdog groups claim is deeply skewed against the Jewish state. In 2019, the Times was forced to apologize after publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that depicted then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David on his collar, leading a blind President Donald Trump who was drawn wearing a yarmulke.

The outlet also caught flak for publishing a glowing portrayal of Louis Farrakhan and a lengthy interview with Alice Walker that failed to mention their anti-Semitism in 2020. That same year, Times opinion editor Bari Weiss stepped down and said she had faced harassment from colleagues over her support for Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China and Russia’s ‘Space War’: Where Is The US? by Judith Bergman

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18451/china-russia-space-war

“Evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut the United States and allied leadership in the space domain can be seen in the growth of combined in-orbit assets of China and Russia, which grew approximately 70% in just two years.” — Kevin Ryder, senior analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for space and counterspace, Air Force Magazine April 12, 2022.

Space has already become the scene of an ongoing “shadow war” in which China and Russia conduct attacks against U.S. satellites with lasers, radiofrequency jammers, and cyber-attacks every day, according to General David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations.

“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day…. We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened…. Hostile action toward our space-based assets is not a question of ‘if,’ but instead, ‘when.'” — General David Thompson, Washington Post, November 30, 2021.

“Fifteen years after China’s ASAT strike, we still lack the ability to defeat an attack on our space systems or launch an offensive strike if circumstances warrant.” — US Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton (Ret.), former commander of U.S. Strategic Command and Air Force Space Command, The Hill, April 12, 2022.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] will continue to integrate space services… to erode the U.S. military’s information advantage.” — Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 2022.

“If deterrence were to fail, we would face an adversary that has integrated space into all aspects of their military operations…. Space provides the foundation of everything we do as a joint force, from delivering humanitarian assistance to combat on the ground, in the air, and at sea…. We cannot afford to lose space; without it we will fail.” — General John W. Raymond, U.S. Chief of Space Operations, Space Force News, April 5, 2022.

Space-based threats from China and Russia have grown exponentially in recent years, according to a new report on the issue by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), published April 12.

“Evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut the United States and allied leadership in the space domain can be seen in the growth of combined in-orbit assets of China and Russia, which grew approximately 70% in just two years,” noted Kevin Ryder, DIA senior analyst for space and counterspace. “This recent and continuing expansion follows a more than 200% increase between 2015 and 2018.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FREE SPEECH ALERT: DHS Setting up New ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ By Athena Thorne

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/04/27/free-speech-alert-dhs-setting-up-new-disinformation-governance-board-n1593400

The ink isn’t even dry on Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and make speech free again, and the authoritarians in the Biden administration are nakedly acting to lock down the flow of information. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating a new agency called the Disinformation Governance Board.

Politico is reporting:

DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. (h/t Daniel Lippman)

Why would a DHS program focus solely on “irregular migration and Russia”? Are there no other threats to the homeland about which someone might mislead us? Or are these just the most politically dangerous narratives for the Left to lose control over?

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed the creation of the new Ministry on Wednesday when speaking with the House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee, in a clip posted by the Post Millenial. When asked what the DHS is doing about an assertion that African Americans and Spanish-speaking Americans are being “heavily targeted” for disinformation, Mayorkas mentioned:

Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our Principle Deputy General Council, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituÿyted misinformation, disinformation governance board.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tearing Down the Silicon Valley Wall The country is ready for a revolution. And Musk believes he can lead it with his Silicon-Valley sledgehammer. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/27/tearing-down-the-silicon-valley-wall/

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out. 

Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time? 

And what happened to the Left’s former worship of Musk as the man who revolutionized the clean, green automobile industry with his Tesla electric car company?

Or Musk the space revolutionary and hip star trekker, who with his own money helped ensure the United States remains preeminent in space exploration?

Or Musk, the patriot who is providing free next-generation internet service to the underdog Ukrainians fighting Russians for their lives? 

No matter. The Left reviles Musk because he has announced that Twitter will be the one social-media platform whose business is not to censor or massage free speech in an otherwise monopolist, intolerant, and hard-Left Silicon Valley. 

Who knows, Musk might even allow former president Donald Trump to communicate on Twitter—in the fashion that the terrorist Taliban, Iranian theocrats, and violent Antifa protesters all take for granted in their daily access to Twitter. 

But how did the once free-speech, anti-trust, let-it-all-hang out Left become a Victorian busybody, a censorious Soviet, and an old-fashioned robber-baron monopoly? 

When it discovered that few Americans wanted left-wing, socialist politics it turned elsewhere. It found power instead through control of American institutions, from academia and Wall Street to traditional and social media. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Al-Aqsa Is Not Now, and Never Was, ‘Under Threat’ From Israel What the British used to call “the vivid oriental imagination” is at work. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/al-aqsa-not-now-and-never-was-under-threat-israel-hugh-fitzgerald/

Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority all agree: Al-Aqsa Mosque has recently been “under threat” because those wild-eyed Israeli “settlers” – madmen all – were about to engage in the ritual slaughter of a lamb on top of the Temple Mount, as part of a diabolical effort to take over Al-Aqsa, bit by bit, and convert it to a synagogue. Those Palestinians, and especially the terrorists among them, have a rich fantasy life, what the British in the Middle East used to drily call “the vivid oriental imagination.”

A report by Nadav Shragai on the Palestinians exploiting the Temple Mount conflict as an excuse for another war with Israel can be found here: “Al-Aqsa Mosque is by no means under threat,” by Nadav Shragai, Israel Hayom, April 17, 2022:

Hamas is trying—and may succeed—in dragging Israel into a conflict on multiple fronts, with the Temple Mount serving as the trigger, exactly as was the case in April 2021. This time, as on previous occasions, the cry is the modern blood libel that “Al-Aqsa is under threat.”For more than a week now, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have been spreading online stories about how a ritual Passover sacrifice will be carried out on the Temple Mount this year.

They’re knowingly lying now, just as they were in the past. They know the Temple Mount’s history over the last 55 years. They know that Israel has never allowed such a ritual to be performed. Moreover, via a number of channels, including Jordanian, Egyptian and American, the Palestinians—the radical Muslims among them—have received clarification that this year, too, no such ritual will be allowed to take place.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

There’s a B-17 Parked on My Desk It reminds me of what America was. Don Feder

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/theres-b-17-parked-my-desk-don-feder-0/

A scale model of a B-17 Flying Fortress — very detailed, with gun turrets and all — sits on my desk. It reminds me of the country we once had and what we’ve lost.

The B-17 was the most widely used strategic bomber in World War II. The Army Air Corps deployed the long-range, heavy bomber to drop 640,000 tons of bombs over Germany and Axis-occupied territory.

As much as any weapon, the B-17 won the war. By 1944, German industry was smashed. Its cities were rubble. It softened up German defenses for D-Day and the liberation of Europe.

The brave men of the Army Air Corps paid a terrible price – 18,400 aircraft were lost and 51,000 died in the skies over Europe. For comparison, that’s more than twice the number of Marines who died in WW II.

The B-17 represented a nation that knew how to defend itself and take the battle to the enemy. It was an America that was determined and unapologetic.

It was the America of the Greatest Generation that survived the Depression, won World War II and went on to create post-war prosperity that was the wonder of the world. GDP soared from $200 billion in 1940 to $500 billion in 1960.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Defending the Constitution Answering the critics who call our founding document “trash.”Jason D. Hill

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/defending-constitution-jason-d-hill/

Recently, Elie Mystal, author and “Justice Correspondent” for The Nation, went on the daytime TV show The View and stated that the U.S. Constitution is “kind of trash.” In his new book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to The Constitution, Mystal continues to denigrate the Constitution in chapters such as “Canceling Trash People is Not a Constitutional Crisis” and “Bigotry is Illegal Even if You’ve been Ordered by Jesus.” Msytal is not alone in his dim view of the Constitution. Repeated surveys show that college students have increasingly come to believe that the U.S. Constitution is outdated and ought to be “brought up to the contemporary era,” radically modified, or abolished altogether. In this first of a series of three articles, I aim to show, in a measured and rational manner, both the indispensability of the Constitution in its universal form and content, and the revolutionary nature of its foundation.

When the Founding Fathers turned on the light of reason over 244 years ago and wrote the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, they achieved a remarkable feat. It was not just, as hundreds have remarked, the creation of an unprecedented political achievement that was the constitutional republic of the United States of America. This republic, replete with its Bill of Rights and subsequent constitutional amendments, was a major civilizational advancement over any other political phenomena that had ever existed.

But the major achievement of the Founding Fathers was not political; that was a derivative achievement. They, the first and last of America’s great intellectuals, had done what no other philosopher had done in the history of mankind: they achieved a revolution in epistemology by discovering the proper application of human nature to its appropriate political configuration. For the first time, the requirements of man’s survival as a human being – that is, man’s nature as a rational and conceptual being – were grafted onto a social and political environment that supported its rational upkeep.

The political milieu that they created was a direct corollary of that nature. In other words, they were the first to understand that the endpoint of all human striving—freedom and happiness—required a specific political milieu in which human preservation and the achievement of rational happiness were possible. They were the first to integrate man’s nature with the perfect political environment. America was and remains a political application of human nature. It is a metaphysical expression in the form of a political republic derived from an unprecedented epistemological feat: the perfect integration of a discovery of man’s nature and the artificial creation of a political system that corresponds to that nature.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Human Rights Watch, ACLU, Amnesty Intl. Clutch Their Pearls in Horror At Elon Musk’s Purchase of Twitter They hate free speech and want you to think it’s dangerous. Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/human-rights-watch-aclu-amnesty-international-robert-spencer/

There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech. The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.

Reuters, adopting the solemn, even funereal tone it reserves for significant Leftist setbacks, noted Monday that Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist” and has called the freedom of expression the “bedrock of a functioning democracy.” That’s exactly what it is, and that’s why Leftists are enraged that someone who believes such things has gained control of one of the foremost means of mass communication in our age. They had become complacent in their control of such outlets, as confident of the rightness of their power as much as any medieval king was in his divine election; but now their hegemony has been severely challenged, and so it’s time to try to shape public opinion by calling out the self-appointed and reliably Leftist “defenders of human rights” to explain to us why this is so very, very wrong.

Deborah Brown, whom Reuters describes as a “digital rights researcher and advocate” at Human Rights Watch, asserted: “Regardless of who owns Twitter, the company has human rights responsibilities to respect the rights of people around the world who rely on the platform. Changes to its policies, features, and algorithms, big and small, can have disproportionate and sometimes devastating impacts, including offline violence. Freedom of expression is not an absolute right, which is why Twitter needs to invest in efforts to keep its most vulnerable users safe on the platform.”