ISRAEL Comments turned off

Captured Documents Prove Iran’s Support for the October 7 Massacre Planning, funding, and providing training for the atrocities. P.David Hornik

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Was Iran behind Hamas’s massacre-and-mass-kidnapping attack in Israel on October 7, 2023? How much of a role did the Islamic Republic play in it?

The day after the attack, October 8, 2023, the Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that “Iranian security officials helped plan” the attack and “gave the green light for [it] at a meeting in Beirut” on October 2. Although the report gives further details, few have accepted it as authoritative because it relies mainly on the word of “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah” and cites contradictory accounts by others.

A report by MEMRI (the Israel-based Middle East Media Research Institute) from July 24, 2024, cites several Iranian statements about its role in October 7.

The most notable ones include: On October 10, 2023, the Iranian regime’s mouthpiece Kayhan stated, in MEMRI’s words, that “a plan for Israel’s destruction, formulated and organized by Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani and dictated by him to the commanders of the resistance organizations just before his assassination . . . had begun to be implemented. Kayhan in fact clarified that [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei was party to the plan and hinted twice that a great victory was on the horizon. Kayhan also wrote that Khamenei . . . in August 2023 had suggested that a major operation would take place soon.”

On October 15, 2023, a report by Iran’s Tasnim news agency “stressed that . . . Khamenei had declared that the operation’s name would be ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ many years before its execution, and that he had ordered the establishment of a joint command and control center—commanded by Iran—for the resistance groups, with Iran providing weapons and training.”

On December 25, 2023, a spokesman for the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) stated that October 7 was Iran’s revenge for Soleimani’s assassination by the US on January 3, 2020. Hours later, Iran’s Fars News deleted that specific claim from its website.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Burgum the Right Choice for Interior Secretary and Energy Czar? By Janet Levy

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/is_burgum_the_right_choice_for_interior_secretary_and_energy_czar.html

From running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination himself, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum has proven himself a Trump loyalist who commands the president-elect’s trust. Announcing Burgum’s appointment at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump said, “He’s going to head the Department of Interior, and he’s going to be fantastic.”

However, given Burgum’s background, affiliations, and views on important issues, is he the right choice for Secretary of the Interior? Trump has also made him the nation’s energy czar by appointing him chairman of the newly formed National Energy Council. But is Burgum fit to chair the council and, under that post, take a seat on the National Security Council?

A close look at Burgum’s origins, career, political and policy plays, and most importantly, his association with people and ideologies in line with leftist-globalists is called for. The facts will make it evident that it won’t be unreasonable to ask if he will serve the interests of “We, the people” in the new Trump administration.

Burgum, a native North Dakotan, grew up in the small town of Arthur and earned a BA from North Dakota State University and an MBA from Stanford. His family had a thriving agribusiness started by his grandfather. His father’s death when he was in high school deeply affected him, and, showing initiative, he started a chimney-sweeping business while still an undergraduate. As an adolescent, he ran his own newspaper. These early efforts impressed his professors at Stanford.

After working as an analyst at McKinsey & Company, he adopted a data-driven approach to business and other decisions, which he still adheres to. In 1983, he invested in Great Plains Software, which he built into a billion-dollar business and sold to Microsoft in 2001. His Stanford classmate and friend Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft. He is also friends with Bill Gates, the Black Rock group, and many deep-pocketed energy industry CEOs.

Today, he’s one of the wealthiest and shrewdest politicians in the U.S. During his short-lived run for president, he spent more than $2.9 million on ads, more than any other politician or group. To reach the quota of donors who would take him to the debate stage, he offered $20 gift cards to each person who donated $1.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How Will Trump Handle Education Policy? I don’t know. You don’t either. By Larry Sand

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/20/how-will-trump-handle-education-policy/

The education establishment is in a colossal snit over Donald Trump’s reelection.

At the college level, Berkeley’s official news outlet published a series of interview vignettes with nearly a dozen professors after the results were in, and they all suggested Trump’s “decisive” victory exposes sinister parts of America’s underbelly.

Additionally, some professors from at least three Ivy League schools—Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia—canceled classes.

According to The Free Press, Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy concocted a “self-care suite” available to students to provide an escape from anxiety about the presidential election. The school reportedly informed students that the suite would be available from 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m., where they will have the opportunity to enjoy Legos, coloring, and milk and cookies while visiting the suite.

The response at the K-12 level has been no less unhinged.

Virginia Education Association president Carol Bauer commented that its members may feel grief over the election results. Bauer noted that educators will likely have students coming to them seeking support and answers to “the hard questions.” Bauer warned VEA members that their professions and schools will “come under attack as never before” under the incoming Trump administration.

Bauer also proclaimed, “I know today feels like a dark day for many of you. Questions and doubts are likely swirling through your head, and it will take time to digest what happened and why. That is understandable.”

In California, a high school teacher from Los Angeles County allegedly stormed out of her classroom at the sight of a student wearing a “Make America Great Again” shirt after the election. The teacher said that wearing merchandise supporting President-elect Donald Trump is “a hate crime when worn at school.”

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can Trump End Ukraine’s ‘Endless War?’ How he could pull that unlikely deal off. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/can-trump-end-ukraines-endless-war/

Trump was elected in part on promises to avoid “endless wars” of the sort that cost American blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq but without resulting in strategic advantage or civilized calm.

Yet as a Jacksonian, Trump also restored American deterrence through punitive strikes against ISIS and terrorist thugs like Baghdadi and Soleimani—without being bogged down in costly follow-ups. During the last four administrations, Putin stayed within his borders only during the Trump four years.

But upon entering office, Trump will likely still be faced with something far more challenging as he confronts what has become the greatest European killing field since World War II—the cauldron on the Ukrainian border that has likely already cost 1-1.5 million combined dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians.

There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. But there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior will nonetheless escalate and lead to a wider war among the world’s nuclear powers.

Many on the right wish for Trump to immediately cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that abrupt cessation would end any leverage with which to force Putin to negotiate.

They claim the war was instigated by a globalist left, serving as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia at the cost of Ukrainian soldiers. They see it orchestrated by a now non-democratic Ukrainian government, lacking elections, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has allied with the American left in an election year.

In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the right’s weariness with the costs of the conflict as the long-awaited global proof of the Trump-Russian “collusion” unicorn.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Two American Nations Not since the Civil War have such stark differences among the pluribus threatened the American unum. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-two-american-nations/

In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil, or The Two Nations, a literary exposition of the social and economic changes that followed the industrial revolution, especially the travails and squalor of the urban working class set off against the aristocracy–– or ‘“the rich and the poor.’”

These two classes, as one character famously describes them, comprise “‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.’”

The political polarization graphically on display during the recent presidential election season–– particularly the unhinged hysteria of the “woke” Democrats after Trump’s victory ––calls to mind Disraeli’s influential novel, for it captures our country’s great divide between not just the economic classes and political ideologies, but also mores, morals, values, tastes, cultures, and sensibilities. Not since the Civil War have such stark differences among the pluribus threatened the American unum.

America, of course, has always been divided by its complex diversity of ethnicities, languages, dialects, manners, customs, faiths, beliefs, cultures, and numerous other defining folkways. Our Constitutional structures are the Framers’ response to that contentious diversity: the Bill of Rights to protect diverse citizens, federalism to protect the diverse states, and a tripartite national government divided and mutually balanced to protect our freedom from the tyranny of any concentrated power attempting to dominate everybody else.

Starting in the later 19th century, for a while, new technologies both of communication such as radio, movies, and television; and of transportation like railroads, automobiles, and airplanes, distributed regional and ethnic cultures across the nation through entertainment, magazines, and tourism. Also, consumer capitalism and mass advertising more widely sold products and fashions that now became the tokens of identity in the homogenizing of America’s regional cultures, and the weakening of all those myriad ethnicities and their distinctive folkways accelerated this process.

Another change that contributed to the refashioning of identities was the postwar expansion and availability of higher education to a more diverse citizenry. Moreover, by the Sixties, colleges and universities were more liberal and left-wing than the nation as a whole, making a college education another marker of identity as well as social status. The influence of the left increasingly made political affiliations signs of elite status too, one with its own tastes and fashions in entertainment, clothes, travel, cuisines, and especially more liberal and hedonistic habits and behavior regarding sex and drugs.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The New Axis of Tyrannies vs. the West: A Mighty Clash of Titans by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on November 20th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21134/new-axis-of-tyrannies

The reason for the axis’s actions appears to be a desire for a new world order with themselves at the helm. They seem to believe that through their combined effort, America’s unipolar global leadership in the political, economic and military spheres can be upended.

[T]he driving forces underlying this developing clash of major powers have many facets, one of which appears to be religion, always a convenient pretext as so much can never be proven.

[I]n autocratic or totalitarian regimes comes the imperative to forcefully assert the regime’s idea of religion, of its “truth,” often upon an unwilling populace. Associated with such systems is the intention of ultimately establishing global compliance with their beliefs, which sometimes appear to be a “religion” of state supremacy.

Standing in Iran’s path is the Jewish state of Israel, whose inhabitants inconveniently refuse to vacate it. To many Islamists, continual jihad appears to go hand-in-hand with the need for acquiring land.

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day,” the Quran commands Muslims in Surah 9:29.

To this effect, the February 2024 issue of the Urdu-language al-Qaeda publication Nawa-i-Ghazwa-e-Hind indicates, “Allah has declared Jihad as the path for the enforcement of religion.” In plain words, jihad is required to forcibly establish Islam as the one “true” faith – a global religion.

Hamas’s primary concern, however, does not appear to be an independent state for Palestinians — as it identifies with the Muslim Brotherhood — but a Sharia-based global Islamic Caliphate through jihad. For Hamas, as for the Muslim Brotherhood, a Palestinian state would be merely the first-step in a wider agenda.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the catalyst movement behind the modern global jihadist movement, and should rightly be designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Its founder, Hassan al-Banna, said, “it is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Hassan Nasrallah espoused the same idea: “We won’t stop until every country on Earth is ruled by the law of Allah and the people of Islam, like our prophet promised.”

The West, meanwhile, due to a variety of weak and compromised political decisions, has tried to prevent Israel from acting alone in direct conflict with jihadists, whether Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran itself. All the same, the nation of Israel, despite nearly 4,000 years of unremitting challenges to its existence, appears to be enduring just fine.

The volatile world political order currently reflects a clash between an axis of hegemonic dictatorships flexing their increasing military prowess, and an alliance of Western nations, including Israel, the West’s sole democratic partner in the Middle East.

Driven by disparate ideologies, the axis includes Russia, with imperialist aims over vast regions, Slavic and otherwise; China, with a desire for world domination; Iran, striving for a global Islamist Caliphate; and, to a lesser degree, North Korea, apparently intent on seizing the Korean peninsula, for a start.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Rise and Fall of Jews on Campus How the revolution that brought Jews to elite campuses turned against themCharles Lipson

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://sapirjournal.org/university/2024/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-jews-on-campus/

The open, virulent, and sometimes violent eruption of antisemitism at elite universities may be the most daunting social challenge faced by American Jews since the Ku Klux Klan’s antisemitic campaign in the 1960s. The Klan had always hated Jews, but its threats — and actions — intensified after Jews emerged as a force in the civil rights movement. Three Jewish students were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the Freedom Summer in 1964. In 1967, Temple Beth Israel in Jackson, Mississippi, was bombed, along with the home of its rabbi.

American Jews would overcome the intimidation of the Klan. And the civil rights movement would succeed in drawing the United States closer to its founding promise of equality. But today’s surge of antisemitism at universities is an outgrowth of a related set of changes that began during the same period in American life.

In the 1960s, elite universities were pressured to do away with long-standing discrimination in admissions and hiring. To diversify their student bodies and faculties, they opened their gates widely to those from different backgrounds. Initially, this opening stressed merit and equal standards, without invidious discrimination. This transformation helped make American universities the best in the world, and it helped make our nation more perfect.

But on its coattails came pockets of far-Left radicalism. The strength of this movement of campus radicals grew over decades as it infiltrated and overhauled university administrations and power centers, emerging as the dominant social force on elite campuses. Today, many universities have morphed into hotbeds of illiberalism and antisemitism.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Dismal State of Literacy When Unions Are at the Helm By Hannah Schmid

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2024/11/18/the_dismal_state_of_literacy_when_unions_are_at_the_helm_1072964.html

In a first-ever election on Nov. 5 for control of the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education, candidates backed and funded by the Chicago Teachers Union were largely rejected at the polls. Out of 10 races, only four CTU-backed candidates won, and one of those was uncontested. 

It was a sign Chicago has had enough of failing schools and voters were placing blame. During CTU’s militant reign over CPS, proficiency ratings for 3-8th graders have plummeted and less than 23% of 11th graders can read at grade level. Meanwhile, the CTU has spent over six months lobbying for a $50 billion contract that rather than advancing classroom instruction makes demands over things such as climate justice, green schools, and affordable housing. 

CTU candidates’ rejection is just one example of a seismic shift in the way constituents are viewing public education across the country. A national literacy epidemic means only 1 in 3 students are meeting proficiency standards in reading. People are seeing the results of union-led public education – and they’re not pleased.

The path forward for families is to stop allowing union-led public education to put power first and students last. Educators must lean into proven methods to help students succeed. 

Literacy is one of the most important skills because it’s the foundation of every milestone that follows: from reading and comprehending course material in every other subject to understanding and following instructions in employment. When children aren’t reading proficiently by the end of third grade, they are far less likely to graduate high school and are four times more likely to drop out.  

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Louis Galarowicz Favoring “Diverse Faculty” New York’s public university system has adopted a program to hire minority professors.

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/favoring-diverse-faculty

The Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) banned the use of race in admissions in higher education. In the State University of New York system, however, race-conscious methods are alive and well in another domain: faculty hiring.

After the ruling, Chancellor John B. King, Jr. and the SUNY Board of Trustees declared that the Court had “attempted to pull our nation backwards in the journey toward equity and civil rights.” Blacks and Latinos “are still underrepresented across institutions of higher education as students, faculty members, and administrators,” they said, so “better paths and bridges” would be needed to dismantle “roadblocks and barriers.”

In the SUNY system, these “paths and bridges” take the form of three diversity awards and scholarships: Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth (PRODiG+); the Empire State Diversity Honors Scholarship; and the Graduate Diversity Fellowship. The first is a recruiting program designed to induce “over 400 postdoctoral fellows to enter tenure-track faculty positions at State-operated campuses”; the latter two are DEI-focused scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively.

SUNY’s PRODiG+ program is explicitly designed to “increas[e] the number and share of excellent diverse faculty committed to advancing the ideals of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).” In practice, “diverse faculty” apparently refers to racial minorities and women. SUNY Cortland’s PRODiG proposal, for example, stated clearly that it intends to “hir[e] a percentage of URM [underrepresented] faculty that equals or surpasses the diversity of our student population.” Cortland’s 2022 program overview clarified further that “underrepresented” groups included “women in STEM disciplines [WSTEM], Hispanic/Latinx, African Americans, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

We’re all Doomed. Yawn Michael Kile

Posted By on November 19th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/were-all-doomed-yawn/

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, but only in My Fair Lady. On October 29 and 30, 2024,  it fell elsewhere with tragic consequences: the loss of over two hundred lives and widespread damage in the Valencia region. Almost as surprising as the downpour’s intensity was the rush by agencies in this space to conclude it was caused by the bogeyman apparently driving most natural disasters today: “climate change”.

An alternative explanation is that the weather gods were up to their old tricks. After all, a so-called extreme weather event (EWE) happens somewhere in the world every day. So the probability was high they might conjure up one just a week before COP29, as indeed they did last year.  Storm Bettina made landfall in Eastern Europe on November 28, 2023, just days before COP28, the annual UN climate conference. It too was attributed promptly to nasty anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

The COP29 Conference of the Parties is being held in Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22, 2024. After 28 years of talks, the event is being promoted, optimistically, as a Climate Action Summit. How many people does it take to change the climate of a whole planet to suit everybody everywhere and forever? At least 40,000, judging by the number of delegates this year. Good luck with that exercise of breathtaking hubris, the bureaucratic equivalent of collective hara kiri, at least for the developed world.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres had a familiar message: immediate steps must be taken to cut [carbon dioxide] emissions, “safeguard people from climate chaos”, and “tear down the walls to climate finance”, especially given what he described as this year’s “masterclass in climate destruction”. It was déjà vu all over again.

COP29 is yet another attempt by the developing world to monetize the climate and raise “trillions of dollars to protect lives and livelihoods from the worsening impacts of climate change.” Yet most countries were silent on the irony of China’s chutzpah: the world’s largest coal consumer, biggest solar panel manufacturer and now space explorer, still claiming developing country status and putting its hand out for billions of dollars of free money.

There is, of course, no suggestion here that the agency rush to judgement mentioned above might have been due to activist researchers so dazzled by confirmation bias – and now underwritten by fabulous funding from both governments and private entities – they could not resist making confident claims about climate causation, such as detecting the “fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events”; or that the MSM is happy to provide them with a media megaphone without further scrutiny, or to question the veracity of their claims.