MEDIA Comments turned off

Joe Biden, An American Autocrat (According To The New York Times)

Posted By on March 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/08/joe-biden-an-american-autocrat-according-to-the-new-york-times/

The left seems increasingly resigned to the fact that Donald Trump could defeat Joe Biden in a rematch this November. So much so that it is busy speculating about the hellscape Trump II will unleash.

He will destroy democracy. He will rule as an authoritarian. And so forth.

The New York Times took another stab at it Thursday in its daily email newsletter, The Morning.

David Leonhardt, who runs the newsletter, says that a good way to understand how Trump might govern in a second term is to look at his “affinity” for Viktor Orban, the conservative prime minister of Hungary, who has become the bête noire of the left.

So, Leonhardt does what journalists always do when they are trying to understand something: they talk to other journalists. In this case, the Times’ Central and Eastern Europe bureau chief Andrew Higgins.

Leonhardt’s first question to Higgins sets the tone for the rest of the newsletter: People often describe Orban as autocratic. But he’s not a ruler who jails or kills his opponents. Can you describe how he suppresses dissent?

The point is to scare readers about what Trump will do if he wins in November.

We can’t say whether Higgins’ portrayal of Orban is accurate — we doubt it’s even close to the mark. But we noticed something in Higgins’ answers. All his attempts to define Orban as an autocratic ruler apply to President Joe Biden, not Trump.

So, as an experiment, we swapped the names from Orban to Biden and replaced other references. We were struck by the results.

But judge for yourselves. Here is Thursday’s The Morning newsletter, updated. (All of our changes to the original are indicated in bold.)

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

International Law or Antisemitism? by Bat Ye’or

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20461/international-law-or-antisemitism

In his study on this subject, David Elber demonstrates that the UN has no possession of territorial sovereignty and therefore cannot decree the allocation of a territory over which it has no sovereignty (on the basis of the universal principle of law nemo dat quod non habet — no one can give what he does not possess), especially when this decision violates previous treaties endorsed by the UN itself. Resolution 181 only made suggestions to avoid the threat of war from the Arabs.

With the Venice Declaration, the European Economic Community demanded the creation of a Palestinian state on the territories liberated by Israel in 1967, which had been illegally occupied and rendered Judenrein [ethnically cleansed of Jews] by Arab countries since 1949. Since that time, the EEC/EU have never ceased to impose the concept of “Palestinian people” instead of Arab refugees, in order to justify its claim to a state that it has been striving to build for decades by monitoring, restricting and harassing Israelis in their own country, recognized by international treaties.

For the past 40 years, the EEC/EU, which wants to get rid of Israel at all costs, has invented a false people, the Palestinians, devoid of national particularisms and history, artificially constructed as a look-alike to Israel, even though they claims to follow the Koran, embody jihad against unbelief and adhere to Nazism.

UN Resolution 181, falsely called international law, authorizes the delegitimization of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem according to the 2,000-year-old anti-Semitic tradition, and the reduction of the Jewish state to an indefensible parcel that will soon be made to disappear. It has already created Palestinian ministries and ambassadors for a people that is not a people, but which it is determined to create in homage to the Hitler-Husseini alliance that symbolizes the jihad against Israel.

Over the last few decades, the EU’s alliance with the Palestinian jihad — a war to Islamize the planet… In its relentless fight against Israel, Europe has sacrificed its own territory and people to Palestinianism. Today, in a strange coincidence, we see the same alliances as in the 1940s: the majority of European countries, united under the government of the Third Reich, allied with Islam and at war with Russia and the Jewish people in a global anti-Semitic tsunami.

It is commonplace to hear it proclaimed everywhere and at every turn as a proven truth that the State of Israel is violating international law. Interviewed by Sonia Mabrouk on February 11, Manuel Bompard once again made this accusation, even specifying a date to a violation that dates back 70 years! This accusation, which determines all the European Union’s relations with the Jewish state, justifies, for example, discriminatory practices against Israel that are unprecedented and never applied against any other state. Thus, we can read in the Journal Officiel (24/11/2016, no. 81) under the heading “Miscellaneous,” regulations relating to:

“the indication of origin of goods from territories occupied by Israel since June 1967 published in the Official Journal of the European Union on November 12, 2015.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

AMERICAN FICTION A MOVIE WORTH WATCHING

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

This movie punctures the political correctness that heaps praise on  Black novels and films, even when they are trash.

Monk as the chief protagonist is named, devises an outlandish book of his own, under a pseudonym and false claim that he is a convict. Critics rave in hilarious scenes of White hypocrisy and condescension. rsk

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Ukrainian Verdun The only thing worse than an armistice with no clear winner or loser is an endless war with more than a million casualties. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/07/the-ukrainian-verdun-2/

Ukraine has ossified into something like the modern version of the horrific Battle of Verdun, fought 108 years ago on the 1916 Western Front of World War I. That meat grinder cost France and Germany some 700,000 dead and wounded.

The nightmare ended ten months later, after the heroic French defense stopped the final German push. But the respective armies ended up in the same position as when the battle started.

After the failed preemptive Russia attack on Kyiv in February 2022 and the subsequent collapsed Ukrainian 6-month-long “spring” counter-offensive of spring 2023, the Ukrainian war has now similarly deadlocked.

Russia has failed to annex Ukraine. It has not expanded much beyond occupied Crimea and Donbass.

Yet Ukraine seems unable to push back the Russians to where they started in February 2022, much less recover lost areas grabbed earlier in 2014.

Although neither side has published reliable and comprehensive dead and wounded statistics, the war has now likely reached a horrific Verdun-like total of 600-700,000 combined casualties.

Perhaps 10 million of Ukraine’s prewar population have fled the country. Due to the massive refugee exodus, the country may have shrunk below 35 million.

In other words, Russia now has a population seven times larger, a gross national product ten times greater, and an area over 30 times the size of current Ukraine.

Still, if NATO and the United States can continue to arm Ukraine, it is as unlikely that Russia can annex Ukraine, even as it is doubtful that Ukraine can ever regain territory lost prior to 2014.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NY Sends National Guard into Subways The subways are officially a war zone. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ny-sends-national-guard-into-subways/

The official media messaging is that crime is at “record lows”. New York City media types smugly post selfies while denying that there’s any violence in the city.

And then the governor sends the National Guard to the subway. The subways are officially a war zone.

Nearly 1,000 New York National Guardsmen, state police and MTA cops are being deployed to carry out bag checks in the Big Apple’s crime-ridden subway system, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday.

The additional forces — made up of 750 guardsmen and 250 law enforcement officers — will work alongside the NYPD to patrol “the city’s busiest transit stations” amid a recent surge in underground violence, Hochul said.

“These brazen, heinous attacks on our subway system will not be tolerated,” Hochul said as she announced a five-point plan to crack down on the city’s burgeoning underground crime wave.

It’s historic… in the worst possible way.

This is the sort of thing Mexico has been doing.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Is A New Biden Scandal About To Erupt?

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/07/is-a-new-biden-scandal-about-to-erupt/

The Joe Biden presidency has had its share of missteps, maybe more than any other administration before it. But the latest scandalous behavior is not an error in the eyes of this White House. In pursuit of cultural and political engineering that only the Democrats would ever consider, the administration has flown 320,000 illegal immigrants into the country directly from foreign airports.

According to the ​​Center for Immigration Studies, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app.”

This was not disclosed at a news conference or at the daily White House press briefing but learned through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that pried the information from an administration that clearly wanted to hide it.

It’s anyone’s guess as to where these aliens have landed. The CBP has withheld the names of the airports that “received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023.” It is also refusing to reveal which foreign airports the immigrants departed from.

Worse, the “passengers” are apparently unvetted, which suggests “it is highly probable the groundwork is being laid for something far worse than 9/11,” says Elon Musk.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

New Hate Speech Laws Threaten Freedom Across the West Those fighting censorship in Canada, or Britain, or Ireland, wish they had a First Amendment to fall back on. By Rupa Subramanya

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/hate-speech-laws-free-speect-first-amendment?utm_source=substack&utm_

One of the first things you learn—or should learn—in Civics 101 is that there is no freedom at all without freedom of expression. Free speech is the essential freedom from which our other rights flow. It’s a right that we have taken for granted in the West. 

But a new wave of hate speech laws has changed that. In English-speaking countries with long traditions of free expression—countries like Canada, Britain, and Ireland—this most basic freedom is under attack. 

Take Canada. Civil liberties groups north of the border are warning a new bill put forward by Justin Trudeau’s government will introduce “draconian penalties” that risk chilling free speech. How draconian? The law would allow authorities to place a Canadian citizen under house arrest if that person is suspected to commit a future hate crime—even if they have not already done so. The legislation also increases the maximum penalty for advocating genocide from five years to life.

These punishments depend on a hazy definition of hate that Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has warned could blur the line between “political activism, passionate debate, and offensive speech.” 

The proposed law is in keeping with the Trudeau government’s broader hostility to free expression. I’ve reported before for The Free Press on this censorious turn in my country, from the crackdown on the trucker protesters to the backdoor regulation of online speech. And, testifying before the U.S. Congress in November, I urged Americans to treat Canada’s war on free expression as a cautionary tale. Increasingly, though, what’s true of Canada is true across the English-speaking world. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas-UNRWA sex crimes and International Women’s Day Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 7th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/hamas-unrwa-sex-crimes-and-international-womens-day/

Israelis don’t need further proof of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 by Hamas, and fellow Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah savages. Testimony from survivors and forensic pathologists abounds.
As if eyewitness accounts weren’t sufficient, there are hours of audio and video recordings from cellphone, GoPro and CCTV cameras, much of which was taped and filmed by ecstatic terrorists boasting of their barbaric accomplishments.

Sadly, however, aspersions abroad make every new sliver of evidence necessary. Not that the two reports released on Monday are likely to make a dent in massacre denial.

Indeed, historical revisionism, of the sort surrounding the Holocaust, is already rampant—a mere five months after the genocidal assault on the Jewish state from the Gaza Strip. Still, both disclosures were particularly worthy of note due to their timing: the approach of International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8. They were also unwittingly connected.

The first was the acknowledgment by the United Nations that sex crimes against women and girls were perpetrated on Oct. 7 by Hamas “and other armed groups.” This better-late-than-never realization was reached by a team of “technical experts,” led by Special Representative of the Secretary-General Pramila Patten, following a two-week mission to Israel last month.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Judith Butler Says October 7 Was neither ‘Antisemitic’ nor a ‘Terrorist Attack’ By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/judith-butler-says-october-7-was-neither-antisemitic-nor-a-terrorist-attack/?utm_source=

Judith Butler, the American gender theorist, said that the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on October 7 was “not a terrorist attack” and “not an antisemitic attack,” but an “uprising” and “armed resistance.”

Butler told a panel discussion in France, hosted by Paroles d’Honneur, that she “did not like that attack,” which was “anguishing” and “terrible,” but that she would be “very foolish” if she “then decided that the only violence in the scene was the violence done to Israeli people. The violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus.”

Revealingly, she added, “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party. We can have different views about armed resistance.”

Can we? Can reasonable people have “different views” about whether it is okay to murder civilians, including young children and the elderly, kidnap them, or subject young women to rape and sexual violence? One doesn’t expect Judith Butler to make much sense, but this is a new low, even for her.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Don’t Fall for Hamas’s Numbers Game By Danielle Pletka

Posted By on March 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/dont-fall-for-hamass-numbers-game/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Lloyd Austin’s recent gullibility about Hamas casualty figures lays bare the terrorist group’s goal: to use lies and propaganda to turn the world against Israel.

At a press conference in the early days of the Israel–Hamas conflict, President Joe Biden was asked about casualty numbers coming out of Gaza. He responded that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” The next day, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked the same question, and in turn explained, “We all know that the Gazan Ministry of Health is just a front for Hamas. It’s a — it’s run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. I’ve said it myself up here: We can’t take anything coming out of Hamas, including the so-called Ministry of Health, at face value.”

Fast forward to February 29, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had no such qualms, parroting before Congress Hamas’s claim that “over 25,000” women and children have perished in Gaza. A few short hours later, the Pentagon walked back the secretary’s claim. Why? Because nobody has any idea — any honest idea — how many Gazans have died in the war that began with Hamas’s October 7 attack.

The only sources of data about casualties in Gaza are Hamas-controlled organizations. And despite a demonstrable record of manipulation designed to exaggerate the deaths of women and children (and minimize the numbers of men — the targets of Israeli military action), these numbers have become the data of record, used without qualification by the United Nations, its specialized agencies, the media, and, pace Joe Biden, one of the U.S. government’s highest officials.

As early as October, after false claims that 471 were killed by an alleged Israeli attack on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, Hamas’s credibility should have been shot. The “attack” turned out to be a misfired missile launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad that damaged an area adjacent to the hospital, and most experts concluded that deaths totaled half that number or even fewer. But doubts about Hamas’s honesty soon dissipated, and much of the press returned to an uncritical repetition of Palestinian statistics.

There can be little doubt that many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have perished. The IDF says that 12,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed — and presumably most, if not all, of these casualties are men. As a proportional matter, if 12,000 men have been killed, it is possible that roughly the same number of women (who are approximately 50 percent of the Gazan population), and almost as many children under 18 (47 percent of the overall population), have also died.

On the other hand, this is not the bombing of Dresden or the carpet-bombing of Vietnam. House-to-house fighting is generally aimed at minimizing civilian casualties, and the IDF has until recently conducted much of its campaign with air support for troops on the ground. Thus, we should assume that a proportional death toll in Gaza of men, women, and children is unlikely. However, Hamas’s penchant for c0-locating their operations with mosques, schools, and hospitals means higher risks for Palestinians who are young, elderly, or infirm.