Biden State Dept. Urging U.S. Embassies to Fly BLM Flags to Mark 1-Year Anniversary of George Floyd’s Death By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/24/biden-state-dept-urging-u-s-embassies-to-fly-blm-flags-to-mark-1-year-anniversary-of-george-floyds-death/

The Biden State Department is encouraging all U.S. “Diplomatic and Consular posts” to display Marxist Black Lives Matter flags on May 25 to mark the one year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, according to a memo obtained by Human Events reporter Jack Posobiec.

The memo, signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said the United States would be among “many in the international community” honoring the career criminal.

Summary: May 25 marks one year since the brutal murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Last year, the horrific video of Mr. Floyd’s final 9 minutes and 29 seconds went viral and spurred Black Lives Matter protests worldwide, in response to his senseless killing and to demand an end to systemic racism and police brutality. One year later, many in the international community will honor Mr. Floyd and acknowledge the long journey nations face to advance racial justice. Leading up to May 25, the Department has issued guidance on the use of Black Lives Matter language, banners, and flags. End Summary.

The vandalism and looting that followed the death of Floyd reportedly cost the insurance industry up to $2 billion, more than any other violent demonstrations in recent history. At least 25 Americans were killed during the unrest, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED).

Additionally, the radical organization’s “Defund the Police” agitation has led to a massive surge in violent crime throughout the nation.

Time to Confront the U.S. Capitol Police About Its January 6 Lies House Republicans unanimously voted against Pelosi’s $60 million payback to the USCP. GOP senators should do the same. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/24/time-to-confront-the-u-s-capitol-police-about-its-january-6-lies/

The body of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick wasn’t even cold before his employer leveraged his untimely death to stoke more outrage about the events in the nation’s capital on January 6.

“At approximately 9:30 p.m. this evening . . . United States Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick passed away due to injuries sustained while on-duty,” read a press release issued January 7. “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots [and] was injured while physically engaging with protesters.  He returned to his division office and collapsed.  He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. The death of Officer Sicknick will be investigated by the Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Branch, the USCP, and our federal partners.”

The agency intentionally included the word “homicide” to suggest Sicknick was killed by homicidal Trump supporters. The next day, the New York Times, citing two anonymous law enforcement officials, claimed “pro-Trump rioters . . . overpowered Mr. Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher.”

“With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support. He died on Thursday evening.”

We now know that gruesome account was completely fabricated. Can anyone doubt, given their flagrant partisanship in the wake of the Capitol protest, the U.S. Capitol Police planted the now-retracted fire extinguisher story?

Rather than act as a politically neutral law enforcement agency tasked with protecting government grounds and public officials on behalf of the federal taxpayers they serve, the USCP has contributed to the fabulism about January 6 while covering up other aspects to help Democrats and Joe Biden’s Justice Department keep the “insurrection” narrative alive. There’s no question many Capitol Police officers acted heroically in the face of several protesters bent on violence that day, however, USCP brass have helped Democrats define the January 6 groupthink from the start.

“The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington, D.C.,” former USCP chief Steven Sund wrote in a statement posted January 7. “[M]ake no mistake—these mass riots were not First Amendment activities; they were criminal riotous behavior.”

What is more sad than the occupation? The need for it. By Lev Tsitrin

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/what_is_more_sad_than_the_occupation_the_need_for_it.html

Not unnaturally, the latest flare-up between Hamas and Israel, and Arab-Jewish violence inside Israel, attracted much media attention. Day after day, pages of the New York Times were filled with reports and opinions from the region — often of very questionable quality. “Guest essays” from Palestinians in Gaza painted a picture of indiscriminate, brutal Israeli attacks on the innocent civilians huddled with their wives and children in helpless dread, not knowing what next to expect from the bare-fanged Israeli monsters.

Equally gruesome was an article showing the picture of wanton Jewish cruelty, that forgot to mention that the organized Jewish self-defense arose as a response to Arab attacks on Jewish Israelis inside Israel which inadequate policing failed to prevent. A gloomy New York Times story about Israel squashing ordinary Palestinians’ simple human happiness was also devoid of background and context.

This article provides the background and context that the New York Times ignored. Let’s fill in the gap by starting with an obvious question: Why is there an “occupation” in the first place? How did it come to be? Why hasn’t it ended long ago? I would argue that, ultimately, it is rooted in willful Palestinian ignorance of Arab history.

(Note: I am speaking here about title to the land, not the right to possession. For centuries, Muslims tolerated a handful of Jews on what was once malarial, swampy land. What they cannot tolerate is Jewish ownership of the land.)

It’s inconceivable that the Palestinians do not know the story of the Arab conquest that started immediately after Mohammed’s death. Within a few centuries, Muslim Arabs spread from what is today’s western Saudi Arabia to encompass half of the then-known world, from Spain in the west to the border of India in the east. The former Roman territory of Palestine (a name the Romans bestowed on the land) came under Arab dominance in about 636 AD. The Arab’s did not begin human settlement on that strip of land, of course. It had been populated since time immemorial, including the Jews who, by 636 had already lived there for close to 2,000 years.

‘Temporary’ Protected Status: A Tool for Executive Mischief By Mark Krikorian

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/temporary-protected-status-a-tool-for-executive-mischief/

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced over the weekend that his agency would grant a work-permit amnesty (under so-called Temporary Protected Status) to all Haitian illegal aliens in the U.S.

Haitians who were here at the time of that country’s devastating 2010 earthquake already had this “temporary” (but routinely renewed) status, but Saturday’s announcement reopened the TPS amnesty to all the new Haitian illegals who’ve come in the decade-plus since then. The Federal Register notice, which hasn’t been published yet, will offer DHS’s estimate of how many illegal aliens would benefit, but media reports put the number at 100,000 or more post–2010 illegals, on top of the 50,000 or so Haitians who already have TPS.

As my colleague (and former senior USCIS official) Rob Law noted, “The stated reasons by the Biden administration for a TPS designation do not conform with the statute.” In the press release announcing the amnesty, Mayorkas said “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic” – this is simply a less scatological version of Trump’s “shithole countries” crack, but even if true, none of this prevents the return of Haitian illegal aliens.

Despite the rhetoric of activists, TPS is not mainly about preventing the deportation of illegal aliens to a country; Biden halted deportations to Haiti shortly after taking office and ICE can exercise discretion like that whenever it chooses. The sole reason for a grant of TPS is to give illegal aliens work permits (and the Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses that follow it), formally embedding them in society and making the revocation of the amnesty extremely unlikely.

And, in fact. President Trump announced in 2018 the decision to allow Haitian TPS to expire the following year, but was barred by the courts from doing so, despite the law’s specific prohibition against judicial review of TPS decisions.

This is why legislative proposals to upgrade long-term TPS holders from their current amnesty-lite to amnesty-premium (i.e., a green card, potentially leading to citizenship) are fatally flawed. The version passed by the House in March includes just such a TPS amnesty upgrade as part of a broader bill — but does nothing to change the TPS process, guaranteeing the need for more amnesties in the future. But any arrangement that gives illegal aliens “temporary” work permits that keep getting renewed for 10 or 20 years is broken and needs to be fundamentally changed.

As Biden “Rebuilds” Gaza Infrastructure, Hamas Brags It Turned Water Pipes Into Rockets Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/05/biden-rebuilds-gaza-infrastructure-hamas-brags-it-daniel-greenfield/

After the war comes the reconstruction.

That means pouring money into Gaza while insisting that none of the money will go to Hamas and that none of the humanitarian aid will be used for terrorist purposes. It’s just rebuilding infrastructure. Meanwhile, Hamas keeps boasting about how it turns infrastructure into terrorism.

Terrorists’ ability to turn seemingly innocent household commodities into the tools of terror has always created a challenge for peaceful states fighting terror. Fertilizer has been used to build lethal bombs and instead of using tons of cement that Israel permitted into the Gaza Strip for the building of homes, schools and factories, Hamas built 100 kilometers of terror tunnels that Israel destroyed in the recent war.

Now there is another seemingly innocuous construction material that has joined the arsenal of terror: water pipes. There were some reports that Israel was surprised by the high number of rockets – 4,300 – that Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists had in their arsenals to launch against civilians in Israeli cities in the recent 11-day Gaza war. Now the Secretary-General of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad has explained this: He bragged that the “resistance engineers” have turned “water pipes… into the rockets that you see.”

Time to rebuild that “infrastructure”.

The United Nations said it had released $22.5 million, which would go towards rebuilding damaged water and electricity infrastructure and disposing of explosive ordnance.

The ordnance can go into the infrastructure. That’s how it works.

President Joe Biden told a White House briefing on Friday that a two-state solution was the only answer to resolving the deep-rooted conflict.

“I’m praying this cease-fire will hold,” he said, before pledging U.S. support to help rebuild Gaza, which is governed by the terrorist group Hamas 

It’ll hold until enough of Gaza is “rebuilt” for Hamas to rebuild more rockets. 

What Happened to the 10th Amendment? What Biden and his handlers intend to do with federal power. Robert Curry

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/what-happened-10th-amendment-frontpage-magazine/

 According to the Progressives, more government is the answer, always. For them, the constitutional limits on the power of government the founders had so carefully crafted are actually defects which must be eliminated. Their aim is total government; their strategy is to achieve total government step-by-step, progressively. 

Michael Finch, the President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has an excellent article over at the American Thinker making clear where the Progressives are in their fight against the Constitution. He identifies what the Biden administration intends to accomplish—nothing less than completing the project of centralizing power in the federal government begun by the Progressives over a century ago. Finch very correctly observes that “the 10th Amendment, with its clear limitations on federal power, has been seriously eroded over the past century,” and that Biden and his handlers intend to put an end to the remaining limitations on federal power.

The Progressives certainly have gotten away with trampling on the 10th Amendment for more than a century, but that raises this question: how did they manage to get away with doing that? 

The answer is that the Progressives tricked Americans into repealing the 10th Amendment without realizing that was what they were doing. It was very cleverly done, so cleverly that even today Americans by and large do not understand what happened. When in 1913 America approved the 17th Amendment, the amendment that provided for the direct election of senators, the 10th Amendment was doomed.

How can that be? After all, the 10th Amendment says nothing about the election of senators. The point of the all-important 10th Amendment is that the Founders created a federal government of strictly limited powers. Here it is in full:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The 10th says the powers of the federal government (here referred to as “the United States”) are limited to the enumerated powers, the limited powers assigned it in the Constitution; the individual states (here referred to as “the States”) retain all their powers not delegated to the federal government. But the important point for us to understand is that the Founders’ method for selecting senators was the key to keeping the powers of the federal government limited. 

Take Heart, America: You Are Not Done Yet You have the fight within you. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/take-heart-america-you-are-not-done-yet-katie-hopkins/

Have you stopped watching the news, or reading traditional media?

A cursory glance across today’s BBC headlines exemplifies the worst of it:

‘Germany bans travelers from the UK!’

‘CDC advises Americans not to kiss chickens!’ (not a joke)

‘Water so toxic it could burn your eyes!’

‘Should all children get the COVID vaccine!’

It is hard to imagine a world more utterly at odds with itself than the one we are living in now. I just took a break from my screen to grab some breakfast and was greeted by this:

By the time some poor kitchen staffer wrapped these apples, two meters of plastic wrap have been used unnecessarily and most of these unappetizing things will hit the trash — without so much as a bite being taken from them.

I wonder: Just who we are saving and from what?

Certainly not ourselves from our own insanity.

But save ourselves we must. We cannot simply resign ourselves to looking the other way, or avoiding all the nonsense we are surrounded by. Our children remind us daily that we have to find a way to endure, and to prevail through this to get to the other side of it and to try and restore some kind of normality or dignity to humanity or the places we want to live. 

The West’s Diplomatic Song-and-Dance about Palestinian Arab Violence And as usual, it will be the Israelis who pay for that routine with their blood. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/wests-diplomatic-song-and-dance-about-palestinian-bruce-thornton/

For more than 70 years the West with some few exceptions has mischaracterized and mishandled the Arab world’s aggression against Israel. The latest barrage of riots and rockets is drawing the same old diplomatic song-and-dance routine that camouflages the Western nations’ despicable moral equivalence of aggressor and victim, and its callous concern for their own interests even if it means empowering terrorist murderers and endangering the only liberal-democratic state in the Middle East.

The latest example of Hamas’ indiscriminate terrorist violence, and Israel’s robust defense of its territory and citizens has elicited an encore of the same old song that the previous three conflicts started by Hamas did. A riot on the Temple Mount over specious claims of Israeli attacks on the al Aqsa Mosque, and a property dispute over Arab squatters on land owned by Jews since 1875 provided Hamas with the pretext for launching nearly 4000 rockets and missiles at Israeli civilians. Meanwhile Iran, smelling the stench of appeasement emanating from the White House, is egging on its clients whom it has supplied with weapons and technological know-how.

This sequence of reactions is familiar: the usual calls on Israel to make concessions for a cease-fire (one took effect May 21); the anti-Semitic slander from U.S. Congressmen, pundits, academics, entertainers, and Leftist outfits; the UN’s hypocritical condemnations from thug-states sitting on the Human Rights Council; and the craven bullying by some Arab states that don’t dare say a word about China’s concentration camps filled with a million Muslim Uighurs who are being deprogrammed from their Islamic faith. And of course, we hear the whole Orwellian vocabulary of “apartheid,” “racist,” “occupiers,” “settlements,” “disproportionate response,” “war crimes,” “cycle of violence,” “two-state solution,” and “peace process.”

The commentary, when it’s not writing what the “woke” call “dog-whistles” for post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, recycles all the assumptions of the “New World Order,” to use George H.W. Bush’s name for the “rules-based international order”: one “where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.”

Democrats Continue to Mislead Americans about the Israel-Hamas Conflict By Brittany Bernstein & Isaac Schorr

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/democrats-continue-to-mislead-americans-about-the-israel-palestine-conflict/?utm_source=

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week we have a rundown of Democrats’ equivocations and lies about Israel, the not-so-curious case of Chris Cuomo, and more media misses.

“Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism”

Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement last week after a flare-up of hostilities caused by rocket attacks from the latter on the former. Ostensibly, Hamas is inspired by the cause of Palestinian statehood broadly and the court-ordered eviction of a small number of Arabs from a neighborhood in Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood — a local, still-ongoing legal fight — in this specific instance.

In truth, Hamas is using this narrow dispute as an excuse to target Israeli civilians, an ever-present objective of the terror group. Hamas’s original charter reads, “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”

And yet, many in the Democratic Party appear to be falling hook, line, and sinker for the ramshackle propaganda of a genocidal cult. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example — she who, when asked to expand upon what she meant by the “occupation of Palestine,” backpedaled into admitting that she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this situation” — tweeted that “apartheid states aren’t democracies.” Lucky for her, no one asked for an elucidation this time. Unlucky for her, Rich Lowry took a knife to the non-expert’s implication.

But the falsehoods aren’t limited to young show horses. Senator Bernie Sanders condemned the evictions, saying that “the United States must speak out strongly against the violence by government-allied Israeli extremists.” Senator Elizabeth Warren — once a denizen of Harvard Law School — called the evictions “abhorrent and unacceptable” without addressing the legal issues driving the controversy, falsely lending credence to the idea that the situation in Sheikh Jarrah is driven primarily by divisions over ethnicity, or even politics.

As Erielle Davidson explained for us last week, “there is intellectual laziness, and then there is shameless misinformation.” Check out her piece for a substantive dive into the issue that you won’t find from progressive politicians who see the world’s only Jewish state as a political football, not one of the United States’ allies.

Many in the media too are of course guilty of shamelessly misinforming their readers, viewers, and listeners. Not only have some members of the press perpetuated the lies about Sheikh Jarrah, they’ve suggested that Iron Dome — the missile-defense system preventing Hamas’s rockets from landing in Israeli population centers — has exacerbated the conflict, implied that Israel did not have evidence of Hamas’s presence in the office building rented out by The Associated Press in Gaza (even though it has been known for years that the AP cooperates with the terror group for reasons of convenience), and failed to distinguish between the inadvertent civilian casualties caused by Israel’s response and Hamas’s initial campaign of intentional terror.

Democrats’ confusion about the state of the conflict — and which groups bear moral responsibility for it — is apparently shared by thugs residing in a number of American and European cities.

Across the West, Jews are being sought out and beaten for the crime of being Jewish: In Los Angeles at a sushi bar, in Manhattan’s Diamond District where explosive devices are being lobbed at them, and in London where anti-semitic incidents have increased by 500 percent over the past few weeks. 

Now Progressives Are Whitewashing Anti-Semitic Attacks By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/now-progressives-are-whitewashing-anti-semitic-attacks/

Ilhan Omar had some interesting things to say about “Benjamin”-grubbing rootless cosmopolitans back in 2019. Though her words precipitated something of a mini-backlash, even then, most Democrats not only refused to denounce her words — the resolution mentioned Alfred Dreyfus and Leo Frank, not the Minnesotan — but they also refused to specifically condemn anti-Semitism. Instead, Democrats passed a watered-down, platitudinous laundry list of all censurable hatreds. “We all have a responsibility to speak out against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and all forms of hatred and bigotry, especially as we see a spike in hate crimes in America,” explained then-senator Kamala Harris.

Resolutions are a waste of time, of course, but the inability of progressives to simply condemn left-wing anti-Semitism, the most consequential and normalized variant, to placate their Israel-haters is telling.

This week, Jews were targeted around the nation, and again the problem was soon conflated with “Islamophobia” — even though many of the attacks were perpetrated by Palestinian Americans and their allies. It is difficult to believe the gaslighting wasn’t a concerted effort. “I strongly condemn the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” wrote Ayanna Pressley. Julian Castro wrote, “we must forcefully condemn anti-Semitic and Islamophobic attacks.” Other House members followed. Even outlets such as Axios reported that there had been “vandalism and harassment fueled by anti-Semitism and Islamophobia” but offered only a bunch of anti-Semitic incidents. “We’ve seen an increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic hate, in NYC and nationwide — hateful words, hate crimes, and other forms of violence,” explains Bernie Sanders, a man who believes in an even-handed approach between Israel and Hamas.