NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

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

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

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.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

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

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

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.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

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

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

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?

MEDIA Comments turned off

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

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

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.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Austin City Hall Is Now Occupied by a Tent City With Machete-Wielding ‘Security’ By Bryan Preston

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/25/austin-city-hall-is-now-occupied-by-a-tent-city-with-machete-wielding-security-n1449682

Mayor Steve Adler’s Austin is still getting worse. He led the explosion of homeless camping citywide and the defunding of police.

Police are leaving in droves, crime is spiking hard, and homeless camping spread serious blight all over the city. Now that blight is concentrating downtown, thanks to another of Adler’s addle-brained decisions.

If you walk or drive around city hall in Austin, Texas, now, you’ll see a new tent city. It sprung up after voters in the city overwhelmingly voted to reinstate the ban on camping on public land on May 1.

Even during the ban, camping at city hall was illegal. Adler and the then-unanimous Democrat city council took care of itself that way, while allowing the rest of the city to become a trash heap and a disease and fire hazard.

Now, because the voters have spoken, the ban is being phased back in citywide.

But city hall is occupied. A tent city with its own machete-wielding “security” squats on space on which it has always been illegal to camp.

Mayor Steve Adler is doing nothing about it.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Those Dirty Electric Vehicles And A Bolt Of Green Hypocrisy

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/26/those-dirty-electric-vehicles-and-green-hypocrisy/

There is much more to the electric vehicle story than the “EVs good, gasoline- and diesel-powered automobiles bad” narrative we’ve been fed. Truth in advertising would require electric cars to be shown surrounded by the Pig Pen-esque dirty cloud that they kick up.

The birthplace of most electric cars is the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country where the diamond trade has helped finance civil war. There, reports the Deseret News, “slave labor” is feeding “big tech’s quest for cobalt,” an element used in the batteries that drive EVs.

“Our children are dying like dogs,” a Congolese mother whose son and cousin died while working in the Congo’s cobalt mines, says the Deseret News. She and others have filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court that “insists companies are simply turning a blind eye to the egregious abuses that include children killed in tunnel collapses or losing limbs or suffering from other horrific injuries caused by mining accidents.”

The United Nations says that “nearly 50% of world cobalt reserves” are found in the Congo. The Deseret News says the figure is more than 60%. But it’s not the only element needed to build “green” batteries. They require lithium, natural graphite, and manganese, raw materials that are “highly concentrated,” according to the U.N., “in a few countries.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Correcting 1619’s Falsehoods About the American Founding A new book published by Robert Woodson’s ‘1776 Unites’ debunks the project’s dubious claims. by Jason Riley

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/correcting-1619s-falsehoods-about-the-american-founding-11621981288?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Regular readers of these pages need no introduction to Robert Woodson. For the uninitiated, Mr. Woodson is a veteran community activist who broke with the traditional civil-rights leadership in the 1970s after realizing that the agenda of “racial grievance groups” like the NAACP was increasingly at odds with the actual wants and needs of the black underclass.

The Washington-based Woodson Center is a community-development organization dedicated to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods, where broken homes, violent crime and abysmal public schools are common. Unlike its liberal counterparts, the center encourages communities to look inward for solutions, as blacks often did with remarkable success before the 1960s, rather than to the government.

Yet Mr. Woodson also makes time to push back at the machinations of progressivism. After the New York Times published its “1619 Project”—which posits that America’s true founding was not 1776 but 1619, the year African slaves arrived in Virginia, and that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery—he became incensed. Not only was it junk history, but it would be disseminated through school curriculums in the name of helping blacks. Mr. Woodson responded by initiating his own project, “1776 Unites,” which enlisted a group of black scholars, journalists and social activists “who uphold the true origins of our nation and the principles through which its founding promise can be fulfilled.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s public enemy No. 1 — crime: Goodwin By Michael Goodwin *****

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/americas-public-enemy-no-1-crime-goodwin/

“Another part of the experiment has prosecutors, politicians and judges, their hearts bleeding with social justice demands, setting the accused free and emptying prisons. The results are in, and they are grim. It turns out that human nature, when it fears no consequences, is emboldened in savage ways. ”

On the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, it is beyond dispute that the case sparked new appraisals of race relations and policing. It is also beyond dispute that the protests and unchecked riots that followed Floyd’s death sparked an epidemic of crime that continues to engulf American cities. 

The statistics are familiar, yet still shocking. The nearly 20,000 gun-related homicides last year were the most in decades, and one researcher found that 51 of the 57 largest cities saw increases. New York’s body count was up by nearly 40 percent. 

Violent crime soared by a reported 74 percent in Seattle, 55 percent in Chicago and 54 percent in Boston. This year is on pace to be far worse, signaling that 2020 wasn’t an outlier so much as the start of a deadly new trend. 

From sea to shining sea, America is witnessing the breakdown of public order and safety. Unfortunately, recent days brought a new dimension to that breakdown — the incidents of anti-Semitism roiling New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. 

It is not a coincidence that the same places where violence and murder are soaring are the same places where it is not safe for Jews to display their religion in public. The ancient hatred has come out of hiding and piggy-backed on the collapse of public order to bare its fangs. 

POLITICS Comments turned off

Of martyrs and manipulators: Liz Cheney’s pointless spectacle By Keith Naughton

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/554951-of-martyrs-and-manipulators-liz-cheneys-pointless-spectacle

In American political life there is always a certain group of people who love the idea of martyrdom — not actual physical death (that might hurt), but electoral death: the “I’d rather be right than win” crowd. Rarely do these wannabe martyrs achieve real martyrdom, i.e., become heroes around whose memory millions rally. Instead, they mostly are forgotten, losers.

Which brings us to Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).

In years past, the third-ranking member of minority party leadership would be a barely noticed presence at the periphery of national politics. But, in a time where Donald Trump is the litmus test for everything, any Republican who will publicly criticize Trump is an instant folk-hero — even pro-life, anti-tax, anti-regulation, pro-interventionist politicians. If you hate Trump, anything is possible.

Cheney’s martyrdom was well-planned. She purposefully agitated her colleagues. There are no reports she actually worked the GOP caucus, canvassing and counting heads. Cheney didn’t fight back, she planned to lose.

The reality is that Liz Cheney should not be in Republican leadership — and not because only Trump acolytes belong. The neocon politics of Cheney (and her father) is not just in eclipse, it’s practically dead. There is hardly any constituency in Republican politics for it.

The truly principled move for Cheney would have been to resign from leadership and not put her colleagues through the public relations meat grinder. After all, being in leadership means you have to at least generally represent the rest of the caucus. Cheney can still serve the voters of Wyoming as a rank-and-file member, retain her seniority and serve as a ranking member of committees (and be in line for a chairmanship if partisan control flips in 2022). She can even complain about Trump anytime and anywhere she wants.

But staging her own ersatz crucifixion opened the door to her own martyrdom and the avalanche of fawning publicity she craves. Too bad her time in the sun probably won’t last nor have much — if any — effect on Trump. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“Cult of Personality v. Suppression of Voices” Sydney Williams

Posted By on May 26th, 2021

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Olawale Daniel, founder of TechAtLast International, once said: “The most dangerous and powerful people in the world do not carry guns or shoot missiles; they write code to surveil and suppress opposing views.” There is no question that a commanding personality can become demagogic, especially when emotion supplants reason, and the goal is nefarious. But a demagogue only becomes dangerous when accompanied by a willing state, a compliant media and a culture of conformity that does not permit dissenting voices. So long as people are free to exercise their natural rights to speak, write, assemble and pray, people will remain the master and politicians the servants.

For four years the Left ranted about the risk to democracy, with a “demagogic” Donald Trump in the White House. They spoke of his coarseness, exaggerations, and his non-PC speech. Ignored were the facts he diminished government’s impact on individuals through deregulation and reduced government’s resources through lower taxes. A charismatic personality can camouflage a bad leader, as the world learned in the last century, with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, but it can also magnify a good leader, like Churchill, FDR or Ronald Reagan. 

It is the suppression of voices that should concern lovers of freedom. In 1950, when the United States was experiencing a “Red Scare” and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was starting his infamous hearings, President Truman sent a special message to Congress on August 8: “…we must be eternally vigilant against those who would undermine freedom in the name of security.” Three years later, in the March 1953 issue of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “Restrictions of free thought is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one Un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” Over the years, free expression allowed man to grow and expand his horizons. Freedom, progress and wealth are its progeny. It is a never-ending process, which will continue so long as man is able to think, speak and act freely.

In his concurrence in Whitney v. California (1927), Justice Louis Brandies wrote: “Man feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” When universities ban books for fear of hurtful language, they do damage to those they purport to protect. When politicians repress opposing views with threats of investigations and inquiries, they do irreparable harm to our Constitution. When tech companies shut down social media accounts for those they dislike, they set precedents that affect all mankind. When mainstream media reports only the news that fit their narrative, they promote ignorance rather than knowledge. During the Trump years, the response of the Left was far more dangerous than anything Mr. Trump said or did, for they blocked dissent and suppressed speech. It is not just Mr. Trump who was treated in this manner, but those who supported him. This was done under a hypocritical flag of moral righteousness, abetted by mainstream media and a cultural environment that celebrated wokeness, and which canceled history and opinions when they did not conform to a predetermined narrative.