FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My column: Move the 2022 Beijing Olympics or Shun Beijing By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on May 25th, 2021

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/move-2022-beijing-olympics-or-shun-beijing-185776

“The politicization of sports will damage the spirit of the Olympic Charter and the interests of athletes from all countries,” a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said recently about calls for the United States and other nations to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s human-rights abuses.

That’s a bit rich because, frankly, the Olympics are inherently political. Especially at times of global tension, the big powers and their allies compete for medals not just to showcase their athletes but to promote the political and economic systems under which they have trained. That was true in the 1930s, as the democracies competed against the fascist powers, and it was true during the Cold War, as the United States and its allies competed against the Soviet Union and its satellites.

Moreover, the international community and individual countries have restricted participation in the games for political reasons on numerous occasions. Germany and Japan, for instance, were not invited to the 1948 games due to their roles in World War II; South Africa was banned from 1964 all the way until 1992 over apartheid; Rhodesia was banned in 1972 amid controversy over its racist policies; Taiwan boycotted in 1980 after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) declared that mainland China would compete as “China” and asked Taiwan to compete as “Chinese Taipei.”

The “politicization” rises exponentially when a nation of sizable power and untoward practice plays host, as Hitler’s Germany did in 1936 and China is slated to do next February. At a time when Beijing is flexing its muscles in Asia and beyond while abusing human rights in ever-more brazen fashion, President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party surely will create a spectacle of self-congratulation from the opening ceremony onward, all to promote the wonders of China’s authoritarian system.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Voices Blinken Won’t Hear by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17401/blinken-palestinian-voices

The renewed talk about a “two-state solution” comes amid a significant increase in the popularity of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group whose charter openly calls for replacing Israel with an Islamic state. It also comes at a time when Abbas’s popularity is at its lowest ebb.

The Palestinians are telling Blinken that he is wasting his time if he thinks that they would accept “so-called peaceful solutions” or “renounce any part of Palestine.” They are also sending a warning to Abbas that recognition of Israel’s right to exist and acceptance of the “two-state solution” is tantamount to treason, a crime punishable by death.

Abbas is afraid that Hamas will try to stage a coup against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank…. Abbas, however, does not feel comfortable talking about the Palestinians’ two rival entities, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and prefers to continue pretending that the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is still a realistic option.

As long as Israel maintains overall security control over the West Bank, Abbas can feel safe sitting in his office or at home in Ramallah. It is only Israel’s presence in the West Bank that is keeping him in power and preventing Hamas from extending its control beyond the Gaza Strip.

A recent public opinion poll showed that 57% of the Palestinians are opposed to the two-state solution. Another 57% said they support the “armed struggle” and “popular resistance” against Israel. According to the poll, 68% of the Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Blinken needs to go out and talk to ordinary Palestinians. There, he will get a good grasp of the Palestinians’ profound anti-Israel sentiments and their deep support for Iran’s proxies and others who wish to wipe Israel off the map.

On the eve of his first official visit to the Middle East, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaffirmed support for a two-state solution as the only way to provide hope to Israelis and Palestinians that they can live “with equal measures of security, of peace, and dignity.”

During his visit to Israel and the West Bank, Blinken is expected to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has been urging the Biden administration to work toward “achieving a just and lasting peace that would ensure the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and independence” and the establishment of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel and Gaza: The Euphoria of Psychosis Daryl McCann

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/05/israel-and-gaza-euphoric-psychosis/

This is the euphoria of victory!” proclaimed Khalil al-Haya, a senior Hamas figure, in front of thousands of Gazans celebrating the end of hostilities between Hamas/Islamic Jihad and Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). An estimated 232 Gazans were killed during the latest hostilities, some by Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s own rockets. The local real estate was (once again) left partially in ruins. But a victory is a victory for the two terrorist groups that jointly rule Gaza – even when they have suffered a defeat. Now why, exactly, might that be the case?

This latest “triumph” by Hamas and Islamic Jihad over the Isreali Defence Forces (IDF) follows on from their brilliant “success” in the 2008-09 Gaza War and the 2014 Gaza War. If Hamas and Islamic Jihad keep up their winning ways a prospective 2026 Gaza War, or perhaps a 2028-29 Gaza war, will see the entirety of Gaza reduced to rubble. But our Islamo-terrorists can dream, can’t they? Approximately four thousand rockets were fired at Israel during the 11 days of the 2021 Gaza War, some even making all the way to the Isreali heartland of Tel Aviv. Next time there might be be 6,000 or maybe 8,000 Iranian-financed missiles raining down on “the brothers of apes and pigs”. Armageddon conceived along these lines is what keeps the like of Khalil al-Haya forever posing before the world’s media with a V-sign for victory. Once Jerusalem is vanquished (or obliterated) by Hamas’s Izz as-Din al-Qassem Brigades, or so the Salafi-jihadist narrative goes, a millenialist Islamic state will arise as surely as night follows day.

Inevitably, perhaps, the euphoria of radical Islamic psychosis is interpreted by our PC commentariat as something quite different. Informed by a bohemian-socialist sensibility, they see the 2021 Gaza War as a case of Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” defying colonialist “white Jews”. Our left-wing identiarians view the latest death and mayhem in much the same way  Walt Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) portrays the plight of the immaculate Powhatan Native Americans up against the “ravenous wolves” from across the sea who “devour everything in their path”. To put it in the parlance of the woke mob, the “white supremacists” have just spent eleven or twelve days waging an unprovoked war on People of Colour.

If you can make a fact-pattern fit the shape of your screwball ideology, then reality is just a mere distraction. The Sydney Morning Herald, perhaps chastened by the embarrassment of then-columnist Mike Carlton’s critique of the 2014 Gazan War, “Israel’s Rank and Rotten Fruit is Being Called Fascism”, played it more shrewdly this time. The SMH invited Asma Abu Mezied to write her eyewitness account – “I Don’t Think Gaza can Rise from the Ashes This Time” – of the damage inflicted on Gaza by the IDF. As an eyewitness to the events, Dr Mezied, the so-called women’s economic empowerment co-ordinator in Gaza, might be expected to have a touch more credibility than the buffoonish Carlton. And so, we should take her account seriously:

Over the past 12 days, more than 220 people have been killed, at least 63 of them children. Apartment blocks have been destroyed, roads critical to economic centres are pockmarked with craters, clinics and schools have been ruined and international media bureaus have been flattened on live television.             

Nowhere in Mezied’s account, however, is there any mention that Hamas kicked off the latest carnage by firing 100 missiles at Jerusalem or that Hamas/Islamic Jihad ended up firing 4,000 missiles in the direction of Israel. Or that some of those dead 63 Gazan children, if that is a genuine figure, were as likely killed by misfiring rockets from her side of the border. Or that Gazan civilians were put in harm’s way not so much by the IDF but Hamas deliberately positioning their mobile launch sites in the vicinity of hospitals/clinics, schools and civilian apartments.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

(Some) communities coming together against anti-Semitism By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/some_communities_coming_together_against_antisemitism.html

Attacks against Jews in the U.S. have surged in the past year, especially in the past few weeks as Israel had the gall — to some — to vigorously defended itself against Arab attacks.  But you could be forgiven for not being aware of these vicious incidents because except for a few outlets, most so-called main(lame)stream media have ignored them or minimized them at best; blaming Israel and its Jewish defenders for striking back at worst. And sadly — but not surprisingly — Joe Biden is silent against this form of hate, perhaps fearful of upsetting his bigoted woke fellow (oh, excuse me for the misogynist term as this also includes female) Democrats. 

In Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb home to a substantial number of Jews, a grassroots coalition of several mostly Orthodox (more traditional) Jewish groups hastily organized a Communities Coming Together Against Anti-Semitism rally yesterday after someone earlier in the week broke a synagogue window, leaving a “Freedom for Palestine” (sic!) sign nearby. 

Skokie, where 44 years earlier, in a prewoke, precancel culture, some American Nazis received court permission to hold an anti-Jewish march through the suburb thanks to the free speech argument of the ACLU’s many Jewish attorneys.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Barr on the Forces of Division in America The forces that Barr recognizes and rightly deplores are not confined to the obviously nasty precincts of explicit Marxism. They are also implicit in large swaths of traditional liberalism. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/bill-barr-on-the-forces-of-division-in-america/

EXCERPTS:

Now back in private life, Barr has lost none of his critical acumen. His speech on May 20 for the Alliance Defending Freedom is a case in point. “[T]he greatest threat to religious liberty in America today,” he said, is “the increasingly militant and extreme secular-progressive climate of our state-run education system.” Barr is right: 

We are rapidly approaching the point—if we have not already reached the point—at which the heavy-handed enforcement of secular-progressive orthodoxy through government-run schools is totally incompatible with traditional Christianity and other major religious traditions in our country.

Barr traced the evolution of the dominant attitude about the relationship between religion and government-financed public schools through three phases. In the first phase, which ran from the educational reform movement of the early 19th century through the mid-20th century, public education was seen as inculcating the values of good citizenship and, beyond that, a moral outlook that was grounded explicitly in Protestant Christianity. In his book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Samuel Huntington spoke in this context of “Anglo-Protestant values,” a phrase that drew instant obloquy from secularists and other radicals who fell over themselves trying to decide which was worse, the “Anglo” part or the “Protestant” part. 

“The key point,” Barr noted, was that until the 1970s, this “anodyne form of Christianity” offered a “generally acceptable ‘pan-Protestantism’” that was taught in public schools throughout the country. Accommodations were easily made for Catholics, Jews, and members of other religions, but the dominant note were those “Anglo-Protestant” values that Huntington extolled. “Throughout American his- tory,” Huntington noted, “people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefitted them and the country.” 

But things took an ominous turn in the 1960s and 1970s. It was then that the ACLU nuts and other members of the Left “embarked on a relentless campaign of secularization intent on driving every vestige of traditional religion from the public square. Public schools quickly became the central battleground.” School prayer? Out. A crèche at Christmas? Absolutely not. This was phase two: the effort to purge the public square, beginning with public educational institutions of all remnants of religious identity. This is what Barr called “secularization by subtraction.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Feet-of-Clay Icons Our most important and cherished institutions—the military, science, and the law—are losing the trust of Middle America. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/23/feet-of-clay-icons/

“The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.”
— Daniel 2:33

Americans mostly have given up on familiar institutions for entertainment, guidance, or reassurance. What now do Hollywood, network news, the media in general, Silicon Valley, the NBA, NFL, MLB, or higher education all have in common? 

A propensity to lecture Americans on their moral inferiorities, a general ethical decline in their own disciplines, and a strange obsession to acquire great wealth while living in contrast to what they advocate for others. Add also incompetence. Movies are mostly bad now. The network news is blow-dried groupthink. There is no “paper of record” anywhere. Twitter and Facebook no longer even try to hide their politicized contortions of warped rules and twisted protocols. 

Professional athletes are now reminders of why no one ever wants to be “enlightened” by multimillionaire quarter-educated narcissists. The public a half-century ago lost faith in academia. It wasn’t just that most new bad ideas could be traced to the campus or that hothouse professors increasingly seemed both ignorant and arrogant, but rather their product—educating students—was defective. No one believes anymore a BA is synonymous with knowledge. More likely, it is a euphemism for incurring $100,000 in debt. 

But until recently there were still a few institutions we considered sacrosanct, incorruptible, and invincible amid faith-based assertions, toxic woke fads, civil dissension, and hatred of the past. One certainly was the military. Another was “science,” or rather the scientists, researchers, and investigators who devoted themselves to disinterested empiricism. And, a third, was the sacred idea of the “law,” or the idea that Americans respect our statutes because they were crafted by ourselves and applicable to all, equally, and without exception.

All three have lost their luster. Americans do not trust them, at least not in the old way. Perhaps it was the 2020 perfect storm of plague, quarantine, recession, riot, a contentious election, and red/blue antipathies that ripped off the scab and exposed beneath something far different than what the public had assumed.

Protect or Proselytize?

HOMELAND SECURITY, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Under Biden, Is the Military Focused More on Winning Kinetic Wars or Culture Wars? By Bryan Preston

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/culture/bryan-preston/2021/05/23/under-biden-is-the-military-focused-more-on-winning-kinetic-wars-or-culture-wars-n1449072

One has to wonder what the United States military is truly focused on now.

The threat of China is rising so quickly that Australia is boosting its defense budget and its top defense official is warning of the “drums of war.”

Department of Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo’s message to all department staff on Australia’s veterans’ day on Sunday, known as Anzac Day, was published in The Australian newspaper on Tuesday.

“In a world of perpetual tension and dread, the drums of war beat – sometimes faintly and distantly, and at other times more loudly and ever closer,” Pezzullo said.

“Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war,” he added.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews said she had approved of the wording of Pezzullo’s message.

That was back in April 2021.

Here in the United States, Joe Biden’s Pentagon has pushed a servicewide Navy standdown to begin a politicization that, if any Republican entertained anything remotely similar, would elicit howls from the political opposition and their public relations organs in the media. That standdown was seen as “chilling” by military officers and inspired Space Force Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier to write a book about it. That book, Irresistible Revolution, shot to #1 on Amazon despite the publishing giant making it unsearchable on its platform. It also earned Lohmeier relief of his command. He was effectively fired, though his actual legal situation remains murky.

The military that is made of volunteers who swear to defend the United States Constitution “from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” took away Lohmeier’s First Amendment rights — or will have, if he is tossed out of the military after an exemplary career.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Texas Legislature Bans Critical Race Theory From Public Schools; Needs to Pass ‘1836 Project’ Bill By Bryan Preston

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/23/texas-legislature-bans-critical-race-theory-from-public-schools-needs-to-pass-1836-project-bill-n1449095

Late Saturday night, the Texas Senate passed H.B. 3979. That bill would ban critical race theory from classrooms in the state’s public schools.

It states:

No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall be required to engage in
training, orientation, or therapy that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or blame on the basis of race or sex.

(6) No teacher, administrator, or other employee in any state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter school, or school administration shall shall require, or make part of a course the following concepts: (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race or sex; (4) members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex; (5) an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex; (6) an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (7) any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex; or (8) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a members of a particular race to oppress members of another race. (h-3) No private funding shall be accepted by state agencies, school district, campuses, open-enrollment charter schools, or school administrations for the purposes of curriculum development, purchase or choice of curricular materials, teacher training, or professional development pertaining to courses on Texas, United States, and world history, government, civics, social studies, or similar subject areas.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Under Pressure for Hamas Links, AP Fires Pro-Jihad ‘Journalist’ And the Left goes nuts. Robert Spencer

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/under-pressure-hamas-links-ap-fires-pro-jihad-robert-spencer/

The oddest thing happened after it came to light that the Hamas-linked Associated Press had hired a serial liar and pro-jihad activist, a young woman named Emily Wilder: AP fired her. As you might expect, because this isn’t the way things are supposed to work, as far as the establishment media is concerned, “journalists” are outraged, and circling the wagons. One of their own has taken the fall for a sinister and corrupt organization, and the other cogs in the machine aren’t going to stand for it.

Emily Wilder herself claimed that the firing was due to her activities as a pro-jihad activist at Stanford University, from which she graduated last year, and asserted that she had fallen victim to “cancel culture”: “There’s no question I was just canceled,” she said in a fawning SF Gate interview that was trending on Twitter for a couple of days. The day after it was published, even AP itself got into the act, writing about the controversy as if it concerned some other organization altogether, and defending Wilder.

Meanwhile, Leftists on Twitter crowed about the supposed inconsistency of foes of Left-fascism opposing “cancel culture” and then being happy that a Left-fascist was canceled. One put it crisply: “Coulda sworn you creeps were against cancel culture.”

There are numerous useful lessons that can be drawn from this ugly little episode. Here are a few of them:

1. AP fired Wilder to save face after being exposed sharing an office building with Hamas in Gaza, which meant either that they were aware of Hamas’ activities and covered for the terror group, or didn’t know Hamas was there and are therefore the worst reporters in the world.

2. AP did not fire Wilder because she is pro-jihad. It is unlikely that there are any AP reporters who are not pro-jihad. AP fired Wilder because her views came out in a way that showed up their claims to be a news organization.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Catastrophe of a ‘Ceasefire’ Only the obliteration of Hamas can secure a lasting peace. Jason D. Hill *****

Posted By on May 24th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/ceasefire-between-israel-and-hamas-death-israel-jason-d-hill/

The recent “ceasefire” between the terrorist organization, Hamas, that rules Gaza, and the ethical state of Israel is a recipe for future disaster. There is one winner, which is Hamas. The loser in this pitiful surrender is Israel.

What does Hamas have to gain by a ceasefire? An awful lot. It claims an indefinite time frame in which to rebuild its arsenal of destruction that will be levied against Israel in a relatively short space of time. It has a chance to showcase to the world the destruction of its infrastructures and civilian habitats. A great segment of the anti-Semitic world will refuse to acknowledge that Hamas is literally responsible for all these civilian deaths — as it is the only army in human history that uses the lives of its civilian population as weapons of war by using hospitals, infant nurseries, schools, civilian homes, and mosques as launch pads for its rockets. Hamas also refuses to allow its citizens to evacuate buildings and targeted areas of attack announced well in advance of any military strikes by the IDF.

Hamas has the infernal impertinence — after initiating an unprovoked war against Israel — to occupy the moral high ground by claiming that it will agree to a ceasefire with Israel on two conditions: that Israeli forces must stop incursions into the Al-Aqsa compound and respect the site. And second, that Israel must stop the forced evacuation of the Palestinian residents in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Where does some primordial and savage terrorist organization that has already evicted itself from the ambit of rights and that, as a retrogressive tribe, exists way outside the historical process, dare to dictate domestic policy inside Israel? In doing so, it appeals to some mawkishly sentimental sense of brotherhood with the war refugees existing in Judea and Samaria and, by default, it wins a popularity contest with the equally execrable, racist, thuggish, and anti-Semitic United Nations and many European countries, that, while paying unconscionable lip service to Israel’s right to exist, secretly hope for Israel’s demise.

A terrorist organization that starts a war, one that is not bombed into oblivion but is altruistically allowed to remain in existence and lectures to Israel the terms of a ceasefire which it intends to use to simply recoup losses and re-strengthen its moral stranglehold over Israel, is so obscene a phenomenon in human history, that Israel, one of the most moral nations on earth, should be ashamed of itself. Israel should be ashamed of itself for allowing such a ghastly enemy that, even in the absence of a war, spews rockets into its country as a way of openly showing its contempt and intention to one day, perhaps visit a nuclear Holocaust on it by coupling with another well-known enemy who wishes Israel obliterated from the earth.

In fundamental terms, what exactly does Israel have to gain from a ceasefire with Hamas? The delay of a final showdown in which Hamas lines up all of its own women and children and fires rockets from behind them and dares Israel to respond — while the world looks on in self-righteous judgment of Israel to make a so-called false move? Will Israel ever realize that, contrary to what the world thinks, it is not and can never be responsible for one civilian casualty in Gaza? No country that is attacked can altruistically bear the responsibility for protecting the lives of the citizens of the aggressor country. That country has abrogated the rights of its citizens. That country is the conferrer of justice and the protector of rights. Israel is no more responsible for the rights of the civilians than you would be for the life of the child of a gunman who uses his child as a shield while shooting at you to gain access to your house. The child’s life cannot and should not supersede your right to your life. The moral responsibility for the child’s life lies entirely with the gunman. You cannot be morally blamed for protecting your life because your bodily integrity is violated by being put in harm’s way.