NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bank Records Show Direct Monthly Payments from Hunter Biden’s Corporation to Joe Biden

Posted By on December 5th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bank-records-show-direct-monthly-payment-from-hunter-bidens-corporation-to-joe-biden/

A corporation owned and controlled by Hunter Biden made several direct monthly payments to President Biden beginning in 2018, according to bank records released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.

The subpoenaed bank records obtained by National Review reveal Owasco PC established a monthly payment of $1,380 to President Biden beginning in September 2018. The committee says the payments establish a direct benefit Biden received from his family’s foreign business dealings, despite Biden’s claims that he has never benefitted from or been involved in his son’s ventures.

“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” House Oversight chairman James Comer says in a new video detailing the findings. “At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes.”

Comer says the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”

“As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” the committee added in a press release.

It was unclear based on the bank records how many monthly payments were made, but a source familiar with the committee’s probe said investigators had discovered at least three payments.

Last week, the committee released an email from a bank money-laundering investigator who expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Witnesses Confirm Rape, Beheadings, ‘Systematic Genital Mutilation’ by Hamas By Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on December 5th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/witnesses-confirm-rape-beheadings-systematic-genital-mutilation-by-hamas/

‘Everything was an apocalypse of corpses,’ one official said, as Israel challenged the U.N.’s silence about Hamas’s crimes.
Witnesses to the brutal aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack presented new, graphic testimony about the group’s widespread use of rape, at a United Nations event today organized by Israel’s mission to the body — one of the most extensive public presentations on those, and other, atrocities yet.

This took place against the backdrop of a rapidly unfurling backlash against the U.N.’s laggard approach to acknowledging Hamas’s use of rape on October 7, with UN Women only condemning the assaults in a statement following public criticism and an interview in which an official struggled to unequivocally condemn the terrorist group. Last week, U.N. secretary-general António Guterres said in a statement on X that accounts of Hamas’s sexual violence need to be “vigorously investigated and prosecuted.”

Meanwhile, the Israeli authorities have deepened their investigation into sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the massacre. Hamas’s sexual crimes might also have played a role in its decision to break the cease-fire with Israel, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller saying today that Hamas appears have chosen not to hand over several female hostages because “they don’t want those women to be able to talk about what happened to them.”

During today’s event, individuals directly involved in tending to the bodies of Hamas victims gave testimony about their experiences, and Israeli officials played videos featuring interrogations of Hamas fighters who acknowledged that members of the group raped victims and an interview with a woman who witnessed rape at the Nova music festival.

Yael Richert, chief superintendent of the Israeli Police’s Lahav 433 unit, described some of the horrifying testimony that her colleagues have gathered so far. Referring to an interview with a survivor of the Nova music festival, she said: “Everything was an apocalypse of corpses. Girls without any clothes on . . . without underwear. People cut in half, butchered, some were beheaded.

“There were girls with a broken pelvis, due to repetitive rapes. Their legs were spread wide apart in a split.” Other survivors said that girls were pulled out of shelters, raped, then burned.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel-Hamas war: a US wake up call! Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on December 5th, 2023

https://bit.ly/3NbGIq2

“Those who experience wake up calls usually discover, in hindsight, that they had received plenty of warning before the poop hit the propeller, but they chose to disregard it…. Whether a wake up call becomes a boon, or a bane, depends on what you’re willing to learn from it, and whether you’re willing to be moved by experience.” (Greg Levoy, a psychologist and an author).

The US-Israel mutual threat of Islamic terrorism

Israel’s war against Hezbollah and Hamas is a wakeup call, highlighting the shared US-Israel war against Islamic terrorism. The latter considers Israel a US geo-strategic beachhead in the Middle East, that should be uprooted as a critical step toward the defeat of the Western “infidel.”

For example:   

*Hezbollah and Hamas are critical proxies of Iran, which funds, trains and supplies advanced ballistic and engineering hardware, aiming to realize its 1,400-year-old vision of toppling all “apostate” (Sunni) regimes, export the Islamic Shiite Revolution globally, and bring “the Great American Satan” to submission.

*Hamas was established in 1988 by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been dedicated since 1928 to the toppling of all national Islamic regimes, replacing them with a universal Islamic society, establishing Islam as the only, divinely-ordained, legitimate religion on earth, defeating the “infidel” Western culture and bringing down “the Great American Satan.”

*Securing a boon, rather than a bane, requires the uprooting of Hamas’ terroristic, political and educational infrastructure, which would deter anti-US Islamic terrorism. On the other hand, the survival of Hamas would adrenalize the veins of anti-US Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and beyond, afflicting the US with a bane.

Israel’s war highlights Iran’s terrorist nature  

*Heeding the October 7, 2023 wakeup call should trigger a US reassessment of its 44-year-old diplomatic option toward Iran, which has facilitated Iran’s lead role – operationally and financially – in the transformation of Hezbollah and Hamas (as well as a multitude of additional Islamic and non-Islamic terror organizations) into a most effective anti-US global terrorist network. The US diplomatic option has also bolstered the evolution of Iran into the leading regional and global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and proliferation of advanced military systems.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

You Probably Beat Harvard’s Moral IQ by Noah Beck

Posted By on December 5th, 2023

https://www.investigativeproject.org/9353/you-probably-beat-harvard-moral-iq

It’s never been easier to beat Harvard’s moral IQ, which has dropped to moronic levels since the Hamas massacre of October 7th. Thirty-one Harvard student groups promptly defended the Hamas atrocities, and the university came under fire for its tardy and weak response. When Harvard president Claudine Gay finally spoke with greater moral clarity, over 100 faculty members condemned her for it. Now Harvard will be federally investigated over claims of campus antisemitism.

The university’s president will have another opportunity to clarify Harvard’s position as she testifies tomorrow morning, December 5th, at 10:15am before the House committee on Education & the Workforce.

To see if you beat Harvard’s moral IQ, just take this quiz by indicating if one should PRAISE or CONDEMN the following (the correct answer appears after each question, so that you can score yourself).

1) 3,000 terrorists breach a sovereign border to murder over 1,000 people and abduct hundreds more, including countless elderly, women, and children (CONDEMN)

2) The terrorists incinerate babies, behead innumerable victims, burn entire communities, rape and murder women and then parade their mutilated bodies before cheering crowds (CONDEMN)

3) The above atrocities will cause even more civilian suffering because they will predictably provoke a justified and massive military response (CONDEMN)

Two “harder,” bonus questions:

1) Should any answer change if the victim is more privileged than the perpetrator? If you answer yes, then your wokeness has obliterated your moral IQ.

2) Should any answer change if the victim is Israeli and the perpetrator is Palestinian? If you answer yes, then you are an anti-Semite.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN and Hamas: Partners in Crime by Robert Williams

Posted By on December 4th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20192/united-nations-hamas

To understand how the UN effectively runs the Hamas propaganda war, it is important to know that the UN, through its agency for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is effectively embedded with Hamas in the Gaza Strip…

“The UN has 13,000 employees in tiny Gaza. They know exactly what’s going on… They all knew Hamas’ terror infrastructure was in the hospital compound, where Israel wouldn’t attack. They lied to the world for 16 years. To paint Israel as evil.” — Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, November 16, 2023.

[T]he UN has sustained an incessant campaign, especially on social media, that accuses Israel of deliberately targeting schools, children, civilians, hospitals and healthcare workers. While those are protected from attack during war by international law, that protection does not apply to schools, hospitals and other civilian sites that are used for military purposes.

When Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance in northern Gaza, which was being used by Hamas terrorists, [UN Secretary-General António] Guterres expressed that he was “horrified” with Israel’s action, while ignoring Hamas’s war crimes. In practice, the UN and Hamas act as partners in crime.

Above all, the UN’s transparent complicity with Hamas should convince the US, finally, that much of the UN is a destructive organization that prolongs wars, and needs immediately to have its funding decimated, and be reduced in importance to the corrupt relic that it is, deserving no place in this century.

Since October 7, when Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and massacred at least 1,200 and kidnapped another 240 Israelis and people of other nationalities, the United Nations has been acting as the unofficial propaganda arm of the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.

The propaganda campaign’s main aim – besides smearing Israel – appears to be to build overwhelming international pressure on Israel to agree to an indefinite ceasefire , which will give Hamas the needed time to regroup and replenish to continue its terrorist activities and to avoid being eliminated by the Israeli Defense Forces.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Weimar America We may be headed for a 1930s nightmare By Victor Davis Hanson *****

Posted By on December 4th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/04/weimar-america/

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee their safety from other students

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Making a silk purse from the crime-ridden rubble of ‘anti-racism’ By M.B. Mathews

Posted By on December 4th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/making_a_silk_purse_from_the_crimeridden_rubble_of_antiracism.html

Much has been said by many trying to excuse bad behavior. Inner cities have crime because… racism. Blue cities are dirty and noisy because… racism. White flight happens because… racism. Black unwed motherhood is on the rise and has become epidemic because… racism. No other reasons are given by black leadership for the failures of blacks to thrive except for… racism.

But racism does not account for these failures. Failure accounts for these failures: Failure to educate. Failure to instill a work ethic. Failure to be good and to do good. Failure to teach respect and good manners to young children. Failure to revere and promote healthy two-parent families. Failure to discourage sexual profligacy. Failure to demand excellence. Failure to reject profanity and embrace decency and honor. Instead, too many in the Black community have embraced the dysfunction within the Black culture with pride, claiming a unique historical experience that they say no one understands but other Black people.

It has been long enough making excuses for Black failures and it is past time for the respectable Black people of America to rise up against the jealous race-baiters and say “No more.” There is nothing preventing Black success that a Judeo-Christian perspective cannot address successfully. Love your neighbor means don’t steal, don’t do the crime. Be nice to each other. Respect the property and lives of others. Be on time (terribly unfashionable among “anti-racists”), work hard (ditto), have a plan to succeed, and above all get educated at a school that does not indoctrinate but educates, which excludes most urban government schools. Unasked-for advice: Do not respect, honor, or adopt the malignant principles of those who teach anti-white racism in the guise of Critical Race Theory, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, or “Anti-Racism” (anti-white racism with an oxymoronic name.)

When a group blames others, they will not succeed because they are always relying on those others to change. When the blamed ones don’t change, the professional victims believe that it’s perfectly okay to steal, cheat, lie, and break other people’s stuff in the name of reparations. That is not the path to success or to a better place in life, although it is a temporary frisson of schadenfreude.

Crime in Blue cities is off the charts because Soros-appointed district attorneys have banded together to excuse crime committed by Black perpetrators. This harms Black people first, then Black neighborhoods, Black aspirations and in itself is criminal. When you teach theft, you get theft. When you get theft, good businesses leave your neighborhood. When they do leave, they take the economic base with them, and who gets hurt? Innocent, freedom-loving, decent people get hurt because they’re often stuck there with the crime they tolerated. The raped businesses will leave and set up shop where they are welcomed.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The New Antisemitism Is the Oldest Kind This isn’t the midcentury ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ variety. It’s the return of pure hatred of the Jews. Lance Morrow

Posted By on December 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-antisemitism-is-the-oldest-kind-israel-gaza-college-campus-protest-d29bb68a?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

I remember a dinner party on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1970s when I and my first wife, who was Jewish, shared lobster with a half-dozen nicely tanned Protestants in sherbet-colored golfing trousers. They chattered about what pests “those people” were, who kept “pushing” to join the local beach club, even though they were “not wanted.”

“Gee,” said a middle-aged Princeton man—pronouncing the word “jay”—“why don’t they stick to their own clubs?”

My then-wife and I left the party early, and in the car she burst into tears.

How innocent the moment seems. That was the postwar “Gentleman’s Agreement” version of American antisemitism—gentiles relaxing up-island, on their fourth glass of Chablis. The word “Jew” wasn’t mentioned. In the Martha’s Vineyard iteration—post-Auschwitz—American antisemitism often had a discreetly covert quality. It emerged from a kind of sly politesse because, after all, everyone at some time or other had seen the films from the Nazi camps—the ones that Gen. Eisenhower had ordered his troops to watch. In Elia Kazan’s 1947 movie based on the Laura Hobson novel “Gentleman’s Agreement,” desk clerks fidget and look away when Gregory Peck, as a journalist pretending to be Jewish, pushes them about renting a room.

America’s antisemites in those days were more fools than monsters. With exceptions—Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, et al.—their antisemitism seemed more snobbery than hate crime. It wasn’t political, programmatic or fanatical. One evening in 1918, Eleanor Roosevelt (of all people) came home from a Washington dinner party for the financier Bernard Baruch and wrote to her mother-in-law that “the Jew party was appalling.”

The antisemitism that has poured forth onto the country’s streets and campuses in the autumn of 2023 is a different thing—a reversion to a politics of aggressive, unapologetic hate. The ominous historical regression at work in the latest Jew-hatred takes up the themes of the mid-1930s, the spirit of Hitler’s brown shirts and Kristallnacht. Of course, the new Jew-haters—especially young people on campuses—think of themselves as perfectly virtuous. What is a thousand times worse, they think of their Jew-hatred as righteous. It’s morally fashionable among them.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Private Jets Headed To Global Warming Conference “Literally Frozen On Runway”by Tyler Durden

Posted By on December 4th, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/private-jets-headed-global-warming-conference-literally-frozen-runway

While world leaders spoke at a ‘global warming’ conference in Dubai, located in the heart of the Arabian Desert, discussing the usual: banning gas stoves, cow farts, and petrol-powered vehicles, a powerful snowstorm grounded all flights at Munich Airport in Germany. 

“Private jets in Munich on the way to Dubai global warming conference are literally frozen on the runway, which has turned into a glacier,” said Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former NOAA chief scientist. 

If world leaders actually believed in global warming, they would’ve not flown private jets to the desert. Furthermore,  having a global warming conference in an area where it snows is just bad optics for these virtue-signaling elites. 

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

What Is Campus Life Like for a Jewish Zionist Student? A guest essay by Maya Rackoff

Posted By on December 3rd, 2023

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/what-is-campus-life-like-for-a-jewish?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2From Glenn Loury

Almost daily, we see images and read news stories about the effect of the Gaza War on college campuses. The dynamics of those stories vary from campus to campus—every university has its own particular student culture and its own administrative response. For an outsider, it can be difficult to understand the complex social dynamics at work beneath the protests and rallies. The opposing demonstrators and counter-demonstrators know each other and may even consider each other friends. They have classes together, live in the same dorms, and eat in the same dining halls. And yet, when the placards are raised and the chants begin, they often level accusations at each other that would seem to make friendship, or even peaceful coexistence, impossible going forward.

My intern, Maya Rackoff, is a student at Brown, where I teach. She is a proud and open Jewish Zionist, an identification that, at this famously liberal school, comes with a social price, despite the fact that she is deeply sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Palestinians. I wanted to know how she is navigating campus life now that her beliefs and identity are at the forefront of world events, and students like her often feel demonized and scapegoated. She wrote this essay in response. It offers an insider’s account of one of the many ways that the Gaza War is altering life here in the US.

A Sense of Paralysis for Jewish Zionist Students

by Maya Rackoff

I am a junior at Brown University majoring in history. I’m originally from New York City, where I grew up immersed in the Upper West Side Jewish community. At Brown, I’ve become very involved in our Hillel, the primary center for Jewish student engagement on college campuses.

I am truly scared about the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, and I worry about my safety whenever I am in the Hillel building. Before October 7, I walked around the building with ease. Now, the building is monitored by more security guards than ever, and I worry each time I see someone unfamiliar. I especially fear the days when there are pro-Palestinian rallies on our main green, in which hundreds of students verbally intimidate Zionist and Israeli students.