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While America Promotes Freedom and Human Rights Abroad, We Must Uphold Those Values at Home By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on June 23rd, 2020

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/while-america-promotes-freedom-and-human-rights-abroad-we-must-uphold-those-values-home

Iran is hosting an “I Can’t Breathe” international cartoon exhibition, with seventy-two pieces from twenty-seven countries, mocking America for its racial unrest and portraying its leaders and police as Nazis and Klan members.

In China, officials are blasting America for its racism while the People’s Daily, the communist party’s official newspaper, ran a cartoon of a crumbling Statue of Liberty and a White House soaked in blood and tear gas. In Moscow, Russian president Vladimir Putin said on state TV that “if this fight for natural rights, legal rights, turns into mayhem and rioting, I see nothing good for the [United States].”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, for Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow are among the world’s leading human rights abusers, and they don’t even pretend to respect the freedoms that Americans take for granted.

Tehran is crushing pro-democracy demonstrations in increasingly harsh fashion, killing hundreds and arresting thousands as recently as November, while jailing and torturing journalists, human-rights lawyers, labor leaders, and other activists. Beijing is jailing lawyers, censoring the internet, holding Uighurs in concentration camps, and curtailing freedom in Hong Kong. The oligarchs, journalists, activists, and opposition leaders who challenge Putin often wind up jailed, attacked, or dead.

Nevertheless, the autocrats’ attacks on America remind us that due to the ideals we promote around the world – freedom, democracy, equality rights, pluralism-we pay a price abroad when we don’t live up to them at home. We invite attack from our autocratic adversaries, divert attention from their human rights horrors, and make ourselves a less effective advocate for human rights.

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US Researchers’ Ties to China by Shoshana Bryen and Stephen Bryen

Posted By on June 23rd, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/2020/06/us-research-scientists-under-fire-for-ties-to-china/

National Institutes of Health recently fired dozens of scientists, mostly Asian men, for having secret financial links to Beijing

Harvard Professor Charles Lieber was formally indicted this month on two counts of making false statements to federal authorities regarding his participation in China’s Thousand Talents program and his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology.

His arrest in January made headlines, but Lieber proved to be only a harbinger of more than 300 similar cases. All are related to US government research contract conditions and requirements, and all are now in the process of public exposure.

Even more worrisome than the number, all of the cases including Lieber were uncovered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), although Lieber held contracts from both NIH and the Department of Defense (DOD).

There is no record of similar impropriety uncovered by the DOD itself, or any broader investigation as yet by the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, State, Education, or other federal government agencies.

But if the US government looked into all contracts across all agencies it is quite likely that the number of cases could easily reach the thousands. The national security ramifications are frightening.

Lieber, the principal investigator of the Lieber Research Group at Harvard, specialized in the highly sensitive area of nanoscience and was funded with more than $15 million in federal grants.

These grants require the disclosure of all sources of research support, potential financial conflicts of interest and all foreign collaboration.

According to the indictment, “Beginning in 2011, Lieber became a ‘Strategic Scientist’ at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China. He later became a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from at least 2012 through 2015.”

In the first count of the indictment, Lieber is alleged to have told the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigative Service that “he was never asked to participate in the Thousand Talents Program” and that he “’wasn’t sure’ how China categorized him.”

The second count concerned his contracts with NIH. “Lieber allegedly caused Harvard to falsely tell NIH that Lieber ‘had no formal association with WUT’ after 2012, that ‘WUT continued to falsely exaggerate’ his involvement with WUT in subsequent years, and that Lieber is not and has never been a participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Theodore! With all thy faults –‘

Posted By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-with-all-thy-faults/91170/

President Trump no doubt speaks for millions of New Yorkers and other Americans when he protests the decision to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the Museum of Natural History. He calls the decision “ridiculous.” There are serious differing views. Ours is that it’s a sad day for those who thrill to the spirit of liberalism in our city and the inclusive Americanism for which Roosevelt stood during his heroic life.

The museum is trying to cast its decision as being animated by something other than disapproval for Roosevelt himself. The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, is insisting to the Times that its decision to remove the monument “is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition that’s depicted in it.” She is referring to the Native American man and African man on either side of TR and the steed on which he is mounted.

We, for one, find that distinction unconvincing, even if art is in the eye of the beholder. The protesters who forced the museum’s hand hate Roosevelt as much as his statue. The sculptor himself, James Earle Fraser, intended the two figures beside TR to symbolize “Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.” Roosevelt mightn’t pass muster with today’s protesters, but in his own time, he was a progressive.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

If Fear Can Strike At University of Chicago, Imagine The Rest of Academia By Ira Stoll

Posted By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/national/if-fear-can-strike-at-university-of-chicago/91171/

In a 2017 New York Times column headlined “America’s Best University President,” Bret Stephens praised Robert Zimmer of the University of Chicago as a defender of free speech.

The column quoted speeches and letters from Zimmer and other University of Chicago administrators and professors, including a committee that issued a 2015 report finding that, as Mr. Stephens quoted it, “Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

So it was surprising to see a blog post from John Cochrane, who until recently was a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Mr. Cochrane wrote on June 15, “I spent much of my last few years of teaching afraid that I would say something that could be misunderstood and thus be offensive to someone. Many of my colleagues report the same worries.”

If that level of fear accurately describes the situation at the University of Chicago, where the university administration has deservedly won national attention for coming down clearly, decisively, and publicly on the “open debate” side of the campus speech wars, imagine just how bad things are in the rest of academia.

In a moment when black Americans fear being killed by police, the concern that tenured professors might be inconvenienced might seem trivial. The worry at Chicago, as described by Mr. Cochrane, was less that university administrators would, on their own initiative, rule speech out of bounds.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ron Dermer: We must stop pursuing a two-state illusion and commit to a realistic two-state solution

Posted By on June 23rd, 2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/19/ron-dermer-we-must-stop-pursuing-two-state-illusion-commit-realistic-two-state-solution/

Ron Dermer is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Determined to advance a realistic solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s prime minister laid out his vision of peace in a speech to the Knesset. The Palestinians, he said, would have “less than a state,” Israel would retain security control over the Jordan Valley “in the broadest meaning of that term,” Jerusalem would remain united under Israel’s sovereignty, and settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria would become part of lsrael.

Those words were not spoken recently by Benjamin Netanyahu but by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, when he defended the Oslo peace process he had initiated two years earlier with President Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat and for which he would be assassinated one month later.

Twenty-five years later, a gulf has emerged between the positions Rabin staked out and what is increasingly believed to be the gold standard for a potential Israeli-Palestinian peace. The result has been the emergence of a two-state illusion that will never happen rather than a two-state solution that might advance peace.

The extension of Israeli sovereignty to certain territories in Judea and Samaria will not, as many critics suggest, destroy the two-state solution. But it will shatter the two-state illusion. And in doing so, it will open the door to a realistic two-state solution and get the peace process out of the cul-de-sac it has been stuck in for two decades.

Let me explain why.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

John Bolton Is The Perfect Washington Man By Ben Domenech

Posted By on June 22nd, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/22/john-bolton-is-the-perfect-washington-man/

Bolton is a thin-skinned and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike.

In the good old days of the internet blogosphere, there was a running bit at Jeff Goldstein’s blog Protein Wisdom which provided a name for John Bolton’s prominent mustache – “Regis”, a globe-trotting nuke-loving Hamas-bashing sexually aggressive bon-vivant with lush whiskey-tinged follicles. The image is ridiculous of course, but it is not far from the image the real John Bolton paints of himself in the absurdly entertaining pages of his book, the inaptly named The Room Where It Happened.

First, let me say that I love this book. I love everything about it. It is true unadulterated fan-fic for Bolton lovers everywhere. He is always right. He is always noble. His purposes are always true. Anyone who disagrees with him is an idiot, or possibly worse. Edward from Twilight has more flaws than this iteration of John Bolton, the mustachioed hero who can do no wrong… except to be, at a critical moment, surrounded entirely by idiots.

If you don’t believe me, just read the reviews from others who have welcomed most if not all of the quite profitable books by insiders excoriating the president released in the past several years.

From The New York Times review:

Underneath it all courses a festering obsession with his enemies … The book is bloated with self-importance, even though what it mostly recounts is Bolton not being able to accomplish very much. It toggles between two discordant registers: exceedingly tedious and slightly unhinged … When it comes to Bolton’s comments on impeachment, the clotted prose, the garbled argument and the sanctimonious defensiveness would seem to indicate some sort of ambivalence on his part—a feeling that he doesn’t seem to have very often.

From The New Yorker review:

Bolton mocks, disparages, or clashes with Steven Mnuchin, Nikki Haley, Rex Tillerson, James Mattis, Mike Pompeo, and others, all within the book’s first hundred pages. By the end of the nearly five-hundred-page book, Bolton also criticizes Mick Mulvaney, Jared Kushner, the entire White House economic team, many of his foreign counterparts, and, although he shares their misgivings about Donald Trump, the House Democrats who impeached the President.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Bolton’s Limp Revenge…..It’s not happening for the mustachioed one. Jed Babbin

Posted By on June 22nd, 2020

https://spectator.org/john-boltons-limp-revenge/

‘Reporters and columnists around the world are falling all over themselves to scour former national security adviser John Bolton’s White House memoir, The Room Where It Happened, for tidbits of criticism of President Trump. They don’t have to look hard to find them.

Bolton’s memoir is not the usual “tell all” book by a former White House staffer. It’s a “get even” book that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro called “revenge porn,” which is not far off the mark.

I have a slight advantage over most of the people commenting on Bolton’s book because I read it before writing about it.

The book is a litany of complaints seeking to convince us that the president is erratic, incompetent, and incapable of running our government. That Trump knows the cost of everything but the value of nothing. After all the media hype, I read carefully to find the ultimate damnations from which Trump can’t recover. They just aren’t there.

While reading, I heard an echo from my youth of Peggy Lee singing, “Is That All There Is?”

As we know from real life, the accounts of direct witnesses to events can vary greatly. That brings us to the first problem with Bolton’s book.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Juneteenth and Zionist history by Moshe Phillips

Posted By on June 22nd, 2020

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/juneteenth-and-zionist-history/

We have not only the right but the obligation to regain a very important commemoration that we have lost. That is: the annual observance of Yom Tel Chai on the 11th of Adar.

It seems to me that before June 2020, Juneteenth was a seldom known holiday for the majority of African Americans and that there was even less awareness of it outside of Black America.

Zionists should take this as a sign that in today’s politically charged environment, where others are reevaluating how to utilize the imagery of historical anniversaries to remind each other and the world about centrally important concepts, that the right thing for us to do is to realize that we can and should do likewise.

We have not only the right but the obligation to regain a very important commemoration that we have lost. That is: the annual observance of Yom Tel Chai on the 11th of Adar.

One hundred years ago a battle took place in the Upper Galilee that saw young Jewish defenders, led by the legendary Joseph Trumpeldor, attempt to protect Jewish lives and property from Arab attackers and who sought to destroy modern Zionism while it was still in its infancy. The memories of Tel Chai, Trumpeldor, and those who were slain with him, were honored, treasured, and beloved as symbols of the pioneers of Eretz Israel in the years between World War I and World War II by Zionist movements from across the gamut of political outlooks.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

So much for Seattle’s ‘summer of love’ By Monica Showalter

Posted By on June 22nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/so_much_for_seattles_summer_of_love.html

“The place has descended into a hellhole with armed warlords loaded for bear and deaths piling up. Naturally, the cops are being blamed.”

So much for Seattle’s ‘summer of love.’ That’s some ‘block party atmosphere’ they’ve got in the CHOP.

Less than two weeks after Seattle’s mayor allowed warlords to declare an autonomous zone over six blocks of Seattle in the name of ‘abolishing’ the police, the place is already starting to look like Liberia.

According to the New York Times:

One person died and another was critically injured by gunfire early Saturday morning inside a portion of a Seattle neighborhood that has been occupied by protesters for more than a week, officials said.

The shootings unfolded at a protester-run region known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or the Capitol Hill Organized Protest area. It has been celebrated as a “no cop” zone, and the Seattle Police Department wrote in a statement that detectives were investigating the shooting “despite the challenges presented by the circumstances.”

Apparently, the cops couldn’t get in in order to clear a path to allow the first responding medics in. 

And for that, the warlords running that hole are blaming cops for their own barbaric rule. 

‘Autonomous’ indeed. Actually, it’s infantile. They take over six city blocks claiming themselves more fit to rule than the established rule of law and its Democratic rulers allowed. They vowed they’d be police-free. They’d show us all how, and then they got exactly what they wanted as Seattle’s wretched leftist officials bowed to them and cheered their becoming police-free. After that, word got out that it was going to get mighty easy to get away with killing people, because city officials had already abdicated.

The ‘gun-free zone’ talk went out the window in this dumpster-fire of autonomous rule, too. Here’s a warlord handing out weapons to anyone over 18 from the trunk of his car:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Soviet Plan for ‘Ideological Subversion’ Describes Our Current Turmoil By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on June 22nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_soviet_plan_for_ideological_subversion_precisely_describes_our_current_turmoil.html

A good friend of mine who fled the Soviet Union many years ago recently sent me a most chilling interview on You Tube.  Under ten minutes long, it needs to be seen by every American who wonders why the country is unraveling before our very eyes.  The interview features Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB spy and state media propagandist who defected to Canada in 1970.  Bezmenov cogently explains how “ideological subversion” is an essential method used by communists to undermine and destabilize Western countries.  His explanation crystallizes so much of what has happened in America in the last 40 years. 

Basically there are four steps to ideological subversion or “changing the perspective of reality” — in other words a mass brainwashing.  The first step is known as demoralization and it takes 15-20 years — the span of time needed to educate one generation by exposing them to the “ideology of the enemy.”  In America we have had

Marxist-Leninist ideology pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students, without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism (patriotism).

And it makes not a whit of difference if these students are exposed to true information because “a person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.”  Their minds are cemented.  Total denial is in force.  Does this not explain why statues are being destroyed and America is continually depicted as a racist country when, in fact, it is not?

In fact, it would take another few generations to change the “tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.”

The second step in ideological subversion is destabilization. This step can be accomplished in as little as five years and the focus is on “destabilizing sectors such as the economy, law enforcement, foreign relations, media, and defense systems.”