NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Merrick Garland Must Go

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/18/merrick-garland-must-go/

A new memo shows that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the FBI snooping on parent groups upset with local school boards for their use of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. If so, it doesn’t warrant a slap on the hand, but swift removal from office.

Presidents deserve to have the people they nominate serve their entire term. But that’s not the case when that person lies under oath to Congress and, by extension, the American people. That’s a criminal offense.

This allegation comes from an official letter sent to the Justice Department by Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee, in response to an email from a whistleblower.

If you’ll recall, on Oct. 21, Garland appeared before Congress and said he couldn’t “imagine any circumstances in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor … a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorists.”  

He went on to say, “I do not think that parents getting angry at school boards for whatever reason constitute domestic terrorism. It’s not even a close question.”

The only problem is, neither statement is true.

Garland in fact proposed using the FBI to investigate parents indignant over schools subjecting their children to the Marxist, anti-American ideological propaganda of Critical Race Theory. For all we know, he’s still doing it.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse Why so many got this story so wrong. Bari Weiss

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse?

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Book of Ruth Ruth R. Wisse’s new memoir is sharp, examined, and a more urgent read than ever By Phyllis Chesler

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/book-of-ruth-wisse-phyllis-chesler

Like the poet John Masefield, I also suffer from “sea fever” and so down I went to the “seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” I needed no “tall ship,” only a room on the beach with a terrace—and all the time in the world to read Ruth R. Wisse’s new book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation.

Reader: I could not put it down. I still chose to read it slowly, to savor it, take it all in. I must have underlined at least a quarter of the book. Wisse commands an aerial view of Jewish history, bringing it to bear on Israeli politics and on the demonization of the only Jewish state. She continues to issue her clarion call about the plague of “political correctness” that threatens to devour the entire Western enterprise.

Free as a Jew is an “intellectual memoir,” but it is also a family history replete with charming photos; a story of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust; and a warm introduction to Yiddish literature, and to many of the major Yiddish writers whom Wisse and her parents knew, hosted, and supported in Montreal, where they lived after fleeing Romania. Wisse introduces us to many of these writers: Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Abraham Sutzkever, and Chaim Grade, as well as to Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Amichai, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz.

For Wisse, Yiddish is not a social justice enterprise, nor is it mainly associated with “progressivism.” Rather, it is a rich language, “associated with the actual Yiddish-speaking communities, which remained what they had always been: outposts of Jewish separatism, consisting mainly of religiously observant Jews living culturally apart from the surrounding population.” Yiddish—the language, the culture, the works—is not meant to be politicized.

Free as a Jew is also a story about Ruth’s love affair with Israel, and about Montreal’s Jews (told through the lens of Ruth’s long career, both at McGill and in publishing, long before she accepted a position at Harvard).

But this work is primarily a quintessential history of ideas, and about the law of unintended intellectual consequences. Wisse now questions her founding Jewish studies, just as I’ve questioned my founding of women’s studies because all identity-based academic studies have become weaponized in the war against Western civilization, which has also come to mean a war against America and Israel.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

If You Read It In The Mainstream Media, It’s Wrong — Plastics Edition Francis Menton

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-16-if-you-read-it-in-the-mainstream-media-its-wrong-plastics-edition

By now you must have noticed how many of the big news stories that have political significance to the left, and are hyped for months or years (or even decades) on end throughout the mainstream media, turn out to be false. Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to hack and steal the 2016 election. Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist vigilante who went to Kenosha to make trouble. There is no such thing as Critical Race Theory taught in K-12 schools. “Climate change” is an existential crisis that can be easily solved at little cost by building wind turbines and solar panels. Saturated fat in your diet is bad for you. Feel free to add your own ten or a hundred examples to this list.

One that I had paid little attention to up to now was the narrative about the evils of plastics — that they cause terrible pollution problems, that they have accumulated in vast amounts in the oceans, that they kill sea creatures by the millions, that they accumulate forever and never degrade, and so forth. While I haven’t been paying attention, this narrative, like so many others, has swept to universal acceptance in progressive precincts, which of course includes my own New York City.

It was a couple of years ago, as this anti-plastics narrative gained traction, that plastic straws first began to disappear from New York City restaurants, generally replaced by paper straws that are much less pleasant to drink from. And the campaign against plastic convenience items has only accelerated. A ban on single-use plastic bags in grocery stores was enacted to take effect in March 2020. That ban got delayed by litigation, but the state prevailed, and enforcement has gradually kicked in over the intervening period. Today, if you go to a grocery store, the formerly standard plastic carry-home bags are gone. You will need to pay to get a paper grocery bag, or alternatively pay even more for a “reusable” bag made of some kind of textile. The disappearance of plastic straws in restaurants has been gradual, but according to this article in the Daily News, an actual ban took effect just a couple of weeks ago on November 1 of this year.

So clearly, there must be something really horrible about these plastic bags and straws, and probably everything else made of plastic. At this point it’s one of those things that everybody just knows.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Iran – the anti-US ripple effect Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3wQd3ZO

The ripple effect theory

An underlying assumption behind any US agreement with Iran’s Ayatollahs is that the Ayatollahs would utilize the resulting financial and diplomatic bonanza for butter rather than guns.

Moreover, it is assumed that Iran’s Ayatollahs are amenable to good-faith negotiation and peaceful-coexistence.  

These assumptions have been quashed by the systematic, rogue, non-compliant and anti-US track record of the Ayatollahs since their violent ascension to power in 1978/79, and especially by their use of the $150bn bonanza showered upon them by the 2015 JCPOA (nuclear accord): intensified regional and global subversion, terrorism, wars, drug trafficking, and the development, manufacturing and proliferation of ballistic technologies.

In fact, the Ayatollahs’ Constitution requires “the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam.”

Furthermore, the assumption that the threats posed by the rogue regime in Teheran is limited to the Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East ignores the ripple effect reality.
Thus, just as a single pebble thrown into a puddle creates a series of ripples throughout the puddle, the eruption of a single local conflict in the Middle East – especially when driven by a 1,400-year-old fanatic, imperialistic, Islamic vision – triggers a series of violent ripples throughout the global puddle. Moreover, a limited-size wave of violence, driven by a megalomaniacal vision – which is accommodated and negotiated rather than crushed – is bound to spark a series of violent waves, evolving into a mega-size lethal wave, which may sweep many regions of the world.

The Iran-driven ripple effects are well-documented in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin and North America. Ignoring the Iranian ripple effects is bound to undermine the US homeland and national security.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Peace-processing Like it’s 1993 Note to Dennis Ross: The world has changed since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

In a meeting in May with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the Biden administration priority “to continue to rebuild our relationship with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority.” Now, after announcing it wants to open a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for the Palestinians, come reports that the administration is working on a plan for a Palestinian “unity government” of Hamas and Fatah to negotiate the “two-state solution” with Israel.

Veteran “peace processor” Dennis Ross wrote the long rationale, including his belief that Israel has to bow in the direction of the anti-Israel progressive “Squad” and “woke” on Capitol Hill:

“Israel cannot ignore the Palestinian issue for its own reasons—the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. But with an evolving political landscape in the U.S., Israel needs to show it is not deepening occupation and is not acting in a way that makes a two-state outcome impossible, even as an option. Drifting toward a one-state outcome in which Palestinians will demand one person, one vote is certain to extend the influence of progressives far beyond where it stands today … . Israel must also deal with the reality that how it approaches the Palestinians will affect how it is seen in the U.S.”  Dennis Ross

Ross also notes that the Palestinians are “divided and show neither the inclination nor capability to adjust any of their positions.” He doesn’t elaborate, and that is his mistake. Hamas and Fatah have been fighting a bloody civil war since 2007—Hamas’s rocket war in May was aimed as much as establishing itself as the more powerful Palestinian faction as it was at Israel. Constructive engagement between Hamas and Fatah is a fantasy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Spain: Migration Crisis Spirals Out of Control by Soeren Kern

Posted By on November 17th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17948/spain-migration-crisis-spirals-out-of-control

“Guys, listen, most of you want to emigrate. Follow this plan: we need 40 volunteers. All the Brooklyn guys who book a flight to Turkey will fly over Spain. One of you will activate the GPS and when the plane approaches Spain you will begin to scream and feign an illness. The stewardess will come and ask for patience until the plane arrives in Turkey. At this moment the others begin to protest and claim that the passenger is going to die…If everyone shows sympathy for the sick passenger, the plane will make an emergency landing in Spain to protect the reputation of the company and to free itself of responsibility.” — A plot by a Moroccan Facebook group to illegally enter Spain, as reported by El Mundo and the Spanish news agency EFE, November 7, 2021

The plot, months in the making and unmatched in audacity, has demonstrated that commandeering airliners is a cheaper and safer way to reach Europe than paying people smugglers thousands of euros for perilous sea crossings.

“Obviously, what can be done with this data is to ignore it and let the problem fester, which is what has been done so far. The last straw is that in Spain they insult you by calling you ‘xenophobic’ and ‘racist’ for the mere fact of pointing out a problem revealed by the official statistics. What they are trying to censor is not a political position, but reality.” — Elentir, blogger, outono.net/elentir, November 6, 2021

As in other parts of Europe, migrant crime in Spain is spiraling beyond the capacity of law enforcement to contain the violence. Migrant crimes are rarely reported by national news outlets, but local newspapers show that migrant criminality is a nationwide problem. Many migrants have criminal records but are repeatedly released back onto the streets by lenient judges. Migrant criminals are rarely deported; many are unable or unwilling to integrate into Spanish society, so the cycle of crime continues apace.

“We say that the requirements to obtain nationality must be toughened because Spanish nationality is a treasure that we are not willing to give away to those who do not respect it and do not deserve it.” — Vox President Santiago Abascal, November 6, 2021

Prosecutors in Spain have charged a dozen North African migrants with sedition for illegally entering the country by forcing a commercial airliner to land on Spanish territory.

The plot, months in the making and unmatched in audacity, has demonstrated that commandeering airliners is a cheaper and safer way to reach Europe than paying people smugglers thousands of euros for perilous sea crossings.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Durham, North Carolina-New Congressional Candidate is Proudly Anti-Israel

Posted By on November 17th, 2021

https://unitedwithisrael.org/new-us-congressional-candidate-is-proudly-anti-israel/

Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Let’s go Nida!”; Keith Ellison tweeted, “Great Candidate”; and Linda Sarsour retweeted Allam’s campaign announcement. 

Nida Allam, a 27-year-old progressive activist and Durham, North Carolina County Commissioner, announced last week that she will run for the Congressional seat of retiring Rep. David Price (D-NC).

I first researched Allam during her 2019 campaign for County Commissioner, due to her anti-Israel positions. What I found was a history of abhorrent statements that extended far beyond Israel.

In 2018, Allam tweeted, “This is the United States of Israel,” which is consistent with centuries-old antisemitic propaganda that Jews seek to dominate the world.

In 2013, Allam tweeted, “F*** the police,” and she has made many offensive and hateful posts over the years.

I spoke with award-winning Durham columnist and black minister, Carl W. Kenney II, who told me that Allam’s use of the N-word in a 2014 tweet is “appalling.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

LIZ SHIELD: THE KNIVES COME OUT FOR KAMALA

Posted By on November 17th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/16/morning-greatness-the-knives-are-out-for-kamala/

The political scandal sheets are reporting a kerfuffle between VP Kamala and the Biden clan. Spinmaster Jen Psaki commented about the rumors at the daily White House propaganda trough on Monday. “The president relies on the vice president for her advice, for her counsel,” Psaki said when asked if Biden has confidence in Harris. Let’s remember how very unpopular Kamala was during her short run as a presidential candidate. She’s there because she checks boxes as a woman and as someone who is not white. Biden promised that he would chose a running mate who met superficial requirements, not ability, merit or skill. Is it any surprise she is treated like a trinket or show pony now?

CNN, one of the corporate propaganda arms of the Democrats described “exasperation and dysfunction” in the VP’s office. On Sunday, corporate propagandist Politico wrote about who Biden’s replacement might be in 2024. Politico writes, “Typically, the person at the other side of that bridge would be the vice president. But less than a year into her time in the executive branch, more than a dozen Democratic officials — some affiliated with potential candidates — say that Harris is currently not scaring any prospective opponents.”

A New Hampshire political operative told Politico, “She’s definitely not going to clear the f—ing field.”

Kamala’s people argue she’s been set up to fail based on the portfolios she’s been assigned: voting rights and illegal immigration. Well boohoo, are you ready for prime time or not? These are both serious and legitimate issues, why can’t she handle them? Psaki told the WH press corp yesterday that Kamala is “not looking for a cushy role” as vice president. It sure sounds like she is. Kamala’s office fired back against the bad press by leaking that Biden’s office is racist. One former aide to Harris explained the “specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking lots of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves.” That white man, is none other than Secretary Mayor Pete.

The icing on the cake is that Kamala is less popular than Biden with only 28 percent job approval compared to a dismal 38 percent for Biden. Good luck in 2024 Kamala!

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How Much Cheating Is Enough? The Virginia election results offer us a misleading, illusory stability, if it leads Americans to believe that our elections can be trusted. By Dan Gelernter

Posted By on November 17th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/16/how-much-cheating-is-enough/

The recent Republican victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race is the best thing that could possibly have happened for Democrats. Yes, we have a Republican governor in a state that was being rapidly dismantled by leftist insanity. But the election also undermines any sense of strategic unity for future election cycles. 

If the Democrats had succeeded in stealing the Virginia election, there could have been no faith in any future election. No reason to continue playing the game that Democrats are so busy fixing (often with Republican cooperation). Instead, a Republican victory makes for useful propaganda. It allows RINOs to argue that what America wants is less Trump and more traditional, middle-of-the-road politicians—the sort of people who play the Washington game and who sacrifice your freedom and spend your money so that they can remain in power. 

The Youngkin victory also becomes a weapon in the hands of both Democrats and corrupt Republicans who wish to undermine the 2020 fraud story. And it will encourage those with legitimate concerns about election integrity to think that the situation is under control, and that we can all relax again. Nothing could be further from the truth.  

Virginia was a case of the Democrats cheating, just not quite enough. New Jersey was a case of the Democrats cheating just enough. Every election, especially an off-year election, is a practice session for Democrats to fine-tune their vote-stealing strategy in preparation for the main event. It is a complex balance: Expectations have to be set correctly with the help of sympathetic pollsters. True results have to be projected in order to understand how many fraudulent votes will be required. (This is one of the main reasons election fraud relies on voting centers staying open late and counting operations being arbitrarily suspended—so that the required votes can be requested and delivered.)