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Where Are the US and the EU on Iran’s Human Rights Violations? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17249/iran-human-rights-violations

Although Iran ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, President Hassan Rouhani’s government has made no effort to alter the country’s Penal Code, which allows girls as young as nine to be executed.

“Iranian courts, and particularly revolutionary courts, regularly fall far short of providing fair trials and use confessions likely obtained under torture as evidence in court. Authorities have failed to meaningfully investigate numerous allegations of torture against detainees. Authorities routinely restrict detainees’ access to legal counsel, particularly during the initial investigation period.” — Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2021.”

In rewarding Iran for malign behavior — by again showering millions of dollars on the Iranian regime, lifting sanctions and reviving the nuclear deal — the US and the EU are empowering the ruling clerics of Iran to further suppress and crack down on dissidents, torture and kill their citizens and expand their tyranny abroad.

While the Biden administration and the European Union are forging ahead to revive the Iran nuclear deal – which, by the way, Tehran never signed — and lift sanctions on the Iranian regime, they are turning a blind eye on the regime’s alarming and increasing human rights violations.

Human rights violations committed by the Iranian regime have become even more shattering and appalling. Unfortunately, Iran’s leaders have been acting with full impunity. First, the suppression and execution of political prisoners and those who protest against Iran’s theocratic establishment have reached an unprecedented level. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, the Iranian regime is one of the world’s leading executioners. In 2020, Iran’s regime executed more than 230 people. These include individuals who committed their alleged crimes when they were children.

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A list of questions that real journalists would ask Joe Biden By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

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

When I grew up, despite their general Democrat-leaning bias, journalists still asked probing questions, that saw them seeking information. That’s not the case anymore. When a Republican is the president, the journalists just play “gotcha.” And when a Democrat is in office, especially a senile Democrat, the journalists pose delicately prepared questions that are intended to elicit a planned speech from the president. Mollie Hemingway has done a great service by setting out a list of questions real journalists would ask Joe Biden about the MLB boycott in Georgia.

If you want a perfect example of what passes for journalism nowadays, you can’t do better than the question PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, a hardcore Democrat activist who operates partially on the taxpayer’s dime, and who functions as the straight man, feeding lines to our joke of a president:

You’ve said over and over again that immigrants shouldn’t come to this country right now. This isn’t the time to come. That message is not being received. Instead, the perception of you that got you elected as a moral decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors. How do you resolve that tension and how are you choosing which families can stay and which can go given the fact that even though with Title 42 there are some families that are staying? And is there a timeline for when we won’t be seeing these overcrowded facilities run by CPB when it comes to unaccompanied minors?

Fourteen years ago, a great video came out showing a man being pulled over by the world’s most loving cop. Watch the video and tell me if that cop isn’t indistinguishable from the tongue bath the media give Biden:

The same thing happened when ESPN’s Sage Steele asked Biden what he thought of having MLB boycott Atlanta, a city that voted overwhelmingly for Biden because Georgia had revised its voting laws to require ID for absentee ballots (something common in most states). Biden enthusiastically supported the boycott, an answer he propped up with grotesque lies. Steele just let all that lie there like rotten fish.

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Noah Green – and ‘Not All Muslims Do That!’ Why the Capitol barricade crasher – and Farrakhan follower – is already out of the news.

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/noah-green-and-not-all-muslims-do-jamie-glazov/

Introduction: Just recently, we witnessed U.S. authorities and the establishment media try their hardest to de-Islamize the Jihad mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, and to obscure the fact that the Jihadist perpetrator, Ahmad Al Issa, is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer.

And now we see the same pattern with Noah Green, who crashed his car into a barricade at the U.S. Capitol building last Friday, hitting Capitol Police officers, one of whom was killed and a second severely injured. Green also got out of his car and charged officers with a knife. The establishment media clearly salivated at the prospect of the perpetrator being a white supporter of Donald Trump, so that they could perpetuate their false narrative about the threat of “white supremacist terrorism” all around us. But alas for the media, it was not to be: Green was a black man and a member of the Nation of Islam. And so he is, typically and expectedly, no longer in the news. President Biden heroically led the way, making no mention of Green’s ideology in his statement on the attack and, instead of condemning Green’s violence, alluding instead to the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in January. Even Facebook did its faithful leftist duty, deleting – within the blink of an eye – Green’s Facebook page, where the Capitol barricade crasher proclaimed himself a “Follower of Farrakhan.” Louis Farrakhan is, of course, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which, apart from things like stirring hatred of whites and Jews, embraces Islam’s jihad doctrine.

‘Not All Muslims Do That!’

Now that we have learned how and why the Left perpetuates Jihad Denial, we move on to examine the key arguments within its toxic agenda. As will be demonstrated below, the entire gambit is a lie and a fraud.

It’s Just the Extremists!

One of the most widely employed Jihad Denial arguments heard in our culture today is the infamous assurance that It’s not Islam, but the extremists! This proposition is interwoven with the central foundation of the Jihad Denial matrix: that it all really has nothing to do with Islam. The thinking goes like this: even when Jihadists quote their Islamic texts to justify their barbaric actions, it is not because of Islam. The terrorists, we are told, are just a very tiny minority of Muslims who have misunderstood and hijacked their own religion. They are, therefore, not even real Muslims.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden & Democrats: ‘American Lives Don’t Matter’ Destroying America from within. Wayne Allyn Root

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/biden-democrats-american-lives-dont-matter-wayne-allyn-root/

We know Democrats support “Black Lives Matter.” It’s all they talk about. While I’m no fan of the Marxist BLM organization, I think all of us can agree that black lives matter. No one wants a single law-abiding, innocent black American to die needlessly.

But someone needs to ask puppet President Joe Biden and every Democratic politician in Washington, D.C., a simple question: Do American lives matter?

Because, from their actions, it’s pretty darn clear that they don’t. It seems like they’re purposely trying to destroy the lives of American citizens.

Who in their right mind would open the borders, stop construction of the wall, invite the entire world to come to America, announce they won’t deport anyone, and incentivize migrants with free lawyers, welfare, bus or air fare and, of course, free health care?

Even worse, who in their right mind would open the borders in the middle of this COVID-19 pandemic?

Who’d be insane enough to demand every American citizen returning to the U.S. to take a COVID test but refuse to give COVID tests to thousands of immigrants illegally breaking into our country each day?

Who would spend $86 million on nice hotel rooms for illegal immigrants, yet ask our brave, selfless troops to sleep in freezing cold parking garages, on concrete floors, with only one bathroom for 5,000 troops?

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My Fight With Canada’s Pravda: Is It Really Not Ok To Be White? Welcome to the CBC’s twisted world of woke racism. George Rojas

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/my-fight-canadas-pravda-it-really-not-ok-be-white-frontpagemagcom/

Canada is an interesting place from a US politics perspective. In terms of left-wing authoritarianism, it’s always been about 2-to-5 years ahead of us Americans. As Rebel News-founder Ezra Levant told the US Congress once: “America should care about Canada because what happens in [] Canada soon comes—or tries to come—to the U.S… we’re a laboratory for bad ideas.”

For this reason, I like checking in on Canada’s state news broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I don’t think the US will be getting officially government-sanctioned news any time soon—the CBC was created in the 30s to counter US-dominance of the country’s airwaves, so they’re in a special position. But Canada’s official outlet is fascinating because it has a special mandate to provide news and commentary to the taxpaying public (who shell out over US$1 billion per year for it) and yet it’s a hyper-elite institution that speaks only to a small part of the country.

Unsurprisingly then, it’s absolutely loathed by Canadian conservatives. When political scientist Eric Kaufmann commissioned a poll in Canada attempting to understand what the left and right most widely disagree on, he found it was ethnic diversity, Handmaid’s Tale-author Margaret Atwood, and the CBC.

In a recent check-up of mine, I found “a story” apparently deemed newsworthy by CBC editors involving some fool in the Toronto suburbs who thought it a good idea to put up stickers saying things like “It’s OK to be white” on a light post. Such an act ‘promoted white nationalism’, according to the CBC’s headline, and supposedly necessitated an interview with the local hate-crimes police unit—Canada does have criminal laws against ‘inciting or willfully promoting hatred’, although this “offense” doesn’t even come close.

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When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War The Palestinian assault against Jewish history. Caroline Glick

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/when-cultural-appropriation-and-historical-caroline-glick/

Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public’s attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua’s Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals. They were burned in an open flame 3,250 years ago—the time generally identified as the period of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel under Joshua. Other remains found at the site included earrings and scarabs made in Egypt at the time of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh often associated with the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

As Zertal explained in a lecture in 2013, the altar was buried under a layer of rocks, in keeping with Jewish prescriptions for preventing the desecration of abandoned holy sites. In keeping with the biblical narrative, the altar is made of unhewn stones; instead of steps, there are two ramps for the priests to alight to the platform—blocks of plaster were found nearby. The altar at Mt. Ebal also matches a Talmudic description of an altar from the Second Temple period, around 900 years later, indicating a continuity of Jewish practices throughout the biblical period.

Although initially controversial, Zertal’s general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus. Nablus, built on the ruins of the biblical city of Shechem, is located in northern Samaria between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative “from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate.”

“There are people who refuse to acknowledge that the damage done here was deliberate,” Major General Gershon Hacohen explained to Newsweek. “That since it was the surrounding wall—rather than the altar itself—that was destroyed, the altar wasn’t harmed. That’s like saying that if someone destroys the steps to the Acropolis, they aren’t harming the Acropolis. It’s the same complex.”

“They also say the Palestinians weren’t trying to damage the site—they just needed stones for their road. But look at this place,” he said and waved his hand across the landscape.

The slopes of Mt. Ebal are strewn with loose rocks.

“If they needed rocks for the road, all the Palestinians had to do was bring up a truck and take as many as they needed. Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of a 3,250-year-old wall.”

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Be Warned: Biden Aims to Outshine Obama as a Progressive Reformer By John Fund

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/biden-aims-to-outshine-obama-as-a-progressive-reformer/

“Instead, the country may well suffer in many ways if Biden succeeds in grasping for the fool’s gold of what he perceives as “greatness.”

As a likely one-term POTUS, he is aiming for ‘greatness’ — fast. And the country may pay the price.

I n looking at the nearly $5 trillion in proposed spending in the Biden budget, people are wondering, “What happened to the Joe Biden who ran for president by citing his 36-year record as a moderate dealmaker in the Senate?”

The answer is that, at age 78, he has bought into the belief that he has only a little time to become a transformational president and leave a legacy of “greatness.” In Washington speak, that means adding to the size of government and ridding oneself of any notion you can spend too much money.

As National Review editor Rich Lowry points out, bills in the Senate still require 60 votes to break a filibuster. Much of what Biden wants will crash against that barrier. But there’s an exception. He can pass his stimulus and infrastructure bills under budget-reconciliation rules in the Senate that require only 50 votes — thus his “stimulus” and “infrastructure” bills.

Biden has also been bewitched by a parade of liberal court historians who have met with him. Their implied message: Because of his age, he’s likely to be a one-term president, but he can still go down in history if he creates his own New Deal or Great Society, and uses executive orders to reform our entire immigration system and to redress income inequality.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Biden Effect’ emerges through massive spending and weaponizing race at every turn By Tom Basile –

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/2/biden-effect-emerges-through-massive-spending-and-/

“Lunch Pail Joe” has gone woke.

A scant couple of months into the Biden presidency and the governing philosophy of the nation’s 46th president has become painfully clear. Increase federal power through massive spending and weaponize race at every turn. The result is the “Biden Effect.”The Biden Effect turns the American economic paradigm on its head by inserting significant government influence into virtually every aspect of the private sector. It undermines racial solidarity and recklessly promotes division that could tear the nation apart. 

This is the administration’s one-two punch to advance its far-left goals. Issues of race are presented as an urgent crisis but instead are tools to justify federal overreach. Radical shifts in policy reminiscent of the failed Great Society and New Deal are the real objectives, not equity, equality or empowerment. 

With the Biden Effect, the Georgia election-law reform is characterized as “Jim Crow in the 21st century.” The filibuster Sen. Joe Biden used against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination in 2006 is now a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” Mr. Biden’s administration baselessly equates an assertive foreign policy toward Communist China with domestic anti-Asian bias. 

Kamala Harris, who compared ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan, is now in charge of the southern border crisis.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Texas Neanderthals were right Texas ditched the mask mandate and opened up – and it’s all fine. Sean Collins

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/01/the-texas-neanderthals-were-right/

In early March, Texas governor Greg Abbott announced he was ending the state’s mandate for people to wear masks, and reopening businesses at full capacity. Media outlets went into overdrive to denounce him and predict catastrophe. CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza called Abbott’s decision ‘head-scratching, anti-science’. ‘Model projections for Texas show worst-case scenario without mask mandate’, warned an ABC TV station in Houston. Abbott’s move was part of a ‘bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans’, screamed Vanity Fair.

Politicians also rushed to criticise Abbott. Former representative and failed presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called his decision a ‘death warrant for Texans’. California governor Gavin Newsom said Texas was ‘absolutely reckless’ for lifting its Covid rules.

No less than President Joe Biden felt obliged to speak out and condemn Abbott. ‘The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine – take off your mask, forget it. It still matters.’

Well, it appears the Neanderthals in Texas got it right, and Biden is the one whose thinking is caveman-like. Now, three weeks after Abbott’s order to lift the mask mandate went into effect, the Covid situation has improved in Texas. New cases are down, to their lowest level since June. Hospitalisations have fallen to their lowest level since autumn. Death rates have plummeted. Furthermore, the outlook for vaccinations in the state appears bright, with a record daily number of people receiving shots. Adults of all ages are now eligible for a vaccine jab, a faster pace than many other states.

Have Biden and the media apologised for slandering Texas? And have they learned that lifting mandates on mask-wearing and removing other restrictions does not lead to Covid-spreading? Of course not.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Appeasing Cuba’s Regime Didn’t Work The Biden administration should learn from the failures of the Obama administration. by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX-10) and Rep.Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL-25)

Posted By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/appeasing-cubas-regime-didnt-work-11617400699?mod=opinion_major_pos5

For more than 60 years, a dictatorship has imposed a violently oppressive system on the Cuban people. Its human-rights abuses grew worse under the appeasement policy of the Obama-Biden administration. Amid the “thaw” in relations, documented political detentions rose to 9,940 in 2016 from 8,616 in 2015. The Castro regime lined its pockets and expanded its machinery of repression.

The malignancy has spread beyond the island. After revamping the Venezuelan military and intelligence services, Cuba led efforts to sustain the illegitimate Nicolás Maduro regime and supported its abuses, which mirrored those carried out against the Cuban people. The 2020 State Department report on Venezuela highlights torture, arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial killings—abuses that “amounted to crimes against humanity,” U.N.-appointed investigators found.

The Cuban dictatorship also worked with Hezbollah, a terrorist proxy of Iran, to prop up the Maduro regime. In Cuba, terrorists find a haven. The regime refused Colombia’s extradition requests following a 2019 bombing that killed 22. The Cuban regime reportedly also harbors American fugitives such as terrorist cop-killer Joanne Chesimard, hijacker-murderer Ishmail Muslim Ali and terrorist bomb-maker William Morales. Inexplicably, the Obama administration delisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terror in 2015. This January, the Trump administration corrected that error.

Let’s not forget that the attacks in 2016 and 2017 against U.S. diplomats in Havana remain unsolved. Many U.S. personnel and their families suffered debilitating brain injuries.