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CRT Roundup: Fairfax County Schools Sent Second Graders Video Vilifying Cops: ‘I Feel Safe When There Are No Police’

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/critical-race-theory-roundup/

Over the last year, teachers and administrators nationwide have weaponized K-12 education, injecting progressive politics into classrooms, and indoctrinating students with novel social justice dogma, including theories that call for racialized curriculums and reverse discrimination to achieve racial equity.

Mainstream media outlets and left-wing commentators have accused conservatives of demonizing critical race theory, and turning an obscure academic theory into a rightwing “bogeyman.” But there sure are a lot of examples of it turning up in schools across the country, from big city Democratic strongholds to suburban districts in red America. The following are summaries of just a small number of the fights that have erupted in the last year.

Fairfax County Schools Sent Second Graders a Video Vilifying Police: ‘I Feel Safe When There Are No Police’

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) sent second-graders a “summer learning guide” in July which included a Youtube video titled “Woke Kindergarten” that vilified the police.

Centered around the importance of “feeling safe,” the video, which was obtained by Parents Defending Education, presents a slideshow of photos featuring groups of young African Americans, some of whom are holding Black Lives Matter signs.

“We deserve to feel safe in our homes… I feel safe when there are no police. And it’s no one’s job to tell me how I feel. But it’s everyone’s job to make sure that people who are being treated unfairly……feel safe too,” a narrator says.

The “suggested texts” section of the summer learning guide also recommends students listen to “Good Trouble by Ki,” which instructs students on the merits of civil disobedience.

The narrator of another video, intended for seven-year-olds, tells students, “sometimes it’s good to get into trouble.” The video also presents a sequence of photos depicting social justice demonstrations, some from the modern day and some taken during the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

In a reference to Representative John Lewis’ 2020 speech in Selma, Alabama commemorating Bloody Sunday, the video adds, “John Lewis was a freedom fighter who got in a lot of good trouble.”

“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America,” Lewis declared at the 2020 event.

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Dems See the Endless Possibilities of the ‘Illegal but Good’ Agenda By David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dems-see-the-endless-possibilities-of-the-illegal-but-good-agenda/

“With eviction victory in hand,” a Washington Post headline informs us, “congressional Democrats turn attention to student loans”:

A torrent of Congressional Democrats is calling on the White House to extend a soon-expiring pause on federal student loan payments, emboldened by their success in pressuring the Biden administration to approve a new eviction moratorium.

It wasn’t “congressional Democrats” who procured this “victory.” It was a “torrent” of activists who happen to be in Congress who were successful. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted yesterday, they took “direct action” and pressured the president of the United States to nullify property rights while ignoring Congress and SCOTUS. Congress did nothing but abdicate its responsibilities.

It’s true that Democrats celebrating this week’s eviction moratorium see the delegitimizing of courts and circumvention of Congress as a “victory.” Why wouldn’t they expect their agenda to be unilaterally implemented via the executive branch? What limiting principle stops Biden from ripping up student-loan agreements? Or mortgages, for that matter? What limiting principle stops the CDC from dropping a national vaccine mandate — with penalties, including jail time — or instituting national vaccine passports? It might be illegal, but if it saves lives, right? And why only the CDC? Why not other federal agencies? Democrats will, of course, whine when President Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump 2.0 governs via similar diktats. But Democrats will have set the precedent: If the president deems his actions “good,” it’s kosher now.

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The People vs. Critical Race Theory Zachary Rogers

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-people-vs-critical-race-theory/

There won’t be a second chance to take back hijacked American schools.

With a speed that has astonished ordinary Americans, a vocal minority of “critical race theorists” has blitzed K-12 education with sweeping changes of law and policy. The New York Times’ 1619 Project has been the tip of the spear of their movement to put anti-American narratives of race and power at the heart of American curricula.

Even at the very highest levels of prestige, the examples now are legion. At the Dalton School in New York City, faculty signed a letter with a long list of recommendations, including: yearly anti-racist training for employees, an expanded diversity bureaucracy with at least 12 positions, and employee anti-racism statements. Prestigious exam schools predicated upon admitting excellent students and outstanding staff have been pushed to abandon entrance tests in the name of equity (not to be confused with equality).

Not to be outdone, the Illinois Board of Education recently amended a rule to establish “culturally responsive” teaching standards. The regulations require educators to recognize that there is no one “‘correct’ way of doing or understanding something”; to acknowledge that “systems of oppression…in our society…create and reinforce inequities”; and to “work actively against” those systems in order to “understand how the system of inequity has impacted them as an educator.” The amendment mandates that teachers adopt a narrow political ideology that includes a view of American history, society, and law that most citizens reject. The prioritization of this agenda comes at a time when many students are not even in the classroom.    

Majority Report

The spirit that moved the Illinois Department of Education saturates social media and is omnipresent on elite college campuses. But there is also good news. Despite what the media and the academy would have you believe, the American people think that free speech, equal opportunity under the law, and the principles of the founding should still govern the day-to-day lives of citizens. A recent survey of 800 Illinois residents sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) strongly suggests that efforts to politicize public education do not align with the values of the majority of citizens. Rather than imposing a partisan agenda through rules and regulations from an agency, citizens should have an informed debate about public school curricula and teaching standards.   

To judge from Illinoisans’ assessment of their K-12 schools, the conversation is overdue. Forty-eight percent of respondents think that schools are doing a “worse than good” job (6 percent answered “excellent”). To improve that number, schools would be well served by focusing on preparing students for lifelong success rather than imposing policies and advocating a socio-political position that is at best controversial. 

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Denying the Centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish People Alex Z. Grobman

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://jewishlink.news/features/45306-denying-the-centrality-of-jerusalem-to-the-jewish-people

Attempts to deny the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is part of this unrelenting war against Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) accuses the Jewish state of fashioning a false Jewish history, while appropriating Palestinian history, culture and heritage. The Palestinians Arabs refer to these actions as “Judaization.” As Palestinian Media Watch founder Itamar Marcus explains, the main target is supposedly the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israel allegedly schemes to demolish to build the Jewish Temple. PA political and religious leaders, officials and academics refer to the Temple as Al-Haikal Al-Maz’oom, the “alleged Temple.”

A Palestinian Arab “specialist” on Jerusalem declared that the well-known verse from the Book of Psalms 137, “If I forget thee, Oh Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill,” is not of Jewish origin, but was originally spoken by a Christian Crusader and “borrowed” by Jews and “falsified in the name of Zionism.”

Irrefutable Evidence

The question of the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people is irrefutable from many sources. Historian Rivkah Duker Fishman examined the works of Greek and Roman authors of classical antiquity from nearly 20 diverse sources dating from the third century BCE to the third century CE, roughly six centuries. Fishman found that the authors of these historic works unanimously agreed that Jerusalem was Jewish since it was “founded by Jews, its inhabitants were Jews and that the Temple, located in Jerusalem, was the center of the Jewish religion.” Even though some of these authors like Manetho, Apion, Tacitus and Juvenal held clearly negative views about Jews and Judaism, they were completely in accord about the Jewish identity of Jerusalem.

Descriptions of the Temple are a part of the reports on Jerusalem and on Judaism, ranging from fact “to the libelous and bizarre. For the Greeks and Romans, Jerusalem was famous for its Temple, which served as the focal point of the xenophobic, strange, and possibly menacing rites of the Jews whose contributions brought much gold into the city…. After its destruction in 70 CE, the memory of the Temple persisted in the retrospective histories by Tacitus and by Cassius Dio.” These ancient texts, therefore, refute current efforts by Muslims and others to deny the historic connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem and the site of the Temple.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

President Biden’s Middle East Policy by Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3xnO4f1

Disengagement from the Middle East?

The Middle East is situated between Europe, Asia and Africa, and between the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

President Biden wishes to disengage from the Middle East, but the Middle East does not intend to disengage from the US.

The US is perceived by rogue Middle East entities as “The Great Satan” and the mega-obstacle on their way to achieve their mega-goal: bringing the West to submission, militarily, culturally and religiously. This mega-goal has been deeply-rooted since the 7th century, independent of US policies.

Isolation is not a realistic option in the increasingly globalized village, where rogue Middle East regimes are engaged in the proliferation of terrorism, non-conventional military technologies and drug trafficking around the globe. Their reach extends all the way to the American continent, impacting the US homeland security.

Will the US lead – or follow – the engagement process?  Will the engagement with rogue Middle East entities be conducted mostly around the US – or the Middle East – “end zone”?

The Biden team’s track record

President Biden’s Middle East policy reflects the worldview of his top foreign policy and national security team, most notably Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who has been President Biden’s most influential advisor since 2002-2008 (similar to Secretary Baker’s influence on President Bush), when Blinken was the Democratic Staff Director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Other leading members of the team are Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, William Burns, the CIA Director and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. They – like Blinken – played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Middle East policy.

For instance, they were instrumental in carving the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran (JCPOA), which followed the US embrace of Iran’s Ayatollahs (Shiite terrorism), while demoting the stature of the pro-US Saudis, the UAE and Bahrain.  This has intensified the existential threat to these regimes, injuring the US’ strategic reliability, and driving its traditional Arab allies closer to China and Russia.

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Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution Francis Menton

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=8d27aee23c

Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state’s attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

The New York Post today has an 8-page special section that starts off on page 4 with the headline “AG: Governor Is A Groper.” Here’s the lead paragraph:

Gov. Cuomo was exposed in a blockbuster investigative report made public Tuesday as a dirty old man who used his powerful position to sexually harass female underlings less than half his age — including by touching their “intimate body parts” without consent.

Here’s the cover from today’s Post:

What has occurred is that lawyers working under the authority of Attorney General Letitia James have spent the past several months looking into allegations of sexual harassment by various women against Cuomo. Yesterday, the investigators issued their 165 page Report. The Report considers claims by some eleven women, with the allegations ranging from inappropriate touching to groping to lewd comments. (Unlike with, say, Bill Clinton, there do not appear to be any allegations of actual unwanted sexual intercourse.). The investigators find the claims to be credible, and the conduct of the Governor to be in violation of state law.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Time to take advantage of cracks in Tehran’s armor By Ruthie Blum 

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/time-to-take-advantage-of-cracks-in-tehrans-armor-opinion-675992

There’s nothing new about the powers-that-be in Tehran speaking out of both sides of their mouths, particularly when switching from Farsi to other languages. The only “novelty” was the inauguration on Tuesday – and swearing-in before the Majlis on Thursday – of Ebraim Raisi as Iran’s eighth president, replacing Hassan Rouhani in the role that he’s held since 2013.

Though it remains to be seen how Raisi “The Butcher” handles the predicament currently confronting the Islamic Republic, it’s safe to say that one way in which he’ll toe the ayatollahs’ line is to rule with an iron fist while lying about it for international consumption.

Indeed, as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s hand-picked victor in the staged June 18 “election,” Raisi is certain to hit the ground running where attempting to quash the countrywide protests that have been plaguing his country for the past few weeks is concerned.
Nor is there any doubt that he’ll continue his predecessors’ tradition of pinning the blame for the public’s dire economic straits on the United States and Israel – the former for “crippling sanctions,” and the latter for aggression.

At this juncture, however, the Iranian people are so fed up with their plight at the hands of the regime that they’re no longer willing to be fed the propaganda. They want actual sustenance in the form of food on the table and water in the tap, both of which are running as scarce as electricity.

The fact that their slogans at mass demonstrations include calls for Khamenei’s death means that they no longer fear the torturous punishment that befalls Iranian dissidents. Their denunciations of the government’s funding of Palestinian terrorism, let alone its bankrolling ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, indicates that they have become emboldened by the sense that they have nothing left to lose

THE TROUBLE is that what they have to gain could easily be thwarted by fantasists in Washington. Yes, the administration of US President Joe Biden incredibly refuses to abandon its notion that a return to some form of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – the nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries from which former president Donald Trump withdrew in 2018 – is the way to curb the threat from Tehran.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It Doesn’t Take Censorship to Fight a Pandemic Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/it-doesnt-take-censorship-to-fight.html

After Biden’s spokeswoman boasted that the administration was ordering Facebook to censor some people’s speech, Fauci joined the campaign by appearing on CNN to warn about the dangers of letting anyone say whatever they think. “We probably would still have polio in this country if we had the kind of false information that’s being spread now,” he falsely claimed.

Fauci as usual is wrong. The polio vaccine was the subject of numerous controversies which played out in public.

There were anti-vaccine campaigns long before Facebook. The most bracing of these took on the polio vaccine with the headline, “Little White Coffins” declaring, “Only God above will know how many thousands of little white coffins will be used to bury the victims of Salk’s heinous, fraudulent vaccine.” Walter Winchell, who at his peak reached over 50 million people, warned that one particular version of the vaccine, which contained a live virus, was a “killer”.

Contrary to Fauci’s fantasies (aided and abetted by a media eager to find a pretext for censoring any open marketplace of ideas), the fifties were not a totalitarian dystopia in which free speech did not exist. Many of the same controversies as today, from socialism to science, played out to large audiences across a bewildering array of national and local newspapers, radio stations, mailings, books and magazines in a country where the media had not yet been consolidated.

Today, much of the newspaper, radio, and television markets, not to mention publishing, are controlled in one way or another by a handful of giant companies. While the fifties had their massive chains and networks, they were far more intellectually diverse, and had plenty of different owners and perspectives in the mix. The American cultural environment today would strike people from that era as Communist because it resembles the tight centralized control of the Soviet Union. America has never had as little free and open debate as it does now because never have the means of debate been clutched in as few hands as is now the case..

There was aggressive promotion of the polio vaccine by the government, by local authorities, and by non-profit advocacy groups, but there was also vigorous opposition by a variety of people, some credible and some not, and the scientific debates over the vaccine, most notably between the live virus and the inactive virus, played out in public with ordinary people following the back and forth between Salk and Sabin. When Salk’s inactive vaccine was replaced with Sabin’s live virus, the vaccine researcher turned to attacking it as unsafe and dangerous.

Americans not only survived a vigorous public debate over the polio vaccine, but managed to stop polio because the debate over the vaccine between advocates and opponents, and between scientists, played out in public creating a sense of transparency and trust.

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Vaccination Weaponization The Biden Administration should look in the mirror before casting stones at others. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/04/vaccination-weaponization/

 It was always going to be Herculean to inoculate, with an untried vaccine, a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million, across a vast continent—in an era when the media routinely warps the daily news. 

Some minorities understandably harbored distrust of prior government vaccination programs. 

Nearly 40 million foreign residents in America are from countries where corrupt governments had long ago lost the trust of the population. 

The anti-vaccination movement was distrustful of what the government said was safe—given the rush to produce previously untried mRNA inoculation methodologies. 

Rural and inner-city poor were sometimes not so easily reached, much less persuaded. 

Yet politics played the most obstructive role early on. Candidate Joe Biden talked grandly of reviving the World War II war production board. He deliberately omitted that it was Donald Trump who emulated FDR’s mobilization of private enterprise under government auspices. 

Trump offered legal protections for companies to accelerate their research and development—in hopes that competition, profits, and public oversight would result in COVID-19 vaccinations just 10 months after the pandemic hit. 

And it worked. Mostly safe and effective vaccinations were rolled out shortly after the election. Some 17 million were inoculated by the time of Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. 

Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the days when he still posed as a bipartisan professional, had dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year 2020. Joe Biden publicly doubted that Trump’s vaccination efforts would either work or be safe. 

In a nationally televised debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris shamefully said she would never be vaxxed with any shot associated with President Trump. All that proved disastrous messaging for an already skeptical nation. 

Pfizer had promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October on the eve of the election. Then it mysteriously went silent—only to suddenly announce its successful  vaccination, just a few days after the November 3 voting. 

Joe Biden continued the politicization of the vaccination program by bizarrely and falsely declaring on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet Biden himself was first vaccinated on December 21 on live television. 

Soon Biden grandly promised that all those who were vaccinated would be safe from infection from the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. And thus they could resume normal lives without masks, quarantines, or social distancing. 

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Israel’s Place in the New Order: A Practitioner’s Perspective by Yaakov Amidror

Posted By on August 5th, 2021

https://jstribune.com/yaakov-amidror-israels-place-in-new-world-order/

The world Israel lives in is dramatically different from the one in which our elders grew up, amid Cold War tensions and with large Arab armies at Israel’s borders. Within the last decade we witnessed the rise of China, America’s announced intention to reduce its presence in the Middle East, the aggressiveness of a weakened but assertive Russia, and the consequences of turmoil in the Middle East. We are faced with multiple threats, including a shifting balance of power in Asia and an increasingly lawless global system—scarred by the failure of globalization during the COVID-19 crisis. Amid all this, it is imperative that Israel sustain its own strength, while working hard to restore bipartisan support in the United States and making good use of the new alignments in the Eastern Mediterranean and with like-minded Sunni Arab nations.

A World of Difference

How different is the world we live in from that which we have been raised to expect? To answer this question we need to define the relevant timeframe discussed in this essay. Clearly this is a world radically different from the one in which I came of age and learned my trade as an intelligence officer—the post-1945 world in which two overly armed nuclear powers, the US and the Soviet Union, faced each other in deadly competition across the globe (with a block of the “non-aligned” trying, not always successfully, to stay on the sidelines); and the post-1948 world in which Israel faced the threat of enemy Arab states surrounding it with a million armed men, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighter aircraft.

Since then, the Soviet Union has fallen apart and in our region, no Arab army (other than the Egyptian military) is large or significant enough to constitute a threat. But to better understand the world in which Israel must function, the changes—globally as well as regionally—within the last decade provide the relevant frame of analysis. This has been a decade in which the global distribution of power became much more evident, in light of several developments:

Eight years of rule—now set to be extended indefinitely—by Xi Jinping in China, under whose leadership the People’s Republic of China pursues a strategy of aggressive growth. It is already America’s peer rival, as it seeks a revision of the global order; this, in turn, has set in motion drastic changes in the global alignments and alliances.

The return of the Democrats to power in both branches of government in the US and the ensuing debate (and internal fissures) on aspects of policy—including the “special relationship” with Israel—amid signs of radical polarization, leading the US away from the traditional role it is expected to play in the region and beyond.

The willingness and ability of Russia, despite demographic decline and severe economic limitations, to play an outsized role due to its readiness to use force, led by an assertive president and backed by an impressive and intimidating nuclear arsenal.

The dramatic and confusing events of the so-called Arab Spring, which brought about the disintegration of several states. It is now evident that the non-Arab powers—Iran, Turkey, and Israel—are the tone-setters in a region once viewed as the heartland of Arab nationalism.

Looking toward the future, five key cycles of dynamic changes seem to have a transformative role and need to be addressed by policy makers.

The Chinese Challenge

China is fast becoming the dynamic revisionist power in the global order—deliberately and rather aggressively expanding its circle of influence. It does not fear competing with the US; rather, it seeks to pose the Chinese model as an alternative to Western democracy and pushes for structural change in any international organization and forum it is part of, or uses existing organizations to implement its own interests. It has become more centralized and utilizes modern technology to tighten its grip on its citizens; hence, its overt self-confidence is evident as Xi rewrites the rules that have held for the last 30 years.

Additionally, the People’s Republic of China did not recoil from the use of force to impose its will on Hong Kong and integrate it within the Chinese system, in breach of the understanding reached with the United Kingdom as to the rights of the former colony. Nor did it hesitate to threaten Australia, to take over atolls and uninhabited islands within the so-called Nine-Dash Map, build military bases, and revive nationalist claims from the 1930s, and to do so in dangerous proximity to other nations in the South China Sea, which have competing claims over the same locations.