NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Democracy Dies In Darkness’? Dems Overwhelmingly Back Big Tech/Gov’t Censorship: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/22/democracy-dies-in-darkness-dems-overwhelmingly-back-big-tech-govt-censorship-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans have come to realize that being online can mean having your speech rights curtailed. But that doesn’t mean they like it. Indeed, they mostly oppose the idea, in particular when it’s Big Tech and Big Government censoring together, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll.

With growing complaints over online censorship, the online national I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Nov. 1-3, asked 1,400 respondents the following question: “Do you approve or disapprove of Big Tech companies working with federal agencies to engage in online censorship?”

For most people, the answer is negative. Of those who responded, 43% say they either disapproved of government and large tech and social media firms cooperating with each other to curb Americans’ speech “strongly” (26%) or “somewhat” (17%).

By comparison, 36% say they approve of it “strongly” (18%) or “somewhat” (18%). A significantly large group, 22%, say they were “not sure.”

The poll has a +/-2.7 percentage point margin of error.

But, the relative closeness of the response is deceptive. When broken down by demographics and political affiliation, surprisingly sharp differences between and within different groups emerge.

Start with politics. Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Big Tech and Big Government censoring online content, 57% “approve” to just 25% “disapprove.”

Compare that with Republicans, who are almost exactly the opposite of the Dems in their response: 26% “approve,” vs. 54% “disapprove.” Similarly, independents “approve” by just 21%, while they “disapprove” by 52%. Republicans and independents are nearly identical, while Democrats are the outlier.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Israel-Hamas Hostage Deal Innocents will be freed, but the terrorists get a chance to regroup.

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-hostage-deal-gaza-51e141eb?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The hostage deal that Israel and Hamas reached Tuesday will spare the lives of some 50 Israelis, and that is a great relief to the innocents and their families. The cost is a short-term cease-fire that Hamas will exploit, and three-quarters of the 236 hostages will remain in terrorist hands.

Israeli leaders believe the trade is worth it, and it’s not our place to second-guess their judgment. In exchange for returning Israeli children and women, 12 or 13 a day, Hamas is set to receive a four-day pause in Israeli military operations and the release of about 150 of its under-18 and female operatives from Israeli prisons.

During the cease-fire, Israel will allow more fuel and aid into Gaza. The pause might also extend longer if Hamas gives up more hostages, 10 for each additional day.

The deal again shows the moral gulf between the two sides. Hamas kidnapped Israeli children as young as nine months to use as hostages and spring its jihadists who have been arrested or convicted in a fair trial for their crimes. Israel takes military risks to save its citizens. Hamas risks Palestinian civilians to save itself.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Cabinet Approves Landmark Hostage Swap with Hamas By Ryan Mills

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hamas-close-to-reaching-deal-with-israel-to-release-hostages-terror-group-chief-says/

The Israeli government approved the transfer of roughly 50 civilian hostages currently held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday night.

While precise aspects of the deal have yet to be officially publicized, it is expected that at least a dozen Israeli hostages will be released over four days. In exchange, Israel has agreed to release Palestinian women and minors currently held in prison, and figures range from more than 400 to as low as 150. The Jewish state further agreed to accept a four-day cease-fire and to allow considerably more humanitarian aid, including fuel, into the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The vote came after tense internal negotiations within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration. “Do you trust [Yahya] Sinwar more than us?” Israeli minister Benny Gantz reportedly pointedly asked finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, an opponent of the hostage swap, referring to the Hamas mastermind allegedly behind the October 7 attacks.

“We are not united,” national-security minister Itamar Ben Gvir pushed back on one Likud cabinet member pleading for consensus. “This is a decision with generational damage that will come back to hurt us badly.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Hamas leaders acknowledged they were “close to reaching a truce agreement” with Israel, the Palestinian terrorist group’s chief Ismail Haniyeh said in a statement provided to Reuters. The agreement is in its “final stages,” and a deal is “closer than it has ever been,” a source familiar with the negotiations told the wire service.

As part of the deal, Hamas would release at least 50 women and children who were kidnapped during the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7. In exchange, Israel would pause its fighting in the Gaza Strip for four or five days and release three Palestinian prisoners for every Israeli civilian released, according to multiple news outlets.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Argentina’s first ‘Jewish’ president? Milei wins decisive victory By David Isaac

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

https://www.jns.org/argentinas-first-jewish-president-milei-wins-decisive-victory/

Argentina’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, won a resounding victory on Sunday on promises to save the country’s crumbling economy. But Jewish issues, too, are close to his heart.

“I am thinking about converting to Judaism and I aspire to become the first Jewish president in Argentine history,” Milei has said, according to Argentina’s Radio Perfil.

He promises to move the Argentinian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to make the Jewish state his first international stop as president.

Milei, an iconoclastic outsider who entered politics in 2020 vowing to “blow up” the system, won by 56% to 44% against his rival, Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa.

Milei makes no secret of his philo-semitism, which appears to have made little difference with the Argentinian electorate, despite its being 92% Catholic. (Jews make up less than 1% of the population, though at 200,000 it is the largest Jewish population in Latin America.)

He told La Nacion, “I don’t go to church. I go to synagogue. I don’t follow a priest. I follow my rabbi. I learn Torah. I’m known internationally as a friend of Israel. And as someone who learns Torah, I’m almost Jewish. I’m just missing the ‘blood covenant.’”

He took the stage at his rock concert-like election rallies—as a teenager, Milei was the vocalist for a Rolling Stones cover band—to the sound of a shofar. At one rally in August, an image of a Jew dressed in a tallit, or prayer shawl, was projected onto a giant screen as the shofar sounded.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Georgetown Teams with Islamist Magazine to Whitewash Hamas, Deride Israeli Deaths by Andrew E. Harrod

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

https://www.newenglishreview.org/georgetown-teams-with-islamist-magazine-to-whitewash-hamas-deride-israeli-deaths/

Israel’s current military campaign to destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip exhibits “blood lust,” stated Mouin Rabbani, coeditor of the Arab Studies Institute’s (ASI) Islamist webzine Jadaliyya, during a recent Georgetown University presentation. Sponsored by Georgetown’s Saudi-established Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), “Israel-Gaza War: A Conversation with Mouin Rabbani” presented Rabbani’s Gaza ravings as fact.

As was visible in the event video, Rabbani addressed an audience in the conference room of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), another event sponsor with faculty that share his anti-Israel views. ACMCU’s new director, Rabbani’s fellow Israel-conspiracy-monger Nader Hashemi, moderated. The Qatari-affiliated Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) think tank, where Hashemi is listed as an expert, also sponsored Rabbani’s talk.

Rabbani described as pure revenge killings Israel’s rooting out of Hamas jihadists from their urban, largely underground hideouts following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. “Israeli public opinion was so outraged” that “Israeli leadership is kind of trying to make good on this by ensuring that many more Palestinians are killed than Israelis were killed on October 7,” he stated. “Flattening entire neighborhoods” is not “in any way significantly degrading actual military capabilities,” he added, as if Israel could avoid harming civilians whom Hamas deliberately exploits as human shields. Israel, he said, is committing “systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Palestinians suffering under Israel’s self-defense actions, not the Jewish and other Israeli citizens butchered by Hamas’s October 7 onslaught, were to Rabbani as the real victims. He bemoaned the “demonization and delegitimization and dehumanization and outright repression of pro-Palestinian sentiment.” He complained of “selective outrage” when comparing Palestinian civilian deaths in combat, which Israel strives hard to avoid, with the Israelis mercilessly targeted by Hamas terror.

“When Palestinians are killed, we take an analytical approach; when Israelis are killed, the criteria is morality,” Rabbani stated. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “broke down on TV like a baby” after having examined images of Hamas’s ravaged victims, Rabbani callously noted, “a blubbering baby, for God’s sake.” Yet when Kirby later answered questions about civilian casualties from Israeli military operations, “all of a sudden he’s a tough guy, war is hell, civilians die, get over it. Ok, are you Jekyll or Hyde?” Rabbani sneered.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Mainstreaming Of Antisemitism in Our Public Schools Eric Levine

Posted By on November 22nd, 2023

NO URL

One need look no further than my hometown of Chappaqua, New York and its public school district (CCSD) to better understand why there has been a spike of antisemitism on our college campuses and in communities across the country following Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack against Israel.  As CCSD’s Superintendent of Schools, Christine Ackerman has made clear, when it comes to teaching Middle East history and confronting the unprecedented spike of antisemitism, CCSD is a “safe space” for antisemitism, moral equivalence, and fact free history. 

Recently, 450 residents of Chappaqua whose children either attend or have attended the town’s public schools, sent a letter to the CCSD asking it to address the alarming rise of antisemitic incidents in the Chappaqua schools and the scourge of anti-Jewish hatred in the community in the wake of “the horrific massacre in Israel on October 7” (attached, although the names of the signatories are redacted for confidentiality).  In response, CCSD put together a Webinar it claimed was designed to address the parents’ concerns. 

Following the Webinar, Ackerman sent a letter to the CCSD community “to share the feedback…that we’ve received from the recent Middle East webinar and BOE meeting public comment period, along with our proposed plan to address the concerns and questions raised by parents.” (The full text of Ackerman’s letter follows this essay below).  The letter reads like a dystopian litany of Orwellian Newspeak. 

It is difficult to know if Ackerman is obtuse, ignorant, or malevolent.  Whichever it is, she must resign or be fired immediately.  She is not qualified to have any role in educating our children and her salary is waste of my tax dollars. 

Not once does she mention the word “antisemitism” or the date October 7 in text of her letter.  It is not until she itemizes the “Middle East Webinar & Community Feedback” that the word  “antisemitism” is mentioned.  By relegating “antisemitism” to the feedback and not raising it as a concern in the body of her letter, she makes clear that the rise in antisemitism is a concern she does not share.  For her, this is merely an exercise in quieting some unhappy taxpayers. 

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Curious Case of Rob Malley by Peter Schweizer

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20166/rob-malley

More bad news for Malley emerged recently when a large cache of Iranian government correspondence and emails was revealed by Semafor and Iran International. In email exchanges between Iranian Foreign Ministry officials working under the supposedly moderate then President Hassan Rouhani, they congratulate each other for the public success of what they called the “Iran Experts Initiative (IEI),” a propaganda effort they created back in 2014, and reportedly “funded and directed by an IRGC official…

The IEI cultivated a network of sympathetic academics and intellectuals “with the aim of shaping political and public opinion as the Iranian government, then led by Hassan Rouhani, pursued a nuclear deal with the U.S.”

Other former officials told the Daily Caller that Malley and a previous advisor of his, Ariane Tabatabai, who holds a senior, security clearance level job at the Defense Department, are “compromised” and had no place running Washington’s Iran policy.

Tabatabai is still employed at the Pentagon where, noted the investigative reporter Lee Smith, “she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier… Tabatabai’s emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic.”

“The contents of the emails,” wrote Lee Smith, “are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime….

Tabatabai still has high-level security clearance and access to classified information. The FBI has reportedly “refused to remove her.” So, while Israel fights for its existence, a genocidal Iran is using three of its proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen — Tabatabai, who according to Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), “had the mission of influencing U.S. policymakers to agree with what the Iranian government wanted,” may be sending classified information about planned U.S. and Israeli military moves back to Iran…. What could possibly go wrong?

[The] use of the term “cosmopolitan” here hits on a core tenet of New Left ideology, where concern for one’s own country is seen as jingoism, and the welfare of other nations, even those openly hostile to the US, occupies the highest priority.

How was [Ms. Tabatabai’s] “top level security clearance” approved and why is she still employed in a senior position at the Pentagon?

[T]he case of Rob Malley indicates a deeper rot in our politics…. [Malley] is far closer to those Ivy League professors currently tweeting gleefully in favor of… the terrorist group Hamas, just to cite the most current example.

It is a wonder Malley ever passed a background check in the first place.

BOOKS Comments turned off

DECEPTION- BY RAND PAUL

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

Senator Rand Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding previously unimaginable power, Fauci misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

One of the few leaders who dared to challenge “America’s Doctor” was Senator Rand Paul, himself a physician. Deception is his indictment of the catastrophic failures of the public health bureaucracy during the pandemic.

Senator Paul presents the evidence that:

The Covid virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China—research funded in part by the U.S. government.
Taxpayer dollars for that research were deceptively funneled to Wuhan without the required regulatory review.
Fauci and his scientific yes-men knew from day one about Covid’s origin and tried to cover it up.
Fauci and his allies ruthlessly attacked everyone—including highly qualified scientists—who threatened to reveal the truth about the pandemic.

Why? Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants and unreported royalties were at stake, and heads would roll if the truth got out.

It almost worked. At Fauci’s insistence, the government imposed needlessly extreme lockdowns on Americans at the cost of immense personal and economic destruction.

Covid-19 was deadly, but the real killer was the coverup, led by America’s most durable medical bureaucrat—a man for whom the truth was too often expendable.

Senator Paul makes a powerful case that funding dangerous bioengineering in a totalitarian country is madness. If we don’t heed this warning, the next pandemic could be far worse.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

More anti-Semitism from Columbia U. By Bill Levinson

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/more_antisemitism_from_columbia_u.html

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has issued a statement that reads:

“Columbia University Apartheid Divest is a coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” Good, please have your female and LGBT members go over to Gaza and see just how “liberated” they are in that environment.
“Israel is bombing hospitals, schools, and homes while cutting off food, water, medicine, and electricity to the more than two million Palestinians in Gaza, half of whom are children.” Hospitals, schools, and homes lose their protected status under the Geneva and Hague Conventions when used for military purposes. This means that Apartheid Divest is intentionally trying to obfuscate Hamas’ war crimes.
“We have previously refused to focus on concerns pertaining to free speech, academic freedom, and student safety on campus, as they distract from Israel’s actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.” This is an application of Joseph Goebbels’ advice to accuse the other side of that which your own side is guilty, as the only genocide was the one attempted by Hamas on October 7.

Here is the list of student organizations that signed this material. Although the names of the student officers are not available, those of the faculty advisors are. If those advisors are not comfortable with the content of this letter, they are free to distance themselves from the organizations in question.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald at Restoration: When Race Trumps Merit What Critical Race Theory has done to the West – while China rises on merit.

Posted By on November 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/heather-macdonald-at-restoration-when-race-trumps-merit/

If anybody’s surprised by the depravity, the moral depravity that’s been coming out of American institutions, educational institutions for the last three weeks, may I say, on behalf of David Horowitz, I told you so. For decades, David has warned that the universities had become the purveyor of lies, not the seeker of truth. David has warned that Islamism and its intersectional variants was becoming as ingrained in academic life as the classical canon once was. And that was a very long time ago in a golden era. The lie currently before us is that it is Israel that is the rights violator in the Middle East. Well, we can test this easily enough. Try holding a gay pride march in Gaza.

Vast swatches of the professoriate and administrators believe that four-year-olds should be told about the fun that awaits them if they declare themselves members of the opposite sex. Well, again, try that in a madrassas and see how far you get. Timeless antisemitism plays a large role in the disgusting spectacle of pro-Hamas demonstrations that we’ve been seeing on college campuses and in city streets. But something more recent and bigger is also at play, and that is hatred towards the Judeo-Christian civilization and a will to self cancelation on the part of elite members of that civilization; that hatred towards the West has become the primary export of the American University into the world at large. This morning I’m going to speak about a key falsehood that emanates from the self-annihilation of the West, and that is the claim that any racial disparity in any institution is by definition the result of racism and white supremacy. This claim has been percolating in American universities for a long time, but after the George Floyd race riots, it became a universal charge among elite institutions from big law to big business to big stem. Museums, conservatories, orchestras, scientific journals, criminal justice leaders all loudly took up the charge that any racial disparity is the product of discrimination against blacks.

Let me give you some examples. Medicine, if any medical school does not have 13% black medical students and 13% black professors, it is by definition a racist medical school. Cancer research labs, alzheimer’s research labs—if they don’t have 13% black oncologists or black neurologists, they’re racist labs. Gifted and talented programs, those of you from the West know about shutting down, getting rid of the exams in Lowell High School. We’ve seen this in Thomas Jefferson, New York City; Stuyvesant is facing a constant charge: it’s racist because its student bodies are not 13% black. This is a long standing one coming up: the teachers licensing exam, police licensing exam, firing of fire departments. If they don’t have 13% black members, they are racist. I’ve been talking about underrepresentation. The same argument applies with overrepresentation above all else in the criminal justice system. If blacks make up more than 13% of our prison population, that’s because the criminal justice system is by definition racist. If blacks are more than 13% of students in high school and in grammar schools who are disciplined for insubordination, for violence, that is because teachers hilariously the most liberal profession in the country, are racist against black students.

So what is the solution in the eyes of the elites to these criminal and racist disparities? It is to throw out the standards, the color-blind standards that are resulting in the lack of disparities. Medical schools: after the second year of medical school students take something called Step one of the U.S. medical licensing exam. Well, step 1 did not have proportional numbers of people scoring well. Because of academic mismatch, because of racial preferences, black medical students were at the bottom of the step 1 score scale. So what do we do? We get rid of grades. We decided last year that we would no longer grade step 1 of the medical licensing exam, but go to a pass-fail basis so that residents choosing their residencies after the second year would not know where students stood on the academic curve. The MCATs, the standardized exams to get into medical school, they have already been rejiggered to try to reduce disparate impact. A quarter of the questions now deal with social issues, with psychology. It has not worked. Black college seniors are still at the absolute bottom of the MCAT scores. So what we’re doing now in many schools is that we’re waiving MCAT submissions for black college seniors applying to medical schools.