RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/antisemitism-is-an-attack-on-american-principles/

America and Jews owe each other a great debt. An attack on one is an attack on both.

The renowned British historian Paul Johnson has called anti-Semitism “a disease of the mind.” There seems to be no permanent cure for this disease. It has flared up again, not just in the usual international settings — in the United Nations General Assembly, for example — but much closer to home.

During the first week of the Israel–Hamas conflict, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) received 193 reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Two weeks ago, Jews were attacked by gangs in New York City and Los Angeles, and synagogues were vandalized in Skokie, Tucson, and Salt Lake City.

Attacks on Jews, however, began long before the most recent clash between Israel and the Islamist terrorist organization of Hamas. In 2019, the ADL recorded more than 2,100 anti-Semitic acts, the highest number in the 40-year history of the organization’s report. The murderous rampages in synagogues in California and Pittsburgh, a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, the arson at the Portland Chabad Center for Jewish Life, the stabbing at the rabbi’s home during Chanukah in Monsey, N.Y., and brutal assaults on Hasidic men in Brooklyn — such incidents are no longer a rare occurrence.

Anti-Semitism is more than a hate crime. It represents a unique assault on America’s founding principles of equality and freedom. Despite the manifest violation of these principles from the start of the American experiment — the existence of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans — the United States created a civic culture that would regard Jews as equal citizens. Outside of Israel, America would become the most welcoming home to Jews of any nation in the world.

https://spectator.org/george-floyd-wokeism-religion/

Roughly one year ago, a religious Reformation occurred.

Over the years, I and many other writers have compared left-wing political “wokeness” to a religion — noting the philosophy’s endless rules, supposed martyrs, sacred spaces, debates about heresy, and even vision of the fallen world after original sin (“the System”). But it seems fair to say that a more aggressive and missionary version of the faith took root last year, following the unfortunate and symbolic death of George Floyd. A national movement rapidly coalesced around the idea of largely or completely defunding the police, while elected officials up to and including the president mouthed critical catchphrases about “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” American schools teaching full-on critical theory as part of the standard curriculum became a real possibility and the basis of a heated national debate. But crime statistics and other empirical data indicate that the promise of today’s new secular faith is a false one and that we should beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing when listening to its prophets.

Analogies between wokeness — Wokeism? — and conventional religion have been made many times, by authors ranging from John McWhorter on the political center-left over to Ann Coulter on the right. I myself wrote a well-received piece along these lines in The American Spectator last year. There are obviously more than a few similarities between faith of the old-timey variety and the modern idea that facially neutral “Systems” are all subtly structured to oppress minorities or the poor (“racism is the everyday”), and heroes are needed to fight this latent evil. The new ideology also boasts acclaimed martyrs such as Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, points of pure faith (such as the claim that racism must explain all performance gaps between groups), prophets ranging from Ibram X. Kendi to attorney Benjamin Crump, and a plentitude of holy places and “sacred spaces.” There is even a concept of original sin, which might be summed up as “privilege” — all people are born with a certain degree of advantage conferred on them by our corrupt systems, which the more fortunate must reject in order for moral purity to be possible.

While often made in fun, the wokeness-to-religion comparison holds up well and has been made for years. We have, however, witnessed a rapid and dramatic surge in the faith after the tragic police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Within the boundaries of the famous analogy, it seems fair to say Wokeism had a Judaism-to-Christianity or Catholicism-to-Protestantism-style Reformatory expansion following that day. Without being at all sarcastic, one can say that Floyd died in fairly classic fashion for a martyr, apparently being killed — however much other factors contributed to this outcome — under the knee of a modern-day centurion, a uniformed big-city police officer.

https://spectator.org/russia-hoax-obama/

“If I hadn’t already used up my 2021 quota of Orwell quotes — it’s been that kind of year — I might be tempted to conclude with this one: “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.” To be clear, Orwell never expected 1984 to be used as a training manual.”

Overlooked in Edward-Isaac Dovere’s much-discussed new book on the 2020 election, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, released May 25, is his credulous account of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Relying heavily on Barack Obama’s key national security people, Dovere seems unaware that they have used him to launder their wretched history.

In Dovere’s retelling, the drama begins when CIA Director John Brennan arrives at a private White House lunch with a package of classified material. “The Russians weren’t just coming,” Dovere writes. “They were already here.” Dovere traces this hush-hush meeting, the first of many, to late July 2016. Being a “do-it-by-the-book” kind of guy, Obama did not want any of this information to leak.

Dovere is either unfamiliar with or fully indifferent to the serious research that has gone into debunking the Russia collusion hoax, a hoax orchestrated in large part by Dovere’s sources.

“We knew that this was a threat to our democracy,” Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice tells Dovere, “and it was potentially going to affect candidates up and down the ballot in every state and every party.” Had Mike Lindell said something this hyperbolic, at least 16 states would have banned MyPillows outright.

Dovere swallows it all. For him, there were “elements of the interference that everyone could see.” He cites — as though equal threats to the Republic — Trump’s joke about Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails, Trump’s (nonexistent) meddling in the Republican platform language about Ukraine, Wikileaks’ supposed mucking about in a South Florida campaign to benefit Roger Stone, and, oh yeah, the Steele dossier. Dovere describes the dossier as “the famous mishmash of rumors compiled by a British former espionage expert” and drops the subject completely.

Dovere repeatedly reminds the reader of the White House’s insistence on keeping the Russian intel tight. Brennan, however, was told to provide classified briefings to the four top congressional leaders. Reportedly, House Speaker Paul Ryan was all ears, telling Brennan, “As you know, I’m not a fan of Trump.” Unfortunately, this exchange seems all too believable.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/28/as-the-big-lie-about-sicknick-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/

On August 26, 2020, Kevin Phomma was arrested in Portland for assaulting several police officers with bear spray during that city’s nonstop siege by Antifa and Black Lives Matters protesters. Phomma and others surrounded the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, blocked traffic, and fought with law enforcement.

In a press release announcing his arrest, the Justice Department said, “Phomma doused several officers with pepper spray while they attempted to arrest him. Once in custody, officers discovered the pepper spray was in fact a powerful bear deterrent pepper spray.”

Phomma, 26, also had a three-inch dagger in a sheath strapped to his left hip. He was charged with a dozen counts ranging from civil disorder—a felony—to unlawful use of mace. He appears to contribute little to society except for his skills as a professional protester.

A few days after his arrest, Phomma was released on bail. His trial is still pending; his lawyers claim the civil disorder charge is “a vestige of opposition to civil rights for Black Americans.” (He does not appear to be black.)

While Phomma roams free, acting as the aggrieved party rather than the aggressor, the two men who allegedly sprayed officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant on January 6 are not so lucky.

George Tanios and Julian Khater were arrested in March and accused of “attacking” Sicknick with a chemical spray; the indictment, not coincidentally, was filed just a few weeks after the initial account of Sicknick’s death—the murder-by-fire-extinguisher story—was exposed as a lie.

Desperate to sustain the lie that a police officer was killed by bloodthirsty Trump cultists on January 6, the media and Democrats quickly pivoted to the idea Sicknick died from an allergic reaction to the bear spray. Tanios and Khater, who traveled together to hear Donald Trump’s speech that day, face four charges of using and carrying the “dangerous and deadly weapon” on January 6.

Unlike Kevin Phomma, one charge filed against Tanios and Khater is “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.” Unlike Phomma and his accomplices, Tanios and Khater also are charged with conspiracy for allegedly pre-planning the assault on a federal officer.

Also unlike Phomma, neither man has been able to post bail; a federal judge last month agreed with Joe Biden’s Justice Department to keep the pair behind bars awaiting trial. D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, a Reagan appointee, even rejected a $15 million bond package backed by 16 relatives of Julian Khater—an amount three times higher than the court-ordered bail for Harvey Weinstein, as one reporter noted.