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President Isaac Herzog’s grand entrance By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 9th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/president-isaac-herzogs-grand-entrance-opinion-673280

It wasn’t surprising when Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy asserted on Wednesday that Israel’s societal discord was worse than the Iranian threat. Nor was the fact that he made the claim during the swearing-in ceremony of Isaac Herzog as the country’s 11th president.

It has become par for the so-called “Center-Left” to bemoan the condition of the country in this fashion. Invoking the terrorist regime in Tehran when talking about internal strife in the Jewish state that it vows to wipe off the map has a twofold purpose.

One is to accuse the Right, led by former prime minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, of causing the political rift that’s supposedly chipping away at Israeli democracy. The other is to minimize the real and present danger posed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies – or at least to imply that Netanyahu has been exaggerating it for decades in order to keep himself in power.

During most of his seven-year tenure as president, Reuven Rivlin honed the art of expressing this view through the use of flowery language to issue heartfelt warnings about the soul of the nation.

It’s a neat trick to admonish the public, while simultaneously professing to love and serve all of its sectors, regardless of political affiliation or ethnic background. It’s the president’s job, after all, to remain above the fray that besets Knesset debates and committee meetings. And Rivlin pretended to perform with aplomb this almost impossible feat in a country filled with a “stiff-necked people,” about whom it is quipped, “Two Jews, three opinions.”

But he hasn’t always been delicate when voicing his criticism. At the opening of the Knesset’s winter session in October, for instance, he announced, “It appears to me as if we have lost the moral compass that was with us from the state’s independence until today – the compass of fundamental principles and values that we are committed to uphold.”

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WHY I’M NOT WRITING “Black” and why I may start! John McWhorter

Posted By on July 9th, 2021

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-im-not-writing-black?token=

A small part of me has always sensed that black when referring to race might be capitalized. The racial concept of black is so far removed from the core meaning of the color that it qualifies as very much a proper noun, a concept in and of itself, of a kind that suggests being couched as a label.

And if we’re in for a renovation of the term we use for referring to black people – and given how such things go it was about time: Negro yielded to black in the late 1960s; African-American settled in 25 years later; since the mid-2010s I’ve been wondering what would be next – Black is a damned sight better to me than African-American ever was.

* * *

I never liked it, and have only ever used it when grace required it. Black has always been good enough for me. For one, since the 1990s so many actual Africans have emigrated to the U.S. that the term African-American is increasingly confusing. Is a descendant of slaves in America “African-American” in the same way as the child of parents who grew up in Ghana and speak Twi at home? And let’s not even get into that white Africans in South Africa sincerely feel themselves, when relocated here, to be “African-Americans,” as do people from Africa of South Asian descent.

And overall, the African connection feels too distant to me to justify an ethnic designation. Opinions will differ on this, but to me, black Americans are not remotely “African” in the sense that, say, the Sopranos were Italian-American. Without the languages, with only extreme refractions of the music (as jazz and rock) or food, with different tastes and even values, I find the “African” designation forced – especially considering that “Africa” is no one thing (note how vacuous and depersonalizing it sounds to call white people “European”).

When “African-American” settled in, a critical mass of black people felt differently. The idea was that calling attention to our “roots” in Africa lent a certain sense of legitimacy, indicating that slavery was not the root, the essence, of what black people are. But this always struck me as an oversimplification of black history, and perhaps even a symptom of internalized dismissal. My “roots” are with the black people of my ancestry who forged lives right here in America, racism and the rest be damned. We might even respect what our ancestors thought. Black people even a generation past slavery who had known slaves born in Africa did not tend to think of themselves as “African.” I’m pretty sure my great grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, of whom one photo survives, did not. My great aunt T.I., trotting in the 1980s up the steep staircase at the North Philadelphia train station in her nineties, was not “African” in any sense: she was an American black woman.

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Xi Jinping Is Mobilizing China for War, Possibly With Nukes by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17547/china-mobilizing-war

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory…. Ladakh is not the only hotspot. There is a Chinese encroachment in India’s Sikkim as well as incursions in neighboring Bhutan and Nepal.

Lately, Xi’s references in public pronouncements have become unmistakable, and his subordinates have been clear that Xi believes that everyone outside China owes him obedience.

Xi, while spouting tianxia-like language and bellicose words, has been getting the Chinese people ready for war.

The changes signal the growing clout of the People’s Army inside the Party and highlight the militarization of the country’s external relations. China is fast becoming a military state.

Xi Jinping on July 1 told the world what he is going to do. We are, in all probability, in the last moments of peace.

China in recent weeks has sent tens of thousands of troops to its disputed border with India in Ladakh, high in the Himalayas.

Beijing looks as if it is preparing for a full-scale invasion of Indian territory.

This deployment occurred while Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, in the words of the Communist Party’s China Daily, made a “pro-peace, pro-development, and pro-cooperation speech” to celebrate the centennial of the Party’s founding.

“The Chinese people have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will,” Xi said on July 1.

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Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins The Biden Administration, the bureaucracy, military, media, academia, Silicon Valley, and corporate boardrooms across America don’t know how to explain, much less solve, our mounting crises.   By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/scapegoats-boogeymen-and-hobgoblins/

The world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America, and its sudden scapegoating of “white supremacist” hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve. 

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4 holiday weekend. About 150 of them were killed. The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city, African-American males. The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars. 

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders, from Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to Cori Bush (D-Mo.), blasted America’s foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans. 

During 120 days of rioting, arson, and looting during the summer of 2020, the country suffered about $2 billion in property damage, roughly 25 deaths, and some 14,000 arrests. 

Rioters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct. They set afire a federal courthouse in Portland. And they tried to incinerate the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church next to the White House. Downtown areas of Portland and Seattle were taken over by rioters, who occupied entire city blocks with impunity. 

Most of those arrested during the violent summer were either released or eventually had their charges dropped or vastly reduced. Although many of the Antifa and BLM rioters shouted revolutionary slogans, called for violence against the police, and carefully organized their rioting on social media, neither the media nor the government ever declared the rioters to be conspiracists or insurrectionists. 

In contrast, when roughly 500 renegade Trump supporters, in buffoonish fashion, broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the media and government immediately claimed it was a carefully planned “armed insurrection.” But no one was arrested for possessing or using a gun. 

Headlines blared of five killed. But four died of natural causes and three of those deaths were among Trump supporters. The only violent death was also of a Trump supporter and military veteran, lethally shot by a Capitol police officer while entering through a window. Her shooter remains unidentified. 

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Keeping Up With Nikole North Carolina’s gain is Howard University’s loss. By Peter W. Wood

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/keeping-up-with-nikole/

No sooner does the Nikole Hannah-Jones story turn in one direction than it veers in another. My wife has a name for roads in rural Vermont that behave like this. She calls them ziggles, a portmanteau of zigzags and wiggles. You can drive them safely, but it pays not to pick up too much speed between veering one direction and another.

It seems like only yesterday that the esteemed board of trustees at the University of North Carolina voted nine to four to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ now infamous “1619 Project,” in order to quiet the controversy over the board’s previous decision to award the acclaimed journalist an academic appointment at the Hussman School of Journalism but not to award her tenure. 

Claiming racial discrimination, Hannah-Jones participated in a high-profile campaign demanding that the UNC board change its mind. And lo! It did. On June 30, the board conscientiously reviewed the case and decided, in the words of chairman R. Gene Davis, “to set the record straight.”

That’s an odd way for the road engineers to describe their plotting of a new ziggle. But let Chairman Davis explain: 

Let me be perfectly clear. Our motto is Lux et Libertas, light and liberty. We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement, all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.

Academic freedom has been robustly vindicated at UNC by capitulating to a woke mob that threatened the trustees and the university if it didn’t get its way. That’s how things are set straight in Chapel Hill these days. The trustees apparently have been studying Vermont road maps.

Of course, that was last week’s news. This week’s news was Hannah-Jones’ decision, announced on CBS News’ “This Morning” on July 6, that she was declining the UNC offer of a tenured appointment in order to accept the position of the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University.

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The Darkening Shadows of 100 Candles by Daryl McCann

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/china/2021/07/ the-darkening-shadows-of-100-candles/

Helmsman Xi Jinping, dressed in his best Mao suit for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), presented himself to the captive population of the PRC, not to mention the (not-yet captive) world, as the third-most significant leader of the party: the successor to Great Helmsman Mao Zedong and Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping. In this, at any rate, Xi was not wrong. Everything else about the July 1 celebrations in Tiananmen Square was pretty much smoke and mirrors.

The great conceit of the Leninist dictator is that that connection between the party, the nation and the people is indivisible. The CCP, according to Xi, has always “loved the Chinese people”. At this point in Xi’s speech, one’s thoughts drifted to the party’s murderously quixotic Great Leap Forward (1958-62) which resulted in the death of approximately 45 million people. Liu Shaoqi (1898-69), at the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, acknowledged the famine was 30 per cent the fault of nature and 70 per cent human error. In other words, the party was directly responsible for the death of 31.5 million people, even more than the 3.9 million (and counting) thought to have died on account of the CCP virus (also known as SARS-CoV-2).

The fate of Liu, one-time PRC head of state and author of How to be a Good Communist (1939), tells us much of what we need to know about Leninism with Chinese Characteristics. The former Chairman of the People’s Republic was demeaned, tortured, and purged by the party during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Officially designated a former-person, Liu (right) was sentenced to house arrest outside of Beijing and died, ignominiously, in 1969. Although his reputation had been trashed by the party for the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Liu was posthumously rehabilitated by Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping in 1980. His definitive rehabilitation, though, has now formally taken place. Helmsman Xi named him, along with Mao, Zhou, Deng and Zhu, as one of the great heroes of the party at the Tiananmen Square celebration.

As President Xi went on about “the spirit of the party”, I wondered what “the spirit of Liu Shaoqi” might have made of the occasion. Would he have been uplifted by the choir of 10,000 belting out patriotic songs about “national rejuvenation” – material, ethical, cultural, and ecological! – under the guidance of the party? Would the first appearance in the sky of the PLA’s Chengdu J-20 stealth fighters (left) have been a moment of immense pride? And, finally, would his induction into the pantheon of party legends have mitigated the shame he endured in the final years of his life?

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France, Germany, and Britain Sound Alarm on Iran’s Nuclear Moves. The U.S…? By Bryan Preston

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/07/07/france-germany-and-britain-sound-alarm-on-irans-nuclear-moves-the-u-s-n1460117

On Tuesday afternoon, France, Britain, and Germany released a joint statement regarding Iran’s latest nuclear moves. VOA’s Jeff Seldin tweeted the statement out.

The three allies “note with grave concern the latest report by the IAEA confirming that Iran has taken steps in the production of enriched uranium material.” The statement further notes that Iran has no credible civilian use for its activities, leading the three to suspect that Iran is taking steps toward developing nuclear weapons.

It should be obvious why this is a gravely serious issue.

It’s made more grave by United States silence on the one hand, and Joe Biden’s obvious eagerness to get the Obama-era Iran deal back in vogue on the other. Like most American leftists, results that benefit Americans are of dubious value and matter a lot less to Biden than the appearances of inking some “historic” deal or initiating some government program that the media will cast as well-meaning. It’s the PR that sells the thought that counts.

Iran is not on strong footing these days, but that matters little. It’s internally as brittle as ever. Israel continues working solid diplomacy with some of its Arab neighbors after Trump’s historic Abraham Accords.

Iran lost power and even its “countdown to Armageddon” clock reportedly went offline in the blackouts. Yes, we’re having some blackouts too thanks to a grid that hasn’t kept up with population growth in Texas and an overreliance on wind and solar there and in other states. But America doesn’t keep a running clock that’s just counting down the seconds until we can annihilate someone based on their race and heritage. Iran does. That clock is what reportedly went dark.

Biden still wants to treat Iran as some kind of quasi-normal state despite the fact that it’s run by one of the world’s worst dictatorships — and one of the world’s most prolific sponsors of terrorism.

Nuclear weapons in such hands spell violence, misery, and doom.

In April 2021, Foreign Policy warned that Biden returning the United States to the Obama-era JCPOA would be unwise.

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The ‘Hotel California’ doctrine of US military intervention By Michael Rich

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/the_hotel_california_doctrine_of_us_military_intervention.html

It is easy to remember why the United States invaded Afghanistan.  Our country had just been attacked by terrorists based there.  The nation was united in a desire to protect itself from further attacks and bring the parties responsible to justice.

It’s not so easy to remember whether the justification for the invasion was based on a broader policy, whether there was discussion at the time of what would constitute victory, or whether the invasion was an actual war in the traditional sense.  More to the point, it’s unclear whether those questions have answers today, even as we exit Afghanistan.

I’ve read several articles written by people with a ton more knowledge than I have about whether our country should stay in Afghanistan or leave.  A lot of the writers had personal experience fighting in Afghanistan.  The opinions they offer differ, with some arguing to stay and others arguing to leave.  The positions of Trump and Biden seem to be aligned on the side of leave, which is remarkable, given how much else they disagree on.

As an average citizen, I supported the decision to invade.  Like most people, the attacks scared the daylights out of me, and I was riled up more than at any other time in my life.  I suspect that our leaders were at least in part reacting to the zeitgeist as much as, or possibly more than they were thinking about the end game.

At this point, I don’t presume to know the correct answer on the stay or leave question, though I could make a solid argument for either course of action.  Stay: The situation in Afghanistan could quickly return to pre-9/11 conditions and again become a haven for terrorists plotting to attack us.  Leave: There’s nothing more to do in Afghanistan that would justify expending more blood and treasure than we already have, and we need to rely on Homeland Security and the “Intelligence Community” to defend ourselves from future terrorist attacks.  You can add in arguments about the positive or negative impacts on Afghanis from either point of view.  On this count, most people would acknowledge that leaving is going to hurt the segment of the Afghani population who want to avoid a return to the tender mercies of the Taliban, including and especially women.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s stupidest mistake By Frank Friday

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/bidens_stupidest_mistake.html

You can’t say Joe Biden hasn’t been busy in the months since he took office. Like most great artists, Biden is prolific. The medium he works in, of course, is stupid mistakes, and he cranks out new ones every day. It is hard to say exactly which one is stupidest of all — like determining which Rembrandt painting or Beethoven symphony is the best.

The current open-the-borders-but-blame-it-all-somehow-on-Trump policy may be the most consequential. I would estimate this will lead to at least 5 million Central American paupers in the USA before Slow Joe finishes his term.

But maybe the ugliest and most humiliating stupidity is happening right now with the Afghanistan pullout, the one and only Trump idea Biden wants to follow through with — although I think Pres. Trump was having second thoughts.

The U.S. achieved mastery over the Taliban years ago. Since 2016, only a handful of our soldiers have been lost there, none last year. While the U.S. military on a global basis loses about 1000 servicemen every year to routine accidents and training mistakes.

At this point, having spent so much blood and treasure to pacify the country, why are we in such a hurry to pull out the 3,000 or so soldiers training and advising the government forces? Forces that seem willing to keep doing their own fighting and dying if we give them just a small bit of assistance.

If we completely pull out and demoralize the Afghans, I think they fold up and quit. The aftermath will be a bloody disgrace, something like the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and the original Afghan fiasco the British Retreat from Kabul in 1842. 

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What Is China Doing? by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on July 8th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17551/what-is-china-doing

What does China want the narrative to be? The ideal outcome would be that the virus originated outside of China. Failing that, an acceptable outcome would be, as highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, that the virus “that killed millions of people and shattered the global economy” would be “among the world’s most consequential mysteries.”

There is one outcome that would be unacceptable to the CCP: China will do almost anything to keep the U.S. from concluding that the virus was developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The CCP is already taking steps to encourage the U.S. to reach “the right” judgment, and it appears to have people in the West, including in the U.S., who are willingly supporting those efforts.

The Lancet has again come out with an unjustified dismissal of the lab leak theory, couched in support for the G7’s call for a new COVID origins study, led by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Nothing could be better for China than having The Lancet as the messenger, lending scientific credibility to what the CCP wants the world to believe.

The July 5 publication of the letter in The Lancet is a strong signal that the CCP has launched an active disinformation campaign. The CCP will continue to spare no effort in ensuring that the COVID-19 virus appears to have originated somewhere other than China….

On May 26, 2021, President Joe Biden announced that he had asked the U.S. intelligence community to redouble its efforts to determine the origins of the COVID-19 virus. The U.S. findings are expected in about 90 days. So now we know what the Biden administration is doing, but what will the Chinese government, or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), do? In light of China’s obfuscation so far, it is absurd to imagine that it will be cooperating with the U.S. investigation. Neither will it be sitting idly by waiting to learn of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusions. Instead, the CCP will be doing everything it can to shape the report and ensure that the findings will be released in a context saturated by Chinese propaganda.

What does China want the narrative to be? The ideal outcome would be that the virus originated outside of China. Failing that, an acceptable outcome would be, as highlighted in a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, that the virus “that killed millions of people and shattered the global economy” would be “among the world’s most consequential mysteries.”