NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Riot Tactics Redux A veteran officer explains how police should incorporate lessons from 2020 in responding to pro-Hamas campus unrest.

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/riot-tactics-redux

The City of Seattle has long been a laboratory for the radical Left. Activists experiment with concepts, language, techniques, and policies that eventually appear in other cities. For this reason, Seattle law enforcement often gets early insight into the evolving tactics of left-wing street protesters. The city’s officers have had decades of experience dealing with Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and anarchist movements, which culminated in the George Floyd riots of 2020.

To understand the latest chaos at American universities, I spoke with Christopher Young, who served as an officer and detective for the Seattle Police Department, including working undercover for a long stretch during the season of George Floyd. Young has since retired and has greater liberty to speak about the current campus unrest and how police departments should respond.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Christopher Rufo: I sense that 2024 might play out as a variation on the theme of 2020, with dramatic political and civil unrest. From a law-enforcement perspective, what has changed?

Christopher Young: The activists are not stupid. They learned a lot during the George Floyd riots. I think the most effective lesson they learned was to pathologize safe and effective riot-control tactics. They say that it’s a “war crime” to use tear gas, but they never say that the cops shouldn’t have riot batons. The reason is that they want to provoke the cops into hitting somebody with a baton, which looks bad on camera.

I worked undercover during the George Floyd riots. I’ve been gassed hundreds of times, which is scary and unpleasant. But it’s better than getting hit with a stick or shot with pepper balls.

Rufo: What is the attitude in police departments in response to the current pro-Hamas campus unrest?

Young: For the most part, the university police can’t really remove the protesters. So, they have to get the city to do it, but the cities are not eager to step in because there’s no upside for them. The university administrations give the protesters an inch, and the protestors take a mile. Then they want the city to come in and deal with the consequences. It’s putting the municipal police departments in an impossible situation, where they’re going to get hit with litigation for routine arrests: “You put the cuffs on too tight. You didn’t read their rights soon enough.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A Palestinian Visits Auschwitz Tells Jews: you belong here. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-palestinian-visits-auschwitz/

The first Palestinian to have visited a Nazi concentration camp was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s to the 1940s, who spent the war years in Berlin. He had a nice chat with Hitler on November 28, 1941, captured in a famous photograph here. Al-Husseini expressed to Hitler his enthusiasm for the Final Solution. He was befriended by Heinrich Himmler, and there is some evidence, not conclusive, that the Mufti may have been taken to Auschwitz by Himmler, or possibly by another person he had befriended, Adolf Eichmann, to see how swimmingly things were proceeding there. It is certain that the Mufti visited the concentration camp at Tebbin, for there are numerous photographs of him at the site together with high Nazi officials, as can be seen here.

As his contribution to the Nazi war effort, Hajj Amin el Husseini is known to have raised several Waffen SS battalions consisting of Bosnian Muslims. He also broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda to the Arab world throughout the war.

In January 2020, in quite a different spirit to that exhibited by the Mufti, a group of 25 Muslim faith leaders visited Auschwitz, in what was at the time called a “groundbreaking” visit. “To be here… is both a sacred duty and a profound honor,” the Saudi head of the Muslim World League said during a tour of Nazi death camp with members of the American Jewish Committee.

Now another Palestinian has just been in the news for his visit to Auschwitz, not undertaken In the spirit of sympathy for the victims that the delegation of Muslim faith leaders exhibited but, rather, in a triumphant mode, demanding that Jews everywhere “return” to where they belong — that is, to the Nazi death camps. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on this latest example of a Palestinian expressing murderous antisemitism can be found here: “Palestinian man visits Auschwitz, publicly calls on Jews to return there ‘where they belong,’” 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

University of North Carolina Board Slashes DEI Funding, Diverts Money to Campus Police By Caroline Downey

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-north-carolina-board-slashes-dei-funding-diverts-money-to-campus-police/

The Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Monday slashed funding for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in next year’s budget, diverting the money to public safety and policing instead.

The measure, which the board unanimously approved, redirects $2.3 million of diversity funding to campus security, possibly precipitating the collapse of the office of diversity and inclusion. The vote, reported by the local Fox8 station, comes amid disruptive anti-Israel protests that have roiled UNC and other college campuses in recent weeks. The board passed the measure after it first cleared the budget committee.

Budget committee vice-chair Marty Kotis said law enforcement needs more investment to counteract the demonstrations disrupting the functioning and stability of the school.

“It’s important to consider the needs of all 30,000 students, not just the 100 or so that may want to disrupt the university’s operations,” Kotis said, according to Fox8.

UNC’s 24-member Board of Governors, which includes the Board of Trustees and is the school’s governing body, is expected to vote next week on changing the school’s diversity policy.

Before UNC voted to cut DEI funding, the University of Florida in March closed its diversity department, fired all of its DEI staff, and canceled DEI contracts with outside vendors to comply with a Florida Board of Governor’s regulation that prohibits funding of such programs. As a result of the policy, the college shut down the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer and eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments.

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Lawyer Cohen Testifies about Covertly Recording Client Trump Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lawyer-cohen-testifies-about-covertly-recording-client-trump/

In Manhattan criminal court today, Michael Cohen testified about a recording the jury had already heard in the criminal trial of former president Donald Trump. It was a recording of a conversation between Cohen and Trump on September 6, 2016 (about two months before Election Day). At the time, Cohen was a lawyer working for Trump and the Trump organization. (He has since been disbarred following his sundry convictions for perjury and fraud.)

It is ethically dicey, to say the least, for a lawyer secretly to record a client. An attorney has a duty of fealty to the client — one that continues even after the representation ends. It would obviously be preferable for a lawyer to inform his client that he is recording their conversation; for such recording to be proper, with or without notice given to the client, the recording would have to be in the service of the client’s interests — the legitimate purpose of the attorney–client relationship. It could not be done to undermine the client, such as to have something to hold over the client.

Cohen has testified that Trump was unaware he was being recorded on Cohen’s iPhone as Cohen sat across from him. In the conversation, they discussed the need for Trump to reimburse David Pecker, then the CEO of American Media Inc., after AMI (which then owned the National Enquirer) had laid out $150,000 for the exclusive rights to Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story about a 2006 affair with Trump.

Cohen claims that he made the recording to keep Pecker “loyal” to Trump by easing his mind that Trump did plan to reimburse him. In the accounts I’ve read of today’s testimony, it’s not clear to me that Cohen ever played the recording for Pecker, just that he now says that’s why he recorded it. It seems to me at least equally likely that Cohen wanted some protection for himself in case Trump later tried to stiff him — i.e., that Cohen, a highly self-interested operator, recorded the conversation for his own benefit, not for Pecker’s and certainly not for Trump’s.

This demonstrates in small compass the weirdness of this case.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

FT-Michigan Ross poll: Biden’s election hopes fall as prices rise again Persistent inflation means American voters do not see evidence of an improving economy

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

The recent uptick in US inflation appears to have reversed any progress President Joe Biden has made in convincing voters he can do a better job of managing the economy than Donald Trump. The poll, conducted between May 2 and May 6, finds that — after a slight uplift in April — Biden’s approval ratings on the economy fell back to levels that will make for depressing reading among the White House’s incumbents. That comes after price data showed US inflation might prove stickier than anticipated at the start of the year. The findings add to the sense that the Biden administration’s messaging on the economy — much of which has been focused on gains US workers have seen to their wages — is not convincing voters.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scientist Or Activist? With Climate, It’s Often Hard To Tell The Difference

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/14/scientist-or-activist-with-climate-its-often-hard-to-tell-the-difference/

Last week, Nature magazine allotted space to a researcher who wrote about “​​the importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism.” While surprising, it is nonetheless encouraging. It’s well past the time the zealots in white coats were outed for who they are.

Ulf Büntgen, affiliated with multiple universities, wrote that he is “concerned by climate scientists becoming climate activists,” and is also “worried about activists who pretend to be scientists,” because doing so “can be a misleading form of instrumentalization.”

That Nature would allow something bordering on blasphemy in the climate cult to appear in its pages is rather remarkable. We thought the publication had hopelessly and forever been lost to wokeness and global warming fanaticism, that objective science had been abandoned in exchange for following the progressive agenda.

Not that anyone would consider Büntgen to be a “climate denier,” an ugly label the media, activists and politicians attach to skeptics of the global warming narrative. He references “the many threats anthropogenic global warming is likely to pose on natural and societal systems” and seems troubled about “the continuous inability of an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to tackle global warming, despite an alarming recent rise in surface temperatures and associated hydroclimatic extremes.”

Yet he is evenhanded enough to point out a “​​quasi-religious belief” instead of an “understanding of the complex causes and consequences of climate and environmental changes undermines academic principles.” He suggests that “climate science and climate activism should be separated conceptually and practically,” and insists that “the latter should not be confused with science communication and public engagement.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

$10 MILLION FROM THE ‘STATE OF PALESTINE’ FLOWED TO HARVARD, BROWN & MORE

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

Troubling gifts and grants from the ‘State of Palestine’ funded anti-Israel curriculums, professorships, and tuition at top U.S. universities. 

Even more troubling, the ‘State of Palestine,’ as a nation, doesn’t exist. 

Neither the U.S. State Department nor the United Nations recognize the ‘State of Palestine.’ 

Airing across FOX Business last night and this weekend, Maria Bartiromo hosted me for an interview on her program “Wall Street” to break down all the details.

Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite universities are turning out graduates who believe that open antisemitism and the championing of terrorism are forms of “social justice.”

Congress should convene hearings to preserve our top schools as unabashedly “American” institutions. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘I am as my people are’-Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/i-am-as-my-people-are/

One lesson Israelis should have internalized by now is that things can always get worse. As we moved on Monday night from mourning to celebration—when Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism abruptly transitioned into Independence Day—we’d have done well to remember what we were complaining about last year at this time.

In the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre, it’s impossible to believe that Israelis of all walks of life were treating judicial reform like a matter of life and death. Though it’s an issue that warrants serious debate under normal circumstances (whatever that means in the ever-besieged Jewish state), retrospect has a way of rendering previous concerns ridiculous. 

While duking it out over the selection of judges and the power of the Supreme Court, Hamas was deep in the throes of the genocidal plan it would carry out a mere few months later. Breaking down the border fence, the Iranian-backed terrorists, joined by gleeful Gazan civilians, committed atrocities impossible for any human being with half a soul to fathom.

Initially, the shock and horror of the that Black Sabbath—families snuffed out; babies burned; women and girls raped; young men beheaded; bodies left mutilated beyond recognition; and 250 people of all ages violently abducted to tunnel dungeons in Gaza—brought the nation together in grief and anger.

How, we asked, could the authorities have allowed this to happen? Where was the attention of the security services and government while Hamas was carefully plotting and training for its mass assault? Why did it take the Israel Defense Forces hours upon hours to come to the rescue of the victims, so many of whom perished while waiting?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why the White House turned on Israel The rift is all about the U.S. State Department’s desire to reassert control. David Wurmser

Posted By on May 14th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/why-the-white-house-turned-on-israel/

The chattering class in Israel is struggling to understand American behavior. They ask: How did the United States go from supporting Israel in the first days of the war with Hamas in Gaza to essentially shielding the terror organization? The Israeli right asks: What happened to the Americans? The left asks: What has Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu done to destroy U.S.-Israel relations?

I believe I have some insight into this. I held a senior policy position at the U.S. State Department for several years. Afterwards, I was a senior advisor to the vice president from 2001 to 2007 and then to the Trump administration’s National Security Advisor John Bolton. I also served a decade in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence officer. I have learned a great deal about the mentality of these bureaucracies.

It is important to understand that the U.S. State Department is not a foreign ministry. It is a super-bureaucracy with domestic as well as foreign functions. Its power over foreign policy far outstrips that of other countries’ foreign ministries.

The Biden administration’s National Security Council is ultimately a political body, but it is not opposed to State Department policy, which is increasingly pushed by younger staffers and senior figures aligned with progressive ideology. There are also the professional foreign service officers who have invested their entire careers advancing foreign policy paradigms that are now collapsing.

The NSC lacks a vast bureaucracy of its own. So, it outsources the drafting of policy to relevant bureaus. On foreign policy, this is almost always the State Department. As in any large organization, the person tasked with drafting the policy defines the policy. Everything that follows is a reactive revision, not a reset.

Intelligence agencies control and distribute information, including the information made available to the president. Thus, they also exercise significant power. But ever since the tenure of George Tenet as CIA director, the intelligence agencies have become active in the implementation of policy as well.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Debra Heine: Coalition of 22 State AGs Call on Biden to Reject Treaty Drastically Expanding WHO Authority

Posted By on May 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/09/coalition-of-22-state-ags-call-on-biden-to-reject-treaty-drastically-expanding-who-authority/

A coalition of 22 state attorneys general have sent a letter to Joe Biden voicing their opposition to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia, led by Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, raised concerns that the proposed agreement threatens U.S. sovereignty by giving the WHO “unprecedented and unconstitutional powers over the people of the United States.”

Critics say that the proposed “pandemic accord” and IHR amendments would give the WHO sweeping new powers over national governments and public health authorities in the event of a new pandemic, and would help set up a global system of “digital health passports.”

In a press release Wednesday, Knudsen asserted that the proposed amendments would give the organization “authority over United States public health policy after failing to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its lies during the COVID-19 pandemic.”