https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/matt-palumbo-video-mind-behind-iron-curtain-bongino-report/
In this new video, author Matt Palumbo talks about his new book: The Man Behind the Iron Curtain. It explores the domestic and international far-reaching influence of leftist financier George Soros, backed by his tens of billions of dollars. Don’t miss it.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/forever-war-islams-war-west-don-feder/
Imagine after Pearl Harbor, FDR announcing, “We’re getting into this to bring human rights to Japanese women” or “Our goal in this war is give Germany a democracy.” He would have been laughed out of office.
There was only one legitimate reason to go into Afghanistan after 9/11 and it’s the same reason that should have impelled us to stay – not human rights, democracy or nation-building – but saving our nation.
We went to Afghanistan to root out terrorism, to destroy Al Qaeda’s infrastructure, to disrupt its network – and, quite frankly, to kill as many terrorists as possible.
The goal was to kill them there so they wouldn’t kill us here, as they did on 9/11. Everything else was extraneous. That the mission failed may be seen in just how quickly the Taliban made a comeback, except now, with the most modern weapons in the region – thanks to Quartermaster Joe.
The cut-and-run crowd called it “the forever war.” Rubbish.
You want to hear about a forever war? Afghanistan was the latest chapter in a conflict that’s been going on since the 7th century.
At one time, Islam engulfed much of the known world – from the Arabian Peninsula west to the Pyrenees and east to the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
In his book “The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order” (1996), Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington spoke of “Islam’s bloody borders,” alluding to the fact that almost all of the religion-based conflicts in the world involve Islam versus someone else.
America’s longest war, they call it. Really? Through April, 2,448 Americans died in the 20 years we’ve been in Afghanistan – fewer than the number of Americans who died in one day in the attack on the World Trade Center (2,996).
The Vietnam War, which started under the French, went on for 21 years (1954-1975). Over 58,000 Americans died when we fought there. Was it worth it? I believe it was. South Vietnam fell. But due to our involvement (and the price we paid in blood), communism is no longer a potent force in Southeast Asia.
https://www.city-journal.org/philly-suburbs-schools-adopt-critical-race-theory
Lower Merion Township’s beauty and wealth belie its proximity to the impoverished neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which borders the township just east on Route 30. Being the first suburb on the Main Line, Lower Merion is home to many of the region’s wealthy residents. With a median income of nearly $140,000 per year has come an extraordinarily well-funded, high-achieving public school district.
The 83-percent-white township is also unabashedly progressive. The town has about 2.8 times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. The school board is run exclusively by Democrats. Local church lawns are filled with colorful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black people killed by police. And shoppers at Suburban Square, a high-end local shopping center, are enveloped in the pride flags that decorate shops and sidewalks every few steps in the month of June.
But despite the town’s progressive vibe, a battle over local schools’ embrace of critical pedagogy is burgeoning. To try and understand this cultural conflict in a place where “wokeness” is part of the atmosphere, I spoke with public and private school parents and a person with experience on the school board, and I attended a meeting of local residents and Republican Party officials. All involved requested anonymity.
When local Republicans hosted a meeting in late June at a home not far from Lower Merion High School, about two dozen people stood in the living room, Rolls-Royces and Honda Civics alike parked along the ornate stone curb. Following a brief overview of local budget issues and political polling came the main issue of the evening: the school district’s left turn. Such terms as “race essentialism” and “transgenderism” were tossed around. Still, agreement on the origins and shape of the ideology that these people found themselves contending with remained elusive.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/03/sorry-afghan-war-isnt-over-until-those-we-left-behind-can-return/
In what can only be called a shocking lack of self-awareness, President Joe Biden this week bragged about his “extraordinary success” in Afghanistan. Now his handlers and the Democratic Party are urging Americans and, of course, the media to “move on.” But there is no moving on from his botched departure from Kabul, whose ill effects will be felt by Americans for decades.
Far from a success, the “evacuation” was in fact an ill-planned, incompetently executed, chaotic dash to cram as many human beings as possible onto planes and transport them away from Kabul. The new talking point is that “only” 100 or so Americans may have been left behind, despite Biden’s explicit promise that none would be.
The media, which for several days seemed actually to be doing their job, are now falling in line with the new White House-Democratic Party spin. Afghanistan is now a yesterday story.
As National Review noted on Thursday:
“Today is the day that the U.S. media begins its pivot away from Afghanistan. The front page of the New York Times features Hurricane Ida’s rains hitting New York City, and the Supreme Court’s declining to block Texas’ new abortion law. Those are the same two top stories at the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.”
While the administration, in one of the epic political spin jobs ever, lauds itself for its evacuation efforts, the truth is it likely left far more Americans and deserving Afghans in Kabul than estimated. That means victims and/or hostages for the now-jubilant, victorious Taliban, an intolerable situation.
Data from earlier this week estimated 116,700 people were evacuated from Afghanistan. “In fact, while only 5,400 or so Americans were brought to safety, only about 8,500 SIV holders were rescued, with the vast majority left behind,” RedState reports.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-reconciliation-entitlements-global-competitiveness-corporate-tax-hike-income-death-11630619861?mod=opinion_featst_pos1
Joe Biden this week completed the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, in a humiliating military surrender to the Taliban. The president is more interested in working on a second capitulation—a wholesale economic surrender to China and other rivals.
Members of the House Ways and Means Committee were notified that markup will begin as early as next Thursday on Democratic plans for the largest tax increase in at least 50 years. House leaders have yet to provide any text for the committee work, since they continue to negotiate the details. But the White House and Democratic lawmakers have made clear the broad contours, which are best read as an exercise in U.S. self-sabotage—a gift to foreign companies and foreign workers everywhere.
Washington excels at spin, but few lines may prove more economically destructive than the continued Democratic claim that the 2017 tax law was about cuts for the “rich.” Even critics at the time acknowledged the law’s real highlight—its central focus—was its overdue and comprehensive reform of the corporate tax system. As this page’s editorial columns noted, the cuts on the individual side weren’t nearly “as ambitious,” making only marginal trims to top rates.
The corporate changes were specifically designed to restore America’s global competitiveness, which had eroded over decades. It cut the top corporate rate, which at 35% was the highest in the developed world. It got rid of a backward “world-wide” tax system, in which U.S. companies paid taxes in countries where they earned income and again if they returned money here. This was fundamentally a “pro-America” reform.
And it worked. An estimated $1.6 trillion flowed back into the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, which businesses poured into American factories, American jobs, American wages.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/soviet-jewish-schools-yeshiva-yevsektzia-schneersohn-yaffed-antisemitism-first-amendment-11630613080?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Mr. Margolin is a senior editor at Chabad.org.
After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks launched a harsh war on religious education throughout the Soviet Union, with devastating consequences for Judaism. To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, Soviet attacks on traditional Jewish schools, known as cheders or yeshivas, were led by the Yevsektzia, the militant Jewish sections of the Communist Party, whose members were often more ideologically zealous than their gentile counterparts. In an effort to win Jewish hearts and minds, in January 1921 the Yevsektzia organized a particularly grotesque episode called the Trial of the Cheder.
Held in Vitebsk, the six-day show trial was similar to the medieval disputations with which Jews had contended for centuries. “Experts” on education and hygiene testified that the cheder was backward and dirty. The spectacle quickly devolved into a blatant attack on Judaism.
Despite a valiant defense by Vitebsk’s Jewish community, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. Every cheder in Vitebsk was ordered to close. In the early 1920s, more than 1,000 cheders were closed in the U.S.S.R.
My grandfather’s Jewish education was terminated at a second-grade level by this crackdown. Born in Ukraine in 1920, my great-grandparents wanted him to receive authentic Jewish schooling. Even as communism destroyed their world, they persisted and sent their young son to a cheder.
“I barely got past alef beis”—the Hebrew alphabet—“and it was closed,” my grandfather told me shortly before his death last spring at 100. “Some teachers were arrested or shot, others scared away. Before long it was all gone.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ida-remnants-hit-northeast-with-rain-flooding-tornadoes-11630554939
States in the Northeast began recovery efforts Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida unleashed record-breaking rainfalls, flash floods and tornadoes in a powerful burst that blindsided some in the region and killed at least 45 people.
The death toll doubled late Thursday afternoon, when New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy reported the tally in his state. At least 23 people died there, the majority caught in vehicles by floodwaters, Mr. Murphy said. Some people were missing since the storm, but he didn’t say how many.
“We are still very much in the midst of the impacts of Ida,” he said at a news conference.
The storm cut a path from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night, trapping some people in basements in fast-rising water and others in cars on flooded roads. In southern New Jersey, tornadoes tore through homes, farms and trees.
Thousands of people across the region had to be rescued by first-responder crews traversing waist-high waters in boats and other vehicles, according to officials in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/taliban-better-armed-nato-afghanistan/
It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing an ‘elite unit’ of the Taliban. In a season finale that the most dystopian screenwriter would have struggled to invent, the elite Taliban unit was itself bedecked in US military kit. That is, they were not only wearing uniforms and protective kit provided by the fleeing US army, but were parading the airport with US-provided guns in US-provided vehicles.
This was the culmination of a two-week period that the White House is still trying to present as a success. One of the biggest airlifts in history, they insist. In reality the Biden administration has pulled off a feat few of us thought possible. A military-political defeat that gets worse the more you look at it.
Take the issue of the kit that the Americans have left behind. I’m sure by now everyone has seen the lists of armaments that the US left with the swiftly dissolved Afghan army that America and its allies struggled to train for two decades.
The Taliban inherited that defeated army’s kit in its entirety. That entirety includes 33 Black Hawk helicopters, 43 MD 530 helicopters, 32 Mi-17 helicopters, 23 A-29 light attack planes, at least 33 other attack planes and three gigantic Hercules aircraft thrown in for good measure. Thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, the Taliban now has more attack helicopters than the UK, and is better armed than almost every Nato country, apart from the US.
When these facts emerged this week, a portion of the commentariat tried to pretend this was no great shakes. These last defenders of the President insisted it didn’t matter that the Taliban had control of all these Black Hawks. For how could a group of goat-herders, who have barely learned to operate their rusty old Soviet motorcycles, be expected to retrain as helicopter pilots? As if they were listening, right on cue, the Taliban began flying one of their new Black Hawks over the skies of Kabul. That was quite the F-you: top kit, in new hands, only one previous owner, hardly used.
Perhaps aware this does not look great, the US military is claiming to have disabled some of the kit they left behind. On Monday, Gen. McKenzie said that before leaving Kabul airport the US military permanently disabled 150 vehicles and aircraft so they can ‘never be used again’. The rocket air defense system was reportedly kept online until the last minute and then demilitarized.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17714/iran-torture-epidemic
While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.
There are reports of slow public hangings-to-death on cranes, amputations of fingers by special guillotines, electric shocks, floggings and rape….
One can also regrettably assume that neither of these men, nor any of the multitudes of others treated in a similar way, was given a fair trial or anything close to a legal defense. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, “Three more human rights attorneys in Iran were handed unjust prison sentences in July 2021 amid an ongoing campaign to eliminate due process for activists and dissidents by intimidating the lawyers who defend them….”
The UN, instead of doing its job, appears to have granted the Iranian regime’s leaders full impunity. For how long are the UN, the European Union and the Biden administration going to continue appeasing the mullahs of Iran instead of holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity?
While the Biden administration and other members of the United Nations Security Council continue to push for the resuscitation of the disastrous nuclear deal — granting Iran nuclear weapons and global legitimacy — they have turned a blind eye to the mullahs’ ever-increasing violations of human rights.
Recently, a hacking group calling itself Edalat-e Ali (Ali’s Justice) leaked videos of Iran’s prisons, some of which revealed abuse, including beatings and other unspeakable treatment of detainees carried out by the Iranian authorities at the notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held. “We will continue to expose the oppression,” that the Iranian government is “inflicting on people,” the group said.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/importing-enemies/
Perennial Democratic White House aide, congressman, Chicago mayor, and ambassador-in-waiting Rahm Emmanuel’s sole memorable utterance—his only candidate for Bartlett’s—is his cynical 2008 maxim that the good guys (i.e., his team) must “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” He was speaking of using the financial crisis to usher in sweeping changes to law, policy, the economy, and society that would otherwise not have been possible through ordinary democratic processes.
The same logic applies now to the Democrats’—and many Republicans’—insistence that America be flooded with Afghan “refugees.” Importing as many immigrants as possible, from cultures as alien to traditional America as possible, is the ruling class’s top priority, after protecting its own wealth and power. But since importing millions upon millions of foreigners is the primary tool by which the ruling class maintains that wealth and power—by suppressing wage growth and dividing the population—it can be hard to disaggregate these two priorities.
The parallels between the two crises are obvious. Just as ruling class hubris, incompetence, dishonesty, and greed created the financial crisis, so did a similar combination produce the mess in Afghanistan. There is no need to rehash the “higher” motives for the failure here. It is worth noting, however, that lower motives were not absent: a lot of people were making a lot of money off that war.
And now, just like thirteen years ago, our rulers want to use a crisis they created as justification to ram through what they always wanted to do anyway. Which, in this case, is to resettle a hundred or two hundred thousand (the number varies depending on who’s speaking) foreigners with no tradition of liberty—who are indeed from a culture deeply alien, even hostile to, Western civilizational norms—in your communities.
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