FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Sentimental Antisemite The CIA’s case for Palestinian statehood was based on analysis. Then the analysts turned out to be wrong. By Lee Smith

Posted By on May 1st, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/sentimental-antisemi

It’s not hard to see the dilemma facing John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Decades of U.S. intelligence assessments of the Middle East, including many he composed and greenlit himself, were trashed during the past four years, as Donald Trump crossed virtually every red line previously drawn by the CIA and other U.S. spy services. Even pro-Israel organizations had assumed that it doesn’t matter what presidential candidates say on the stump—like Bill Clinton, like George W. Bush, and like Barack Obama, they all inevitably walk back their campaign promises. Sure, all presidents would like to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But after seeing the top-secret intelligence and consulting with their well-connected spy chiefs, what president would risk the war that such a move would start?

But the so-called Arab street didn’t erupt when Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Islamists didn’t topple the regimes in Cairo and Amman when the U.S. recognized Israel’s sovereignty in the Golan Heights. Saudi Arabia, the custodian of the two holy shrines in Mecca and Medina, gave all but explicit approval when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel.

That left Brennan with egg on his face. Now out of government, Brennan believes that despite “dealing with a dizzying array of domestic and international problems,” the Biden administration should prioritize “the Palestinian quest for statehood.” Why? To put an end to Israel’s “oppressive security practices,” Brennan wrote on Tuesday for The New York Times. But the case he makes for bumping Palestinian nationalism to the top of the White House’s to-do list is not strategic or rational. It’s sentimental, with a dollop of antisemitism on top—just like his decades of poor intelligence assessments.

“I always found it difficult to fathom how a nation of people deeply scarred by a history replete with prejudice, religious persecution, & unspeakable violence perpetrated against them would not be the empathetic champions of those whose rights & freedoms are still abridged,” Brennan tweeted Tuesday, promoting his Times op-ed.

KRD NEWS Comments turned off

THE DEATH OF THE POST-RACIAL SOCIETY THANE ROSENBAUM

Posted By on May 1st, 2021

WHEN a youthful but electric Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, there was much talk about what it would mean to America to elect its first black president. The very prospect of it was exhilarating. It tapped into our truest democratic ideals, a major national milestone and giant leap in rectifying our racist past. Both black and white Americans shared the symbolism of the moment.

Obama’s political opponent, John McCain, was an old white male, a war hero who had been brutalized as a prisoner in Vietnam, and a longtime serving United States Senator. Immensely qualified and deserving, but he never stood a chance.

Color blindness has disappeared, replaced by full floodlight x-ray vision—deep into the soul of the nation.

What Obama represented was too intoxicating and exotic to ignore. Even the rest of the world wanted to vote for him. Before there would ever be an Italian, Jewish, Asian, Puerto Rican, Indian, or Greek president, America would first elect a black man. How appropriate; how morally vindicating. Not even a woman would reach the White House first, since Obama handedly dispatched Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. It was a historic and touchingly romantic moment in American history. Obama won Iowa, with a 95 percent white population. More white people voted for Obama in 2008 than they did for John Kerry in 2004.

Obama’s victory carried with it the implicit possibility that a vote for Obama could lift the disgrace of racism that has strangled this nation since its inception. An Obama presidency would signify that white Americans once and forever will regard their darker-skinned fellow citizens as equals. The message to African Americans would be that feelings of inferiority and damaged dignity now and forever shall come to an end. And, hopefully, in time, all lingering resentment toward white Americans would dissipate in this newly “post-racial society.”

True colorblindness. Race-free judgments. Pigmentation a vague sidenote, scarcely visible in all interactions between blacks and whites. 

Obama’s campaign slogan was, “Yes, we can.” He made it easy, spending little time discussing race. It wasn’t a campaign issue, and the press did everything it could to deliberately leave race out of this presidential race. Anyone who wanted to racialize this presidential contest would be breaking the new ground rules, trespassing on the free lane that had opened up for Obama, and Obama alone. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Abbas Does Not Want Elections by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17321/abbas-does-not-want-elections

The violence erupted for one single reason: hatred for Israel and Jews. It erupted because many Muslims do not want to see Jews in Jerusalem or any part of Israel.

Attacks on Israeli security forces and Jews in Jerusalem have been taking place for decades — with or without a “reason”.

The call to murder Jews (“Oh Jews, remember Khaybar; the army of [prophet] Mohammed is returning”) is a reminder that today, for many, this war from the seventh century is not over.

Israel never said it would prevent PA elections from taking place in Jerusalem…. Israel said nothing.

The overwhelming majority of Jerusalem Arabs have not shown the slightest interest in, or enthusiasm for, the upcoming Palestinian elections…. It seems, in fact, that the United Nations and European Union officials were more interested in Abbas’s planned elections than most of the Arab residents of Jerusalem…. Abbas evidently announced the elections only to appease his Western donors.

In the past he used to accuse his Hamas rivals; now he is casting around, trying to blame Israel for “obstructing” the elections.

Abbas’s attempt to hold the Israeli government responsible for not holding Palestinian elections is simply the result of his and the PA leadership’s ongoing, vicious incitement to violence against Israel and the demonization of Jews.

It is this type of deliberate and constant race-baiting that is driving young Arabs in Jerusalem to take to the streets to attack policemen and Jewish civilians, and to whip up Jew-hate among the Palestinians.

Those who claim that the recent violence in Jerusalem erupted because the Israel Police did not allow Arab Muslims to hold nightly celebrations during the fasting month of Ramadan have no idea what they are talking about.

Those who say that the violence erupted because Israel did not allow the Arab residents of Jerusalem (who hold Israeli-issued ID cards in their capacity as residents, and are not citizens of Israel) to participate in the Palestinian Authority elections also have no idea what they are talking about. What they all seem to have no idea about is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Radical Parents, Despotic Children Sooner or later, Orwellian methods on campus will lead to Orwellian outcomes. Bret Stephens

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/radical-parents-despotic-children-1448325901

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.

“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”

Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”

And this: “We see also around us the scarring consequences of decade after decade, group after group, strangers to each other, enemies even within the same land, separated by an architecture of segregation, an economy of inequality, a politics of polarization, a dogma of intolerance.”

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: PARENTS AND REGRETS

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

The political schism between parents and offspring is an issue perplexing so many of my conservative friends. Perhaps it was always thus. John Locke (1632-1704) an English philosopher and physician, was regarded as one of the founding fathers of  liberalism. He mused:

“Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves have poisoned the fountain.”

Author and commentator Midge Decter, my dearest friend  asked in 1975 in her book “Liberal Parents, Radical Children”Why and how did liberal parents end up raising a generation of radicals?”

In 2015 Bret Stephens opined:

Radical Parents, Despotic Children  Sooner or later, Orwellian methods on campus will lead to Orwellian outcomes.https://www.wsj.com/articles/radical-parents-despotic-children-1448325901

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.”

For almost 50 years universities have adopted racialist policies in the name of equality, repressive speech codes in the name of tolerance, ideological orthodoxy in the name of intellectual freedom. Sooner or later, Orwellian methods will lead to Orwellian outcomes. Those coddled, bullying undergrads shouting their demands for safer spaces, easier classes, and additional racial set-asides are exactly what the campus faculty and administrators deserve.

Please read his entire column under EDUCATION

rsk

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French Generals, Top Officers Warn Political Elites of Military ‘Intervention’ if Divisive Critical Race Theory Breaks Down Society By Andrew Thornebrooke *****

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.westernjournal.com/french-generals-top-officers-warn-political-elites-military-intervention-divisive-critical-race-theory-breaks-society/

“The generals’ letter closed with the words of the late Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, famous in his own time for his pastoral resistance to the German occupation of Belgium during WWI. “When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere.” Indeed, it is time for the West to regain its courage.”

A massive group of former and current French military personnel signed an open letter this week warning of the imminent danger posed by so-called anti-racist ideology, and urging French President Emmanuel Macron to work quickly to prevent a civil war.

The letter, published in French magazine Valeurs Actuelles, was signed by 20 former French generals, 100 officers and over 1,000 other military personnel.

It accused the French government of kowtowing to destructive ideologies such as anti-racism and Islamism, which it said were being leveraged for the purposes of sowing unrest in French communities and risking a descent into full-blown civil war.

The signatories expressed grave concern with the government’s push to deconstruct and decolonize its own history in an attempt to placate a growing Islamism that has wracked the nation with violence and argued that radical Islam is being used to subject neighborhoods to dogmatic rules that go against the French Constitution, creating an unconstitutional parallel Islamic state.

“Perils are mounting, violence is increasing day by day,” the letter warned. “Who would have predicted ten years ago that a teacher would one day be beheaded when he left school?”

The sentence was a reference to the murder and beheading of Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, in a Parisian suburb last year.

Paty had been teaching a course on free speech and showed his class the cartoon of Muhammad that Islamic terrorists claimed justified the Charlie Hebdo shooting. He was soon after ambushed, murdered and decapitated by a Muslim refugee. Seven more people were charged with facilitating the murder, including a local imam, a parent of one of his students and two students who attended the school.

Notably, the letter explicitly linked the growing threat of an Islamic insurgency in France with the everyday terror of violent socialist and anti-racist riots that have frequently piggybacked off of the chaos of the Yellow Vest protest movement.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The dark night of fascism has finally landed in the United States By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_dark_night_of_fascism_has_finally_landed_in_the_united_states.html

Tom Wolfe famously quipped, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Certainly, that was the case during the Trump presidency, when leftists insisted he was Hitler, yet were unable to point to a single instance in which he’d engaged in conduct actually associated with fascists. However, in the topsy-turvy world that is 2021, Wolfe’s saying has been turned on its head. With the advent of the Biden administration, America is heading into a purely fascist future. Meanwhile, Europeans are insistently demanding freedom, whether it’s generals and other civil servants pushing back against Critical Race Theory and Islam, or ordinary people singing and dancing in the streets.

In America, people who committed a misdemeanor by entering the Capitol without permission are still rotting in jail in solitary confinement without ever having had a hearing. The situation is so dire and un-American that Senators Elizabeth Warren and Dick Durbin, both proponents of total government, protested:

Most of the 300-plus people charged with participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot have been released while they await trial, but dozens of those deemed to be dangerous, flight risks or at high risk of obstructing justice were ordered held without bond. D.C. jail officials later determined that all Capitol detainees would be placed in so-called restrictive housing — a move billed as necessary to keep the defendants safe, as well as guards and other inmates. But that means 23-hour-a-day isolation for the accused, even before their trials begin.

And such treatment doesn’t sit well with Warren or Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), two of the chamber’s fiercest critics of solitary confinement.

“Solitary confinement is a form of punishment that is cruel and psychologically damaging,” Warren said in an interview. “And we’re talking about people who haven’t been convicted of anything yet.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Shameful ‘Attack on Our Democracy’ Rhetoric His shameless descriptions of January 6 desecrate the memory of those lives lost in real attacks against this country and serve to justify the ongoing attack on our democracy he is perpetrating.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/29/bidens-shameful-attack-on-our-democracy-rhetoric/

Joe Biden is either an historical illiterate or a shameless liar. Perhaps he is both.

Desperate to keep the disintegrating narrative about the events of January 6 alive, Biden, in his first sparsely attended speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night, declared the January 6 protest was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Marked safe from Washington Post fact-checkers, Biden continued to lie. “As we gather here tonight, the images of a violent mob assaulting this Capitol, desecrating our democracy, remain vivid in our minds,” he lamented. “Lives were put at risk. Lives were lost. Extraordinary courage was summoned. The insurrection was an existential crisis, a test of whether our democracy could survive. It did”

Of course it did. And no, lives weren’t lost. A single life was lost. Yes, many police officers acted courageously while many politicians scurried to hide under their desks. It wasn’t an existential crisis—no term in the vernacular of your average Democratic politician is more overused—or even a desecration. 

It certainly wasn’t an “attack on our democracy” in any manner. Excuse the language but only a complete moron—or your average MSNBC viewer, but I repeat myself—can possibly believe that comment to be true. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Words That May Not Be Spoken About Black Law Students The case of two professors savaged by the woke campus ‘police’. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/words-may-not-be-spoken-about-black-law-students-richard-l-cravatts/

” The diversocrats on American campuses may recoil at the notion that their efforts to achieve racial equity have unintended, even harmful, consequences, but suppressing the speech of and punishing those who reveal some of the defects of affirmative action is a serious violation of academic freedom, not to mention the willful blindness of progressives who seem to care more about appearing virtuous than they do about contributing to actual constructive social change.”

As one more bit of evidence that universities have become “islands of repression on a sea of freedom,” Georgetown University’s Law Center is currently experiencing paroxysms of anti-racist fervor after two adjunct professors teaching a joint negotiations class, Sandra Sellers and David Batson, were unknowingly recorded bemoaning the low academic performance of their black law students.

 “I hate to say this,” Sellers is recorded as saying to Batson in the 43-second video clip made in February that both professors thought was a private conversation, “I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on!’ You know? I get some really good ones but there’s usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy. Of course, there are the good ones . . . but come on . . . .”

Once the offending video clip was posted on social media, the Georgetown Law campus erupted with howls of indignation, rage, and calls for the termination of both Sellers and Batson.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Profiteers of Biden Administration’s Open Borders Policy Malfeasance has it rewards. Michael Cutler

Posted By on April 30th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/profiteers-biden-administrations-open-borders-michael-cutler/

It has been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The border crisis endangers national security, public health and public safety, yet for the Biden administration, the border crisis that creates consternation for most Americans, incredibly, is viewed as a success story by Biden and the radicalized Democrat Party.

As you will see shortly, Biden immigration policies are also important to human traffickers, drug smugglers, terrorist groups and American companies that move the money of all of the above and, incredibly, even the “fees” and ransom money paid to the human traffickers by aliens’ family members.

As I noted in my recent article, Biden Amps Up The Immigration Delivery System, the Biden administration’s refusal to declare a border crisis is more than a matter of semantics.  

Over the past several decades, globalists in both major political parties have come to see immigration as a delivery system rather than a law enforcement system that is dedicated to protecting America and Americans.

This immigration delivery system delivers a virtually unlimited supply of cheap exploitable workers (and not just the illegal aliens who perform economic bottom rung low-skilled, physically demanding menial jobs, but increasing numbers of highly skilled alien workers who are granted visas to work legally in the United States).  This delivery system also delivers a nearly unlimited number of foreign tourists (hence the continually expanding Visa Waiver Program), a huge number of foreign students including students from adversarial nations such as China, and a virtually unlimited number of clients for immigration law firms.  Indeed, there are a significant number of  immigration lawyers in both political parties.