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AUSTRALIA: THE PERSECUTION OF GEORGE PELL

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/

The Persecution of George Pell chronicles how the highest levels of the police, judiciary and politicians in Australia, plus victim lobby groups, compensation lawyers, and journalists, used bogus accusations of child sexual abuse to persecute, convict and jail an innocent man.

Keith Windschuttle uncovers the campaign aimed not only at personally destroying one of Australia’s most influential religious leaders, but also of trashing the reputation of the Catholic Church. Had it succeeded, the campaign would have set damaging precedents for the rule of law in Australia. Pell spent 400 days in prison before a unanimous judgment of the High Court finally set him free.

To get their man, lawyers, judges and a Royal Commission reversed long-standing legal principles, including the presumption of innocence, the onus of proof, and guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Every claim of child sexual abuse, they insisted, must be believed. This is the story of profound injustice heaped on one individual and the social and legal damage caused by radical ideologues convinced of their own virtue.

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China Has Already Started to Test the Biden Administration by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16999/china-test-biden

Not a week has passed since the inauguration of President Joe Biden — whose son reportedly engaged in business deals with China worth $1.5 billion — and the Chinese Communist Party, which illegally seized Hong Kong last summer, has already sent more than two dozen warplanes, including bombers, into Taiwan’s airspace for two days in a row.

China also issued a new law permitting its “coastguards to launch pre-emptive strikes without prior warning” on any foreign ship that might enter disputed waters that China would like to consider its own.

Biden’s team should not misinterpret any Chinese conciliatory rhetoric as being a sign of a less aggressive CCP effort to push US military assets out of the Western Pacific.

Xi, a stalwart of the “One China Policy,” may still demand not words but actions, such as: a moratorium on Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) by US Navy vessels in the South China Sea, a cessation of US criticism of Chinese human rights violations, and a promise to reduce American VIP visits to Taiwan following President Trump’s high-level contacts with Taipei.

China has clearly assessed Biden’s capacity for bold leadership as highly improbable.

The Biden administration should not assume that Chinese objectives are negotiable. The CCP is committed to becoming the premier power in the world at the expense of US interests and is most likely willing to risk war to accomplish it.

Not a week has passed since the inauguration of President Joe Biden — whose son reportedly engaged in business deals with China worth $1.5 billion — and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which illegally seized Hong Kong last summer, has already sent more than two dozen warplanes, including bombers, into Taiwan’s airspace for two days in a row.

China also issued a new law permitting its “coastguards to launch pre-emptive strikes without prior warning” on any foreign ship that might enter disputed waters that China would like to consider its own.

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping is certain further to test the mettle of the new Biden Administration within the context of China’s “great power rivalry” with the United States. China’s leadership will determine the manner and speed in which to pursue the CCP’s geopolitical goals based upon Beijing’s assessment of Biden’s response to any test. Historically, the timing and the circumstances of China’s tests of previous administrations have been unpredictable, but there are a few that it seems likely will happen.

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Even Europe Is Losing Patience with Iran’s Nuclear Antics by Con Coughlin

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16987/europe-iran-nuclear-antics

In recent weeks Iran announced that it had begun work on enriching uranium to 20 percent — just short of the level required to produce nuclear weapons — as well as informing the International Atomic Energy Agency… that it was to resume work on producing uranium metal.

Both these developments represent a clear breach of the JCPOA. Under the agreement, Iran committed to keep uranium enrichment at 3.5 percent, the level required for civilian use, and signed up to a 15-year ban on “producing or acquiring plutonium or uranium metals or their alloys”.

Iran’s announcement that it was proceeding with the production of uranium metal has prompted a furious response from the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany, who, in a joint statement earlier this month, warned that there was “no credible civilian use” for the element, and that “The production of uranium metal has potentially grave military implications.

[W]hat makes anyone think Iran would honour a new deal any more than they honoured the old one? Why enter a new sham deal at all?

When the European Union starts warning the ayatollahs that the Iran nuclear deal is at a “critical juncture”, it is a clear sign that Tehran’s increasingly aggressive conduct in relation to its nuclear activities will make incoming US President Joe Biden’s hopes of reviving the deal almost impossible.

From the moment the nuclear deal was agreed to between Iran and six of the world’s leading powers — the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — in 2015, the EU has been an enthusiastic champion of the deal.

Even though neither Iran nor the EU itself was a signatory to the deal, the organisation’s then foreign policy chief, the British Labour politician and veteran Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist Catherine Ashton, led a sustained campaign on behalf of the EU to support the agreement.

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GOP Election Fraud Deniers Face Reckoning One cannot simultaneously defend the integrity of the 2020 election and demand new laws to ensure election integrity.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/25/gop-election-fraud-deniers-face-reckoning/

So here’s the official company line promoted by establishment Republicans to defend the outcome of the 2020 presidential election: Of course the election had some irregularities like all elections but nothing that would change the result and, by the way, the country needs some major election integrity reform before this happens again.

The doublespeak designed to refute what election fraud deniers call “the big lie” was best expressed over the weekend by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, failed presidential candidate, and now paid ABC News shill. While attempting to shame fellow Republicans for bolstering Donald Trump’s complaints about how the election was handled in states that flipped to Joe Biden in 2020, Christie falsely claimed there wasn’t any evidence of vote fraud. “I don’t think there’s any question that the country needs to focus on in terms of our elections is making sure we have some effective electoral reform . . . we need to make the system better for 2022,” Christie told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “But this election was not stolen.”

Others have set up a similar trap for themselves. Just hours before the so-called “insurrection” began, ex-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed his GOP colleagues planning to protest the results and demand an election audit. Like Christie, McConnell defended the integrity of the election while supporting election reform at the state level. “Last year’s bizarre pandemic procedures must not become the new norm,” McConnell lectured January 6.

Which raises the question—why not?

If the 2020 election was legitimate and, as McConnell and others insist, featured no evidence of decisive fraud outside the normally acceptable level of illegalities, then why should anything change?

Tens of millions of mail-in ballots without signature verification or documented chain of custody or other legally required proof should indeed be the “new norm” if their analysis is to be believed. Election Day will last not weeks but months; every voter will receive an absentee ballot, even those who didn’t request one, and it can be returned past Election Day without a postmark or delivered to drop-boxes manned by partisans in deep blue counties and cities.

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Mitch McConnell announces he’s willing to abandon the filibuster By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/mitch_mcconnell_announces_hes_willing_to_abandon_the_filibuster.html

Most of the time, Americans pay scant attention to the rules that the House and Senate choose to govern themselves. We laugh when the House decides to go for gender-neutral language, but none of us think that makes any real difference. However, in the Senate, “China” Mitch McConnell has paved the way for a rule change that will allow the Democrats to alter forever America’s long-standing structure and enable them to become a permanent governing class.

The Senate currently is split perfectly in half, with fifty Senators who are Democrats and fifty who are Republicans. It would be nice if that created a stalemate, which would at least keep Congress from harming America, but that’s not the case. Kamala Harris is now the tie-breaking vote on any deadlocked initiative. In other words, the Senate effectively has a Democrat majority.

The only thing protecting the minority interest in a Senate the reflects America’s strong ideological divisions is the filibuster. This rule went into effect in 1806 – that is, 215 years ago. The filibuster allows a senator, or a group of senators, to block legislation from going forward by continuing to debate a matter unless “three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen and sworn” vote to end the debate by invoking cloture. Currently, the filibuster is all that stands between the Democrats adding new states that will give Democrats a permanent Senate majority and packing the Supreme Court – which will effectively nullify the Constitution.

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Jewish revenge in post-WWII Europe By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/jewish_revenge_in_postwwii_europe.html

It was sometime in the 1990s, at a conference, when I met a film director with whom I became friendly, especially when he told me he had been a fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto.

In his vigorous 70s, Moshe Mizrahi detailed for me some of the experiences he had undergone fighting the Nazis during the all-out valiant battle in the Ghetto uprising.  

Mizrahi later invited me to his home in the “five towns.”  He introduced me to his maid, a woman with a discernible Polish or Hungarian accent.  She had been, she revealed without any sign of reluctance or regret, a qualified doctor in Europe during the war.  The director, whose name took some effort to recall, told me his conscientious housekeeper preferred working as a domestic in the United States to working in post-war Europe as a physician, with all the privations, widespread poverty, and rancor.  Plus low wages, absence of benefits, shortages.  

Walking me around his home, Mizrahi remarked in an aside that she made more money, and had more comfort, as a domestic in the U.S. than as a physician in post-WWII Europe.  

Among other recollections, the director told me that after the war, he, and others who had survived the life-and-death fight against the Nazi juggernaut, roamed at will through towns and outlying areas of war-torn former Nazi strongholds.  He told me in undramatized terms that he had entered homes at will, taking whatever he saw that he wanted, with quiescent and obviously terrified inhabitants not muttering a peep when he came through, he plainly furious on whatever revenge he could wrest from the burghers.  

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Freedom of Speech Slipping Away An unprecedented threat under Biden. Star Parker

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/freedom-speech-slipping-away-star-parker/

As the new Biden-Harris administration assumes power, the most basic American freedom of speech and expression is under unprecedented threat.

For the first time ever, I am concerned about my freedom to do my work, to run a policy institute addressing issues of culture, race and poverty from a conservative perspective.

Technology — the internet — which was largely nonexistent just 25 years ago, now plays a huge role in our lives as a tool of communication.

In a survey just published by the Pew Research Center, 86% say they “often” or “sometimes” get their news from a digital device — smartphone, tablet or computer. This compared with 68% who say they “often” or “sometimes” get their news from television, 50% who get it from radio and 32% who get it from print publications.

According to Statista.com, the United States has 223 million Facebook users, almost the size of the entire U.S. population over age 18. Per Pew, 22% of U.S. adults use Twitter.

These developments have put enormous power at the disposal of technology firms over what we see and read.

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Fourteenth Amendment Follies Desperate Democrats want to get medieval on Trump. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/fourteenth-amendment-follies-matthew-vadum/

Democrats are so scared one of their all-time favorite boogeymen, former President Donald Trump, will run and humiliate them again they are considering banishing him from electoral politics forever through an obscure constitutional provision created in the aftermath of the Civil War to deal with Confederate leaders and soldiers.

Disqualifying opposing candidates, in case you forgot, is part of the old Barack Obama playbook from his Illinois Senate days, and, call me crazy, but Donald Trump is no Jefferson Davis.

Because leftist depravity is bottomless, it should come as no surprise that Democrats are fine with going full-on banana republic to “save” the country from the potential reemergence of a truly great, legitimate president who, unlike the phony who has (temporarily) succeeded him, loves America, and who spent his four years in office expertly outfoxing Democrats to the benefit of the American people.

And because two bogus impeachments based on absolutely nothing are not enough for these people, left-wing lawmakers, wooden stakes in hand, are demanding Section 3 of the 14th Amendment be invoked before Count Trumpula rises from the political grave.

That amendment, by the way, was ratified July 9, 1868, a little over three years after Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox Court House and Democrat actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated the Republican U.S. president, Abraham Lincoln.

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Lessons From the Least of These The keys to transforming lives in the most desperate communities. Jason D. Hill

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/lessons-least-these-jason-d-hill/

At the heart of charity lies a great deal of moral sadism. For many left-liberals who stake the moral meaning and purpose of their lives on relieving black suffering in order for their own lives to have continued meaning and purpose, they not only must see black people suffer, but they must also create policies that perpetuate black poverty and block the initiatives of blacks in their efforts towards self-reliance.

If black individuals dare to reject the victim-narrative on which charity and welfare are dependent in order to gain the Left’s philosophical legitimacy, it means they have not allowed their agency to be expropriated, and instead will rely on the virtues of their own character and their own capabilities for their uplift. Blacks who have the temerity to effect this effrontery against the managerial liberal welfare class have identified the moral hypocrisy of people who pretend they want to help, but whose real purpose is racial exploitation and power lust. These left-liberals need blacks to suffer so they can gain moral atonement and redemption in the amelioration of that suffering. But what if blacks never had to suffer — and don’t need to?

What if poor blacks, former gang members and drug addicts, welfare recipients and prostitutes had a credo and philosophy—superlative guiding principles by which to live such that they would be weaned from the dependency on welfare and from the elitist experts and managerial classes who claim to know how best to solve their problems? What if the engines of change came from blacks themselves, and any helping hand extended to them was not based on charity but, rather, one based on the trader principle? That is, help based on principles of reciprocity that guide the philanthropic exchange just as it guides exchanges in the market. In other words, anyone helping others regardless of background should be told: never do more for them than they are willing to do for themselves.

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Xi Jinping Wows Them at Davos China’s President sweet-talks liberal leaders as he threatens Taiwan.

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-wows-them-at-davos-11611617879?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Chinese President Xi Jinping knows his audience. In his Monday address to the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of global luminaries in Davos, Mr. Xi sounded like a liberal internationalist in good standing. He pulled out all the buzzwords that make Davosians swoon: “inclusive growth,” “green development,” “global governance” and “consensus building.”

The Davos website effused that this was a “historic opportunity for collaboration.” But Mr. Xi’s People’s Liberation Army told a different story over the weekend, menacing Taiwan with back-to-back military flyovers of more than a dozen planes. The provocation is a reminder that while the government has changed hands in Washington, it hasn’t in Beijing, which still sees extending sovereignty over Taiwan—possibly by force—as a priority.

Mr. Xi said in his speech that “the strong should not bully the weak,” but that admonition doesn’t seem to apply to his own government. “We should stay committed to international law and international rules, instead of seeking one’s own supremacy,” he added. Tell that to the people of Hong Kong who were promised autonomy through 2047 in a treaty Beijing signed with Britain but are now being arrested for even mild political dissent.

Judging from comments by Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in their Senate hearings, the new Administration seems to recognize the importance of Taiwan’s independence and U.S. predominance in the Western Pacific.