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CNN Runs Free Advertising for Protests in Support of Palestinian Jihad By Robert Spencer

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/22/cnn-runs-free-advertising-for-protests-in-support-of-palestinian-jihad-n1448976

First the Associated Press was 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. And now comes more confirmation that what we are told are news organizations are actually propaganda arms not only for the Left’s agenda, but for the Palestinian Arab jihad against Israel. CNN on Saturday published an article entitled “Protests in support of Palestinians expected across the United States,” which was not so much a piece of reporting on those protests, but a free advertisement for them, complete with a case for why you should participate in your local orgy of Jew-hatred.

It doesn’t start out too badly: “Protesters are expected to rally in cities across the United States this weekend in support of Palestinians, as Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire ending days of destruction and bloodshed.” But immediately after that comes the staple of establishment media reporting on Israel and the Palestinians: the casualty count. “Since May 10,” CNN claims, “Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 243 people in Gaza, including 66 children, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health. Twelve people in Israel, including two children, died as a result of militant fire from Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces and Israel’s emergency service.”

Oh, hey, that’s bad: 243 Palestinians, including 66 children, were killed versus only twelve Israelis. The clear implication of CNN’s framing of the story here is that Israel responded in a disproportionate manner to the rockets Hamas fired into Israel, and indiscriminately bombed Gaza without regard for the lives of civilians. Reality is quite different. In the latest conflict, Hamas followed its longstanding practice of launching attacks from civilian areas so as to draw retaliatory fire that would harm civilians and be usable for propaganda purposes. This launching of attacks from civilian areas has been abundantly documented, even by the unflaggingly anti-Israel United Nations. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tweeted Thursday: “It’s not easy fighting a terrorist organization that embeds its military infrastructure in civilian areas. We use the latest military technology to precisely strike Hamas targets, while minimizing damage to the surrounding areas.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why Are Democrats So Afraid of Election Audits? Democrats claim election audits like the one in Arizona are an existential threat to democracy, but it’s difficult to see how—unless they reveal that our elections have been hijacked. By Charlie Kirk

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/why-are-democrats-so-afraid-of-election-audits/

Democrats are positively terrified of election audits that aren’t completely controlled by the political establishment. If there’s a chance an audit might reveal meaningful information, you can bet Democrats (and certain weak Republicans) will stridently oppose it. The only audits Democrats and their allies support are the ones designed to rubber-stamp previous conclusions.

The increasingly desperate attacks on the ongoing audit in Maricopa County, Arizona—particularly those intended to undermine the credibility of the auditors—show just how much the Democratic Party establishment fears the whole process. Their entire argument is based on sarcasm, scorn, and scare quotes.

The auditors are inspecting the paper that ballots were printed on? They must believe in a far-fetched conspiracy theory!

The auditors are checking to make sure the ballots don’t have watermarks that are not supposed to be there? They must be members of fringe online message boards!

The audit is being funded primarily by private donations? It must be an elaborate “grift” rather than a serious fact-finding effort (not to mention they need the funds to fend off the litany of lawsuits they’re facing).

By smearing the auditors as corrupt and/or inept, and the audit itself as a partisan stunt, leftists are hoping they can discredit the process and convince Americans to stop asking pesky questions about whether any laws were broken or procedural loopholes exploited during the 2020 elections. That’s the way people respond to questions when they don’t want anyone to know the answers.

It’s not just the Arizona audit, either. Democrats and their media allies are already fully engaged in a crusade to preemptively impugn the legitimacy of any audits that might be conducted in other states, describing conservative support for audits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as “a bid to bolster former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

If they really believe the 2020 elections were “the most secure in American history,” then they should welcome audits as a way of substantiating that claim. Indeed, they should even be celebrating audits run by Republicans, since their conclusions will carry so much more weight with GOP voters. That said, the Arizona auditors have practically been begging Democrats to participate, but the Democrats have only been interested in attacking the process from afar.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Peter Wood :Nikole Hannah-Jones at the Summit The Pulitzer Prize-winning force behind “The 1619 Project” has begun the descent that favored radicals of the past such as Rigoberta Menchú suffered after people began to scrutinize their claims.

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/22/nikole-hannah-jones-at-the-summit/

Nikole Hannah-Jones was having a very good year. She reached the summit on April 28, when it was widely reported that she had been appointed with tenure, effective July, to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The news came a week after the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced Hannah-Jones was among some 259 “outstanding individuals” elected to the Academy in 2021. She led the list of eight chosen in “Journalism, Media, and Communications.” 

A year ago May 4, Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Between those bookends, she has been invited to present numerous prestigious lectures at universities and other august venues. She received the George Polk “special award” in 2019 after receiving it in 2015 for “radio reporting” for “The Problem We All Live With.” She also received a 2015 Peabody Award for “The Case for School Desegregation Today.”

Of course, she was also a 2017 recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships for “reshaping national conversations around education reform.”

But her appointment to a named chair at the school from which she received her master’s degree in 2003 had to be among the sweetest distinctions. She was being recognized as a top figure in her chosen profession. 

But on May 18, the bottom fell out. 

The Fall

That day the UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees took the unusual step of refusing to grant Hannah-Jones tenure. The board offered her an alternative: a five-year appointment as a “professor of practice,” with the option of a tenure review down the road. In higher education parlance, this would be a “probationary appointment.” In Hannah-Jones’ world, it might be called a humiliation. She sees herself as one of the most authoritative voices in journalism today. The news that she would still have to prove herself worthy of a tenured academic appointment must have hit her hard.

Be that as it may, it certainly hit the American higher education establishment hard. “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones Is Craven and Dangerous” roared Silke-Maria Weineck, a University of Michigan German professor in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle also features an essay by staff writers Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason, who explain, Hannah-Jones’ “‘1619 Project’ Is a Political Lightning Rod. It May Have Cost Her Tenure.” Colleen Flaherty at Inside Higher Ed headlines her account “A Blatant Intrusion.” She leads with a quote from an anonymous source who says UNC’s trustees acted under “pressure.” 

I would hope so. If there were ever a time when university trustees should be called upon to live up to their responsibilities to maintain the integrity of academic appointments, this was it.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Great Artist’s Career in Anti-communism By Kyle Smith

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-great-artists-career-in-anti-communism/

A rare voice of sanity in the theater, Tom Stoppard vigorously rebuked and lampooned the most monstrous idea of his time.

 I f the Left can be reduced to a word, it is “utopianism.” Seeking to perfect man, progressives can never be satisfied with the state of things. To be a progressive means consistently to overlook undeniable progress — decreased poverty, for instance, or enhanced opportunity for minorities of all kinds — while insisting that everything is still terrible and calling for redoubling the fight with huge new injections of funding and ever-expanding bureaucracies.

By contrast, our greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard, makes a Chestertonian case for accepting our gifts and muddling through. The director Mike Nichols once called him “the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Conservatism at its core rejects ideology — it is what is left behind when the grand schemes collapse and people just get on with it.

In the other direction, the revolutionary one, lies catastrophe. As recounted in Hermione Lee’s impressively wide-ranging new biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Stoppard’s most successful work this century is the nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), the sprawling story of the mid-19th-century radicals and intellectuals, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who contemplated how Russian society should be reformed after the last tsar. The work is an ingenious way of reviewing the greatest human disaster of all time, the Communist debacle, by considering its ideological conception.

Bakunin, a proto-Bolshevik, argues in the play for a maximalist approach that starts with a vengeful spree against the ruling class; but Stoppard’s sympathies clearly lie with the meliorism of Herzen, who pleads “to open men’s eyes and not to tear them out. To bring what’s good along with them.” Herzen’s final speech, which Stoppard took almost verbatim from an 1855 essay, cautions against the folly of the “ancient dream” of “a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way toward it, we won’t be grown up as human beings.”

Stoppard, nearly alone in his industry, resolutely made the case against communism and utopianism, from the Seventies on into this century. His having been right about communism isn’t why he’s an essential artist — and right-wing artists can be hacks too — but the virtue of his convictions gives his plays a satisfying heft to go along with their famous wit, effervescence, and undergraduate vigor.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Jews vs. The World

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/culture/the-jews-vs-the-world/

As a weak and sclerotic Democratic leadership cowers before the anti-Israel zealotry of the Squad and its acolytes in the House of Representatives, American Jews are getting a glimpse of what the future may hold: a return to a not-so-distant past in which Jews stood alone to face either slaughter or survival.

There are differences between now and then, of course. The Jews now have a state and an army, facts that provide the fig leaf for the new anti-Semitism now exhibited by left-wing Democrats, academics, and Jewish radicals. The old hatred has found new life in characterizing Jews as oppressors and the genocidal Hamas as victim.

In a kind of provincial stupidity the left would abhor in almost any other context, the liberal elite has conflated caricatures of the Palestinian experience with that of the minority experience in the United States.

The left-wing congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), his anti-Semitism cloaked in the argot of the social justice warrior, has called on Israel to stop brutalizing and murdering “Black and brown bodies.”

Members of the Princeton University faculty on Tuesday released a similar statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people that rejects what they call “Jewish supremacy”—an inartful attempt to liken Jews to their tormentors in the Ku Klux Klan.

The faculty statement will have no impact on world events, but it sends a clear message to Jewish students at the university. It will be familiar to any Jew who managed to sneak into Princeton between its founding in 1746 and the infamous “dirty bicker” of 1958, in which Jews were systematically excluded from the school’s social clubs. University-sanctioned anti-Semitism has been the rule, not the exception, at Princeton.

Finally, there are the Jews who will give cover for this Jew-hatred. Many signed the Princeton letter. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who made a name for herself arguing that congressional support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” has a Jewish spokesman. Hamas has retained a Jewish lawyer, too.

We don’t despair for two reasons.

First, the enmity of the world around us is the strand that connects the Jews of today to their ancient ancestors.

The brief moment in which the majority of the world’s remaining Jews found safety in Israel and the United States is a historical aberration, but Jewish culture has well preserved the outsider mentality that will be necessary as we brace for the return to normalcy.

Second, Zionism was incubated and refined for moments just like this. The good will of the United States was a blessing for Israel; it was not, however, a prerequisite for Zionism’s success. The very premise of the movement was that the Jews could rely on no one but themselves for their own survival.

And for American Jews who can imagine no other home and no other life, we still have righteous and stalwart allies, from our Evangelical Christian friends to Republicans in Congress (with the notable and ignoble exception of Indiana senator Todd Young) to the vast majority of the American people.

Despite a steady diet of anti-Israel invective by the media, Americans seem largely immune to the prejudices and fads of the country’s elite: The latest Economist/YouGov poll shows that 63 percent of Americans have the decency and common sense to say that protecting Israel should be either “very important” or “somewhat important” to the United States.

The future may yet be as dark as the past, but not yet. Hamas and its many sympathizers here and around the world will have to endure at least another day of unrepentant Jewish survival.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Revolution Comes for Israel By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-revolution-comes-for-israel/

Israel has battled Hamas four times since the terror organization seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Each battle unfolds the same way: Hamas launches rockets at Israel’s civilian population, Israel bombs Hamas targets, and the fighting continues until terrorist infrastructure is sufficiently degraded so that the rocket fire stops for a few years. Israelis call it “mowing the lawn.” The last major clash was in 2014. In its origins, order of battle, and strategy and tactics, Operation Guardian of the Walls, which began May 10, resembles these previous flareups.

So what’s different? Just about everything.

The region has changed. In 2014 the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, legitimizing the nuclear program of Israel’s archenemy Iran, was a gleam in John Kerry’s eye. Its adoption the following year, and America’s withdrawal from the agreement in 2018, realigned the Middle East along the axis of Iranian power. The result was an Arab–Israel détente formalized in the 2020 Abraham Accords. From a regional perspective, the Palestinian cause is less important than Iran’s ambitions.

Israel has changed. In 2014, Benjamin Netanyahu was at the outset of his third term and led from a position of strength. His indictment on corruption charges in 2019 initiated a political crisis that has led to four elections (and most likely a fifth) in the space of two years. On the eve of the latest violence, Israel’s bewildering politics became even more surprising when two of Netanyahu’s rivals enticed an Arab Islamist party to join a coalition government. That effort collapsed when the rockets blazed. The subsequent outbreak of intercommunal violence in cities with large Arab-Israeli populations is a reminder of Israel’s pressing domestic challenges. The security issue unites Israel. Just about everything else divides it.

America has changed. In the summer of 2014, Barack Obama was a lame duck, the Republicans controlled the House and were on the verge of winning the Senate, and Donald Trump was the host of Celebrity Apprentice. Obama’s dislike of Netanyahu and willingness to expose “daylight” between the United States and Israel was no secret. But anti-Israel invective was limited to the fringe. And anti-Israel media bias was nowhere near as bad as it is today.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Joe Scarborough’s insane rant proves he’s just a histrionic blowhard By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

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

Joe Scarborough is one of those pathetic persons who inhabit the periphery of cable news.  The morning show he hosts with his adoring but insipid wife Mika is apparently a favorite of Kim Jong Un and perhaps a mere one million equally mentally challenged Americans.  Beyond those relative few, no one pays a bit of attention to his vicious anti-Trump rants or the vitriol he spews daily upon Trump and his supporters.  

The man, like the rest of MSNBC’s denizens, is not very bright but he is very impressed with his own self-perceived brilliance.  In short, he’s something of a joke to all but a few blinkered souls.  He makes no difference on any issue on which he expounds; he changes no minds.  Those who watch his early morning program are not critical thinkers.  They are unthinking acolytes of a shameless shyster. 

On Friday morning however, Scarborough lost it, went full mental.  

He melted down, screaming like a banshee about his loathing of anyone who supports the audit currently underway in Arizona. 

Like his colleague Rachel Maddow, he knows what the Arizona audit portends and the truth of it has filled him with horror.  Like the rest of the left, he knows only too well that the 2020 election was rigged in numerous ways (see Molly Ball’s article) and that Biden is not a legitimate President.  He accused all the patriots supporting the audit of everything up to and including treason.  He shouted that they should just leave, that immigrants would be better citizens.  He is hoping that hysteria will trump evidence.  But as the great Anthony Daniels (pen name Theodore Dalrymple) said “The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes.  Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent.”  Poor Joe Scarborough’s morning hysteria is clearly an act, a bad act.  His hatred for all things Trump has rendered him thoroughly irrelevant.   

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Woke culture comes for Shakespeare By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

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

William Shakespeare wrote his plays at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Over the years, people have tried to make Shakespeare more palatable for then-current audiences, either by putting the plays in new settings or getting rid of “objectionable” issues. Nothing, though, has ever equaled what Britain’s modern Globe Theater plans to do: It’s going to “decolonise” Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s plays have lasted 500 years. Even in 21st century America, we still routinely used words and phrases that Shakespeare first wrote: “admirable,” “barefaced,” “hostile,” “sanctimonious,” “all that glitters isn’t gold,” “break the ice,” “clothes make the man,” “a laughing stock,” “It’s Greek to me,” “too much of a good thing,” and many more.

It’s true that much of Shakespeare’s language is hard to understand for modern people — although, oddly, Americans may find Shakespeare’s English easier to understand when spoken as he would have spoken it, rather than as actors speak it today – but it’s still exquisitely beautiful. And while his plays’ values can be strange or even offensive, Shakespeare nevertheless had such a deep understanding of unchanging human nature that he always has currency. Whether it’s those stupid teenagers in Romeo and Juliet, the witty Beatrice and Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, or even Shylock’s ageless plea that others recognize his common humanity, he still can resonate with modern audiences.

At various times, people have tried to bring Shakespeare in line with their times.  In 1807, Thomas Bowdler created a cleaned-up Shakespeare, shorn of suicides, blasphemy, prostitution, etc., so that families could read it together without shame. His effort became so famous we still use his name as a verb for someone creating a mangled abridged version of an original work of written art. At around the same time, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb prepared a clean and simple version for children.

In our modern era, we’ve seen The Taming of the Shrew reworked as Kiss Me Kate, a brilliant Cole Porter musical; Richard III reimagined in a fictional 1930s fascist England; Much Ado About Nothing moved to small-town America at the end of the Spanish American war; and Macbeth transformed into a feudal Japanese tale in Throne of Blood. Shakespeare is almost infinitely malleable because, under the British renaissance trappings lies someone who understands people – how they behave in different circumstances and what motivates them, whether we look at people’s best or worst instincts.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Social Justice’ Rabbinic Students Betray The Jewish People In Time Of War By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

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

While the young men and women of Israel are putting their lives on the line defending their homes and family, here in America we have a comfortable and self-indulgent group of rabbinical students verbally attacking Israel and giving moral support to the Hamas and Palestinian Arabs trying to destroy Israeli families. Most are from the Boston Hebrew College, the Reconstructionist Jewish Seminary, and Hebrew Union College, and they are trying to influence world opinion against Israel, which enhances the ability of the terrorists to murder more Jews.

It is a despicable act of betrayal and cowardice and should not be construed as coming from people with a higher moral standard. Sitting in their protected ivory towers – never being forced into a draft for either the American or Israeli army – they announce with detached pontification how much better they are than those “warmongering” Israelis who man their tanks, pilot fighter bombers, and raise their rifles while soldiering forward into danger.

By now, it is obvious that Hamas and other jihadists, unlike Israel, are not interested in peace and, instead, represent the most barbaric actions and attitudes, even to their own people – in contrast to Israel which tries exceedingly hard to defend itself in the least harmful and most humane way possible. Whereas, for example, Israel protects its civilians by placing women and children behind soldiers, the jihadists put their women and children in front of their men to protect the men and disarm their opponents. Whereas Israel has forfeited vast segments of its land and made other sacrificial peace offers, no P.L.O or Hamas leader has ever agreed to any formula for peace except to brazenly announce his intention that a Muslim Palestine will replace all of Israel.

But these rabbinical students seem so immersed in self-righteousness and virtue signaling, so intoxicated by a feeling that they know better than those “morally inferior” to them, they do not seem able to see the obvious Jewish side of the conflict. Rather, they identify totally with those who would gleefully murder their brothers and sisters, not because they are Israelis but precisely because they are Jews.

What they think is social justice is actually injustice and ignorance. Worse, it is an indifference to the plight of the Jewish people they hope one day to lead. They are not to be admired for “idealism;” instead, they should be scorned for taking the easy way out and masking their cowardice in lofty sounding principles of “social justice.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: 10 Characters in Search of a Protector by Amir Taheri

Posted By on May 23rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17396/iran-election-candidates

With Iran arguably stuck in its deepest crisis in decades while economic meltdown, rampant corruption and Covid-19 chaos wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale, the Khomeinist regime is in dire need of reasserting its legitimacy.

The terms “Russophile” and “Americanophile” may need to be explained. Neither means any actual sympathy for either Russian or American ways of life and political systems…. Both want to “export” revolution, destroy Israel, if possible, and impose hegemony on the Middle East. In short, both wear beards, though of different styles.

Russia isn’t a potential ideological rival because the “Russian way of life”, unknown to most Iranians, lacks any seductive power capable of challenging Khomeinism. In other words, the Khomeinist regime has a better chance of survival under Russian protection than it could have under American tutelage.

Within days the all-powerful Council of the Guardians of the Constitution is expected to publish the list of “approved candidates” for next month’s presidential election in the Islamic Republic in Iran.

According to official reports, a total of 592 men and one woman have filled in the forms for consideration as a candidate. The council, however, is expected to approve no more than seven to 10 applicants.

What is not clear is whether the council will assess the applicants on the basis of existing regulations or in accordance with new rules it published last month. The Interior Ministry, which has the charge of organizing the elections, says nothing outside the existing regulations should be at play. The council, however, says the ministry’s role does not include an assessment of applications.

The dispute may furnish some fuel to feed the low-burning fire of this bizarre election. Everyone knows that the final list will be established by the “Supreme Guide” who has the final word in the Khomeinist regime.

If previous elections are to be taken as a guide, this time, too, the “Supreme Guide”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is likely to use the election as a multipurpose exercise.

The first objective is to ensure as large a turnout as possible.

Khamenei has described elections in the Islamic Republic as referenda on the regime itself. With Iran arguably stuck in its deepest crisis in decades while economic meltdown, rampant corruption and Covid-19 chaos wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale, the Khomeinist regime is in dire need of reasserting its legitimacy.