ISRAEL Comments turned off

Security group to IDF: Take tougher stand against refusal to serve David Isaac

Posted By on August 17th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/idf/23/8/14/310395/

An interview with Israel Defense and Security Forum CEO IDF Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

The issue of Israel Defense Force reservists refusing to serve for political reasons again made headlines on Sunday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoning for an “urgent” meeting the heads of Israel’s security establishment for an overview of the military’s operational readiness.

The meeting was sparked by an earlier one on Friday led by Israeli Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Tomer Bar, who told a group of pilots and officers that the damage the country’s political turmoil is doing to military preparedness will grow “deeper and deeper as time goes by.”

Those refusing to serve are protesting against the government’s judicial reform effort. They say the plan will turn Israel into a dictatorship and that they are therefore justified in taking extreme measures, including breaking a long held, unspoken rule that politics and the military don’t mix.

Opponents say the current political situation is no excuse for overturning that understanding and that doing so undermines military cohesiveness. Once politics enters the army, they warn, there will be constant friction as there always will be some group unhappy about one or another government policy.

Some say the IDF has treated the refusal phenomenon with kid gloves and have allowed it to gain momentum by not speaking loudly enough against it.

The Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group comprising thousands of former security officers, has pulled together former chiefs-of-staff from both sides of the political spectrum to condemn refusals.

IDSF’s CEO and founder Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi recently spoke with JNS.

Q: What is your message to the IDF?

A: We have been talking extensively to the army and the chief of staff. Everybody agrees: This phenomenon in which people don’t volunteer, carry out insubordination, even to a certain extent mutiny—at the end of the day, it endangers Israel. It endangers our deterrence. It endangers our readiness.

We asked a simple question. These people who are doing all of this: Who are they? Are they tragic heroes? Or are they people who’ve lost sight of basic values and are undermining the army? And we’re saying to the army: The way you’re handling this, it seems that these people are being portrayed as tragic heroes.

We think that the army should have been crystal clear: Somebody who undermines the army’s deterrence, the cohesiveness of the army—a hero he is not.

I would have expected the chief of staff from day one to say this is something we’re not willing to accept. It’s politicizing the army. Anyone who politicizes the army is doing harm. It goes completely against our values. It’s terrible and it’s hurting us.

Q: Why does the army seem to have such a hard time saying that?

A: Take a real-world example. There’s an Air Force guy who’s 61 years old. He’s been volunteering for two decades at Air Force headquarters. He’s extremely experienced. He’s somebody who has been there since the age of 18. He announces he won’t volunteer anymore. What do you say to him? The army can’t say ‘you have no values.’”

Q: Couldn’t the army show compassion one-on-one and still condemn the phenomenon in public?

A: When I was a young platoon commander taking my first steps as a leader, the first thing I learned is the difference between what happens when you stand in front of the whole platoon and what happens when you stand before one soldier. Before the group, you have to be strong and tough and clear. Before an individual, you really need to be able to speak heart-to-heart and connect. So what you’re saying is true. You can do both. You can be empathetic and show appreciation on a personal level. But you must be emphatic in front of the whole unit, or the public. You must be very clear about values.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can it happen here? The lessons of Europe’s red-green antisemitic surge Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on August 17th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/antisemitism/european-antisemitism/23/8/16/311333/?_se=Y

America isn’t Europe. That’s the key thing to bear in mind when reading the Anti-Defamation League’s sobering report on “Antisemitism and Radical Anti-Israel Bias on the Political Left in Europe,” published last week.

Some parallels can be drawn between the way a bizarre and troubling red-green alliance between leftist elites and Muslim immigrants has mainstreamed antisemitism in Europe and the growing influence of the intersectional left in the United States with the same aims. Americans should be paying close attention to the rising tide of Jew-hatred on the other side of the Atlantic and seeking to learn from it. But it’s important to remember the big differences between the two situations. More than that, the ADL’s policy recommendations stemming from its research don’t adequately alert Americans to the forces that are working toward the same dismal surge in antisemitism.

The first thing to recognize about this subject is that antisemitism is not an integral part of the history or the official policies of the United States, unlike the nations of the Old World. Equally true, the majority of Americans are likelier to be philo-semitic and pro-Israel in numbers that are not to be found in Europe. Still, important lessons may be learned from the subject of the ADL report.

While nothing in the study is particularly new, it confirms the way political parties and activists have embraced anti-Zionism, and the way that has inevitably sparked a new wave of hatred for Jews on the continent. Focusing on the state of affairs in four countries—the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Spain—it provides a generally accurate and worrying evaluation of the predicament for Jews that resulted from the left’s adoption of the Palestinian cause that has enabled the legitimization of attitudes and action that undermines the Jewish community and spreads intolerance.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism

While all of these countries are different, the parties of the left in each have shown themselves vulnerable to co-optation by anti-Israel ideologues. They dominate public discourse about Israel and help create an atmosphere in which Jewish activism is treated as inherently racist.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Climate For Absolute Power- The Democrats Are Using “Climate Crisis” as a Means to Establish Unfettered Power.

Posted By on August 17th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/17/a-climate-for-absolute-power/

How do we know that Joe Biden has made a verbal blunder? His lips were moving. There are so many slip-ups and absurdities coming out of his mouth that it’s hard to keep up. But one recent gaffe stands out: The president said last week during an interview with the Weather Channel that he had already “practically speaking” declared a climate emergency.

He of course hasn’t, but should he or another president do so, they would in effect also be declaring themselves to be an American kaiser who could issue tyrannical edicts with absolute power. They would be able to autocratically “deploy around 130 different powers,” says Climate Depot’s Marc Morano.

Operating under emergency climate powers, a president could halt “the export of crude oil … phase out all exports and imports of fossil fuels entirely … stop issuing permits for offshore oil and gas wells under already existing leases and halt all drilling immediately … marshaling funding under the DPA to deploy clean energy – for example, rooftop solar installations on low-income housing,” according to Morano.

He, or she, could also implement lockdowns similar to those forced on us during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s a truly frightening proposition. Worse than one-party rule, it would be one-man rule.

Which means that the green-on-the-outside, red-on-the-inside radicals are giddy over the proposition even as they feel Biden’s rhetoric is running too far ahead of his actions.

“Activists say nothing short of an emergency declaration will address deadly heat – and the fossil fuel dependency driving it,” gushes Grist, the “Pravda version of the Whole Earth Catalog.” They would be happy to see Biden “divert billions of dollars from the military toward constructing renewable energy projects.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Inflation Reduction Act Flim-Flam Biden touts it, though it has killed jobs and spurred inflation. By Steven Law

Posted By on August 17th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-reduction-act-bidenomics-ira-2024-president-cost-of-living-energy-jobs-unemployment-fossil-fuel-318d577f?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

It isn’t surprising that President Biden is marking the Inflation Reduction Act’s first anniversary by traveling the country trying to convince voters that the law is working and the economy is getting better. Good luck to him.

A recent CNN poll found Americans still consider the economy the most pressing issue facing the country. More than half of Americans think the economy is bad and getting worse, and only 37% approve of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy. Just 30% approve of his handling of inflation.

That doesn’t augur well for the credibility of Democrats and the legislation Mr. Biden promised would “reduce inflation at the kitchen table” and kick-start new economic growth. Every Democrat in Congress supported the bill. It should doom them in 2024.

Republicans must aggressively articulate what is wrong with the legislation. The most obvious point: After a year, the legislation hasn’t reduced inflation. Food and consumer costs are increasing again. Rent is going up too. Even Mr. Biden conceded that the title is a misnomer, telling donors at a fundraiser, “I wish I hadn’t called it that.”

His administration has admitted the act could cost Americans their jobs. Brian Anderson, executive director of the administration’s interagency working group on energy communities, says the law will hit workers in the fossil-fuel industry especially hard.

The fossil-fuel industry supports nearly 100,000 jobs in West Virginia and more than 350,000 in Ohio, two states critical to control of the Senate. Yet Mr. Anderson told the New York Times, “We’re standing right at the cusp of potentially still leaving them behind again.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Florida’s Education Triumph The state has established new standards that emphasize traditional learning in schools. By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller

Posted By on August 17th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/floridas-education-triumph-woke-schooling-teachers-unions-dues-textbooks-students-afc26028?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization to impart contextual literacy rather than abstract, content-free reading strategies. This change will have positive effects in teacher training: If familiarity with the Western canon becomes a prerequisite for teaching, education schools will have to emphasize traditional learning.

The Florida Education Association, the state’s biggest union, opposes the new standards for not teaching students “uncomfortable truths” about racism. Anticipating the push-back, Mr. DeSantis sought to gain teachers’ confidence in his reforms by distinguishing between them and their union. His administration has fully implemented paycheck protection, requiring written consent from employees before union dues are deducted from their paychecks, and he has granted teachers unprecedented pay increases—salaries statewide now average about $50,000—to win support. Only 22 of the 67 countywide teacher unions won the 60% approval necessary to gain federal certification in 2023. The number of teacher-union members in Florida decreased by at least 4,500 through 2020-21, the fourth-highest loss in the nation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Race Against the Truth What is the long-term Democrat strategy that requires such short-term malodorous skullduggery? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 16th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/14/joe-bidens-race-against-the-truth/

Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician—if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?

Joe Biden’s serial yarn that he never knew anything about his son Hunter’s quid pro quo grifting with rich foreign grandees has been finally exposed as the old lie it always was.

Biden’s fallback untruth—that he never got involved in Hunter’s business—proved instantly laughable, given prior damning testimonies from Hunter’s business associates, from IRS whistleblowers, from the assertions of foreign beneficiaries, from Hunter’s own laptop, and from Joe’s own earlier loudmouth braggadocio about using threats of canceling U.S. foreign aid to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption of the sort in which his own son was knee deep. (Did not then president Barack Obama know the nature of Biden corruption when he appointed him as point man on Ukraine)?

To his partners in corruption, Hunter referred to his father variously as the “big guy” as well as the recipient of “ten percent” of the leveraged income. And apparently as a rather greedy pop, Hunter whined that Joe himself demanded half of all Hunter’s own shake-down income from abroad—despite Hunter’s payment of many of Joe’s monthly bills incurred on his palatial lakeshore mansion.

At some point, even the corrupt leftwing media and DNC cannot continue to laugh off eyewitness testimonies, whistleblowers’ revelations, bank records, Hunter Biden’s own computer messaging, Joe Biden’s phone calls and personal appearances, and the evidence from foreign beneficiaries.

And then there is simply the power of reason and logic.

Over the last five years of this hushed-up tawdry saga, Americans knew immediately that Joe Biden was lying in all his denials of any involvement whatsoever in the procurement of a large part of his income from abroad simply because no one in the entire Biden family had any business, investment, or energy expertise. In other words, as grifters without Joe, the Bidens had zero market value.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The West’s Long Demonization of Israel Shameful moral idiocy and cowardice. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on August 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wests-long-demonization-of-israel/

Joe Biden recently spoke out on the terrorist violence afflicting Israel, particularly in the refugee camp in Jenin, currently controlled by Iranian surrogates. Sourcing the violence to vague “extremists”––the West’s go-to euphemism for hiding the widespread popularity of such attacks among Palestinian Arabs––our titular president then pulled out another duplicitous evasion by blaming Israel’s political “extremists” on the right. At the same time, he refused to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington until he was pressured to do so. These are just a small sampling of Biden’s hostility to Israel.

The implied moral equivalence between murderers and their victims has for decades been a sign of the West’s shameful moral idiocy and cowardice when it comes to Israel. Biden’s latest commentary follows his school-marmish scolding of Israel for its ruling party’s attempts to reform the overpowerful judiciary. This sort of intrusion into an ally’s domestic politics is common when it comes to Israel, but seldom expressed by the administration with the same rudeness when it comes to calling out our sworn enemies like Iran and China.

Once again, we see the wages of decades of a fossilized foreign policy with its stale narratives and serial failures. Only now the stakes for Israel and the region are much higher: Iran, an enemy sworn to “wiping Israel off the map,” is dangerously close to possessing nuclear weapons. In addition, they continue to transfer missiles and drones to Israel’s enemies like Hezbollah, hosted by hostile neighboring Lebanon.

Indeed, just a few days ago, Israel’s IDF estimated that Hezbollah could fire 6000 missiles in the first few days of a conflict, and even after Israel’s retaliation, could still rain down 1500 a day––existential risks facilitated by the Democrats’ feckless obsession with returning to Obama’s disastrous “nuclear deal” with the mullahs, and its danegeld they’ve used to finance these weapons.

But the failures of our foreign policy in the region go back to Israel’s violent birth in 1948, when Harry Truman had to override the foreign policy establishment–– “those stripe-pants boys, the boys with the Ha-vud accents,” as he sneered at the time–– in order to recognize the new state.

One of the biggest failed solutions, and the most thoroughly repudiated by history, has been the “two states living side-by-side in peace” diplomatic magical thinking.

Just give the Palestinians their own state, we’ve been told decade after decade, which would require removing the Israeli “settlers” (a sly slur evoking the Boers of apartheid South Africa) from historically Jewish Judea and Samaria, now camouflaged as the West Bank, and peace will bloom throughout the region. But extremists on both sides, the narrative goes, and especially Israeli policies are preventing this solution from being implemented.

This clichéd interpretation of the conflict and its solution is dangerously deluded. It assumes that a majority of the Palestinian Arabs really want a Palestinian state––something that could have been created before 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan, or with the five subsequent offers of a state, all summarily rejected. And don’t forget, Israel evacuated Gaza and turned it over to the genocidal Hamas in 2005. Instead of peace, Israel reaped thousands of missiles attacking its civilians.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Is This The Most Asinine Sentence Ever Written About ‘Climate Change’?

Posted By on August 16th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/16/is-this-the-dumbest-sentence-ever-written-about-climate-change/

In reporting on a Montana case in which a judge ruled that the state had to include the climate effect of oil and gas permits before deciding on them, the Associated Press showed just how brain-dead the discussions of “global warming” have become.

District Court Judge Kathy Seeley ruled in favor of several young plaintiffs – ranging in age from 5 to 22 – saying they “have a fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, which includes climate as part of the environmental-support system.”

As proof of the harm the plaintiffs are suffering, the order has a list of horribles that includes:

“Olivia expressed despair due to climate change.”
“Badge is anxious when he thinks about the future that he, and his potential children, will inherit.”
“Grace … is anxious about climate change.”
“Mica gets frustrated when he is required to stay indoors during the summer because of wildfire smoke.”

(Perhaps the judge should have ruled against the adults who are filling these poor children’s minds with climate alarmist fantasies, but that’s another story.)

The ruling was heralded by the likes of Julia Olson, executive director of the Oregon-based Our Children’s Trust, which has filed similar lawsuits in other states, who said: “Today’s ruling in Montana is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.”

(Apparently, after “global warming,” and “climate change,” and “climate crisis” failed to move the needle, the left is trying out “climate chaos.”)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Prime Minister Shtayyeh’s Straight-Faced Lies to Official US Delegations by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on August 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19888/palestinian-prime-minister-shtayyeh-lies

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has shown that he can include two lies in one short sentence.

During the meeting [with a US Democratic delegation], Shtayyeh blamed Israel for the fact that the Palestinians have not held general elections for nearly two decades. He also accused Israel of “attempting to combat the Palestinian democracy.” Shtayyeh’s remarks, reported by the Palestinians’ official news agency Wafa, show that Palestinian leaders apparently think that many foreigners, especially Americans, are stupid enough to believe anything that comes out of their mouths.

Shtayyeh lied both when he claimed that Israel was responsible for obstructing Palestinian elections and that Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy democracy.

“The truth is Abbas canceled the elections because all credible public opinion polls showed that this month’s legislative vote would have decimated the ruling clique of his Fatah party and ushered in a whole new politician configuration. This would have seen Abbas’s rivals Marwan Barghouti and Nasser Al-Qidwah emerge as the new leaders of Fatah. If this scenario were to occur, a whole class of millionaires who turned the Palestinian struggle into a lucrative industry, generously funded by ‘donor countries,’ was at risk of losing everything. …. There is nothing that Abbas can say or do at this point to restore the people’s confidence in his authority. Arguably, he never had their confidence in the first place. By canceling the elections, he has crossed a red line, thus placing himself and a few others around him as enemies of the Palestinian people, their democratic aspirations, and their hope for a better future.” — Ramzy Baroud, editor of The Palestine Chronicle and author of five books,, arabnews.com, May 3, 2021.

So, evidently Abbas’s decision to call off the elections really did have nothing to do with Israel. It was mainly the result of Abbas’s totally justified fear that his divided Fatah faction would once again be trounced by Hamas.

Yet, Shtayyeh seems unwilling to allow the facts to get in the way of his straight-faced lies. In the past two years, Shtayyeh has been repeating his lie, that the elections were canceled because of Israel, on almost a weekly basis. He has repeated this lie to virtually every foreign dignitary or delegation he meets with, including, recently, the US Democratic Congressional delegation.

About Shtayyeh’s other lie that he keeps repeating, that Palestinians have democracy, one does not need to be an expert on Palestinian affairs to know that unfortunately the Palestinians are actually controlled by two undemocratic, repressive regimes: the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Shtayyeh, it seems, also forgot to tell the Congressional members who came to see him… that the Palestinians do not have either a free and independent media or a functioning parliament.

Shtayyeh further forgot to tell his visitors that his own Palestinian Authority government was viciously cracking down on Palestinian journalists, human rights activists, political opponents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the West Bank. The same holds true for the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has also been targeting human rights workers, peaceful protesters, journalists and political activists.

In the past few years, Palestinians have taken to the streets to protest Palestinian corruption and repression.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Garland Illegally Appointed Weiss as Special Counsel by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on August 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19889/garland-illegally-appointed-weiss

“The special counsel shall be selected from outside the United States government.” — Code of Federal Regulations, Title 28, Chapter VI, § 600.3(c). [Emphasis added]

This requirement is the law. The regulations were authorized by Congress under 5 U.S.C. 301, 509, 510, 515-519.

The attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. It is certainly expected that he would obey the law in its entirety.

If he feels that somehow there is an applicable exception to this requirement, he is obliged to explain why.

Special counsel is supposed to be independent of the current government, not an employee….

Democrats frequently say that no one is above the law. Yet they have been silent about Garland apparently placing himself above the law in choosing Weiss in violation of governing legal regulations.

[I]t is within the powers of Congress to summon Garland and ask him to explain why he believes he is justified in ignoring a federal regulation that seems to limit his authority to appoint special counsels.