A Closer Look at the Legacy of George Floyd’s Death By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-legacy-of-george-floyds-death/

It is right to condemn excessive police force. To turn Floyd into a hero of a racialized morality play is inane.

T oday marks one year since the death of George Floyd in police custody — I can never get used to invoking the term “anniversary” in connection with such dark events. There is, as one has come to expect, no shortage of vaporous talk about Floyd’s “legacy.” We should not, however, conflate the man with the event.

Floyd should not have died as he did. For their complicity in his demise, four former Minneapolis police are being held accountable, beginning with Derek Chauvin, who was convicted last month. Still, a stubborn fact remains: Floyd bore significant responsibility for the tragedy that unfolded.

There was probable cause that he committed a crime. He was not profiled or otherwise singled out for harassment by police officers acting on suspicions rooted in “systemic racism.” To the contrary, a local food-store merchant complained to police that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. That complaint was based on a report by the young black cashier who handled the transaction and whom Floyd willfully put in an unfair position — either speak up or be personally liable for the store’s loss. Before calling the police, store employees, including the cashier, twice implored Floyd (who was parked outside) to come inside and settle the problem that he had caused. He refused. And although Floyd had serious health issues — e.g., an enlarged heart, hypertension, narrowings in major passages near his aorta, and a recent bout with COVID — he continued to abuse illegal narcotics and was at the time ingesting a potentially deadly combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Floyd was a tragic figure, but not an admirable one. What happened last Memorial Day was not his first run-in with the law — far from it. In the decade beginning in 1997, when he was 23, he was arrested at least nine times. Several of these resulted in criminal convictions, generally for small-time narcotics and theft offenses. The resulting prison stints were usually short. But not all of them.

Blinken blinkered: Biden Secretary of State can’t give a clear answer on Hamas financing from Iran By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/blinken_blinkered_biden_secretary_of_state_cant_give_a_clear_answer_on_hamas_financing_from_iran.html

The Biden administration is loaded with people who can’t admit the obvious.

The border is in crisis. Immunization means you can’t catch COVID. COVID originated in a ChiCom lab.  Inflation? What inflation? 

Now it’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s turn. Get a load of this exchange reported by the Daily Caller, describing Blinken’s appearance on ABC’s “The Week”:

The show’s host [former Clinton administration operative George Stephanopoulos] then brought up a May 13 letter by a group of Senate Republicans, in which the lawmakers urged Biden to stop offering sanction relief to Iran, citing its funding of Hamas.

“Do you believe that Iran is funding Hamas? And if they are, should the sanctions stay in place?,” Stephanopoulos asked Blinken.

“You know, George, Iran is engaged in a number of activities, including funding extremist groups, supporting terrorism more broadly, supporting very dangerous proxies that are taking destabilizing actions throughout the Middle East, proliferating weapons,” Blinken responded.

The secretary of state also said that the first priority is to bring Iran back into “compliance with the nuclear agreement, the so-called JCPOA,” and that Former President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure … clearly did not get the result that we all seek.”

Biden’s unconscionable validation of anti-Semitism By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/bidens_unconscionable_validation_of_antisemitism.html

It is hardly a new phenomenon that the American left has over time become so radical that a vicious form of anti-Semitism has become its norm.  The Democrat party could, once upon a time, be counted upon to firmly support Israel against its enemies here and abroad, but no more.  The party now openly embraces proud anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and AOC.

Just the other day, Tlaib harangued Biden for thirty minutes on the tarmac at Detroit Airport.  She supports the terrorist organization Hamas and was furious that Israel was so effectively defending itself.  Biden praised her “passion” without a word of support for Israel.  Biden had recently handed over $234,000,000 to the Palestinians, which they promptly used to attack Israel.

Iran was and is completely on board, using Hamas as its proxy.  And even as twenty to thirty percent of their rockets fell on their own people, Hamas, as usual, using its civilian population as human shields, the Democrats still supported the terrorists.  They even voted against sanctioning foreign entities that provided financial aid to Hamas!  They voted against providing additional funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system.

The despicable AOC and her Squad have introduced a resolution that would block arms sales to Israel.  As any sentient person should know, there is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas.  And as everyone should also know, the destruction of Israel is the essence of Hamas’s charter.

Throughout the Hamas/Israel violence, Biden offered no support for Israel beyond his mild “Israel has a right to defend itself.”  In effect, he succumbed to Tlaib’s shrieking pro-Palestinian rant.  So, with the permission granted by default to anti-Semites everywhere, attacks on Jews are occurring everywhere.

Inside Hamas’ Hate A journey into the Heart of Darkness. Dr. Shmuel Katz

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/understanding-hostility-dr-shmuel-katz/

There is ongoing incitement by the radical Muslims and their supporters against Israel using lies and deception. These actions are preparing their supporters to use and implement the concept of Jihad, to act against the Infidel in general, and against the Jews in particular.

Recently, there has been a confluence of several factors which gave the terror-supporting Iran and their proxy Hamas the miscalculated incentive to rally their oblivious supporters, and try to liquidate the state of Israel and gain power.

The initial excuse for the Arab confrontation in Jerusalem, was associated with two big lies:

1. “The Jews decides to evict innocent Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem” – This is a lie. The fact is that this dispute is related to a long-standing refusal of four Arab squatter Families to pay rent to their Jewish landlords. This case was deliberated in the Israeli courts for many years and now it seems that the courts, that have already ruled to recognize the ownership of the Jews of these houses in the past, clarified that the Arab tenants refusal to pay rent is against the law. There is a pending Supreme Court decision which may decide that the squatters should be removed form these houses, which do not belong to them.

2. “The Israeli police decided to attack peaceful Muslim worshipers on Temple Mount” – This too is a lie. The fact is that following violence by some Radical Muslims and by few Radical Jews, Arab Palestinian agitators and Hamas supporters piled up fire bombs, firecrackers and rocks on the Temple Mount and in the Al Aqsa Mosque, and used them to attack the Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall Plaza, about 70 feet below them. The police had to go into the involved areas on Temple Mount, in order to stop these terror attacks and riots which spilled over also into other locations in Jerusalem and into other cities in Israel.

Hamas gave an ultimatum to Israel on May the 10th to leave the Temple Mount and the Sheikh Jarrah areas, and release by 6:00 pm all the Arab rioters that were caught and arrested by the Israeli police. Israel ignored this insane ultimatum, and Hamas started a massive assault on Jerusalem and other Israeli locations, launching multiple rockets from within their own civilian population, into the Israeli civilian population, in order to initiate and support a wider Jihad against Israel. They were hoping that it would involve even more of the brainwashed Israeli Arab Citizens and many of their international supporters around the world. Unfortunately, even many Media outlets fell prey for these maliciously calculated terror waves. Seeing civilian casualties is horrible, but when the casualties are caused by malicious calculation of a terror organization which planned to create this human disaster, it makes it even worse. Some of these casualties came despite the careful defensive Israeli efforts to stop the Hamas rocket launchers and the attempt to destroy the Hamas infrastructure which supported this terror effort. In addition, many Palestinian casualties were caused by the misfired rockets which were launched by Hamas, which were aimed at Israeli civilians, but hit their own population.

Rallying in Support of Terror – and Denouncing Israel on Woke Campuses A “new” anti-Semitism rages at universities across America and Europe. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/rallying-support-terror-and-denouncing-israel-woke-richard-l-cravatts/

As Israel and Hamas crafted a cease-fire to end two weeks of military activity in which both Gazans and Israelis have died, student governments and faculty members at many universities have issued statements of support. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, this support was not for the region’s only thriving democracy and American ally, Israel, but for Hamas, the designated terror group which rules over Gaza and speaks for the Palestinians and whose lethal use of more than 3000 rockets raining into southern Israeli towns with the object of killing Jewish civilians actually instigated the current escalation of conflict.

Tellingly silent as rockets were launched indiscriminately by Hamas into southern Israeli towns with the express purpose of murdering Jews (each of which rocket, incidentally, representing a war crime), these virtue-signaling students and faculty only became indignant at the violence and body counts once Israel was forced to protect its citizenry by defensive action to suppress Hamas’s lethal aggression.

At the University of Michigan, as one troubling example, the university’s Central Student Government published a statement in which Israel, not Hamas, was accused of “inhumane, international war crimes,” an ongoing process of “ethnic cleansing and apartheid” by Israel that is “a continuation of the displacement of indigenous Palestinians since the Nakba [the Arab’s term, “catastrophe” for the creation of Israel].”

In language the echoes the sentiment of Israel-haters everywhere, the Michigan statement apparently suggests that Israel is not a legitimate country at all. While anti-Israel individuals regularly refer to the existence of a country called Palestine—while no such country ever existed and does not exist now—they still consider Israel to be illegitimate, a colonial enterprise constructed on the stolen lands of an indigenous people. So the current conflict between Hamas and Israel, in their minds is immoral and unlawful. “This is not a ‘conflict,’” the statement reads, “but emblematic of Israeli settler-colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid” so if the Jewish state is illegal, Israel’s efforts at self-defense are therefore not justifiable.

In a May 12th “Statement by Palestine Student Groups at Harvard University on Violence Against Palestinians,” students similarly denounced Israel, wishing to “acknowledge and express our outrage at the latest wave of Israeli state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians. [which] follows years of systematic oppression and ethnic cleansing committed by the State of Israel.”

Heading to New York with trepidation and a Star of David Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/heading-to-new-york-with-trepidation-and-a-star-of-david/

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m actually nervous—as a Jew—about my upcoming trip from Tel Aviv to New York.

For one thing, the United States has been safer for the tribe than the rest of the Diaspora. For another, it’s pretty ridiculous to fear anti-Semitic assault in America after spending the past two weeks running for cover from Hamas rockets in Israel.

The worry is especially odd, given the many decades I’ve spent trying avoid and protect my family from Palestinian rock, Molotov-cocktail, suicide-bombing, stabbing and vehicular attacks. But there’s clearly something about the dangers one knows and has come to expect that make them less daunting, or at least more manageable.
Growing up in a rough Manhattan neighborhood the 1970s, I was no stranger to perils that felt familiar. The area around our apartment on the Upper West Side was rife with junkies, muggers and deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients. The subways, filled with vagrants, were filthy and covered in graffiti.
The stations, particularly at night, were so menacing that even the cops were hesitant to police them. Central Park, though passable in the daylight hours, was the site of rapes and murders after dark. Riverside Park was iffy at all hours.
And don’t get me started on Times Square, where drug dealers and prostitutes aggressively solicited passersby.
I took all of the above for granted, instinctively crossing the street before reaching a corner at which certain thugs hung out, for example, and knowing when not to “eyeball” the wrong group of girls sparring for a fight.
And though my complexion often made me somewhat of a sitting duck, my Jewishness never was an issue. Indeed, by the time that I moved to Israel at the age of 19, I had experienced a total of two anti-Semitic incidents.
The first took place at an Italian diner in the Bronx, where my best friend and I ate breakfast every morning on the way to school. The year was 1973, and it was the height of the Yom Kippur War.
The owner of the establishment—who, up to that point, had been very chummy with us—began to rant against Israel. While my friend promptly engaged him in a counter-argument, I was taken aback by the hostility in his tone, and I coaxed her off the premises.

Ex-CAIR Director Hassan Shibly Posts Video Telling Israelis to ‘Go Back to Europe’ Following resignation over domestic violence, Shibly drifts further towards Hamas. Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/ex-cair-director-hassan-shibly-posts-video-telling-joe-kaufman/

This past January, following his wife’s accusation of domestic violence against her, Hassan Shibly resigned his leadership position within CAIR, a Hamas-linked group founded in June 1994. Shibly was Executive Director of CAIR’s Florida Chapter. Today, Shibly describes himself as a self-employed attorney, but his embrace of Hamas groups continues. This month, as a new Mid East conflict erupted, Shibly has promoted Hamas-related charities and cranked up his own extreme rhetoric. He has even gone so far as to post an anti-Semitic video calling for the Jews in Israel to go back to Europe. CAIR or no CAIR, Shibly is out and about spreading terror.

On December 20th, Imane Sadrati created a GoFundMe page to advertise her claim that she had suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of her then-husband Hassan Shibly, beginning when she was pregnant with her first child. It was a huge scandal for Shibly, separating him from his beloved job at CAIR and tarnishing the star he had become in Islamist circles. It was just over a year prior that he had successfully fought the US government in the courts on the constitutionality of its terror watch list, a list that Shibly himself had his name on. Unlike his alleged domestic violence, though, he could blame the watch list on “Islamophobia.”

While much of this exposes the true face of Shibly, it is his extreme hatred for Israel that really defines him. In November 2006, he labeled Hezbollah “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization.” In August 2014, he tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In April 2017, he used Facebook to laud Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti as a “hero.” And in May 2019, he used CAIR’s Tampa office to meet with convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operative, Hatem Fariz. According to the indictmentagainst him, Fariz “was a PIJ member” who conspired “to commit offenses against the United States…”

Recent events have, once again, triggered Shibly’s rage.

Diaspora Follies When the likes of Sarah Silverman smear the IDF Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/diaspora-follies-bruce-bawer/

These days the shameless perfidy of the New York Times is palpable on the front page of every new issue, but it can take a big story like armed conflict between Israel and Hamas to ratchet up the paper’s bias and duplicity to Pulitzer Prize levels. You barely need to look beyond the headlines: “Gaza War Deepens a Long-Running Humanitarian Crisis” (May 18); “After the Cease-Fire, Gaza Awakens to a Sea of Rubble” (May 21); “Life under Occupation: The Misery at the Heart of the Conflict” (May 22). Such articles being tailor-made to manipulate readers who still get their news (to use the term loosely) from the mainstream media, and whose opinions on serious issues are easily influenced by shamelessly contrived propaganda, it was no surprise to find one Marisa Kabas opening her own recent piece for Rolling Stone with a reference to a May 13 Times article, headlined “In Gaza, an Ordinary Street, and Extraordinary Horror, as Missiles Thunder In,” about Palestinians killed by IDF rockets. Kabas’s take: as the “granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor,” she had been “raised to see Palestinians as the enemy” and never to question “Israel’s existence, actions, and connection to the United States”; but after reading this Times article, she confesses, “I mourn.”

In fact, Kabas (B.A. in journalism, George Washington University, 2009) more than mourns. She has now decided – and seems to be under the impression that this is a fresh thought – that Jews’ “history of oppression should make us even more empathetic to the displacement and killing of Palestinians.” And she tells us that when she posted this insight on social media, she “was surprised and humbled by the overwhelmingly affirmative response, with fellow American Jews publicly and privately agreeing they’re no longer able to accept the party line on Israel-U.S. relations” or to “square their love for their people and history with their commitment to racial and social justice.” One of the fellow American Jews who have evolved along with her, she is glad to inform us, is a certain Jeremy Slevin (B.A. in political science, Washington University in St. Louis, 2010), who, as it happens, works as “senior communications director for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar” – a job that over time has helped him, as Kabas puts it, “to separate his Jewish American identity from Israel.” Gee, I’ll bet it has. (Slevin, according to his LinkedIn page, has previously worked for Keith Ellison, MSNBC, and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.) Kabas concludes that “causing trauma to another group will never ease our own. Killing more than 200 Palestinians in two weeks won’t bring back our ancestors who perished in the Holocaust, and it certainly won’t bring us closer to a lasting peace. Until we recognize that no one is safe until we’re all safe, the cycle of oppression will play on.”

Secret Recordings Reveal ‘Filthy’ Conditions for Migrant Kids at Fort Bliss By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/05/25/secret-recordings-reveal-filthy-conditions-for-migrant-kids-at-fort-bliss-n1449432https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/05/25/secret-recordin

More than 4,500 migrant children — mostly teenage boys — in Fort Bliss, Texas, are being held in enormous tents in unsanitary “filthy” conditions according to an investigation conducted by Reason.

“If you took a poll, probably about 98 percent of the federal workers here would say it’s appalling,” a federal employee detailed to the facility told Reason. “Everybody tries in their own way to quietly disobey and get things done, but it can be difficult.”

Those federal employees have neither the skills nor the training to care for so many kids. The Fort Bliss shelter is part of the Biden administration’s “shell game” of moving kids from Customs and Border protection facilities at the border to more than 200 shelters at arenas, auditoriums, and military bases, mostly in the Southwest.

Recordings obtained by Reason reveal the stress the influx of unaccompanied minors has put on the federal government. They also reveal that leaders at the shelter are well aware that they are failing to provide basic necessities, including medical care and physical safety, to the children under its supervision.

Federal employees detailed to the Fort Bliss shelter, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Reason they are working 12-hour shifts six days a week. Basic forms and equipment, including lice kits, are in short supply, and frustration is mounting.

“I’m not going to lie, we’ve got people dropping like flies because it’s just not something that they’re used to,” the trainer says in the recording, which Reason is not releasing to protect the source’s identity. “This facility is growing so fast, and we are getting kids on a daily basis. We don’t have enough staff to maintain.”

But there’s no crisis, right Joe?

Chinese Communist Party Shelled Out Millions for Propaganda in American Newspapers By Jim Treacher

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jim-treacher/2021/05/25/chinese-communist-party-shelled-out-millions-for-propaganda-in-american-newspapers-n1449515

As more and more Americans allow themselves to accept that this [EXPLETIVE DELETED] pandemic finally might be ending, as we start to see “the light at the end of the tunnel” that the oldest POTUS in American history keeps yammering about, a lot of stuff that’s been in the back of our minds over the last 15 months is starting to tiptoe to the front. We’ve all got persistent little questions like: How did all this happen, anyway? Who’s responsible? How much of what we’ve been told about the origin and spread of COVID-19 is true, and who benefits from the lies? And sooner or later, those questions all end up having the same answer: the Chinese Communist Party.

For the past year, our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have insisted it’s a lunatic conspiracy theory to speculate that COVID-19 might have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But suddenly they’ve all reversed themselves, and now they’re admitting that a lab leak is not only possible but probable. (Without ever admitting they were wrong for an entire year, of course, and that they tried to silence anyone who dared to say anything about a lab leak. Their pride won’t allow them to admit error. Honesty is too much to expect from the people who never stop congratulating themselves for bringing us the truth.) As legendary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick put it: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” And the lab-leak theory isn’t going away, despite the best efforts of a lot of people who want you to shut up about it.