Mosques flourishing, French churches up for sale Europe’s empty churches are now hotels or empty lots not far from where shuls were once burned to the ground. And mosques flourish. Giulio Meotti

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/285939

A traveller to Eastern Europe can visit the sites of once-famous yeshivas like Slobodka, Kelm, Volozhin Telze and Ponevech and mourn at seeing buildings that once echoed with Talmudic study and which are now either empty ruins or have been transformed into community centers or shops.

Those yeshivas, however, abandoned because of the Holocaust and prior periods of persecution, and the shuls burned to the ground by Nazis and their cohorts, have been reborn in Israel (and the USA)..Today, the sound of Torah echoes from thousands of voices, more than there ever were in the renowned European yeshivas.

One cannot say the same about what is happening to Christianity in Europe, with France at the head. The worshipers are no more, and now it is the turn of the buildings.

“Should we abandon the churches of our villages, victims of de-Christianization?”, asks Stéphane Bern, commissioned by Emmanuel Macron to protect French cultural heritage, in a new essay for La Reveue des deux mondes.

On its website, the Patrice Besse real estate agency, which specializes in historic buildings, lists thirty churches currently for sale. Per square meter, desecrated churches are the cheapest lots in the country.

Edward Alexander (1936-2020) The dean of America’s intellectual pro-Israel defenders has died by Moshe Phillips

https://worldisraelnews.com/the-dean-of-americas-intellectual-pro-israel-defenders-has-died/

Edward Alexander, the Jewish scholar and author who passed away last week at age 84, was called “Seattle’s Jeremiah” by his hometown newspaper. An Israeli publication once hailed him as “Jewry’s premier polemicist.” For more than half a century, Alexander fought for Israel and the Jewish people in the trenches of the battlefield of ideas.

Alexander grew up in the heavily Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The “most vivid and satisfying memory” of his childhood occurred in May 1948, when he was eleven years old. It involved Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, whom he and his boyhood pals regarded as “the greatest man in the world,” and David Ben-Gurion who was “a close second to Robinson in our esteem.”

“These two heroic figures came together for me almost magically when I heard Robinson address a block party to celebrate Israel’s independence,” Alexander recalled.

“I consider myself lucky,” he wrote, “never to have been disillusioned about what my parents taught me: that both men symbolized the belated righting of ancient historical wrongs, that Robinson was indeed a uniquely courageous figure and that the birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people…”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in English literature at Columbia, Alexander completed his master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. That was where he met his future wife, Leah. She, too, was a scholar of English literature and her senior thesis, on Henry James, was published as a book. Leah passed away in 2017.

Before the Storm in Minneapolis A needlessly racialized zoning fight offers some cautionary lessons for supporters of housing reform. Howard Husock

https://www.city-journal.org/minneapolis-2040-plan

In the months before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a small group was doing its best to spread the message that the city was deeply racist. They were not protesters or looters, or the organized African-American community of the city’s soon-to-be-burned North Side, but rather the mayor and city council. Their focus was what might have seemed an obscure and technical topic: zoning. They were led by one-time San Francisco city planner Lisa Bender, president of the city council, a position considered almost as powerful as that of the mayor.

“We’ve inherited a system that both for decades has privileged those with the most and forgotten the people that we really have left behind,” Bender said. “And housing is inextricably linked with income, with all these other systems that are failing, especially in Minnesota, people of color.” She put forth a plan to relax single-family zoning and to permit more multifamily home construction in a city that was—at least pre-George Floyd—attracting millennials and increasing its population, anomalously for the Upper Midwest. Mayor Jacob Frey shared Bender’s view. The city, he told Politico, was perpetuating “racist policies implicitly through our zoning code.”

What might have been both an effective consensus reform and a change that could inspire other cities and suburbs to follow suit backfired, thanks to being tied—unnecessarily and unjustifiably—to alleged racism. The plan did not originate in the city’s black community, and black leaders in Minneapolis have not even mentioned it as part of what the city must do to expunge racism in the wake of Floyd’s death. It was driven by the city’s white progressive leadership.

Does Anyone Know What “Defund the Police” Really Means? Jane Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

In cities across the country, it has been a summer of continuous protests, many of which have escalated to riots, arson, and looting. The protesters chant to defund the police, but as many of the protests have turned violent, police departments in affected cities have been overwhelmed with calls for assistance.  

So should protesters’ demands to “defund the police” be taken literally?  I spent some time looking into what proposals to “defund the police” actually entail, though I often wonder if protesters themselves know what their goals are. There definitely seems to be a divide between media and think tank commenters on the one hand, and the protesters in cities on the other.  

Consider a June 19 report from Brookings Institute. According to this Report, “defund the police” technically just means “reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple.” Similarly, for The Cut, Amanda Arnold writes:

“Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services.”

• The Democrats’ Public Shaming Is Now Coming For You By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/26/the-democrats-public-shaming-is-now-coming-for-you/

In June of 2018, a spate of incidents occurred in which Trump administration officials were heckled at or asked to leave restaurants. This happened to then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen who was heckled at a DC eatery and then-Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders who was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by its owner. A debate grew about whether such public shaming was an acceptable form of political speech. Many on the left argued it was.
One Democrat, Rep. Maxine Waters had no doubt about the just nature of this tactic, she said at the time, “Lets make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Other Democrats pushed back, albeit gently, against Waters’ rather extreme remarks but now it appears Waters’ approach is gaining momentum, not in regard to members of Trump’s Cabinet, but rather against any person that refuses to obey the orders of Black Lives Matters activists. This week a viral video emerged of a woman being harangued by a large, mostly white, BLM crowd, screamed at, with people right in her face because she refused to raise her fist in the air in a sign of solidarity.
To call this shift from shaming politicians to shaming regular citizens predictable is a vast understatement. It was always the logical end of the road Waters was laying out. After all, if political disagreement is enough justification for screaming at a person in power, why not a person you suspect of help putting them there? In the case this week, which was one of many, the young woman was actually supportive of BLM, but her refusal to raise her fist was sufficient to make her a target.

‘It’s Showing Up in the Polling’: CNN Hosts Worry Dems Will Face Electoral Consequences If They Don’t Address Rioting

thttps://www.nationalreview.com/news/cnn-hosts-worry-dems-will-face-electoral-consequences-if-they-dont-address-blind-spot-on-rioting/

CNN’s Don Lemon warned Democrats of electoral consequences if they fail to address the “blind spot” that’s prevented them from condemning the rioting that plagues the country nightly.

“I think Democrats are ignoring this problem, are hoping that it will go away. And it’s not going to go away,” Lemon remarked to fellow CNN host Chris Cuomo on Tuesday night.

Lemon went on to urge Biden to give a speech similar to the one Barack Obama delivered in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray, in which the former president condemned the rioting in Baltimore.

“He’s got to come out and tell people that he is going to do deal with the issue of police reform in this country, and that what’s happening now is happening on Donald Trump’s watch, and when he is the president, Kamala Harris is the vice president, then they will take care of this problem. But guess what, the rioting has to stop,” Lemon stated. “Chris, as you know and I know, it’s showing up in the polls, it’s showing up in focus groups. It’s the only thing right now that’s sticking.”

Lemon’s warning came as violence in Kenosha, Wis. escalated for the third-straight night after police shot Jacob Blake, a local black man, in just the latest example of the political violence that’s raged across the country this summer.

Democrats were silent on the stark rise in violent crime across American cities during their four-day convention last week, with Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot failing to mention the rampant looting that happened in her city earlier this month.

On Night 2, CNN Plays Right into the RNC’s Hands By Isaac Schorr

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/on-night-2-cnn-plays-right-into-the-rncs-hands/

The GOP presents inspiring human-interest stories, and all CNN’s sourpusses can do is complain.

The second night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) seemed destined for disaster. Before it had even started, there were fires to put out. On Tuesday afternoon, scheduled speaker Mary Ann Mendoza, whose son was killed in a car accident with a drunk illegal immigrant, retweeted a thread promoting the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, this was not the first instance of Mendoza promoting such drivel. Thankfully, the RNC pulled Mendoza from its slate. Another speaker, Planned Parenthood clinic director turned pro-life activist Abby Johnson, had controversial comments in which she claimed police would be “smart” to be “more careful” around her biracial “brown son” than her white children reposted by Vice News. Johnson’s address went ahead as planned.

To its credit, though, the RNC — with a little help from the folks over at CNN — more than salvaged the evening. Anticipating that commentators would end the pre-convention coverage with ominous sign-offs — Jake Tapper gravely warned of “norm erosion” — the RNC began with a cheery message and full-throated endorsement from the Vice President of the Navajo Nation. That was followed by the touching story of Jon Ponder, a felon who found Christ and reformed himself, and the FBI agent who arrested him. It culminated with President Trump giving Ponder a pardon, live on air. Anderson Cooper cut in afterwards looking troubled, repeatedly calling what had just transpired “unprecedented.” Van Jones concurred and lamented that the pardon was being used for political purposes.

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron to Joe Biden: “I Am Not in Chains, My Mind Is My Own” Posted By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/08/25/kentucky_attorney_general_daniel_cameron_to_joe_biden_i_am_not_in_chains_my_mind_is_my_own.html

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron was a breakout star Tuesday at the second night of the 2020 Republican National Convention, directing his speech directly at Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

“I think often about my ancestors who struggled for freedom,” said Cameron, the first Black man to hold the office of attorney general in the Bluegrass State. “I also think about Joe Biden who says ‘If you aren’t voting for me, you ain’t Black,’ who argued that Republicans would put us back in chains, who said there is no diversity of thought in the Black community.”

EXPOSÉ: Biden/Obama gave Iran $150 billion – $300 million for each US soldier they killed

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/285752

EXPOSÉ: Biden/Obama gave Iran $150 billion – $300 million for each US soldier they killed

In a recent TV campaign ad, Democrat Nominee for US President, Joseph Biden, accused President Trump of ‘betrayal’ for allegedly ignoring intelligence that Russia put a bounty on heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Once again, it’s another “Samestream” Media fake news story, and Pres. Trump’s National Security Advisor O’Brien cateforically stated

 “The president’s career CIA briefer decided not to brief him because it was unverified intelligence.”
Despite this contextual clarification, Biden in his ad goes on to fulminate that “This is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation–protect & equip our troops when we go into harm’s way.”
Since Biden has raised the issue, let’s look at how Vice President Biden betrayed his “most sacred duty” by ignoring the murder of US troops in Iraq at the hands of Iranians. In fact, despite the fact that VP Biden knew that the Defense Department had already conclusively found by July 9, 2015 that Iran had directly murdered a minimum 500 US soldiers with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) in Iraq over the past seven years, a mere five days later, on July 14, 2015, VP Biden cheer-led the Iran Nuclear deal that handed Iran $150 Billion dollars.

Do the math. That means that in 2015, VP Biden paid Iran $300 million for each US soldier Iran murdered.
VP Biden and President Obama are the greatest betrayers of our soldiers in the history of America.

Clinesmith Guilty Plea: Lying about Lying By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/kevin-clinesmith-guilty-plea-russia-probe-ly

He went to great lengths to lie to a federal court and, when caught, lied by saying he didn’t really intend to lie.

Author’s Note: This is the last of a three-part series (see Part 1 and Part 2).

To recap, in June 2017, as the FBI was preparing to submit a fourth sworn application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to surveil former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page, FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith came up with a story to conceal Page’s history as a CIA informant.

On June 15, a CIA liaison had told Clinesmith that Page had been a witting informant who reported information to the agency, a status denoted by a classified digraph (a two-letter symbol). Clinesmith, however, disingenuously claimed to have been told that Page was never a CIA informant; rather, he was purportedly an American who unwittingly passed information to the CIA by communicating with an unidentified third person who was an actual CIA informant. This was a distortion of what the CIA liaison had told Clinesmith.

He concocted the story, nonetheless, by fixing on the liaison’s use of the word encrypt. In its intelligence reports, the FBI routinely conceals (i.e., encrypts) the identities of Americans whose information is incidentally captured because they communicate with third parties who are FBI informants or surveillance targets. Clinesmith purported to construe the digraph as signifying that the CIA had concealed Page’s identity for a similar reason — i.e., he was not source, but he had dealt with someone who was a source.

Clinesmith studiously declined the CIA liaison’s offer to discuss the matter further, for that would have made it impossible to feign confusion. But he still had to get his fictional version of Page’s status past two officials.