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Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy Michael Oren

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-835379

Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.

Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.

While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.

The man whose legacy could have been cherished by future Jewish generations, with streets in Jerusalem named for him and communities created in his honor, will be at best forgotten, if not reviled. That is the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a leader who could have gone down in Jewish history as a second Truman, will be recalled, if at all, as another Bernie Sanders.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the Jewish state owes Carter an immense historical debt. In an anomalous way, his insistence on including the Soviets in the Middle East peace process immediately after Egypt succeeded in evicting them convinced president Anwar Sadat of the need to act swiftly and independently of the United States.

The result came in November 1977, with Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel. Carter, to his credit, leaped into the diplomatic breach, and devoted 13 presidential days to forging the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. Though never close to yielding a warm peace, that treaty has since withstood tectonic pressures and relieved Israel of the threat of large-scale Arab armies.

But, sadly, that achievement proved to be a one-off. The self-proclaimed champion of human rights, Carter was comfortable with Middle Eastern dictators like Sadat, Hafez al-Assad, and the shah of Iran, but endlessly critical of Israel’s democratically elected leaders, beginning with Menachem Begin.

No sooner were the Camp David Accords signed in 1979 than Carter embarked on a 40-year smear campaign against Israel.

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Jimmy Carter’s Obsession with Israel Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/12/jimmy-carters-obsession-with-israel?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=jimmy-carters-obsession-with-israel

Much of the world is describing Jimmy Carter as a saintly soul who went around the world building housing for the poor, monitoring elections to make sure they were free and fair, and still managing — such a humble man! — to teach Sunday School at the small church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. But those familiar with his obsessive dislike of Israel that descended into outright antisemitism have a different view of the Man From Plains. The historian Michael Oren reminds us of this side of James Earl Carter, Jr. here: “Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy – opinion,” by Michael Oren, Jerusalem Post, December 30, 2024:

Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.

Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.

While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.

Not just Jews, but all those who care about Israel, will be reluctant to join in the orgy of posthumous praise for Jimmy Carter.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Report: China Orders Largest Military Build-Up Since 1930s Germany By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/report-china-orders-largest-military-build-up-since-1930s-germany/

According to a report by a national security expert, the People’s Republic of China has ordered the largest military build-up of any nation in the world since Germany in the 1930s, raising concerns about the military threat presented by China.

As Fox News reports, the claims were made in an article in The Federalist written by Chuck DeVore, the chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. DeVore points out that while the American military has spent over $5.4 trillion on wasted wars such as the “War on Terror” and subsequent attempts at “nation-building,” China has been strengthening its military.

“China is engaging in an unprecedented military build-up that the world frankly hasn’t seen since Adolf Hitler in the 1930s,” said DeVore in an interview following the publication of his article.

“They’re massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore explained. “The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does.”

Among other expansions, China has increased the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) by 50 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), bringing the new total to around 400. The Department of Defense (DOD) also reports that 300 more medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles have also been added. China currently has over 600 operational nuclear warheads, and is expected to increase that total to over 1,000 by the year 2030.

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Brazen Taxation While some taxation is necessary—maintaining a national defense force, for example—too much of it is thievery. By Larry Sand

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/31/brazen-taxation/

hen I think about government-run schools, I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s famous quote, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

While taxes are not necessarily socialist, they can be overbearing, nowhere more so than in education. In fact, the government excels at spending other people’s money on schooling. The U.S. (i.e., taxpayers) spent $1.2 trillion on K-16 in 2022.

Of that astronomical amount, spending on higher education amounted to $226 billion, which often goes to schools that don’t need it. Researcher Jay Greene examined payments to Ivy League schools and found that the federal government provides enormous subsidies to these elite institutions, which are the wealthiest universities in the country. “The eight universities in the Ivy League receive $1.8 billion each year from taxpayers, despite the fact that these universities are sitting on $192 billion in endowment funds. If they need money for buildings and electricity, donors have already given them plenty. There is no need for taxpayers to give the richest universities $1.8 billion each year to cover the costs of buildings that their donors have already enabled them to maintain and update.”

There are about 4,000 for-profit colleges in the U.S., and they receive the great majority of federal tax dollars for higher education, with just 22 colleges in the country refusing any public funds.

But the swindle doesn’t stop there. The American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus runs the think tank’s Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker, which identifies all student loan revenue from the U.S. Treasury that has been “forgone or forgiven during the Trump and Biden presidencies.” The tracker’s total now sits at about $415 billion.

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Washington state: Muslim mother caught trying to flee to Canada after attempted honor murder of daughter Robert Spence

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://jihadwatch.org/2024/12/washington-state-muslim-mother-caught?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=washington-state-muslim-mother-caught

In the Qur’an, a mysterious figure, known as Khidr in Islamic tradition, kills a boy in an apparently random and gratuitous attack. He then explains: “And as for the boy, his parents were believers, and we feared that he would overburden them by transgression and disbelief. So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them one better than him in purity and nearer to mercy.” (18:80-81)

And according to Islamic law, “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance of the Traveller o1.1-2).

Muslims commit 91 percent of honor killings worldwide. The Palestinian Authority gives pardons or suspended sentences for honor murders. Iraqi women have asked for tougher sentences for Islamic honor murderers, who get off lightly now. Syria in 2009 scrapped a law limiting the length of sentences for honor killings, but “the new law says a man can still benefit from extenuating circumstances in crimes of passion or honour ‘provided he serves a prison term of no less than two years in the case of killing.’” And in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

“Mother was caught escaping to Canada after ‘trying to strangle daughter, 17, in an honor killing,’” by Nic White, DailyMail.com, December 28, 2024:

A mother was arrested at the border while fleeing to Canada after she allegedly tried to strangle her daughter in an ‘honor killing’.

Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, was charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, and assault after the attack on October 18, alongside her husband Ihsan Ali, 44.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

How DEI Is Helping Fuel a Huge Rise of Antisemitism in Health Care and Hospitals By Irit Tratt

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/12/30/how-dei-is-helping-fuel-a-huge-rise-of-antisemitism-in-health-care-and-hospitals/

More than a year has passed since the hate-fueled encampments and rallies targeting Jews became fixtures on college campuses and in cities across America. Over time, the emerging narrative centered on the assumption that those participating in sowing the antisemitic chaos were confined to specific industries, such as Hollywood and academia, or were among an ignorant cast of undergrads steeped in an ecosystem of radical progressivism. 

Unfortunately, in a disturbing phenomenon plucked directly from a Nazi-era playbook, a troubling rise of antisemitism in the medical community is now manifesting as an alternative and potentially deadly avenue through which Jew hatred is spreading across the US. 

In its first published study of “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: A Survey Study of Reported Experiences,” the Data and Analytics Department of StandWithUS, a Jewish civil rights group, surveyed 645 self-identifying Jewish healthcare professionals, 74 percent of whom are physicians. The study found that nearly 40 percent of respondents recounted direct exposure to antisemitism within their professional or academic environments. 

The results of the survey confirm an underacknowledged reality — that the healthcare arena is emerging as a new and dangerous stronghold for antisemites to exert their influence. If left unchecked, this movement will rupture the integrity of America’s medical professionals. 

The rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in healthcare stems from several factors, including the decision made by some medical schools to supplant critical instructional time with toxic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that supposedly focus on cultural inclusion and social inequities. 

Unsurprisingly, when combined with a deterioration of academic standards, medical students educated in this pedagogy prove prone to gravitating towards a framework that designates Israel, and by extension, all Jews, as privileged colonialists.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reflections on Jimmy Carter Should he have just stuck to building houses for poor people? Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 31st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-jimmy-carter/

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
– Matthew 6:5

When word came that Jimmy Carter, age 98, was entering hospice care, the predictable plaudits began to pour in. Calling Carter “an inspiration,” Maria Shriver gushed that he “moves humanity forward every single day.” Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) described Carter as having always “walked with God.” Rocker Nils Lofgren called him “[a]s fine a man and soul as I’ve ever seen.” And Steve Martin tweeted: “We’ve seen few humans this devoted and humble….Quietly continuing his mission,which was to do good. If you must leave us go gently . Leave your heart and bravery so we might learn.”

All of which is testimony to the power of hype.

I was nineteen years old during most of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. You might have expected me to support him. Three years earlier, after all, I’d been every bit as addicted to the Watergate hearings on afternoon TV as my mother was to As the World Turns. I was besotted by the movie All the President’s Men, released a few months before the 1976 election. At the time of the election, I was a student on a college campus dominated by lefties who, purportedly jaded and alienated by politics in those post-Watergate days, embraced Carter as a breath of fresh air, a magnanimous soul uniquely equipped to make America, once again, a City on a Hill, noble in its character and great in its deeds. As Carter put it himself, “I can give you a government that’s honest and that’s filled with love, competence, and compassion.”

I didn’t trust the son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.

Yes, Nixon, aside from being a brilliant statesman, had been a wily character. The Watergate tapes had revealed his salty side. He was no saint, but then again he didn’t sell himself as a saint. What politician is a saint? What mattered was that Nixon was brilliant. He was a terrific president. He knew his stuff cold. He loved America. He hated Communism. Yes, he was often characterized as being awkward in his own body and very uncomfortable about interacting with voters on the campaign trail – which to me meant that, well, at least he wasn’t slick.

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Our woke military By Mike McDaniel

Posted By on December 30th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/12/our_woke_military.html

Harris/Biden military officials have denied their addiction to DEI, CRT and wokeness in general has had anything to do with the alarming decline in enlistments. Only the Marine Corps has been largely immune to a dearth of enlistees. It seems they’ve done their best to avoid the worst aspects of woke lunacy, or perhaps their historic focus on destroying American’s enemies has helped convince prospective Marines they might have to put up with some woke nonsense, but it won’t keep them from being Marines.

Our service academies, as one would expect of educational institutions, have apparently gone gladly woke, the Air Force Academy in particular:

Graphic: X Screenshot

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 478 pages of records from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), a component of the United States Department of Defense, which includes instructional materials and emails that address topics such as Critical Race Theory, “white privilege,” and Black Lives Matter.

The Academy’s descent into woke insanity is fully as bad as one might expect:

The presentation includes a set of tables with the headline “White Americans’ Support for Democratic Candidates for President as a Function of Old-Fashioned Racism.” Another slide depicts tables which purport to show “Correlations between Republican Party Identification and Old-Fashioned Racism among White Americans.”

That theme persists:

A “CRT Talking Points” document prepared at the direction of the Air Force Academy Superintendent includes the question “Does CRT teach cadets to hate our country?” The scripted “academic answer” to the question asserts, “much of what is ‘divisive’ [about CRT] is that it’s hard for people to hear the words ‘white supremacy’ without feeling defensive, even though that is the academically correct way to talk about most of American history.”

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Why both sides are right in the H-1B visas row The tech bros and the MAGA populists could chart a new way forward. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on December 30th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/30/why-both-sides-are-right-in-the-h-1b-visas-row/

The current clashes over high-skilled immigration between Donald Trump’s right-wing base and his ‘first buddy’, Elon Musk, reveal a fundamental divide within the US president’s odd coalition. On one side are the populists concerned with jobs being prioritised for American workers. On the other, libertarians fret about how businesses can compete on a global scale.

The row was sparked last week by a tweet by Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chair of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, in which he blamed American culture for celebrating ‘mediocrity over excellence’, causing firms to seek skilled workers from abroad rather than hire home-grown talent. Musk has since chimed in to tell opponents of high-skilled immigration to ‘take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face’. ‘I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend’, he wrote on X.

Never one to sweat the details, Trump’s views on this issue are often ill-defined and seem ideal for sparking just such an internal conflict between his base and his Silicon Valley backers.

As the populists point out, H-1B visas – temporary work permits for skilled workers, first introduced in 1990 – have a record of abuse. Most notably, in 2014, Disney was accused of exploiting the H-1B programme to replace American programmers en masse with cheaper Indian ones. In an era of depressed growth in tech jobs, in part due to AI, the oligarchs’ claim that we face a profound shortage of such workers may be increasingly strained.

The populists also have it right in that H-1B visas have accelerated class divides, particularly in places like Silicon Valley. Valley types used to hire from local schools, like San José State University, rather than from places like the Indian Institutes of Technology. Today, roughly three-quarters of the Valley’s jobs go to non-citizens. Tech oligarchs may like this arrangement, but taking jobs from people who vote can have severe political ramifications, something those galaxy-brained techies seem not to comprehend.

What’s more, the widening social divides in the Bay Area have already created a progressive monoculture, while the GOP has all but ceased to exist there. Back in the 1970s, when the Valley was a place of upward mobility, its politics were decidedly centrist.

On the other hand, the oligarchs are also correct, as Ramaswamy has pointed out, about the stark weaknesses of the US educational system. Only five per cent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 per cent in China. In 2016, Chinese universities graduated 4.7million students in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), versus 568,000 in the United States. China also produces six times as many students with engineering and computer-science bachelor’s degrees as the US does.

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Devin Nunes Reemerges 2024 marked the comeback of figures once dismissed, with Elon Musk and Donald Trump reclaiming dominance and Devin Nunes solidifying his role as a stalwart in intelligence oversight. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 30th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/30/devin-nunes-reemerges/

2024 proved to be the year of the reemergence of many once and unfairly pilloried public figures.

Elon Musk weathered nonstop attacks on his X social media platform. Furor escalated over his newfound 2024 Trump advocacy—even as he ended 2024 with his iconic Tesla brand still the best-selling car in six states and the most popular electric vehicle in the entire nation.

Tesla’s rising stock prices ensured by year’s end that Musk was by far the richest man in the world with a net worth of well over $400 billion. His recyclable SpaceX Super Heavy starship rocket booster mesmerized the nation as it returned to the launch pad to be caught by a huge mechanical arm.

After January 6, 2021, the media swore that Donald Trump was supposedly washed up. He left office with a 34 percent approval rating. Over nearly the next four years, Trump would face 91 felony indictments and be liable for over $400 million in assorted fines.

Now he is a reelected president. Former oppositional world leaders traipse to Mar-a-Lago to seek his approval even before his tenure begins. His erstwhile critics at home are scurrying about in disarray.

The Trump-hating media who swore Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle” are mostly discredited and are, for now, still bleeding audiences. And Trump’s chief political adversaries, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Obamas are increasingly either unpopular or irrelevant—or both.

Yet one unremarked-upon return is that of former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), who, after 20 years of representing Central California in Congress, retired on January 1, 2022, from the House to become CEO of the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, tasked to oversee its social media platform, TruthSocial.

Nunes has regained public attention over the last two weeks after Trump appointed him to become chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees the conduct and performance of America’s intelligence agencies.

And once more he too is the target of tired residual left-wing venom, as a “pugnacious Trump loyalist” in the words of the New York Times.