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Woke Inquisitors in the Medical World By Joel Zinberg

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/woke-inquisitors-in-the-medical-world/

A recent ‘controversy’ reveals how politically correct ideology is harming health care.

Four hundred years ago, Italian astronomer Galileo was persecuted for advancing Copernicus’s theory that the earth and other planets rotate around the sun. This heliocentric theory violated the prevailing belief dating back to Aristotle and engrained in Christian theology that the sun and planets rotate around a stationary earth. Galileo was tried for heresy and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Science would eventually vindicate Galileo.

Today’s scientists and physicians face a different orthodoxy that explains all disparate health outcomes as the result of structural or systemic racism. Doubters and those who investigate genetic and scientific alternative explanations face their own latter-day inquisition. Just ask Howard Bauchner, editor in chief of JAMA — the Journal of the American Medical Association — who was recently forced to resign. While the remaining JAMA editors offered fulsome praise in a farewell editorial citing his accomplishments, including a commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, make no mistake: He was purged for a thoughtcrime.

Dr. Bauchner’s offense was that he presided over JAMA when it aired a podcast titled “Structural Racism for Doctors — What Is It?” in late February. The podcast featured two white physicians — JAMA deputy editor Ed Livingston and Mitchell Katz, an editor at JAMA Internal Medicine, president and CEO of New York City’s public-hospital system NYC Health + Hospitals, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Katz described structural racism as societal policies or practices that perpetuate racial inequality, as opposed to individuals’ racist beliefs. Dr. Livingston wondered if “structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.” (emphasis added) He worried that people offended by being labeled racist would not address the societal barriers to equal opportunity. JAMA’s tweet promoting the podcast stated, “No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors. . . .”

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The Coming Backlash against Woke Public Schools By Michael Farris

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-coming-backlash-against-woke-public-schools/

Parents have had enough of the politicization of their local schools.

The reports coming out of the school systems of Portland, Ore., and its suburbs are simply terrifying. Children are being taught the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, and the rioters who continue to wreak havoc on that once-beautiful, quiet city are held up as heroes. As Christopher Rufo has reported, “The schools have self-consciously adopted the ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ as their theoretical orientation, activated through a curriculum of critical race theory and enforced through the appointment of de facto political officers within individual schools.”

And it is working. The schools have become, Rufo notes, “a school-to-radicalism pipeline.”

But it is not just in radicalized Portland or Seattle where these forces hold sway. In my own home county of Loudoun County, Va., the radicals have seized control and plunged with abandon in a radical direction, leaving much of our community gasping at the temerity of their tactics and shuddering at the implications for the future of our community and our nation should they succeed.

Loudoun is the school district that suspended its teacher, Tanner Cross, for having the audacity to speak for one minute at a recent school-board meeting in opposition to a proposed sexual/political mandate. Let that sink in. Before the policy was in place, a highly regarded teacher was suspended for simply disagreeing with a proposed policy.

The legal organization I lead, Alliance Defending Freedom, represents Tanner. I was astounded when, in the midst of a hearing seeking a temporary injunction to reinstate him, which the court granted Tuesday, the school district’s lawyer volunteered the fact that he was the eighth employee in the past two years who has been suspended for out-of-school speech. Apparently, consistently violating the First Amendment rights of its employees makes everything all right in the minds of this school district.

Parents know that the curriculum has recently turned hard to the left. Racial and sexual politics are the prime directive of the school system. Every child will be immersed. And every teacher will recite the party line. No dissenting allowed.

The school district seems oblivious to the fact that they are losing not just conservative parents, but the great bulk of the middle-of-the road families who simply want their children to get a quality academic education.

The leadership of the Loudoun County Public Schools may be woke, but they are blind. They do not seem to see the growing signs of an educational revolution that is stirring in communities all across the nation. Parents have simply had enough of the politicization of their local schools and the attempts to turn their children into young but full-throated activists for the progressive movement.

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The Poisonous Fruit of Appeasing Iran’s Mullahs by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17452/appeasing-iran-mullahs

The Arabs clearly see what the Biden administration, Britain, Germany and France are refusing to see — that Iran has ambitions not only to acquire a nuclear bomb, but also aggressively to export its “Islamic revolution” and terrorism on a global scale.

It is also important to note that one of the missions of Quds Force is to “liberate Jerusalem and Palestine,” a euphemism for the elimination of Israel.

“The Quds Force is in Yemen to launch attacks on Mecca and Medina and their surroundings [in Saudi Arabia]. The goal of the mullahs in Tehran is to attack Muslims and inflict the greatest possible harm on them.” — Walid Al-Ghamidi, Saudi writer, YouTube, June 5, 2021.

“The Houthi’s missiles and drones nearly hit the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. How can Iran invest in the bombing of Saudi Arabia while claiming… that it seeks to liberate Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque? Iran’s claim to support Islamic holy sites is not related to any religious beliefs. It is related to regional ambitions, expansionist dreams, and striving to export the Iranian revolution to various countries in the region.” — Mohammed Hassan Mufti, Saudi author, Okaz, June 3, 2021.

“There is no dispute among experts and political analysts that Iran is a direct cause of the complete destruction of at least four Arab countries”: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. — Mohammed Hassan Mufti, Okaz, June 3, 2021.

“America’s entry into the Iranian nuclear agreement will…. enable the mullahs to obtain nuclear weapons and more than a billion dollars. Some of the money will go to Iran’s agents in the region.” — Bader bin Saud, Saudi columnist, Okaz, May 24, 2021.

“Does Iran want to liberate Jerusalem and give it to the Palestinians, or does it want to add it to the group of Arab capitals it occupies, such as Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and Sana’a?” — Faisal Al-Qassem, prominent Syrian writer and journalist, Al-Quds Al-Arabi, May 14, 2021.

Qassem also pointed out that some commentators have come to prefer keeping Jerusalem under Israeli control over its liberation by Iran: “Look at the capitals occupied by Iran: Baghdad has become, according to the United Nations, the dirtiest capital in the world, while Beirut has become the largest dumpster in the Middle East. As for Damascus, it turned into a ruin, while Sana’a returned to the Middle Ages.” — Faisal Al-Qassem, quoting an Arab in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, May 14, 2021.

“Jerusalem is not in the mind of the regime. Rather, what concerns Iran is killing Arabs and occupying their countries.” — Dr. Bahera Al-Sheikhli, Iraqi author, Al-Arab, May 21, 2021.

“The truth is that Iran established the Quds Force to occupy Arab countries, recruit Arab traitors into terrorist organizations to overthrow Arab governments, and threaten Arab national security.” — Abdel Munim Ibrahim, Emirati political analyst, Akhbar Al-Khaleej, May 12, 2021.

The Arabs, however, are sending a very different message to the Biden administration and other Western powers: Appeasing Iran by reviving the nuclear deal, lifting sanctions or giving it money will only assist the Iranian regime in perpetrating more crimes and increasing instability and terrorism in the region.

Iran is continuing to exploit the Palestinian issue to promote its expansionist schemes in the Middle East and meddle in the internal affairs of Arab countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain.

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Denmark Cracks Down on Mass Migration “The Current Asylum System Has Failed” by Soeren Kern

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17450/denmark-mass-migration

The Danish Parliament has passed a new law that will allow the government to deport asylum seekers to countries outside of the European Union to have their cases considered abroad. The legislation is widely seen as a first step toward moving the country’s asylum screening process beyond Danish borders.

“Denmark is committed to finding new and sustainable solutions to the present migration and refugee challenges that affect countries of origin, transit and destination. The current asylum system is unfair and unethical by incentivizing children, women and men to embark on dangerous journeys along the migratory routes, while human traffickers earn fortunes.” — Danish Immigration Minister Mattias Tesfaye.

“Gang crime in no way belongs in Denmark. When foreigners or persons to whom we in Denmark have granted Danish citizenship participate in the gangs’ ruthless crime, it is a fundamental expression of contempt for the society of which they are a part. Therefore, it is good news that Parliament has today passed the government’s bill to provide the opportunity to revoke citizenship in the event of serious gang crime to the serious detriment of the state’s vital interests. It is a goal for the government to ensure that Danes can be safe in their everyday lives.” — Minister of Justice Nick Hækkerup.

The Danish Parliament approved a first-ever Repatriation Law which authorizes the government to deport failed asylum seekers and other migrants illegally in the country…. The Danish government tightened citizenship rules…. The Danish government announced a package of new proposals aimed at fighting “religious and cultural parallel societies” in Denmark…. The Danish Parliament approved a new law that bans foreign governments from financing mosques in Denmark…. The Danish Parliament approved a ban on Islamic full-face veils in public spaces.

“We hope that people will stop seeking asylum in Denmark.” — MP Rasmus Stoklund.

The Danish Parliament has passed a new law that will allow the government to deport asylum seekers to countries outside of the European Union to have their cases considered abroad. The legislation is widely seen as a first step toward moving the country’s asylum screening process beyond Danish borders.

The law, proposed by the Social Democrat-led government, is aimed at discouraging frivolous asylum applications. It has been greeted with fury by those who favor mass migration, presumably out of fear that other EU countries may now follow Denmark’s lead.

Denmark, which already has some of the most restrictive immigration policies in Europe, is at the vanguard of European efforts to preserve local traditions and values in the face of mass migration, runaway multiculturalism, and the systematic encroachment of political Islam.

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Who Loses When the China Bat Cave Implodes? Charles lipson

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/08/who_loses_when_the_china_bat_cave_implodes.html

The story about Wuhan’s “wet market” is taking on water. We’ve moved well past the “trust but verify” stage. We’re now in the “don’t trust a damn thing they say” stage. In this case, “they” refers mostly to the Chinese Communist Party. But the public’s mistrust has spread to our own government’s public health experts, and to much of the Western media, as well.

We still don’t know where the COVID-19 pandemic originated, but the more we learn, the less China’s official story sounds right. The World Health Organization’s year-long endorsement of Beijing means nothing. At this point, even the WHO is starting to say we need a more thorough investigation. Good luck with that. China has prevented independent scientists from conducting any serious, open inquiry of the pandemic’s origins. That won’t change.

China’s secrecy tells us sometimes, but we can’t be sure what. Remember, U.S. intelligence agencies and the George W. Bush administration made the wrong inference from Saddam Hussein’s secrecy about weapons of mass destruction. Saddam impeded international inspectors to search freely for WMDs, which he possessed previously. There was no proof he had destroyed them. Yet he blocked unannounced international inspections of Iraqi sites that might contain WMDs. The natural inference was that he still had those weapons and was hiding them. American and British intelligence researched that conclusion. The CIA director famously told President Bush it was a “slam dunk.”

It wasn’t. What Saddam was actually hiding was that he didn’t have WMDs. He was hiding that less from his Western enemies and more from his dangerous neighbor, Iran, and possibly from internal enemies in Iraq itself. That mistaken inference is worth remembering as we ponder the still-murky origins of the Wuhan virus. We know China is hiding something. What we don’t know is what it is hiding and why.

Beijing could be hiding that a natural virus escaped from the lab.
Beijing could be hiding that the escaped virus was artificially enhanced, made more contagious and lethal (called “gain of function”).
Beijing could be hiding the fact that China’s military was involved in this gain-of-function project, or at least in some aspects of the lab’s research.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese political leaders knew, early on, that the virus spread from human to human and that it kept this crucial finding secret for months. During that period, Beijing and the WHO were falsely telling the world that the virus could not spread from human to human.
Beijing could be hiding that Chinese leaders not only knew the virus was contagious, but that they acted on that knowledge by allowing Chinese nationals to travel freely around the world, spreading the disease, while sharply restricting travel within China from Wuhan. And, finally,
Beijing could be hiding anything and everything simply because that’s how totalitarian regimes operate. They always hide information, control the flow, and prevent outside inspections.

Whatever they’re hiding, they have powerful reasons. The Chinese Communist Party knows how high the stakes are if it is found responsible for a deadly lab leak and for keeping that information secret when others could have acted promptly and saved countless lives. Americans will be outraged, as they should be, and Washington will be forced to take serious action.

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Critical Race Theory’s Poisonous Roots Trace Back To Harvard University Harvard bears a unique responsibility for disseminating the toxic ideology known as critical race theory into our national discourse.By Kenny Xu

Posted By on June 10th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/09/critical-race-theorys-poisonous-roots-trace-back-to-harvard-university/

In the past several months, multiple state legislatures have made moves to ban critical race theory — the latest hot-button issue in contemporary American politics — from their public schools. Activists have opined that critical race theory is either the cure for racial injustice in America or the most dangerous force threatening our democracy.

Plenty of writers have explained the main tenets of the theory, some in great detail. But where did it come from? How did an obscure academic theory come to dominate the national political conversation in only a few years?

The answer to these questions lies in the origins of the theory. Critical race theory emerged from one of America’s foremost institutions: Harvard University. Tracing the history of critical race theory reveals just how intimately connected it is with America’s most prestigious university.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal scholars grappled with how the sweeping legislation would affect America’s racial struggles. By the 1970s, it was clear that anti-discrimination law and racial integration had not fully healed the nation’s race relations. This frustrated many civil rights advocates, who after Martin Luther King Jr. died in 1968 lacked a moral lodestar to underpin their faith in American democracy to solve racial problems.

The Road Leads Back to Harvard

Borrowing from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who posited a theory of “cultural hegemony” by the capitalist ruling class, a group of Ivy League law professors developed a school of thought called “critical legal studies,” synthesizing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony with racial classification. The most important thinkers of the group of critical legal theorists were all Harvard Law professors: Derrick Bell, Roberto Unger, Duncan Kennedy, and Morton Horwitz.

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INTERMISSION

Posted By on June 7th, 2021

No posting until June 10…rsk

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Fifty-four years after June 7, 1967 … taking a moment to reflect Daniel Gordis

Posted By on June 7th, 2021

https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/just-a-pile-of-rocks?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo

Today is June 7 – the secular anniversary of Israel’s capturing the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel has had the Old City for so long – for 54 of its 73 years – that it’s hard for us to remember Israel without it. It’s hard to remember Israel merely nine miles wide, or Israel without the Old City or the Western Wall. But what’s really almost impossible to fathom is something we hardly ever think about: Israel with no holy places whatsoever.

Israel before 1967 had already accomplished much, but it had a blemished soul; it was a Jewish state, but it had no hallowed Jewish places.

To bring Israeli history to life, to make it three dimensional, Israel from the Inside will periodically examine famous speeches, events, eulogies, songs and the like that afford us a more robust understanding of the Jewish state, certainly more than the news can, and even more than many books do. To understand the veritable messianic sentiment that the Six Day War unleashed, we have to return to a speech little known outside Orthodox circles today, delivered on Yom Ha-Atzma’ut 1967 by Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, the son of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the Chief Rabbi of the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community in the Land of Israel).

By 1967, Rabbi Kook the elder had already died (he did not live to see the state founded), but his son, Tzvi Yehudah, was at the height of his powers. And on Independence Day in 1967 (a few weeks before the war), he addressed the students at his yeshiva, explaining why unlike virtually everyone else on that famous night of the United Nations vote on November 29, 1947, he could not rejoice. (In a later post, we’ll examine Amos Oz’s now classic description of that night, one of the most powerful pieces of Israeli writing I’ve ever encountered.)

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Putting an end to ‘Reimagining’ the Criminal Justice System By Janet Levy

Posted By on June 7th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/putting_an_end_to_reimagining_the_criminal_justice_system.html

Many majority Democrat cities have fallen victim to progressive prosecutors. Rather than drive down crime, improve public safety, and promote common sense tough-on-crime policies, these zealots campaign on platforms of structural racism, outcome equity, and restorative justice. In these cities, such performances have in fact become a requirement for the office of district attorney (DA). Aspiring DAs must protest the disproportionate prosecution of minorities without examining the underlying causes; they must clamor for the elimination of cash bail in the name of racial fairness; and they must recommend sentence reduction or alternatives to incarceration to mitigate “past injustices.”

Committed to “reimagining” the criminal justice system in the service of “woke” rhetoric, these DAs are neither acting in the public interest to enforce the law nor honoring their oath of office. They forget that their principal duty is to uphold the law, not crusade for changes driven by their political agenda. In the process, they are emboldening offenders, fostering disrespect for the law, unleashing dangerous criminals on society, and – worst of all – robbing victims of due justice. San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, who wears his ideological lineage on his sleeve and currently faces a recall campaign, arrogantly claims that a DA can “challenge the legitimacy of a law by declining to bring charges in certain cases.”

Progressive policies have time and again been proven to be misguided, even inimical to public safety.

A study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) found that in six jurisdictions with “social justice” prosecutors, reduced conviction rates and fewer guilty outcomes for serious felonies accompanied rising crime rates. It questioned the supplanting of the standard requirement of “competency and experience” for DAs with “ideological zeal.” In his foreword to the study, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III wrote that elected leaders, law enforcement and the media should realize that “leftist ideas of social justice and true criminal justice are not compatible.”

The radicalization of DA offices and the clamor for defunding the police comes as crime rates are skyrocketing and Americans are worried. A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 49% of respondents said that violent crime was their top concern, ahead of the pandemic, the economy, political correctness, and race relations.

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The Lethal Wages of Trump Derangement Madness In their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, Trump haters suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—–and people died as a result. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 7th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/06/the-lethal-wages-of-trump-derangement-madness/

Think about it: For about five years, anything candidate, president-elect, and President Trump said or did, the media, the Left, and progressive popular culture opposed in Pavlovian fashion.

 Anything that Trump touched was ridiculed or discredited—regardless of evidence, data, or cogency. The merits of a Trump policy, a Trump assessment, a Trump initiative were irrelevant—given the primordial hatred of the Left of all things Trump: the president, the person, the family. 

 Under the reductionist malady of Trump Derangement Syndrome, facts and logic did not matter. Instead, anything not said or done in opposition to Trump empowered the supposed existential Trump threat. Ironically, some of the most deductive and reductionist Trump haters were supposedly professionals, the highly educated, and the self-proclaimed devotees of the Enlightenment. And yet in their uncontrolled aversion and detestation, they suspended all the rules of empiricism, logic, and rationality—and people died as a result.

 Most Americans did not care much when the apparently sane went completely insane in their irrational hatred of Trump. Few cared whether Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) wished to destroy his career in trying to predicate his crackpot policies in opposition to Trump. Who worried that Anthony Fauci seemed to have tarnished his distinguished career by his anti-Trump triangulations? Did it matter to anyone that the obsessed Lincoln Project grifters were rendered utterly disgraced, or that the NeverTrumpers were left irrelevant and inert by their irrational and uncontrollable venom?

 Yet, existentially hating everything Trump said or did—as opposed to expressing political opposition to him and his policies—did not just implode elite careers. It also turned deadly. The result of such knee-jerk revulsion was a great deal of damage to the country in general and unnecessary deaths of Americans in particular. 

 For over a year, anyone who questioned the official NIH/NIAID/Fauci narrative that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a new viral mutation that had jumped to humans from bats (or pangolins)—perhaps carved up in the Wuhan wet market—was attacked both personally and professionally. Why? Mostly because Trump himself had questioned just that improbable hypothesis. And Trump certainly could not be right. But even if he were, it was still the moral thing to say he was not.