FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The American Peace Initiative: Lessons Learned from the Abraham Accords The Abraham Accords, centered on regional peace and prosperity, brought the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo into normalized relations with Israel. By Bart Marcois

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/the-american-peace-initiative-lessons-learned-from-the-abraham-accords/

Based on interviews of Ambassador Robert O’Brien, Ambassador John Rakolta Jr., Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba (UAE), Robert Greenway, Alan Clemmons, and Aryeh Lightstone.

The authors’ views are theirs alone and do not represent the United States Government or any other institution

The United States has its own Middle East peace initiative. While the Israeli-Palestinian 1993 Oslo Accords and the regional 2002 Arab Peace Initiative were cultivated outside the United States, the 2020 Peace to Prosperity plan and the Abraham Accords were born in the USA.1

The Abraham Accords, centered on regional peace and prosperity, were the 2020 agreements that brought the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and Kosovo into normalized relations with Israel. They were an aggressive pursuit of American strategic and security interests that capitalized on emerging dynamics in the Middle East. The intent of the Accords was to strengthen stability and deter Iranian, Chinese, and Russian attempts to extend influence or hegemony in the region. Expanding the Accords further secures a part of the world long synonymous with conflict.

The following lessons learned are based on interviews of those who paved the way for the Abraham Accords. We call upon leaders and lawmakers to support us in creating a digital archive to document guiding principles and lessons learned in the process. We believe this model can be replicated for other Muslim-majority countries through courageous, practical diplomacy.

There were certain dynamics that highlighted the benefits of the Abraham Accords process. For example, Israel, as a trade partner, has so many quality of life benefits to offer, including sectors such as water, technology, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, health sciences, and defense. In short, it would be regressive not to normalize with Israel.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Are Iran’s Nine Lives Nearing an End? By unleashing war in the Middle East and targeting Israel, Iran may soon learn that Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/18/are-irans-nine-lives-nearing-an-end/

The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century.

So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the killing of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.

Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980.

Iranian surrogates next bombed the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983.

In fact, Iran has attacked US and Israeli diplomatic posts off-and-on for decades, most recently in 2023, when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.

For this reason and several others, Iran’s justification for sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel on the grounds that Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic post is completely ridiculous.

One, Iran has never honored diplomatic immunity. Instead, it habitually attacks and kills embassy personnel and blows up diplomatic facilities across the world.

Two, on April 1, the Israelis attacked a pseudo-“consulate” in Damascus which was hosting grandees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as they planned terrorist attacks on Israel.

Without Iran, the Middle East might have had a chance to use its enormous oil and natural gas wealth to lift its 500 million people out of poverty rather than to be mired in constant tribal and religious anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western terrorism.

During the Iraq War, Iran’s Shiite terrorists and its massive supplies of deadly shaped-charge explosive devices killed hundreds of Americans. It routinely hijacks container ships in the Straits of Hormuz and stages near collisions with American ships and planes.

How does Iran get away with nonstop anti-Western terrorism, its constant harassment of Persian Gulf maritime traffic, its efforts to subvert Sunni moderate regimes, and its serial hostage-taking?

The theocrats operate on three general principles.

One, Iran is careful never to attack a major power directly.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

‘Sweden has been vindicated on Covid’ Martin Kulldorff on why lockdowns were a disaster for public health.

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/17/sweden-has-been-vindicated-on-covid/

Almost as quickly as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020, governments began locking down. These measures, we were told, might have been insanely authoritarian and historically unprecedented, but politicians were just ‘following the science’. We simply had to give up our freedoms in order to save lives. And yet, in Sweden, ‘the science’ looked very different. The nation refused to go into full lockdown, insisting this would be better for health in the long-run. It made itself a global pariah in the process.

So, four years on from the first lockdowns across the West, has Sweden’s more liberal approach been proven wrong or vindicated? Swedish epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, one of the co-authors of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss how Sweden fared. They also discussed censorship and the lockdown on dissent during the pandemic. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Were you taken aback by how difficult it became to criticise lockdowns during the pandemic and have a reasoned, scientific discussion?

Martin Kulldorff: I was shocked. I never imagined that someone like me, a scientist stating what used to be basic principles of public health, would suddenly be at the centre of a political whirlwind. The interesting thing for me, though, was that I had two different experiences simultaneously during the pandemic. On the one hand, I was mostly writing and advising in the US, where I live. But at the same time, I was deeply involved in the Swedish debate. I was published in Swedish newspapers, defending Sweden’s approach to the pandemic. In the US and UK, I was a fringe voice opposing the establishment. But in Sweden, I was actually defending the establishment position of not closing everything down.

Of course, not everyone in Sweden was happy with the government’s strategy. There was a group of 22 scientists who publicly opposed the no-lockdown approach in 2020. In effect, they wanted Sweden to copy China, the US and the rest of the world and shut society down. So they published critical articles in Sweden’s major newspapers, making arguments that I completely disagreed with and responded to. And even though I thought they were wrong, I’m glad they wrote those pieces. There were obviously plenty of people in Sweden who agreed with them and were asking why we were doing things differently. People wanted to know why we weren’t locking down like everywhere else.

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A New Blood Libel Endlessly Repeated Declan Mansfield

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/a-new-blood-libel-endlessly-repeated/

One of the defining features, possibly the crucial, most existential characteristic, of intelligence, is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. This is true in every aspect of our lives. A car is not a horse. The sky is not a mountain. Taylor Swift is not Led Zeppelin – and Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. That this needs to be said is not an indictment of our education system, or society, or contemporary politics, or social media, or not being breast fed as a child. It’s simply a statement of fact, because people who score between 25 per cent and 75 per cent on the bell curve of intelligence, the average Joe or Josephine Soap in other words, do not generally have an inclination to understand and distinguish why W. H. Auden’s poetry is superior to the comic verse of Pam Ayres, or why the value of something, as Oscar Wilde said, is different to its price, or why perennial worth is better than this month’s hyped fashion, or why there is a difference between being ‘merely clever’, as Wittgenstein said, and being intelligent.

Moreover, and this is an age-old problem articulated by philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heidegger – average minds are easily swayed by the cultural zeitgeist, by arguments from authority (whether from priests, politicians, ‘experts’ or celebrities), and especially by public opinion. They fall, regularly, for every contemporary trend. Look, for example, at the uncritical attitude and acceptance, from the majority, to the Covid-19 measures.

People with average intelligence are decent, kind, trustworthy, extraordinarily capable in ways that leave more intelligent people scratching their heads in admiration, not the least bit lacking in street smarts, and know implicitly what is good for themselves and their families, (especially when government policy negatively affects their wallets). What they are not, though, is particularly interested in abstract thought.

The impact of intelligence on politics and culture has become clear in recent months. People who six months ago couldn’t spell anti-Semitism are now parroting the most harebrained anti-Semitic delusions, without knowing much about Jews, Israel, Arabs, Islam or the modern history of the Middle East. In the words of Heidegger, people ‘fall’ into the ‘they’.

Antisemitism, though, is a hydra-headed beast, which, like a chameleon, changes its colours in different environments.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How to Save the West An interview with Spencer Klavan. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-save-the-west/

In his book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, Spencer Klavan has written a modern tour de force that straddles two realms. The first is that the book is a prescient and chilling analysis of the “five essential crises” facing Western civilization today:

The Crisis of Reality: Is there such a thing as objective truth—and even if there is, can “virtual reality” replace it?
The Crisis of the Body: Not just the “transgender” insanity, but the push for a “transhumanist” future;
The Crisis of Meaning: Evolution—both biological and cultural—is a process of endless replication, of copying. But is there an original model that gives us an aspiration to aim for? Do our lives and actions have meaning?
The Crisis of Religion: Science has not eliminated man’s religious impulse, but rather misdirected it—and wrongly dismissed the profound philosophical plausibility of Judeo-Christian revelation;
The Crisis of the Regime: Has America reached a point of inevitable collapse? Republican government was meant to end the destructive cycle of regimes rising and falling—but can it?

Second, Spencer Klavan takes us on a whirlwind and in-depth journey through the ideas of Western philosophy, literature, and classical thought both to bring into sharper relief these crises, and also to demonstrate how an application of ancient wisdom can be a plausible panacea to much of the malarkey, willed ignorance, and malice that constitute the crises facing Western civilization today.

I interviewed Spencer Klavan, a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford University and a senior editor at The American Mind, about his most recent book.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Columbia University Closes Campus as Hundreds of Anti-Israel Student Protesters Occupy Quad By James Lynch

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-closes-campus-as-hundreds-of-anti-israel-student-protesters-occupy-quad/?utm_source=recirc-

New York — Columbia University closed its doors to the public on Wednesday as hundreds of campus activists protested Israel’s ongoing military campaign against Hamas. 

Campus police and NYPD officers prohibited those without a Columbia ID card from entering campus as students erected dozens of tents on the school’s main campus lawn and hurled anti-Israel slogans. The protest was held as Columbia president Minouche Shafik testified before Congress.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” protesters could be heard chanting. Two Jewish Columbia students spoke  about their experience during the protest and the larger issue of antisemitism on campus.

“They took over the lawn, set up tents so people don’t have access to it, and they continued their anti-semitic, hateful chants,” Jewish student Jonathan Lederet told National Review.

“Intifada, intifada” and “death to [the] Zionist state” were among the chants hurled by the protesters, he recalled.

“They all chant ‘shame, shame on you.’ I say ‘I want there to be more aid, Hamas steals the aid.’ I say ‘Let’s chant for peace, let’s talk about co-existence, have a dialogue.’ They chant about martyrdom and violence and killing. So yeah, they all hate me, but I’m not going anywhere,” Lederet added.

Lederet held up an Israeli flag and wore his yarmulke to the march. Footage shared by independent left-wing reporter Talia Jane showed protesters chanting “shame on you” to the pro-Israel students who came to the event.

Another Jewish student from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister college, said she was “disgusted” by the protest and it happens “all the time.” The student, whose first name is Katie, called on Shafik to take further action against antisemitism and live up to Columbia’s values.

“If somebody says calling for the genocide of Jews makes me unsafe, they say ‘f*ck you.’ And then there’s no consequence, people have been told ‘f*ck the Jews,’ they’ve been spit on, someone threw coffee on a Jew today,” she said.

“A lot of Jewish students have either switched rooms, moved off campus, transferred,” Katie added. She was one of the Jewish students who moved off campus because of the antisemitic climate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Throw the Anti-American Left Under the Bus Noah Rothman

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/throw-the-anti-american-left-under-the-bus/

You’re likely to hear a lot about the polls showing that Americans are growing impatient with Israel. Democrats and their media allies seem to have concluded that this sentiment will grow along a straight-line trajectory until a majority have become intractably hostile toward Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. But straight-line trajectories are inherently fallacious. They take no account of exogenous events, such as, for example, Iran’s brazen, multilayered missile and drone attack on Israeli population centers. Indeed, even before that attack, Democratic and media elites had already internalized a misreading of this war and voters’ perceptions of it.

For example, a Pew Research Center poll from late March showed that, while the public is growing weary of watching Israel zealously prosecute its right to self-defense, those same voters also understand that Israel’s casus belli is just while Hamas’s is not. That survey found that only 15 percent of respondents believe that Israel’s reasons for fighting Hamas are “not at all” or “not too” valid. By contrast, 49 percent of respondents don’t believe that Hamas’s aims or cause are valid. Although 34 percent said Israel’s conduct on the ground in Gaza is “completely” or “somewhat” unacceptable, the October 7 massacre that begat this war was seen as an “acceptable” response to Israel’s actions by precisely 4 percent of American adults. Nearly three-quarters of the Americans surveyed rejected the notion that the barbarity unleashed on 10/7 was a legitimate response to the conditions that prevailed in the Gaza Strip.

This dichotomy is something on which America’s center-left elites should reflect amid their ongoing efforts to coddle and mollify what can only be described as a pro-terrorism constituency.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

YORAM ETTINGER: PASSOVER (APRIL 22-30)

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

bit.ly/445DATx
1. Passover (April 22-30, 2024) is a Jewish national liberation holiday, highlighting the Exodus, the Parting of the Sea, the Ten Commandments, the 40-year-wandering in the desert, and the reentry to the Land of Israel 3,600 years ago.

2. The Abolitionist and human rights movements were spurred by the Passover Exodus. For example,  in 1850, Harriet Tubman, who was one of the leaders of the “Underground Railroad” – an Exodus of Afro-American slaves to freedom – was known as “Mama Moses.” Moreover, on December 11, 1964, upon accepting the Nobel Prize, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, ‘Let my people go!’” Furthermore, Paul Robeson and Louis Armstrong leveraged the liberty theme of Passover through the lyrics: “When Israel was in Egypt’s land, let my people go! Oppressed so hard they could not stand, let my people go! Go down Moses, way down in Egypt’s land; tell old Pharaoh to let my people go….!” 

3. The US Founding Fathers were inspired by the Exodus, in particular, and the Mosaic legacy, in general, shaping the Federalist system, including the concepts of (anti-monarchy) limited government, separation of powers among three co-equal branches of government, featuring Congress, as the most powerful legislature in the world. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – “the cement of the 1776 Revolution” – referred to King George III as “the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England.” And, the Early Pilgrims considered their 10-week-sail in the Atlantic ocean as “the modern day Parting of the Sea,” and their destination as “the modern day Promised Land” and “the New Israel.”  

4. The US Founding Fathers deemed it appropriate to engrave the essence of the Biblical role model of liberty (the Passover-related Jubilee) on the Liberty Bell: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof (Leviticus, 25:10).”    The Jubilee is commemorated every 50 years, and the Liberty Bell was installed in 1751 upon the 50th anniversary of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges.  

Moreover, there are 50 States in the United States, whose Hebrew name is “The States of the Covenant” (Artzot Habreet -ארצות הברית ). Also, the Exodus is mentioned 50 times in the Five Books of Moses; Moses received (on Mount Sinai) the Torah – which includes 50 gates of wisdom – 50 days following the Exodus, as celebrated by the Shavou’ot/Pentecost Holiday, 50 days following Passover.

5. According to Heinrich Heine, the 19th century German poet, “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Economic Dunkirk

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/18/joe-bidens-economic-dunkirk/

Just after Ronald Reagan won the presidential election in November 1980, economic adviser David Stockman wrote a memo warning the president-elect that he faced an “economic Dunkirk” thanks to the disastrous economy he was inheriting.

Among Stockman’s warnings was that the Carter administration had set a “ticking regulatory time bomb” that would blow up the economy.

“They have spent the past four years ‘tooling up’ for implementation through a mind-boggling outpouring of rulemakings, interpretative guidelines, and major litigation – all heavily biased toward maximization of regulatory scope and burden,” Stockman wrote.

Stockman – who would later serve as head of the Office of Management and Budget and ended up losing Reagan’s trust – had that part wrong. While Carter was a disaster as president, at least he showed an ability to learn on the job. And so late in his term, Carter embarked on a deregulatory campaign to fight inflation. Among other things, he freed the trucking and airline industries from onerous government mandates.

“Carter gave Reagan the phenomenal gift of deregulation. Combined with the (Reagan) tax cuts that largely took effect in 1983, the economy went on a growth tear,” wrote Brian Domitrovic, a scholar at the Laffer Center, in Forbes. “All the capital that Reagan freed up via his tax cuts found room to roam in the deregulated world which Carter had set up.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot. She is trying to wreck the GOP

Posted By on April 18th, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/marjorie-taylor-green-idiot-wreck-gop

It’s high time someone in the Republican Party told Marjorie Taylor Greene to turn all that bombastic self-serving showmanship and drama queen energy on Democrats, and stop trying to defeat her own party. 

The Georgia Republican, who famously displayed sexually explicit photos of Hunter Biden  during a committee hearing and called fellow representative Lauren Boebert a bitch on the House floor, is known for wild antics and equally harebrained conspiracy theories.   

Currently, she is threatening to oust Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. The Louisiana Representative, with a five-vote majority in the House, is attempting to keep his caucus intact as he navigates treacherous issues including funding Ukraine, which has become unpopular with some conservatives, and reauthorizing the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He also struggled to pass a funding bill, which required relying on Democrats to get another big spending package over the threshold. 

To be sure, not all Republicans approve of spending billions more to arm Ukraine, especially since our own border remains wide open; many in the GOP wanted Johnson to demand border enforcement in exchange for support of Kyiv. Ukraine is one of the most corrupt countries in the world (which is perhaps why Hunter Biden was so richly employed there) and it not clear that America’s billions sent to fight Vladimir Putin have all been spent towards that end. There is almost certainly inadequate oversight, as I wrote early in the war. 

Nonetheless, countering Russia’s power-mad dictator is the right thing to do