FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Paper Tiger Hectoring world leaders with idle threats. Kenneth Timmerman

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-paper-tiger/

Mao used to call America a “paper tiger,”  in appearance very powerful, but in reality nothing to be afraid of. That is the way China’s current president, Xi Jinping, views the Biden administration.

How do I know this? Just look at the way the Chinese “welcome” visiting Biden administration officials.

When Secretary of State Tony Blinken arrived in Shanghai last Wednesday, he climbed down from that big beautiful aircraft with “United States of America” emblazoned in huge letters across its sides to the bare tarmac, where minor Chinese officials were waiting to greet him. Not the foreign minister. And no red carpet. That is the Chinese version of a snub.

And Chinese commentators took notice. “Blinken arrives in China and is met WITHOUT RED CARPET. No band or anything,” said an X user with the name “Lord Bedo. “He’s welcomed like a somebody unimportant.” No kidding. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen received the same treatment a few months ago.

On Friday, Blinken met with President Xi in Beijing. His message? To express “serious concern” about China’s support for Russia’s war effort by selling them microchips, machine tools, and other dual-use equipment. “I told Xi, if China does not address this problem, we will,” Blinken told his American media pool.

While that may sound like tough language, what does it really mean? The U.S. will impose sanctions on China if they don’t stop those dual-use exports to Russia. Really?

Russia and China, like their ally, Iran, have become masters at avoiding U.S. sanctions. Following U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and gas over the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s oil and gas exports have continued non-stop, and with increased prices, are earning them more than ever.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Domestic Enemies Daniel Greenfield’s new book reveals the Founding Fathers’ fight against the Left. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/domestic-enemies/

That there’s always more history to learn is one of the many lessons of Daniel Greenfield’s truly magnificent new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight against the Left. In six riveting, eye-opening chapters, Greenfield guides us through untold or little-told stories of leftist perfidy beginning in the days prior to the ratification of the Constitution and concluding in the last years of the Civil War. It is a genuinely remarkable work, which even for many people who consider themselves relatively well-informed students of history is full of one revelation after another – all of which serve to underscore that the far-left phenomena that today seem to portend nothing short of apocalypse (from BLM riots to outrageous election irregularities to the breathtaking efforts by New York officials to destroy Donald Trump’s financial empire) are in fact nothing new.

The late writer Howard Zinn, in his appallingly successful People’s History of the United States (1980), pushed his far-left agenda on naive young readers by, at every turn (and here I adapt from Johnny Mercer’s immortal lyric), fanatically accentuating the negative aspects of American capitalism and liberal democracy and utterly eliminating the positive. Greenfield is the anti-Zinn: whereas Zinn besmirched American liberty at every turn, Greenfield tells the plain truth about far-left challenges to that liberty that have either been whitewashed in most history textbooks, given very short shrift by them, or scrubbed from their pages entirely. The result is a superbly illuminating book that has the drive and urgency of a great political pamphlet as well as the density and detail of a distinguished three-volume historical opus.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Has Chosen The Least Bad Of Bad Alternatives Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/29/israel-has-chosen-the-least-bad-of-bad-alternatives/

History frequently offers insight into present-day events. Far too often that perspective is ignored either because of a lack of knowledge, the mistaken belief that it has no relevance in today’s world, or discomfort over the challenge that that knowledge presents. The war in Gaza does have an historical precedent, albeit one on a far grander scale.

Bear with us as we unpack the analogy …

As the endgame of World War II in mid-1945 became focused on the planning of “Operation Downfall,” the invasion of the Japanese homeland, the decision was made to deploy the first (and last) atomic weapons ever used in warfare. This was not a choice taken lightly and was repugnant to President Harry Truman and many of his advisers. But it was made based on a grim calculus comparing the hope that the bombs would force an immediate surrender (at a cost of more than 100,000 civilian lives), against the anticipated casualties and impact of an invasion of Japan’s home islands.

An article written by one of us (Dr. Miller) last year delves into the background. After experiencing 18,000 dead and 78,000 wounded in capturing Iwo Jima and Okinawa (two relatively small islands), the magnitude of the resistance was understood. And unlike in those battles, a mainland invasion would face troops who could be easily resupplied, making them even more difficult to dislodge.

In that 2023 article, a Marine four-star general and historian is quoted as saying there were no post-invasion plans for the six Marine divisions (each 23,000 strong) in Operation Downfall because they were expected to be decimated and non-functional after invading Honshu to make way for the Army. In other words, it was expected that just to commence the invasion, some 100,000 allied lives would be lost, along with far more Japanese killed. Estimates of subsequent American deaths neared 1 million, with at least 5 million Japanese expected to perish.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It Would Be Foolish To ‘End Fossil Fuel’

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/30/it-would-be-foolish-to-end-fossil-fuel/

Let’s say tomorrow, or in 10 years or even 15, that by some feat of magic that wind and solar could fully power the global economy. We could then stop extracting oil and the natural gas that’s a byproduct of drilling. Right?

No, it wouldn’t work that way – because it can’t.

Even in a world that ran entirely on renewable energy, it would still be necessary to drill for crude. Why? Because of, as Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock was told 1967’s “The Graduate,” plastics.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire, a family friend, told Ben at his college graduation party.

More than a half century later, none of us can imagine our lives without plastic and other products made from the oil refining process.

We’ve heard the argument that we should be moving toward an economy in which we drop the fuels for transportation and power plants and drill only enough to make plastics and other products of modernity. It’s made by those who believe they’re always the smartest person in the room but don’t know what they don’t know.

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Sheryl Sandberg’s Great Documentary—and the Cataclysm That Continues October 7 was only the beginning of a moral collapse. David Hornik

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

The new one-hour documentary Screams Before Silence by Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, is one of the major events since October 7. It’s a harrowing, profound, utterly unforgettable film, superbly directed by Anat Stalinsky. In it Sandberg, who came to Israel to get the background for the film, “interviews multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres,” people who have seen some of the worst sights and undergone some of the worst experiences imaginable—or beyond imaginable. Released on YouTube on April 26, Screams Before Silence already totals half a million views and will indelibly engrave the horrors of sexual assault and other crimes, both on October 7 and in its aftermath, among large portions of humanity not hopelessly lost to antisemitic hatred or ludicrous ideologies.

And for that, Sheryl Sandberg must be credited with a tremendous achievement.

Screams Before Silence begins with a visit to a devastated, largely burned-down kibbutz, then takes you to terrifying footage from the onset of the attack on the Nova music festival very early that Sabbath morning at 6:30 a.m., and then—mainly via the interviews—takes you deeper and deeper into hell until you reach its core. It does not show you images from that abyss (“Out of respect for the victims and their families, we chose not to show explicit images in this film”); but you hear the voices and see the facial expressions of people who were there; or who, as first responders, came upon the scenes of horror; or who, as forensic experts, had to deal with the corpses; or who, as hostages, continued to suffer in hell for weeks on end.

To look up—dazed and silenced—from this film and stare around at the world almost seven months later, a world of crazed “demonstrations” on US campuses and attacks on Jews in London, Paris, and elsewhere, is to have the bewildering feeling that what happened on October 7 was really just the inception, the igniting spark, of a global wave of hysterical hatred of Jews and, particularly, of the Jewish state that was already, latently, there, and just needed something like a horrific massacre to set it in motion. The tens of thousands of people bellowing “From the river to the sea…,” “Resistance by any means necessary,” “Globalize the intifada,” and the like know exactly what happened on October 7, and continues to happen in its aftermath in the tunnels of Gaza, and think it’s great.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Protesters take over Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall in escalation of anti-war demonstrations

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://lite.aol.com/news/story/0001/20240430/8b0d3a0cedb17f5e892c6ca43bbdf628

Dozens of protesters took over a building at Columbia University in New York early Tuesday, barricading the entrances and unfurling a Palestinian flag out of a window in the latest escalation of demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war that have spread to college campuses nationwide.

Video footage showed protesters on Columbia’s Manhattan campus locking arms in front of Hamilton Hall early Tuesday and carrying furniture and metal barricades to the building, one of several that was occupied during a 1968 civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protest on the campus. Posts on an Instagram page for protest organizers shortly after midnight urged people to protect the encampment and join them at Hamilton Hall.

The student radio station, WKCR-FM, broadcasted a play-by-play of the hall’s takeover – which occurred nearly 12 hours after Monday’s 2 p.m. deadline for the protesters to leave an encampment of around 120 tents or face suspension. Representatives for the university did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment early Tuesday.

Universities across the U.S. are grappling with how to clear out encampments as commencement ceremonies approach, with some continuing negotiations and others turning to force and ultimatums that have resulted in clashes with police. Dozens of people were arrested Monday during protests at universities in Texas, Utah and Virginia, while Columbia said hours before the takeover of Hamilton Hall that it had started suspending students.

Demonstrators are sparring over the Israel-Hamas war and its mounting death toll, and the number of arrests at campuses nationwide is approaching 1,000 as the final days of class wrap up. The outcry is forcing colleges to reckon with their financial ties to Israel, as well as their support for free speech. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Humza Yousaf is everything that’s wrong with modern politics Vain, haughty and brazenly disdainful of working people – we now know what wokeness in power looks like. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on April 29th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/28/humza-yousaf-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-modern-politics/

For me, the most notable thing about the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf is his haughtiness. Rarely has a man’s arrogance been so out of proportion to his intellect. He has honed to perfection the Diane Abbott style of addressing both the media and the masses as if they were special-needs children. Remember the time he told a striking nurse to stop being patronising? All she’d said is that politicians like him are not listening to nurses’ concerns. ‘Let’s not patronise each other’, he snapped. A man with great power telling an underpaid health worker to check her patronising tone is, ironically, patronising beyond comprehension.

If this were just a personality trait, I could live with it. (Kind of.) If his ‘snide, arrogant and patronising’ demeanour – as one Scottish observer described it – was just the way he is, I’d be a tad more forgiving. We can all be wankers at times. But with Yousaf, something else is at play. His condescending style is directly reflective of his condescending politics. His conceited bemusement at journalists’ questions and pompous disdain for the Scottish throng are less personality tics than core tenets of his identitarian belief system. It is not an accident that a man beholden to the ideology of woke should be such a neo-aristocratic arse.

As Yousaf heads for a no-confidence vote – following his dissolving of the coalition between his Scottish National Party and the Greens – it’s worth reflecting on what his time in office has told us about politics in the 21st century. It is unlikely his first ministership will bother the history books much – though his recent batty claim that men experience misogyny might be included in a future tome on Stupid Shit Politicians Say. And yet there is something noteworthy about his rule. It’s shown us what wokeness in government looks like. It has given us a grisly glimpse of what will become of public life once the grievance-mongers of identitarianism seize the reins of power.

Fundamentally, Yousaf’s is a government not for the people, but against them. It’s an administration devoted less to unleashing Scotland’s potential than to taming its bigotries. It’s concerned less with meeting Scots’ needs than with policing their feelings. This is why his speech on the unbearable whiteness of Scottish politics was so important. You remember it. It’s gone viral about a hundred times since he first made it in the Scottish parliament during the BLM madness of June 2020. He reeled off various ruling-class positions – lord advocate, solicitor general, Police Scotland chief constable – and barked the word ‘white’ after each one. A country where 96 per cent of people are white has mostly white rulers? I’m shocked.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘You Have a Beautiful Daughter…’: The Persecution of Christians, March 2024 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on April 29th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20605/persecution-of-christians-march

[O]n March 25, the Lahore High Court in Pakistan awarded custody of a 13-year-old Christian girl to her Muslim kidnapper.

Charges were filed, “but instead of arresting the two suspects, police tipped them off …. Since that time, they have been threatening me and my mother to withdraw the case or face the consequences.” – Morning Star News, March 8, 2024, Pakistan.

“Christians are obviously a despised minority [in Yemen]… Christians are often last in line as it relates to being able to receive the care and attention there as war and as these things continue to escalate. That has a ripple effect … while Christians were already last [in] line, that line becomes even further elongated.” — Open Doors USA CEO Ryan Brown, Christian Broadcasting Network, March 8, 2024.

“I thought it only happened elsewhere.” — Mayor of Clermont d’Excideuil, France, March 11, 2024.

The Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Russia: On March 22, Muslim terrorists armed with automatic weapons launched an attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow, massacring at least 139 people and wounding more. Boasting of “killing Christians,” ISIS quickly claimed the attack in a statement that said the assault was intentionally designed to target “thousands of Christians.” Two months earlier, ISIS issued a communique to the “Lions of Islam” — presumably Muslim “avengers” around the world — to terrorize and slaughter Christians and Jews, including by targeting churches and synagogues.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Shock and Awe on the Campaign Trail A Rubicon has been crossed, and advance troops are already besieging various outposts of our taken-for-granted institutions and assumptions about our social lives. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 29th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/28/shock-and-awe-on-the-campaign-trail/

I would wager that a million or more words have been written about the trials and tribulations—but especially the trials—of Donald Trump. I have written quite a few myself, here at American Greatness and elsewhere.

Some stories from the left are of the gleefully salivating variety. “Goodie! The Bad Orange Man is Getting His and Might Even go to Jail.  Hallelujah!”

But it is my impression that more and more commentary has a worried, if not an out-and-out tone of alarm.  Former Attorney General William Barr is no fan of Donald Trump. But he recently announced that he was endorsing Trump because the likely alternative—Joe Biden—was so much worse.

I suspect that, with the passage of time, that endorsement will be seen to mark a turning point in l’affaire Trump. If even an anti-Trump figure like Bill Barr has lined up behind the former president, a rearrangement of the stars is underway.

Note well: The primary fulcrum of this change is not an assessment of the relative merits of Trump vs. Biden.  Rather, it’s a reaction against the perversion of the DOJ and the coercive power of the state under Biden.  Trump is the most obvious victim. But any opponent of the regime is a potential target.

“Shock and Awe” is the popular phrase military folks use to describe a strategy of using “spectacular displays of force to paralyze the enemy’s perception of the battlefield and destroy their will to fight.”

That is a good description of what the Biden administration is attempting to do to Donald Trump.  Thanks to the incisive reporting of Julie Kelly, Mike Davis, and others, we now know that there was extensive co-ordination between the Biden White House and the myriad prosecutors, attorneys general, FBI agents, and other official factota to formulate a strategy to indict, intimidate, and neutralize Trump as a political actor.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Travesties of the Trump Trials Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 29th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/29/the-travesties-of-the-trump-trials/

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.

Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-election Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state ballots; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the Electoral College; or the radical opportune changes in state election laws to ensure massive mail-in balloting.

Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the election.

Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The January 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.

Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for reelection. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the January 6 demonstrations/riot, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.