Inside the Dems’ betrayal of Israel Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2021/05/22/inside-the-democrats-betrayal-of-israel-goodwin/

As presidential press releases go, this one was very short and enormously consequential. Eleven minutes after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the  White House issued a two-sentence statement.

The first said simply, “This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine and recognition has been requested by the provisional Government thereof.”

The second sentence made history: “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the State of Israel.”

It was signed “Harry Truman.”

The president’s decision made America the first country to recognize the new nation and made him a hero to Jews around the world. It also helped make the Democrat Party a reliable ally of Israel for decades as war after war threatened its survival.

Unfortunately, Truman would not recognize his party today.

An anti-Israel faction has taken root among Democrats and was on full display during Israel’s recent clash with Hamas. Because that faction is largely synonymous with the party’s ascendant far-left wing, more moderate Dems are increasingly afraid to speak up for Israel, just as they are afraid to speak up against the emergence of socialism and anti-white racism in their party.

MORE HEADLINES MAY 23, 2021

BIDEN’S EPIC FAIL MAKES YOU WONDER HOW ITS EVEN POSSIBLE HTTPS://DFCTODAY.COM/BIDENS-EPIC-FAIL-MAKES-YOU-WONDER-HOW-ITS-EVEN-POSSIBLE/

Joe Biden is proving even more of a ‘master of disaster’ than Jimmy Carter https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-05-21-biden-more-of-a-master-of-disaster.html

Dan Crenshaw Shares ‘Devastating’ Video: ‘Do Those Palestinians’ Lives Not Matter, Rashida?’ https://www.westernjournal.com/dan-crenshaw-shares-devastating-video-palestinians-lives-not-matter-rashida/

 

Analysis: The Squad Can’t Stop Repeating Hamas Propaganda https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2021/05/21/analysis-the-squad-cant-stop-repeating-hamas-propaganda-n2589752?

GOP sticks up ‘I stand with Israel’ posters in AOC’s hallway in message to ‘Hamas Caucus’ and Squad members who say the ceasefire is NOT enough https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9605681/Squad-members-Ilhan-Omar-Rashida-Tliab-say-Israel-Hamas-ceasefire-NOT-enough.html 

GOING VIRAL IN JAPAN: JOE BIDEN SENT OUT $1,400 STIMULUS CHECKS TO OVER 100,000 JAPANESE CITIZENS (VIDEO) HTTPS://REDRIGHTVIDEOS.COM/GOING-VIRAL-IN-JAPAN-JOE-BIDEN-SENT-OUT-1400-STIMULUS-CHECKS-TO-OVER-100000-JAPANESE-CITIZENS-VIDEO/

 

Tulsi Gabbard Calls on Chicago Mayor to Resign Over ‘Anti-White’ Racism https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/05/21/tulsi-gabbard-calls-on-chicago-mayor-to-resign-over-antiwhite-racism-n2589828?

“Tied Up and Tortured”: The Persecution of Christians, by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17394/persecution-of-christians-april

In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him….

“We should remember that Greece spent 400 years under Turkish Islamic rule and that the fight for freedom was bloody. With that in mind it is even more dramatic seeing these images of fighting age migrants desecrating Greek holy places and having no respect for the country they are allegedly seeking refuge in.” — Greek City Times, April 12, 2021.

“[H]e was kept in at least three different police stations and illegal torture cells, where he was mentally and physically tortured to confess to the baseless accusation [of blasphemy]… [P]olice repeatedly threatened to kill him…. The police investigators…also tortured him into naming other members of the Bible study circle…” — Aneeqa Maria, Salamat Masih’s attorney, Morning Star News, April 29, 2021, Pakistan.

The Slaughter of Christians

Egypt: In a video released on April 17, Muslims connected to the Islamic State in Sinai executed 62-year-old Nabil Habashi Salama, a Christian. Salama appears on his knees in the video, with three men holding rifles standing behind him. The one in the middle launches into a typical jihadi diatribe: “All praise to Allah, who ordered his slaves [Muslims] to fight and who assigned humiliation onto the infidels” —pointing contemptuously at the kneeling Christian before him — “until they pay the jizya while feeling utterly subdued.” The words are a paraphrasing of Koran 9:29, which commands Muslims to “fight the people of the book,” understood as meaning Christians and Jews, “until they pay the jizya (monetary tribute) with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued.”

The middle speaker continued by threatening “all the crusaders of the world” — a reference to Christians in the West — while singling out the countrymen of the one about to be slain: “as for you Christians of Egypt, this is the price of your support for the Egyptian army.” The speaker then points his rifle at the back of the Christian’s head —as chants of “jihad! jihad! jihad!” blare out — and fires at point-blank range, killing him.

It is unclear when the video was made — Salama was abducted at gunpoint over five months earlier for helping to build the only church in the area. “He kept the faith till the moment he was killed,” the group Sinai Province said of the slain Copt in a statement. During the months of his captivity, several Egyptian activists accused the authorities of indifference in not being able to locate and secure the release of Salama, which they say could easily have been done. Ironically, the Egyptian government issued a statement the day after the video was released saying that they had located and killed the same three terrorists that had executed the Copt—without offering any specifics. The claim was met with skepticism.

In a separate incident, on April 3, in the streets of Minya, a Muslim man butchered a Christian woman and her toddler son with a machete—”as if he were slaughtering chickens,” said eyewitnesses. The murderer, a tuk-tuk driver, is Abu Muhammad al-Harami; his victims were Mary Sa’d and her six-year-old son, Karas. When their paths crossed in the streets, he had made threatening and derogatory comments to Mary. When she said she would report him to police, Abu Muhammad leapt on her with his machete, butchering her and her son. Although Egyptian media and authorities claimed, as they always do, that the man’s motives appear not to have been religious, the fact is every once in a while such “random” attacks on Egypt’s Christians occur.

In late December 2020, for instance, two Muslim brothers went on a stabbing spree against Christians, killing one and critically injuring two others. Authorities said the brothers were in mourning and upset because their mother had died earlier that day. But as a local Christian clergyman said, “what does the death [of the Muslims’ mother] and the Copts have to do with each other?” The same year, on January 12, 2020, a Muslim man crept up behind a Coptic woman walking home with groceries, pulled her head back with a hand full of hair, and slit her throat with a knife in his other hand. Catherine Ramzi was rushed to a nearby medical center, where her throat was sewn with 63 stitches; doctors told her she came within an inch of dying. It is believed that he may have identified her as a Christian for not wearing a hijab around her hair or for having a cross tattoo on her wrist.

CNN Runs Free Advertising for Protests in Support of Palestinian Jihad By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/22/cnn-runs-free-advertising-for-protests-in-support-of-palestinian-jihad-n1448976

First the Associated Press was exposed sharing an office building with Hamas in Gaza, which meant either that they were aware of Hamas’ activities and covered for the terror group, or didn’t know Hamas was there and are therefore the worst reporters in the world. And now comes more confirmation that what we are told are news organizations are actually propaganda arms not only for the Left’s agenda, but for the Palestinian Arab jihad against Israel. CNN on Saturday published an article entitled “Protests in support of Palestinians expected across the United States,” which was not so much a piece of reporting on those protests, but a free advertisement for them, complete with a case for why you should participate in your local orgy of Jew-hatred.

It doesn’t start out too badly: “Protesters are expected to rally in cities across the United States this weekend in support of Palestinians, as Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire ending days of destruction and bloodshed.” But immediately after that comes the staple of establishment media reporting on Israel and the Palestinians: the casualty count. “Since May 10,” CNN claims, “Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 243 people in Gaza, including 66 children, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. Twelve people in Israel, including two children, died as a result of militant fire from Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces and Israel’s emergency service.”

Oh, hey, that’s bad: 243 Palestinians, including 66 children, were killed versus only twelve Israelis. The clear implication of CNN’s framing of the story here is that Israel responded in a disproportionate manner to the rockets Hamas fired into Israel, and indiscriminately bombed Gaza without regard for the lives of civilians. Reality is quite different. In the latest conflict, Hamas followed its longstanding practice of launching attacks from civilian areas so as to draw retaliatory fire that would harm civilians and be usable for propaganda purposes. This launching of attacks from civilian areas has been abundantly documented, even by the unflaggingly anti-Israel United Nations. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tweeted Thursday: “It’s not easy fighting a terrorist organization that embeds its military infrastructure in civilian areas. We use the latest military technology to precisely strike Hamas targets, while minimizing damage to the surrounding areas.”

Why Are Democrats So Afraid of Election Audits? Democrats claim election audits like the one in Arizona are an existential threat to democracy, but it’s difficult to see how—unless they reveal that our elections have been hijacked. By Charlie Kirk

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/why-are-democrats-so-afraid-of-election-audits/

Democrats are positively terrified of election audits that aren’t completely controlled by the political establishment. If there’s a chance an audit might reveal meaningful information, you can bet Democrats (and certain weak Republicans) will stridently oppose it. The only audits Democrats and their allies support are the ones designed to rubber-stamp previous conclusions.

The increasingly desperate attacks on the ongoing audit in Maricopa County, Arizona—particularly those intended to undermine the credibility of the auditors—show just how much the Democratic Party establishment fears the whole process. Their entire argument is based on sarcasm, scorn, and scare quotes.

The auditors are inspecting the paper that ballots were printed on? They must believe in a far-fetched conspiracy theory!

The auditors are checking to make sure the ballots don’t have watermarks that are not supposed to be there? They must be members of fringe online message boards!

The audit is being funded primarily by private donations? It must be an elaborate “grift” rather than a serious fact-finding effort (not to mention they need the funds to fend off the litany of lawsuits they’re facing).

By smearing the auditors as corrupt and/or inept, and the audit itself as a partisan stunt, leftists are hoping they can discredit the process and convince Americans to stop asking pesky questions about whether any laws were broken or procedural loopholes exploited during the 2020 elections. That’s the way people respond to questions when they don’t want anyone to know the answers.

It’s not just the Arizona audit, either. Democrats and their media allies are already fully engaged in a crusade to preemptively impugn the legitimacy of any audits that might be conducted in other states, describing conservative support for audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as “a bid to bolster former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

If they really believe the 2020 elections were “the most secure in American history,” then they should welcome audits as a way of substantiating that claim. Indeed, they should even be celebrating audits run by Republicans, since their conclusions will carry so much more weight with GOP voters. That said, the Arizona auditors have practically been begging Democrats to participate, but the Democrats have only been interested in attacking the process from afar.

Peter Wood :Nikole Hannah-Jones at the Summit The Pulitzer Prize-winning force behind “The 1619 Project” has begun the descent that favored radicals of the past such as Rigoberta Menchú suffered after people began to scrutinize their claims.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/nikole-hannah-jones-at-the-summit/

Nikole Hannah-Jones was having a very good year. She reached the summit on April 28, when it was widely reported that she had been appointed with tenure, effective July, to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The news came a week after the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Hannah-Jones was among some 259 “outstanding individuals” elected to the Academy in 2021. She led the list of eight chosen in “Journalism, Media, and Communications.” 

A year ago May 4, Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Between those bookends, she has been invited to present numerous prestigious lectures at universities and other august venues. She received the George Polk “special award” in 2019 after receiving it in 2015 for “radio reporting” for “The Problem We All Live With.” She also received a 2015 Peabody Award for “The Case for School Desegregation Today.”

Of course, she was also a 2017 recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.”

But her appointment to a named chair at the school from which she received her master’s degree in 2003 had to be among the sweetest distinctions. She was being recognized as a top figure in her chosen profession. 

But on May 18, the bottom fell out. 

The Fall

That day the UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees took the unusual step of refusing to grant Hannah-Jones tenure. The board offered her an alternative: a five-year appointment as a “professor of practice,” with the option of a tenure review down the road. In higher education parlance, this would be a “probationary appointment.” In Hannah-Jones’ world, it might be called a humiliation. She sees herself as one of the most authoritative voices in journalism today. The news that she would still have to prove herself worthy of a tenured academic appointment must have hit her hard.

Be that as it may, it certainly hit the American higher education establishment hard. “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous” roared Silke-Maria Weineck, a University of Michigan German professor in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle also features an essay by staff writers Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason, who explain, Hannah-Jones’ “‘1619 Project’ Is a Political Lightning Rod. It May Have Cost Her Tenure.” Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed headlines her account “A Blatant Intrusion.” She leads with a quote from an anonymous source who says UNC’s trustees acted under “pressure.” 

I would hope so. If there were ever a time when university trustees should be called upon to live up to their responsibilities to maintain the integrity of academic appointments, this was it.

A Great Artist’s Career in Anti-communism By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-great-artists-career-in-anti-communism/

A rare voice of sanity in the theater, Tom Stoppard vigorously rebuked and lampooned the most monstrous idea of his time.

 I f the Left can be reduced to a word, it is “utopianism.” Seeking to perfect man, progressives can never be satisfied with the state of things. To be a progressive means consistently to overlook undeniable progress — decreased poverty, for instance, or enhanced opportunity for minorities of all kinds — while insisting that everything is still terrible and calling for redoubling the fight with huge new injections of funding and ever-expanding bureaucracies.

By contrast, our greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard, makes a Chestertonian case for accepting our gifts and muddling through. The director Mike Nichols once called him “the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Conservatism at its core rejects ideology — it is what is left behind when the grand schemes collapse and people just get on with it.

In the other direction, the revolutionary one, lies catastrophe. As recounted in Hermione Lee’s impressively wide-ranging new biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Stoppard’s most successful work this century is the nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), the sprawling story of the mid-19th-century radicals and intellectuals, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who contemplated how Russian society should be reformed after the last tsar. The work is an ingenious way of reviewing the greatest human disaster of all time, the Communist debacle, by considering its ideological conception.

Bakunin, a proto-Bolshevik, argues in the play for a maximalist approach that starts with a vengeful spree against the ruling class; but Stoppard’s sympathies clearly lie with the meliorism of Herzen, who pleads “to open men’s eyes and not to tear them out. To bring what’s good along with them.” Herzen’s final speech, which Stoppard took almost verbatim from an 1855 essay, cautions against the folly of the “ancient dream” of “a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way toward it, we won’t be grown up as human beings.”

Stoppard, nearly alone in his industry, resolutely made the case against communism and utopianism, from the Seventies on into this century. His having been right about communism isn’t why he’s an essential artist — and right-wing artists can be hacks too — but the virtue of his convictions gives his plays a satisfying heft to go along with their famous wit, effervescence, and undergraduate vigor.

The Jews vs. The World

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-jews-vs-the-world/

As a weak and sclerotic Democratic leadership cowers before the anti-Israel zealotry of the Squad and its acolytes in the House of Representatives, American Jews are getting a glimpse of what the future may hold: a return to a not-so-distant past in which Jews stood alone to face either slaughter or survival.

There are differences between now and then, of course. The Jews now have a state and an army, facts that provide the fig leaf for the new anti-Semitism now exhibited by left-wing Democrats, academics, and Jewish radicals. The old hatred has found new life in characterizing Jews as oppressors and the genocidal Hamas as victim.

In a kind of provincial stupidity the left would abhor in almost any other context, the liberal elite has conflated caricatures of the Palestinian experience with that of the minority experience in the United States.

The left-wing congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), his anti-Semitism cloaked in the argot of the social justice warrior, has called on Israel to stop brutalizing and murdering “Black and brown bodies.”

Members of the Princeton University faculty on Tuesday released a similar statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that rejects what they call “Jewish supremacy”—an inartful attempt to liken Jews to their tormentors in the Ku Klux Klan.

The faculty statement will have no impact on world events, but it sends a clear message to Jewish students at the university. It will be familiar to any Jew who managed to sneak into Princeton between its founding in 1746 and the infamous “dirty bicker” of 1958, in which Jews were systematically excluded from the school’s social clubs. University-sanctioned anti-Semitism has been the rule, not the exception, at Princeton.

Finally, there are the Jews who will give cover for this Jew-hatred. Many signed the Princeton letter. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who made a name for herself arguing that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” has a Jewish spokesman. Hamas has retained a Jewish lawyer, too.

We don’t despair for two reasons.

First, the enmity of the world around us is the strand that connects the Jews of today to their ancient ancestors.

The brief moment in which the majority of the world’s remaining Jews found safety in Israel and the United States is a historical aberration, but Jewish culture has well preserved the outsider mentality that will be necessary as we brace for the return to normalcy.

Second, Zionism was incubated and refined for moments just like this. The good will of the United States was a blessing for Israel; it was not, however, a prerequisite for Zionism’s success. The very premise of the movement was that the Jews could rely on no one but themselves for their own survival.

And for American Jews who can imagine no other home and no other life, we still have righteous and stalwart allies, from our Evangelical Christian friends to Republicans in Congress (with the notable and ignoble exception of Indiana senator Todd Young) to the vast majority of the American people.

Despite a steady diet of anti-Israel invective by the media, Americans seem largely immune to the prejudices and fads of the country’s elite: The latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that 63 percent of Americans have the decency and common sense to say that protecting Israel should be either “very important” or “somewhat important” to the United States.

The future may yet be as dark as the past, but not yet. Hamas and its many sympathizers here and around the world will have to endure at least another day of unrepentant Jewish survival.

The Revolution Comes for Israel By Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-revolution-comes-for-israel/

Israel has battled Hamas four times since the terror organization seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Each battle unfolds the same way: Hamas launches rockets at Israel’s civilian population, Israel bombs Hamas targets, and the fighting continues until terrorist infrastructure is sufficiently degraded so that the rocket fire stops for a few years. Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.” The last major clash was in 2014. In its origins, order of battle, and strategy and tactics, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which began May 10, resembles these previous flareups.

So what’s different? Just about everything.

The region has changed. In 2014 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, legitimizing the nuclear program of Israel’s archenemy Iran, was a gleam in John Kerry’s eye. Its adoption the following year, and America’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, realigned the Middle East along the axis of Iranian power. The result was an Arab–Israel détente formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords. From a regional perspective, the Palestinian cause is less important than Iran’s ambitions.

Israel has changed. In 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu was at the outset of his third term and led from a position of strength. His indictment on corruption charges in 2019 initiated a political crisis that has led to four elections (and most likely a fifth) in the space of two years. On the eve of the latest violence, Israel’s bewildering politics became even more surprising when two of Netanyahu’s rivals enticed an Arab Islamist party to join a coalition government. That effort collapsed when the rockets blazed. The subsequent outbreak of intercommunal violence in cities with large Arab-Israeli populations is a reminder of Israel’s pressing domestic challenges. The security issue unites Israel. Just about everything else divides it.

America has changed. In the summer of 2014, Barack Obama was a lame duck, the Republicans controlled the House and were on the verge of winning the Senate, and Donald Trump was the host of Celebrity Apprentice. Obama’s dislike of Netanyahu and willingness to expose “daylight” between the United States and Israel was no secret. But anti-Israel invective was limited to the fringe. And anti-Israel media bias was nowhere near as bad as it is today.

Joe Scarborough’s insane rant proves he’s just a histrionic blowhard By Patricia McCarthy

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

Joe Scarborough is one of those pathetic persons who inhabit the periphery of cable news.  The morning show he hosts with his adoring but insipid wife Mika is apparently a favorite of Kim Jong Un and perhaps a mere one million equally mentally challenged Americans.  Beyond those relative few, no one pays a bit of attention to his vicious anti-Trump rants or the vitriol he spews daily upon Trump and his supporters.  

The man, like the rest of MSNBC’s denizens, is not very bright but he is very impressed with his own self-perceived brilliance.  In short, he’s something of a joke to all but a few blinkered souls.  He makes no difference on any issue on which he expounds; he changes no minds.  Those who watch his early morning program are not critical thinkers.  They are unthinking acolytes of a shameless shyster. 

On Friday morning however, Scarborough lost it, went full mental.  

He melted down, screaming like a banshee about his loathing of anyone who supports the audit currently underway in Arizona. 

Like his colleague Rachel Maddow, he knows what the Arizona audit portends and the truth of it has filled him with horror.  Like the rest of the left, he knows only too well that the 2020 election was rigged in numerous ways (see Molly Ball’s article) and that Biden is not a legitimate President.  He accused all the patriots supporting the audit of everything up to and including treason.  He shouted that they should just leave, that immigrants would be better citizens.  He is hoping that hysteria will trump evidence.  But as the great Anthony Daniels (pen name Theodore Dalrymple) said “The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes.  Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.”  Poor Joe Scarborough’s morning hysteria is clearly an act, a bad act.  His hatred for all things Trump has rendered him thoroughly irrelevant.