IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Migrant children held in mass shelters with little oversight

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-immigration-health-coronavirus-pandemic-government-and-politics-3b4e480c9021e6a8e02313f4c73a497e

By GARANCE BURKE, JULIET LINDERMAN and MARTHA MENDOZA

The Biden administration is holding tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities that The Associated Press has learned spans two dozen states and includes five shelters with more than 1,000 children packed inside.

Confidential data obtained by the AP shows the number of migrant children in government custody more than doubled in the past two months, and this week the federal government was housing around 21,000 kids, from toddlers to teens. A facility at Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army post in El Paso, Texas, had more than 4,500 children as of Monday. Attorneys, advocates and mental health experts say that while some shelters are safe and provide adequate care, others are endangering children’s health and safety.

“It’s almost like ‘Groundhog Day,’” said Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Luz Lopez, referring to the 1993 film in which events appear to be continually repeating. “Here we are back to a point almost where we started, where the government is using taxpayer money to build large holding facilities … for children instead of using that money to find ways to more quickly reunite children with their sponsors.”

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, Mark Weber, said the department’s staff and contractors are working hard to keep children in their custody safe and healthy.

A few of the current practices are the same as those that President Joe Biden and others criticized under the Trump administration, including not vetting some caregivers with full FBI fingerprint background checks. At the same time, court records show the Biden administration is working to settle several multimillion-dollar lawsuits that claim migrant children were abused in shelters under President Donald Trump.

Part of the government’s plan to manage thousands of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border involves about a dozen unlicensed emergency facilities inside military installations, stadiums and convention centers that skirt state regulations and don’t require traditional legal oversight.

Inside the facilities, called Emergency Intake Sites, children aren’t guaranteed access to education, recreational opportunities or legal counsel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Elephant and Donkey Go Plunging Over the Cliff . By Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/12/the_elephant_and_donkey_go_plunging_over_the_cliff_145744.html

In the 19th century, when political parties worried about voters who couldn’t speak English or read campaign flyers, they adopted animal symbols. Despite originally being a symbol of ridicule, the Democratic Party came to embrace its inner donkey. Likewise, the Republican Party grew to love the elephant. It was an easy way to identify their candidates. Today, the elephant and donkey are less-beloved mascots and more like Wile E. Coyote, who continually plummets over the cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner.

The GOP pachyderm took the plunge on Jan. 6. Outgoing President Donald Trump sat unsteadily atop the beast, where he remains, and contributed mightily to losing two Senate seats in Georgia. His behavior after the November election alienated many undecided voters and even some erstwhile supporters. He fumed and fulminated, contested the election results without winning in court, and stampeded GOP congressional leaders over the size of the next round of stimulus checks. His refusal to accept certified vote totals challenged basic constitutional norms. That behavior hurt the candidates he ostensibly backed in Georgia, costing his party its Senate majority. Outgoing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was furious and said so publicly. Most of his Republican colleagues agreed but remained silent. They knew Trump would retaliate for any criticism and his die-hard supporters would back him.

The giant splat of the elephant hitting the canyon floor was the sound of Republicans losing the upper chamber. That loss has had immense political consequences. It is the dominant fact of Joe Biden’s presidency so far. The only way to moderate his agenda, aside from court decisions, would have been Republican control of the Senate.

With their slender majority, Democrats gained control of all Senate committees and held the sole power to conduct hearings and subpoena witnesses. Since Democrats already controlled the House of Representatives, albeit narrowly, they found themselves in control of both Capitol Hill and the White House. That gave them free rein, something donkeys are unused to, and they used it to reign freely. They proceeded to do exactly what Trump had done after November: gallop at full speed toward the cliff’s edge.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Barrage of rockets launched at Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip Emily Jacobs

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/barrage-of-rockets-launched-at-tel-aviv-from-the-gaza-strip/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20210511&mpweb=755-9375372-720223421

Tel Aviv came under a barrage of 130 rockets launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sending residents fleeing for shelter as air raid sirens blared across Israel’s second-largest city.

Israel’s anti-rocket defense systems were activated Tuesday night, with the streaks of multiple interceptor missiles lighting up the skies over the area.

The heavy bombardment came in retaliation for an Israeli strike earlier on Tuesday evening that leveled a high-rise building in Gaza, which housed the offices of several top Hamas officials. That strike had come in ralition for earlier Hamas bombings.

Both sides had been firing at each other almost nonstop throughout the day, in some of the worst fighting between Israel and the terror group since their 2014 war.

As the rockets launched into the skies from Gaza on Tuesday night, mosques blared with chants of “God is great,” “Victory to Islam” and “Resistance.”

One of the rockets appeared to have hit an oil pipeline belonging to an Israeli state-owned energy company, setting a large storage tank on fire. Videos showed flames engulfing the tank in the city of Ashkelon, which reportedly burned for hours.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Loss, Discovery, and a Lost Discovery in “Reading Ruth” Parent-child collaborations are rare enough in literary history. Grandparent-grandchild collaborations are unheard of, until the publication this spring of a new study of the book of Ruth.

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2021/05/loss-discovery-

Hillel Halkin

Parent-child collaborations are extremely rare in literary history. Of grandparent-grandchild collaborations, I had never heard—never, that is, until the publication this spring of Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel, a slim book jointly written by the eminent American-Jewish thinker, author, Bible commentator, and Mosaic contributor Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum. As told by Kass in a brief preface:

We did not start out intending to write a book. We began it, in the fall of 2015, to give comfort to each other following the death of our beloved Amy Apfel Kass—wife of 54 years to Leon, grandmother (“Gaga”) of sixteen years to Hannah. Leon was living, then as now, in Washington, D.C.; Hannah was living, then as now, in Jerusalem. The idea was Hannah’s, suggested in one of her daily calls: “Zeydeh,” she said, “perhaps you would like to read something with me.” Leon grabbed the offer: a log brought to a drowning man. We settled easily and quickly on the book of Ruth. Not only was it short and lovely. It also had special meaning for Leon. Some twenty years earlier, Amy and he had made a discovery in the book of Ruth that they thought might be the key to understanding its meaning, and they had spoken about working on it in the future. But that future never arrived, and Leon had forgotten the insight. He was therefore particularly keen to see whether, with Hannah’s help, it could be recovered.

And so one begins Reading Ruth with a set of questions. What was Leon and Amy Kass’s insight? Will Leon recover it? And how can Hannah help him to do this? It is almost like starting a suspense novel.

Although there are many ways of reading Ruth, they all fall into two basic categories.  One, more appealing to modern sensibilities, is to view it as a love story, the tale of a widowed young Moabite who tells her mother-in-law Naomi, a widow herself, “Whither you go, I shall go. . . . Your people is my people and your God, my God.” Ruth joins Naomi in returning from Moab to her native town of Bethlehem in Judea; lives there with her in poverty and isolation; catches the admiring eye of the unmarried Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s late husband Elimelech and a leading citizen of the town, when he notices her foraging for the grain left behind by the harvesters in his fields; is drawn to him in return; and, in the end, following a dramatic night of romantic confession, is happily wed to him and bears him a son who turns out to be the grandfather of King David.

The second and more traditional way of reading Ruth, best exemplified by rabbinic exegesis, is as a narrative of religious faith, personal virtue, and obedience to God’s commandments, for their exemplification of which Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are rewarded with the ancestry of Israel’s greatest king. And since the Moabites, according to the Bible, are Israel’s bitter foes with whom it is forbidden to mingle, there are also two ways of thinking about Ruth’s Moabite identity. Its function in the story can be said to champion acceptance of the stranger, no matter how hateful his or her background, or to extol the determination of the proselyte who overcomes such a background in order to cleave to a new people and its God.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: “RISK”

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Recently, while walking around Boone Hall Plantation and Gardens, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, my son and his family came across an alligator. They watched it, but wisely did not approach it. Risk aversion can be a wise decision. Seth Klarman, president of Baupost Group once wrote: “In contrast to speculators preoccupation with rapid gains, value investors demonstrate risk aversion by trying to avoid loss.” But as Paul Singer, another wise investor, remarked regarding the role of government in our economy: “…the forces of risk aversion and constant conflict serve to stultify and narrow the range of ideas up for debate.” We must walk the line, avoiding obvious risks, but being unafraid to speak out and take risks. “Security,” wrote Helen Keller, “is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice: “Do one thing every day that scares you.”

Every day we make hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decisions that involve risk. Many, if not most, are subconscious – standing on one leg to put on our trousers, reaching high for a coffee cup, ignoring the slippery spot on the floor, crossing a street. Do we take the short cut over the mountain, or the longer but safer route? Determining risk is a measurement of success versus failure. In investing, businesses calculate the potential for profit against the possibility of loss, which is why the Biden Administration’s proposal to strip Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson of their patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines add risk to all future investments drug companies make in research. If patent protection can be breached, what does that say to those who invest in scientific research, and to those who risk everything in the creative arts, all of which are supposed to be protected by intellectual property rights?

At a time when hesitancy has caused the number of daily vaccinations to decline by almost two thirds, the President, who was fully vaccinated in December, should not have worn a mask when outside and not surrounded by others. Yet he did just that last week when he and his wife left Jimmy and Roslyn Carter’s home. The message: the vaccine does not assure safety. When the FDA ordered Emergent BioSolutions to suspend production of Johnson & Johnson’s single dose vaccine because seven out of seven million vaccinated patients developed life-threatening blood clots, was the risk worth the cost of scaring people off being vaccinated? On Jimmy Kimmel’s show last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was frustrated that nearly 26% of the population won’t get the vaccine, yet he said he would not dine in an indoor restaurant, despite being fully vaccinated. What kind of a message was he sending? Being vaccinated will not eliminate all risk of getting COVID-19, but it greatly reduces it. Responsible leaders lead, not inject fear.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America Playing With Fire by Evelyn Markus

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17351/america-playing-with-fire

The Nazi’s were obsessed with race. They suppressed dissent, controlled the dissemination of news and controlled culture. In 1933, the German Student Union started to burn books in an effort to align German arts and culture with Nazi ideas. Books of authors such as Hemingway, Helen Keller and Jack London were considered dangerous and had to be “canceled.” The students did not see themselves as suppressing culture; they saw themselves as advancing a just culture.

“The first thing every totalitarian regime does, along with confiscation and mutilation of reality, is confiscation of history and confiscation of culture. I think they all happen almost simultaneously.” — Iranian professor and author Azar Nafisi, whose book Reading Lolita in Tehran was canceled in Iran.

What used to be unimaginable is now taking place in America. We see certain aspects of totalitarianism in the United States: the obsession with race, declaring an ethnic group collectively guilty, shaming, humiliations based on ethnicity, lootings, arson, racist violence, intimidation of opponents, cancel culture, controlled dissemination of news, and indoctrination of children in schools. We see fake news, conspiracy theories, an overhaul of history, a new language imposed, and unprosecuted theft. All in the name of a more just culture.

On May 8, 1945, men and women rushed to the streets of New York, London and Moscow to hug, kiss and dance. Germany had just surrendered. The war against Nazi Germany was over. The killing had stopped. A great evil had ended. Yet many had mixed feelings of joy and grief. More than 100,000 US soldiers had given their lives and almost another 450,000 had been wounded. In all, 15 to 20 million Europeans had been killed. May 8 is still celebrated in our times as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Iran’s Proxy War Against Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17364/iran-proxy-war-israel

Last year, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted for the first time that his country was supplying the Palestinian terrorist groups with weapons….”Iran realized Palestinian fighters’ only problem was lack of access to weapons” — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Reuters, May 22, 2020.

The [earlier] denial exposes the extent of Iran’s scheme to deceive the international community not only regarding its supply of weapons to the Palestinian terrorist groups, but also concerning its plan to acquire a nuclear bomb and bolster its production of nuclear material.

Iran… repeatedly violated the terms of the [2015 JCPOA] nuclear deal, according to the UN’s nuclear monitoring Atomic Energy Agency.

Were it not for Iran’s financial and military aid, the Palestinian terrorist groups would not have been able to attack Israel with thousands of rockets and missiles.

In the past, Iran used its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to attack Israel. Iran is now using its Palestinian proxies to achieve its goal of eliminating Israel and killing Jews. This is a war not only between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist groups. Rather, it is a war waged by Iran against Israel.

The Western powers that are currently negotiating with Iran about the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal are emboldening the mullahs and allowing them to continue their war of “kill[ing] all the Jews.”

The Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization announced on May 11 that its members fired a burst of “Badr-3” missiles into Israel, killing two women and injuring dozens others. The announcement was made by PIJ’s military wing, Al-Quds Brigades, after the group and other terror factions in the Gaza Strip, including Hamas, fired hundreds of rockets into Israel within 24 hours.

The “Badr-3” missile is an Iranian-made missile that appeared for the first time on the battlefields of the Middle East in April 2019, when the Iranian-backed Houthi militia used it during the fighting in war-torn Yemen.

The “Badr-3” missile carries an explosive warhead weighing 250 kg, and has a range of more than 160 km, according to Debka, an Israeli website that reports on military issues. “The missile explodes within 20m of target and releases a 1,400-piece shower of shrapnel fragments,” the website reported.

PIJ was the first terrorist organization to use the Iranian missile against Israel in 2019.

Until a few years ago, PIJ, Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist groups used to receive rockets and other weapons directly from Iran — smuggled in by sea or across the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. For some years now, however, according to Israeli intelligence sources, these terrorist groups have used years of experience with Iranian and other rockets to develop their own versions.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian leaders’ Al-Aqsa hoax strikes again by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-palestinian-leaders-al-aqsa-hoax-strikes-again/

(May 11, 2021 / JNS) The anti-Israel response to the current Palestinian and eastern Jerusalem Arab violence was to be expected, particularly as it has been on a steady crescendo since the weeks leading up to and during Islam’s holy month of Ramadan. But, contrary to the successful dissemination and perpetuation of propaganda, it has nothing to do with Israeli behavior or its celebration of Jerusalem Day—the anniversary of the unification of the city after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Palestinian Authority leader and his Fatah faction know this full well. Ditto for Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and the other terrorist groups, such as Islamic Jihad, lurking in the enclave beyond Israel’s southern border.
Ironically, the real struggle taking place at the moment is between Fatah and Hamas, with Israel caught in the crossfire, yet forced to take police action against rioters in Jerusalem and launch military strikes over Gaza.
The timing of this latest round of so-called “clashes” is not coincidental. On the contrary, it was calculated and cultivated by Abbas, who rightly feared a Hamas victory in the legislative and presidential Palestinian elections—the first since 2006—ostensibly slated for the end of May. Before indefinitely postponing the vote, which he had only scheduled in the first place to appease his Western donors, the P.A. chief turned to his comfort zone of incitement against the Jews and Israel to prove to his people that he is just as stalwart and radical an anti-Semite as any of his Hamas rivals.
He is aware that one surefire method of exploiting the gullibility of and riling up young hotheads is to reiterate false claims about Israel trying to “storm” the Al-Aqsa mosque. Never mind that the house of Muslim prayer in question is located on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. In the tradition of his predecessor—arch-terrorist and PLO chief Yasser Arafat—Abbas is a “temple denier” who rejects the Jews’ history in and connection to the city.
That this position runs counter to ancient Islamic texts is irrelevant to Abbas, who always plays fast and loose with facts as a matter of course. Nor does he have a problem simultaneously denying the Holocaust and accusing Israel of emulating the Nazis. So, distorting the reality of the Temple Mount as a tool for spurring death and destruction comes naturally to him.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Patriotic Bore: God and Country at Yale Steven Smith’s endeavor was a failure from its start when it denounced half the country as extremists. By Ken Masugi

Posted By on May 11th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/patriotic-bore-god-and-country-at-yale/

A review of “Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes” by Steven B. Smith
(Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28)

This is a tough time to be a patriot. In “Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” Glenn Ellmers charges that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Ellmers’ shocking yet compelling argument, further elaborated at American Greatness, is the sort of “extremism” that appalls Steven Smith, who also believes that patriotism is not enough and wants to save it from Ellmers as well as from those he deems the opposite extremes at the “1619 Project” and Black Lives Matter. The problem that haunts the book is whether Smith’s positioning himself in the middle reduces patriotism into a middling mediocrity, lacking passion, conviction, and persuasiveness. 

But Smith’s middle is the not-mediocre Yale University—the book is devoted to a recent past president of the university—where Smith has taught political philosophy for over 30 years. He laments that the inscription “For God, for Country, for Yale” is now but a “quaint reminder of a benighted past,” as is his former title of “master” of Branford College. Smith sees his challenge today as saving his readers at Yale and beyond from the regnant “dehumanizing” extremes of MAGA nationalism, on the one hand, and BLM, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. 

In his view, neither extreme respects “the specificity of what it is to be an American and a patriot.” Since Yale is scarcely threatened by white nationalists—as much as some students there may fancy it is—one must understand his book’s mission to focus on cosmopolitan identity politics’ threat to patriotism and its repurposing of spiritedness and minds. He thus echoes the NeverTrump and establishment academic view of patriotism as reducible to belief in an American creed. 

“This book is for this moment,” the preface warns. Smith will conclude his book with “American patriotism is aspirational,” especially in the “enlightened” form on which his book is focused. He identifies patriotism as a form of loyalty, a feeling of care for others that all human beings need to display in order to fulfil their political and social natures. 

But loyalty tests the heart as well as the head. Such loyalty resembles that of a family, with “both good and bad” creating a distinct ethos—Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory.” Americans’ loyalty is to those twin principles of equality and liberty that make up the American creed. Yet at the same time loyalty also requires grounding in place and shared sentiments. Patriotism is thus both love of the Good and love of one’s own, it involves both philosophic striving and familial rootedness, meaning there will be both profound debates and irksome squabbles, a neverending odyssey and utter devotion to the homeland. Here the book dissolves into inchoate impressions, for it doesn’t consider America as embodying the best regime, as Harry Jaffa has urged: “The unprecedented character of the American Founding is that it provided for the coexistence of the claims of reason and of revelation in all their forms, without requiring or permitting any political decisions concerning them.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Is the Government Hiding January 6 Video Footage? The American public still doesn’t know exactly what happened on January 6—and it’s clear the government will use any means necessary to keep it that way. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 11th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/why-is-the-government-hiding-january-6-video-footage

Joe Biden calls it the worst attack since the Civil War. Attorney General Merrick Garland compares it to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI is breaking down the doors of Iraq War veterans and small business owners who have no criminal records, and some are hauled off to rot in solitary confinement in a fetid D.C. jail, for their involvement in the alleged travesty.

The event, of course, is the roughly four-hour-long disturbance at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. As mostly nonviolent Americans dared to protest Congress’ certification of a clearly fraudulent presidential election in a place that once was considered “The People’s House,” lawmakers scurried for cover as reporters and photographers captured part of the ruckus on video and still shots to wield as political ammunition against Donald Trump and his supporters.

But have we seen a full and fair depiction of exactly what happened that day? The answer, as evidenced by an ongoing coverup by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Justice Department, clearly is no.

Almost all the January 6 video seen by the public isn’t from official government sources but by social media users and journalists on the scene. For example, the widely viewed footage of protestors occupying the Senate chamber was recorded by a New Yorker journalist.

But thousands of hours of real-time footage is in the hands of the Capitol Police—and that agency, along with government lawyers and federal judges, is using every legal trick possible to keep the trove hidden from the public even as clips are presented in court as evidence against hundreds of January 6 defendants.

According to an affidavit filed in March by Thomas DiBiase, the Capitol Police department’s general counsel, the building is monitored 24/7 by an “extensive system of cameras” positioned both inside and outside the building as well as near other congressional offices on the grounds.

The system captured more than 14,000 hours of footage between noon and 8 p.m. on January 6; the archive was made available to two Democratic-controlled congressional committees, the FBI, and the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. (After a request by Congress, the agency reportedly handed over footage from the entire 24-hour period.)

Capitol Police also produced selective clips for Democratic House impeachment managers to use in the trial against Donald Trump.