Blinken Seems Intent on Sparking a Crisis Over Jerusalem The State Department wants to open a consulate to the Palestinians there despite Israel’s objections.By Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blinken-biden-foreign-policy-crisis-over-jerusalem-embassy-consulate-israel-palestine-11635195523?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The biggest diplomatic spat between Israel and the U.S. in recent memory is brewing over the Biden administration’s insistence on opening a consulate to conduct diplomatic relations with the Palestinian Authority and locating it in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Despite vociferous Israeli protest, the State Department has repeatedly said it would push forward with opening a consulate anyway, and Secretary Antony Blinken will personally lead the effort.

The U.S. Embassy to Israel is already in Jerusalem, and it has a consular department that provides services to Palestinians. Opening a separate, independent diplomatic mission would undermine a longstanding bipartisan policy of treating Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of Israel.

The consulate plan is a way to undo in part President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem without paying the political price of fully repudiating a move that had broad support even among Democrats. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh understands this and recently crowed that Mr. Blinken’s consulate is a stepping stone to a recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem.

Under settled international law, Israel’s consent is required for any diplomatic mission to be opened on its territory. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Gideon Saar have all forcefully rejected the idea, as has the opposition Likud party. Jerusalem is one of the few issues that unite Israelis across the political spectrum.

The State Department won’t take no for an answer. After Mr. Lapid made Israel’s opposition clear, Mr. Blinken said: “We’ll be moving forward with the process of opening a consulate as part of deepening of those ties with the Palestinians”—a clear démarche to Jerusalem to acquiesce or face consequences. This contempt for Israel’s government is extraordinary.

When Mr. Trump in 2017 recognized Jerusalem as being in Israel and subsequently moved the U.S. Embassy there, he implemented the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, enacted with massive bipartisan support. That put to rest an absurd and anachronistic U.S. policy that treated Jerusalem as not being located in Israel at all, a legacy of an abortive 1947 U.N. initiative to make it an “international city.”

Doing the Enemies’ Bidding Eileen F. Toplansky

In his 1980 book titled Seeds of Progress, Leonard E. Read reminds the reader of the prescient words of George Washington.

There is a natural and necessary progression from the extreme of anarchy to the extreme of tyranny, and arbitrary power is most established on the ruins of liberty.

Leonard E. Read then goes on quote Dr. Ludwig von Mises who wrote “Socialism is planned chaos.  Anarchy is unplanned chaos.”

Consider the weeks of violence and anarchy in Portland and other cities.  It was the first step in the communists’ designs upon America.  The continuing erosion of our culture is intended to restrain America’s potential in every conceivable way.

Furthermore, in the chapter “Two Ways to Go Wrong” Read emphasizes that those who would deny impartial justice will heartily support anarchy and tyranny.

First tell me who you are and then I’ll tell you what your rights are.

A society in which gross inequalities before the law are tolerated will prevent the market from operating in its economic life.

And so socialism and communism worm their way into the fabric of our lives aided and abetted by the most Leftwing President this country has ever experienced and our economy is worsening.

As Read asserts “[w]hen the government enters your home, takes your possessions, keeps them for himself or gives it to others to obtain their votes, it is coercive force.”  

When Biden mandates what people must do with their bodies and when his henchmen (DeBlasio, Murphy, Lightfoot and Newsom) dictate where Americans can dine, shop and enjoy life, we are in the throes of a dictatorship.

The internal enemies of the state are ensuring that America’s youth are denied learning about their birthright and the foundational ideas such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Without understanding and valuing these basic principles, the young cannot perceive they are worth defending.  Mull over the erasure of the 1776 Project by Biden.

Instead, indoctrinate them with misinformation and outright lies and demand they regurgitate the information.  Create at least two generations of historically illiterate youth.  Consider the administration’s embrace of Critical Race Theory.                                                                                           

Eliminate literature that emphasizes character building. Instead advocate tracts of repetitive hate-filled ideas that  pit student against student based on their skin pigmentation. Reflect on the adoption of the works of anti-White author Ibrahim Kendi with nary a word from the Department of Education.

Distort language so students are ignorant of the nuances of words and ideas and cannot engage in genuine critical thinking or introspective questioning.  Heck, men are women and girls can be erased altogether. Confusion abounds because as Jacques Barzun stated, “[i]ntellect deteriorates after every surrender to folly.  Unless we consciously resist, the nonsense does not pass us by but into us.”

Should one, however, dare to speak out, quickly punish the offending individual. Consider the ongoing censorship and assault against speakers on campuses and no rebuke from the administration. Consider the inhumane incarceration of Americans who marched on January 6, 2021.

Book Review: ‘Woke Racism’ by John McWhorter For the left, antiracism is the new religion, and ‘pious, unempirical virtue signaling’ is a form of political activism.By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-woke-racism-by-john-mcwhorter-11634596283

‘This book frankly leapt out of me,” writes John McWhorter, “during the summer of 2020.” The country was convulsed not just with Covid-19, but with protests in response to the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman whose actions were caught on camera. Mr. McWhorter began to write in the first week of August. Eight weeks later, he’d finished “Woke Racism,” a book that hits back at the “antiracists” who prowl public life in search of transgression, and whose mission to rid America of “racist” thought he likens to that of a religious cult. His book is a cry from the heart, and readers should gauge the depth of his indignation from the fact that its working title was “F*** ’Em.”

This eloquent manifesto is Mr. McWhorter’s 22nd book, a majority of those on the subject of linguistics. His is a split personality: A linguist in his day job as a professor at Columbia University (specializing in creoles, particularly the Saramaccan language in Suriname), he’s also an outspoken commentator on race whenever the national mood requires it. As Mr. McWhorter’s thinking on race is in conflict with that of the black American political mainstream, he’s often miscast as a black conservative by glib taxonomists. But he’s careful to point out that he wasn’t “thinking of right-wing America as my audience,” even as he acknowledges that many liberal readers will think him “traitorous” for writing this book.

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

By John McWhorter

Mr. McWhorter’s target audience is, precisely, the one that would regard him as racially incendiary. It includes white progressives who have “fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism.” Equally, it comprises black people who have succumbed to the “misimpression” that the way to their own salvation lies in “a curated persona as eternally victimized souls.”

Mr. McWhorter’s targets in “Woke Racism” are antiracist crusaders whom he calls the Elect—borrowing a term used by the essayist Joseph Bottum in his book “An Anxious Age” (2014). Mr. McWhorter chooses not to call these people Social Justice Warriors or Inquisitors, deeming those labels “unsuitably dismissive” and “mean,” respectively. He’s not the first to trace the “rootstock” of their ideology to critical race theory. This is a once-fringe belief, now muscling its way into mainstream thought, that every individual’s fate is determined by racial “hierarchy” and power. The theory contends, writes Mr. McWhorter, that a nonwhite in America is “akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.”

France: Can Éric Zemmour Be the Next President? The Journalist Who Is Reshuffling the Cards in French Politics by Yves Mamou

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17888/france-eric-zemmour

Zemmour represents the France of yesteryear: the France of Napoleon, Notre Dame de Paris and General Charles de Gaulle, a France that does not want to become an Islamic Republic. “The danger for France is to become a second Lebanon,” Zemmour often says, meaning a country fragmented between sectarian communities that hate and fear one another.

He is the man who broke through the glass ceiling to insert into the media discussion topics such as “immigration” and “jihad” — which no one had ever dared to talk about publicly. He is a man who embodies the fear of seeing traditional France — the one of church steeples and the “baguette” — disappear under the blows of jihad and political correctness.

The meteoric rise of Zemmour has had a second effect: he has broken a degrading electoral trap in which the French people are stuck…. dividing the right to prevent them from returning to power.

From the middle of the eighties until now, the media and the left, together, manufactured an industrial-strength shame-machine to stigmatize as “racist” and “Nazi” anyone who dared to raise his voice on issues of immigration…

The Zemmour fight is just beginning. One thing, however, is certain: Zemmour is restoring an authentic democratic debate about topics — security, immigration, Islam — that really matter to the French. For many, Zemmour is the last chance for France not to become an Islamic nation or a “Lebanon in Europe.”

The Financial Times calls him “the extreme right-winger”. For the New York Times he is the “right wing pundit”. For Die Zeit, he is “the man who divides France”… Eric Zemmour, journalist and essayist, is not (yet) an official candidate for the French presidency, but because of his popularity, France is already living at election time.

Palestinian Prisoners No One Talks About by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17880/palestinian-prisoners-no-one-talks-about

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad prisoners, who have been convicted of terrorism against Israel, received wide coverage because they are being held in Israeli prisons. They are being held in prison because many of them were involved in major terror attacks against Israel, including murder. The international media and the Palestinian Authority (PA), however, refuse to call the prisoners terrorists. Instead, they call them “militants” or “political detainees.”

While the world’s attention remains focused on the Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, there is hardly any mention of prisoners and detainees held by the PA security forces in the West Bank

A Palestinian who goes on hunger strike in a Palestinian prison can only dream of being noticed by a foreign journalist or a human rights organization in the US and Europe. A Palestinian who declares a hunger strike in an Israeli prison, on the other hand, has nothing to fear. He or she knows very well that within minutes the whole world will learn about his “grievances.”

A report by the Committee of the Families of Political Detainees revealed that the Palestinian security forces committed 217 “violations” against Palestinians just during September.

If Abbas cares so much about Hamas and PIJ prisoners, why is he ordering his security forces to arrest and beat Palestinians for being affiliated with the two groups? If he thinks that these prisoners should be released from Israeli prisons, why doesn’t he first release those who are being held in Palestinian prisons?

A final, damning question: Why are the Palestinian security forces arresting or interrogating prisoners shortly after their release from Israeli prisons? How can the PA condemn Israel for arresting these men, but later arrest them on suspicion of belonging to Hamas or PIJ?

In public, Abbas demands that Israel free all the prisoners; but when Israel complies, he rushes to arrest them for “security reasons.” The Palestinian prisoners were lucky when they were in Israeli prisons: they attracted the attention of human rights organizations and journalists around the world.

Those who are now being held in Palestinian prisons are undoubtedly wishing that they could be sent back to Israeli prisons, where they would be better treated and win international sympathy.

A recent hunger strike by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) prisoners held by Israel caught the attention of many journalists and media outlets. Reports about the hunger strike appeared in newspapers around the world and were included in dispatches by major news agencies.

Ground Zero of Woke Universities are making themselves not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/24/ground-zero-of-woke/

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.  

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions. 

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose. 

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities. 

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor. 

High Stakes in Virginia This is only one battle in a much bigger war. Thomas Sowell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/high-stakes-virginia-thomas-sowell/

Although Virginia has been a politically blue state for years, this year’s election has the Democrats’ governor facing a serious challenge.

One of the reasons is that many Virginia parents are outraged by the “woke” propaganda their children are being subjected to in the public schools — and the governor has sided with the education bureaucrats and the teachers union.

Very few politicians in any state dare to go against the teachers unions, which have millions of votes and millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.

If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.

Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.

24 Hours in the ER A reminder that humanity prevails even in COVID hell. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/24-hours-er-katie-hopkins/

Good friends say I’m stubborn as hell. My own mother has slightly less choice words for it — pig-headed, she says, and I guess she knows best.

Either way, as a result of my unwillingness to acknowledge I am struggling, or asking for help last week, I ended up in the back of an ambulance headed to the ER.

I knew I was sick. Even after I regained consciousness, vomiting on my bathroom floor, I thought sleep and a NyQuil would sort me out…pig-headed, you see.

I was wrong. Do not fear, this is not a splurge about myself and the inner workings of my intestines or nasal passages. Nor is it a self-pitying lament about how jolly hard it can be on the road. My affliction was my old adversary, meningitis, returned to remind me I am mortal and need to be a great deal more grateful to be alive.

Rather, this is a glimpse into the inside of an American ER, and a peek into the inner workings of a hospital, in the grip of the COVID storm.

The ambulance men were brusque on arrival, finding my British accent indecipherable and unable to fathom how I had washed up at a hotel on the Oklahoma border without car or a loved one to get me to the hospital. Impatient with my feeble answers, they marked me down as homeless and warned me the hospital was swamped, I should be prepared for a 6-hour wait, and that I should watch my back because “this place is COVID soup.”

Dr. Dog Torturer Fauci funds barbaric torture of beagles in a Tunisian lab. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/dr-anthony-fauci-funds-torture-beagles-tunisian-lloyd-billingsley/

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” the non-profit White Coat Waste project told reporters. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” all to test an “experimental drug.”

White Coat Waste also claimed that some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so their barking would not disturb the attending scientists. Rep. Nancy Mace fired off a letter to the National Institutes of Health, calling the cordectomies “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” Mace is a South Carolina Republican but signatories to her letter included Democrats Cindy Axne, Steve Cohen, Jimmy Gomez, Josh Gottheimer, Ted Lieu, Mike Quigley, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Terri Sewell and Eleanor Holmes Norton, plus more than a dozen Republicans, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Salazar.

In a related cause that could use more bipartisan support, Dr. Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are also under fire for funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The NIAID boss denied funding such research, but now the NIH admits a “limited experiment” to test if bat coronaviruses were “capable of binding” to a human receptor. That contradicts Fauci, the nation’s chief white coat supremacist, who has escaped scrutiny on a number of fronts.

Arming the Taliban—But Not Cops? Lawmakers take aim at a program equipping police with military-surplus gear. Dorothy Moses Schulz

https://www.city-journal.org/equipping-cops-with-military-surplus-lawmakers-taking-aim-at-1033-program

Can anyone forget the images of Taliban fighters riding around Kabul on U.S. vehicles, wearing U.S.-supplied uniforms, and carrying U.S.-made rifles? In addition to stranding people in Afghanistan, the Americans also abandoned Humvees; trucks and armored vehicles, including Mine-Resistant Ambush Protection (MRAP) vehicles valued at about $800,000 each; artillery; aging but operable helicopters and attack aircraft; drones; artillery and mortars; and millions of rounds of ammunition. No one is quite sure how many of these items were disabled or are too sophisticated for the Taliban to operate. Estimates of their value range from $24 billion to $83 billion. Whatever the true figure, U.S. agencies and a few independent investigators agree that close to one-third of what Washington spent on the Afghan defense forces went for war matériel now held by an enemy we ousted 20 years ago.

Contrast the relative apathy shown by many over Taliban possession of this equipment with the ongoing furor over the $7.5 billion worth of decommissioned military gear that the Department of Defense provides to U.S. and territorial police departments under the 1033 Program, which many on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures want to curtail or eliminate. The 1033 Program was meant to save tax dollars by passing off the Pentagon’s excess equipment to local police, who receive the items for free except for shipping costs. The program was part of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, though there have been similar programs since the end of World War II. An earlier version of the program under President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and 1991 sought to aid police departments in fighting the war on drugs. Under President Bill Clinton, counterterrorism was also included among the program’s goals.

According to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which operates the program as part of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Disposition Services, about 8,000 of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies have received military-grade equipment, subject to approval by their states. Much of the cast-off gear is office equipment, clothing and uniforms, tools, and radios.

It is the “controlled equipment,” including armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, rifles and grenade launchers, that has led to demands to rein in the program. The outcry over images of police riding on armored vehicles, wearing night-vision goggles, and carrying military-grade firearms during the 2014 Michael Brown protests led President Barack Obama to issue Executive Order 13688 in 2015, limiting what the Defense Department could transfer. Prohibited items included tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles; .50-caliber firearms and ammunition; bayonets; camouflage uniforms; and grenade launchers. In response, LESO reported that police had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets by April 1, 2016.

But the prohibition was short-lived. In August 2017, President Donald Trump revoked EO 13688, again permitting the transfer of tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, and utility knives—with the rationale for the last two being that officers kept these in their vehicles for use during emergency situations. The program had discontinued transfers of grenade launchers in 1999, prior to Obama’s executive order—a policy that remains in effect today.