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A Pilotless Pilot Program By Seth J. Frantzman

Posted By on September 15th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/a-pilotless-pilot-program/

Israel–U.S. drone cooperation could revolutionize what soldiers carry into battle.

The U.S. and Israel reached a new milestone in defense cooperation this month as Israel’s Ministry of Defense announced that an Israeli start-up named Xtend would be part of a pilot program with the U.S. Department of Defense to use its Skylord drones. The program will initially include several dozen of the small drone systems, which are designed for air defense against drone or other threats.

If this all sounds a bit futuristic and confusing, using drones to confront other drones, it is because the current threats that we face from drones and other types of enemy innovations are increasing daily. Xtend’s innovation is in using augmented reality, basically wearable goggles like the ones hi-tech gamers use, to guide the drones to find and destroy threats. Imagine soldiers guarding the perimeter of a base and being alerted to a terrorist drone threat, like the kind ISIS used in the battle for Mosul. Now, instead of taking cover or plinking away with rifles at a hard-to-hit small drone, the soldier can put on virtual-reality glasses and guide their own drone in for the kill.

The Combating Terrorist Technical Support Office at the Department of Defense is supporting this project. It is part of a much wider ecosystem of defense and research-and-development cooperation between Israel and the U.S. For instance, the military is evaluating Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, which can be used against rockets and other threats. Americans have been killed this year in Iraq by pro-Iranian groups firing rockets at bases where soldiers are housed. An Iron Dome–style system could help protect them. Similarly, American tanks use the Trophy defense system developed by Israel. The technology goes both ways: Israel is among the most active users of the American-made F-35.

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Son of Murdered French Holocaust Survivor Mireille Knoll Blasts French Judiciary for ‘Unconscionable Treatment’ of Jews

Posted By on September 15th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/09/14/son-of-murdered-french-holocaust-survivor-mireille-knoll-blasts-french-judiciary-for-unconscionable-treatment-of-jews/

The eldest son of the Holocaust survivor who was brutally murdered during an antisemitic assault in her Paris apartment castigated France’s judiciary for its alleged indifference to violence against Jews in an emotional speech in the French capital this past weekend.

Allan Knoll — whose 85-year-old mother, Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, was stabbed and then burned to death in March 2018 by two intruders who believed that because she was Jewish, she would be hiding large amounts of cash — addressed a small rally on Sunday in the Place de la Republique in Paris.

The demonstration was organized by “The Group Against Silence,” a collective of activists that is campaigning for justice in the case of Sarah Halimi — a 65-year-old Jewish widow who was slain in her Paris apartment by an antisemitic assailant eleven months before Mireille Knoll suffered a similar fate.

But while Knoll’s accused killers will face trial, the individual charged with Halimi’s murder — 29-year-old Kobili Traore — was excused from a criminal trial last December after a court in Paris deemed that his ingestion of cannabis on the night of the killing had rendered him temporarily insane.

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Questions for American Jewish leaders about the Israel-UAE deal Democracy demands US Jewish groups ask members what they think before taking drastic new positions, like UAE peace trumps sovereignty.

Posted By on September 15th, 2020

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/287256

Whenever there is a major diplomatic development involving Israel, news reporters call the presidents of various American Jewish organizations for their comments. Naturally they are tempted to immediately respond. But the statements some Jewish officials issued in response to the Israel-United Arab Emirates deal remind us that caution is often the more prudent course.

Of course, leaders of Jewish organizations have a practical need for the public’s attention. Getting quoted in a newspaper is critical to fundraising. It demonstrates to potential donors that their particular organization is significant and valuable. It’s the donations that keep our many Jewish and Zionist organizations alive. That’s what pays for the salaries and the per diems and more.

Still, although Jewish leaders may have their reasons for rushing, to give statements and issue press releases, it’s fair to ask whether it is appropriate for a leader of a American Jewish organization to take a public stance on a major controversial issue without consulting the members of that group. Especially when it involves taking a stance that differs significantly from the traditional positions taken by that organization.

Consider the decision to suspend declaring sovereignty over any part of Judea-Samaria, in exchange for diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates.

This question might not apply to the various left-of-center American Jewish organizations. They have always been strongly opposed to Israeli sovereignty in the territories, so the leaders of their groups are on safe ground with their constituents on that issue. It’s hard to imagine any members of J Street or Peace Now opposing the statements which their leaders made in support of the Israel-UAE agreement. The very essence of the agreement is the fulfillment of the classic slogan that Peace Now dreamt up in the 1970s, “Peace is better than an undivided Land of Israel.”

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Judge Rules Pennsylvania Governor’s Shutdown Orders Unconstitutional By Jack Phillips

Posted By on September 15th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-rules-pennsylvania-governors-shutdown-orders-unconstitutional_

A federal judge has struck down Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s CCP virus restrictions that required people to stay at home, put limits on gatherings, and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to stay shut down.

U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV on Sept. 14 sided with plaintiffs that included drive-in movie theaters, hair salons, farmers markets, and several GOP officials who sued as individuals. Butler, Greene, Fayette, and Washington counties were also listed as plaintiffs.

Stickman’s judgment stipulates that “the congregate gathering limits imposed by defendants’ mitigation orders violate the right of assembly enshrined in the First Amendment,” the “stay-at-home and business closure components of defendants’ orders violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and “the business closure components of Defendants’ orders violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, argued that the actions taken by Wolf and Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, who are both Democrats, “were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency,” but that “even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered.”

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How The 1960s Riots Foreshadow Today’s Communist Weaponization Of Black Pain By Katharine Gorka

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/14/how-the-1960s-riots-foreshadow-todays-communist-weaponization-of-black-pain/

“To Truly Help Black People, Reject BLM-Why is this all of this so vitally important? Because right now, many well-intentioned Americans believe they are helping black people by putting Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards. A number of corporations believe they are helping stamp out racism by donating millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter. Middle schools and high schools across the country are using a curriculum developed by Black Lives Matter to teach children that America is riddled with systemic racism.But in fact, Black Lives Matter is not about helping black people. It is about using black people to achieve the co-founders’ revolutionary, ideological aims.”

Many would have us believe that the riots and violence sweeping across America’s cities this year are spontaneous. But history and current evidence tell us otherwise.

Leaving the White House grounds recently, I knew I would encounter protestors. You could hear them throughout the evening, trying to disrupt.

Most of the protestors were to the east and north of the White House, so staff directed us to exit out the west gate. A security guard offered to accompany me and my husband south to Constitution Avenue to meet our Uber driver, and we went safely home.

We heard numerous stories the next morning of guests who had been threatened and endangered. One friend with whom we had walked out of that west gate actually decked a foul-mouthed biker. The biker had veered too close to our friend’s wife while shouting threats and obscenities, and the husband then acted as a man might reasonably be expected to — he punched the guy.

Elsewhere, dozens of angry protestors surrounded Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife Kelley as they left the White House grounds. Eventually, more police officers arrived and escorted the couple to the safety of their hotel.

Sen. Paul later reported: “After we got back to our hotel room and some safety we heard something frightening. The ‘protesters’ were staying on our floor — including the room next door to us. They were talking about their mob activities and even saying they thought we were here on this floor. We had to develop a 3 a.m. plan with the Capitol Police to get to safety.”

Paul asks, “Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in?” What he saw that night led him to conclude, “It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent.”

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Cotton Announces Bill to Revoke China’s ‘Most Favored Nation’ Status By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cotton-announces-bill-to-revoke-chinas-most-favored-nation-status/

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) announced Monday that he is introducing legislation to repeal permanent most favored nation trade status, a designation that guarantees equal trading opportunity among a nation’s trade partners.

In an appearance on Fox & Friends, Cotton criticized China’s status as a most favored nation, and said he would introduce legislation this week that would require the president and congress to reassess the status each year.

Under Cotton’s new legislation if China were to “shoot missiles at our ships in the Western Pacific” or crack down on Hong Kong as it has done this year, “then we would be able to say each year we are not going to renew most favored nation status for China,” he said. 

The senator also blasted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for his decades of support of increased trade opportunities with the Chinese Communist Party.

“This week is the twentieth anniversary of Joe Biden voting to give permanent most favored nation status to China,” he said. “Just think about that — most favored nation status to a communist country.”

He said the status had “supercharged the loss of American manufacturing jobs” and criticized the former vice president for defending it last week during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

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Leading Versus Lying – It’s hard to take Bob Woodward’s gotcha gambit seriously Roger Kimball

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

https://spectator.us/leading-vs-lying-woodward-coronavirus/?

At his short Thursday news briefing, President Trump laid out the many successes that the United States has enjoyed in its battle against the Chinese virus compared with the record in Europe and other parts of the world.

Trump’s decision to end air travel between China United States at the end of January was roundly derided as overkill and ‘xenophobic’ by the entire Democratic establishment from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on down. But that decision is now widely credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. Under Trump’s direction, the US went into overdrive, producing masks, gowns, test kits, ventilators and other medical materiel in astonishing quantities, not to mention the instant erection of a (largely unneeded) field hospital in New York’s Javits Center and the dispatch of the 1,000-bed hospital ship Comfort to New York Harbor.

You won’t hear Govs. Newsom or Cuomo singing Trump’s praises now, but back in the spring they were both on record expressing their gratitude for the effectiveness and alacrity with which Trump responded to the crisis. (‘Promise made,’ Newsom said in April, ‘promise kept.’ Quoth Cuomo around the same time, ‘he has delivered for New York.’)

The Trump administration’s triumphs in dealing with the coronavirus do not end there. A whole host of effective therapeutics have been developed to battle the microbe while Operation Warp Speed has mobilized a vast array of medical and manufacturing talent in an effort to produce an effective vaccine by January 2021, years before anyone thought possible.

Then there has been the administration’s stunning economic initiatives, from the paycheck protection program to the many incentives deployed to put Americans back to work. As a result, the implosion of the US economy in March — the Dow lost 10,000 points in a few weeks and tens of millions were suddenly out of work. The market crashed from some 29,000 to 18,300 in the blink of an eye. Today? It is back in the neighborhood of 28,000 and unemployment has fallen from an eye-popping 16 percent to a little more than 8 percent with all indications that those trends will continue.

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Israel & The Middle East: The Difference A President Makes (American, that is)… by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

Fast forwarding from the days that Presidents Truman had to fight his own Arabist, Big Oil-connected State Department over the very rebirth of Israel in ’48; when Secretary of State Dulles and Eisenhower threatened to cut off all private as well as official aid to Israel over its response to incessant terror and blockade in the Sinai Campaign in ’56; the officially neutral stance of President Johnson in the brief “Six Day War” in ’67; positive response from Nixon but horrendous reviews for his machiavellian SoS, Kissinger, in the Yom Kippur War of ’73; etc….there were reports that emerged, despite “the filter,” that the ground-breaking flight of President Sadat of Egypt directly to Israel in 1977 and historic peace treaty which followed in ’79 actually took place as much as despite Jimmy Carter than because of him… https://ekurd.net/jews-should-not-henry-2019-07-14

Carter wanted such things as bringing Russia in on the deal, shoving a Palestinian State upon a super vulnerable 9-15 mile wide Israel, and so forth. The Sunday School teacher– who, among other things, still likes to preach about G_d-killing, money-loving Jews, and so forth, and writes about “Apartheid Israel”–changed his mind only when he saw in ’77 that Egypt and Israel were about to leave him behind in history…

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/meir-soloveichik/jimmy-carter-sunday-school-years/

And then there was William Jefferson Clinton…the president who had a murderous Arafat to his White House repeatedly, and who pressured Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 to forsake the promise of meaningful territorial compromise via the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 in the wake of the 1967 War that Israel would never have to return to the suicidal ’49 Auschwitz/Armistice lines of 1949–which made Israel, for almost two decades, a mere sardine can ghetto of a State where most of its population and infrastructure where located. George W. Bush would comment that Texas had driveways larger than that.

During the era of Clinton’s so-called “Oslo Peace,” the more Israel gave in territory, the more it profusely bled via predictable increased blown buses, restaurants, and other acts of Arab “peace making”–courtesy of the American State Department and its Hebrew arm-twisting boss in the White House. First Lady Hillary gave Arafat’s wife a big hug right after the latter gave a speech accusing Israel of poisoning Arab children.

Only Arafat’s refusal to accept almost all of the disputed territories (i.e., forget about Israel getting 242’s more defensible, secure, and real borders)–along with a 33 billion dollar virtual slush fund, half of Jerusalem, and more–were these terms not shoved up or down some Israeli orifice. Yasir’s Swiss bank accounts were/are legendary. His latter day Arafatians-in-suits, led by Fatah and the PLO/PA’s Mahmoud Abbas, learned this lesson well: It literally pays nicely to be designated a “moderate.”

While Israel thankfully was saved from Slick Willy’s dangerous machinations via the Arabs themselves, the “Progressive” Ehud Barak’s caving became the starting point for later American “peace making”–notably that of Barak Hussein Obama.

The very first person Obama called on the international arena after winning the presidency was Mahmoud Abbas. This would prove to be a harbinger of what his eight years in office would bring to an Israel seeking some degree of a viable existence.

Earlier, he had a long history in Chicago attending one of the worst antisemitic pastors’ in America church for decades–Reverend Jeremiah Wright, bosom buddies of the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farakhan, who himself later proclaimed Obama to be “the messiah.” Guess why? https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/9494

To be fair, however, after all, there were no other churches in Chicago that Obama could have frequented…Right?

Obama hounded any Israeli leader who expected UNSC Res. 242’s call for a meaningful compromise in the disputed territories as if he/she was Public Enemy # 1. And he hated/hates Benjamin Netanyahu in particular for this—what the “Settlement Issue” is mostly all about.

Earlier, President Trump’s opponent in 2020, Senator Joseph Biden, pounded the table to try to intimidate the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin over the same issue

https://ekurd.net/biden-jihadi-cheer-leaders-2019-03-06; and John Kerry warned that Israel needed to be saved from itself because of this as well. Both were later peas in the Obama pod and served as major attack dogs https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/21625

While still a senator, Obama began stating that Israel would be crazy–exact words–to not accept the “Saudi Peace Plan.” He would repeat this when in the White House as well. Among other things, that beloved Obama plan demanded Israel withdraw to its ’49 Auschwitz/armistice lines (not official borders) existence which made it 9-15 miles wide at its waist, and expected it to allow itself to be inundated by real or fudged jihadi-raised Arab refugees. Recall more Jews fled Arab/Muslim lands than vice-versa over a war Arabs started in 1948 over Israel’s rebirth on less than one half of one percent of the region.

How dare those Jew–at least some–not be thankful for such a “deal” !

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Fire set, bricks thrown in downtown Lancaster after man wielding knife is shot, killed by police

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

Overnight, Lancaster police released body cam video of the shooting. It shows a man holding a knife, running at police

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State Department reported Burisma paid bribe while Hunter Biden served on board, memos show State, DOJ officials reported to FBI concerns Ukraine gas firm made bribe to local prosecutors while under corruption investigation. John Solomon

Posted By on September 14th, 2020

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/monamholdstate-dept-feared-burisma-paid-bribe-while

Just eight months after Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings, U.S. officials in Kiev developed evidence that the Ukrainian gas company may have paid a $7 million bribe to the local prosecutors investigating the firm for corruption, according to interviews and State Department memos.

State officials believed the alleged bribe was paid between May and December 2014 and got confirmation from one prosecutor. They argued the bribe amounted to a “gross miscarriage of justice that undermined months of US assistance” to fight corruption in Ukraine, contemporaneous memos show.

The concerns were eventually reported to the FBI, although it is not clear whether the allegations were ever investigated more fully, according to current and former U.S. and Ukrainian government officials.

The anecdote, buried in five-year-old diplomatic files, provides a fresh illustration of the awkward, uncomfortable conflict of interest State officials perceived as they tried to fight pervasive corruption in Ukraine under Joe Biden’s leadership while the vice president’s son collected large payments as a board member for an energy firm widely viewed as corrupt.

The concerns first came to a head in January 2015, the memos show, about eight months after Hunter Biden was named to Burisma’s board and after two major corruption investigations — one in Ukraine and the other in Britain — were opened against the gas firm.