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Qatar’s World Cup: What Visitors Were Not Shown by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on December 13th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19230/qatar-migrant-workers-world-cup

Qatar claims that 37 workers died during the construction phase of its World Cup infrastructure projects. The organization Amnesty International asserts that authorities in Qatar failed to investigate the deaths of thousands of migrant workers who lost their lives working on construction projects associated with the World Cup. One UK press report puts the total number of victims at 6,750.

The workers often arrive in debt, due to extortionate fees charged by recruiters who facilitate the employment process. Qatar’s kafala (sponsorship) system is so fraught with abuse that it approaches the level of human trafficking.

Working conditions are medieval. Laborers have little to no access to health care: they cannot afford health insurance and there are no on-site clinics. They are also forced to work long hours, often seven days a week. Many migrants die from the extreme heat during Qatar’s summer: temperatures sometimes reach above 44 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit).

Despite the presence of a large US military base, Qatar’s ruling Al-Thani family is a huge financial supporter of various terrorist groups, including Hamas. This wealthy, conservative Sunni mini-state is also a sanctuary for several terrorist operatives.

The violation of migrant workers’ human rights in Qatar has been massive and woefully underreported by the Arab Gulf State and many others. Qatar’s dismal treatment of “guest workers” has become more pronounced and visible since its selection in 2010 by FIFA as the site of this year’s World Cup football (soccer) tournament.

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Who’s More Un-American: Oil Companies Or Joe Biden?

Posted By on December 13th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/13/whos-more-un-american-oil-companies-or-joe-biden/

When Biden administration officials aren’t promising to put them out of business, they’re calling oil companies “un-American” for not drilling more. They should look in a mirror.

Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s “senior adviser for energy security” at the State Department, complained to the Financial Times last week that oil companies were using profits to buy back stock rather than invest in oil production.

“It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public,” he said. “You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

This is the same guy, by the way, who just a few months ago said that oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition” away from fossil fuels.  

In any event, by Hochstein’s standard, Biden is the most un-American president in history, because his policies are behind both the industry’s increased profit margins and its decision to spend that money on stock buybacks rather than increase production.

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8-minute-video: State Department’s systematic failures in the Middle East: Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on December 13th, 2022

https://bit.ly/3Wd2dZg

Synopsis:

*The State Department assumes that generous diplomatic and financial gestures could induce the violently volatile Middle East to embrace peaceful-coexistence, good-faith negotiation, democracy and human rights.  However, this policy has generated tailwinds to rogue entities and headwinds to the US and its Arab allies.

*Since 1979, the State Department has espoused the diplomatic option toward Iran, assuming that the Ayatollahs are amenable to moderation. However, the diplomatic option has bolstered the Ayatollahs’ anti-US rogue strategy, posing a lethal threat to every pro-US Arab regime, undermining the US posture in Latin America, and letting down most Iranians, who aspire for a regime-change in Tehran.  

*In 2010, the State Department welcomed the turbulence on the Arab Street as “the Arab Spring,” “Facebook and youth revolution” and a “March for peace and democracy.” However, it has been another tectonic Arab Tsunami, not an Arab Spring.

*The State Department extends to Palestinian leaders red carpet reception, contrary to the shabby doormat extended to Palestinians by all pro-US Arab leaders. Arabs are aware of the intra-Arab and anti-US rogue Palestinian track record.

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The Apartheid Libel to Destroy Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19218/israel-apartheid

Recently… however, with the UNHRC’s persistent allegations that Israel is an apartheid state, that label is being pushed even further in an apparent effort to make it stick. The complicity of recent reports from NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch appear to be trying to ensure that their libel will be complete.

The campaign emboldens the radicals among the Palestinians, including the Iranian-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), whose declared goal is to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.

Terrorist groups such as Hamas and PIJ are undoubtedly happy to see non-Arabs and non-Muslims — and even ostensible human rights organizations — join their effort to falsely depict Israel as an apartheid state.

Former UNHRC chief Navi Pillay, despite extensive evidence of massive anti-Israel bias, was recently appointed to chair the UNHRC’s first and only open-ended Commission of Inquiry.

Basically, [the New York Times] is saying that although the two countries cannot be equated, the comparison is being forced and twisted into place for the sake of furthering an alternate agenda which has little to do with the facts on the ground.

Israel’s founding charter pledges to safeguard the equal rights of all residents: “… It will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Among many of South Africa’s Apartheid laws, the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act effectively stripped all Blacks of their South African citizenship and of the right to vote.

Israeli Arabs, however, have full citizenship, including the right to vote and to public demonstration. They are represented in all levels of government, including positions as members of Knesset (parliament), in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as Supreme Court justices. Israeli Arabs hold positions as high-ranking officers in the Israel Defense Forces, including that of major-general in the Central Command.

Israeli Arabs are deans, department heads, scientists, and professors at prestigious universities and hospitals. They are news anchors, journalists, actors, athletes, and are represented in every aspect of Israeli society.

The false allegations also come from incorrectly confusing the nearly two million Israeli Arabs — who make up about 21% of Israel’s population and are full citizens of Israel — with thousands of Arabs whose families left Israel when five Arab counties attacked Israel in 1948. After the Arab armies lost the war they had started, they were surprised to find that they were not welcomed back. They have since settled in other countries – such as Lebanon, Jordan, and the West — as “Palestinians,” but are not citizens of Israel and therefore, of course, not subject to Israeli laws… If all the Arabs in the area are called “Palestinians,” however, it makes it easier to claim grievances, merited or not.

Both [the West Bank and Gaza] are now disputed territories where the Arabs totally run their own affairs, and have officially committed to direct, bilateral negotiations with Israel about “final status” issues, including where the borders should be. Lately, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate, apparently in the hope that the international community will hand them a better deal. They have been offered their own Palestinian state three times, and each time have said no, without so much as a counteroffer.

As Navi Pillay herself conceded (in reference to the US, certainly not Israel), “There isn’t a country in the world which has a perfect human rights record…”. Israel is certainly no exception.

If you are looking for real apartheid against Arabs, try Lebanon or Jordan.

The “limitations” referred to above are actually the limitations of the facts. What is missing is that Israel does not fit the legal definition of apartheid; therefore, some are forcibly attempting to recreate the legal definition with an “alternative definition” to fit Israel, to ram a square peg into a round hole. The “alternative definition” is, sadly, just a political maneuver to gather unwarranted international cover for still another attempt to replace Israel.

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The Biden Administration’s Hostility to Israel by Guy Millière

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19181/biden-hostility-israel

The January 28, 2021 appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israeli and Palestinian Affairs of Hady Amr, a man who wrote “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada” and who falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” was a significant step that promised the worst.

Two days before that, the Biden administration not only restored relations with the Palestinian Authority, but resumed most of the financial aid that had been suspended by the Trump administration — but they failed to ask the Palestinian leaders to stop financing and supporting terrorism.

The Biden administration also announced its willingness to return to a basically fictitious “two-state solution.”

A speech by Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Mills, announcing these decisions, defined the “settlements” as “an obstacle to peace”. He left out that many Palestinians regard the entire state of Israel as one big settlement to be dismantled.

Since then, any construction of homes in the existing Israeli suburbs has been condemned by the State Department in the strongest terms. By contrast, the Biden administration has never made the slightest remark concerning the massive illegal Palestinian construction intended to create “facts on the ground” or “land grabs” in both the West Bank and Israel’s Negev desert.

On a more deadly front, on July 14, 2022, Biden signed a Joint Declaration on the US-Israel Strategic Partnership, and promised he would “never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon”. Since the first days of coming to power, however, on January 29, 2021, the Biden administration has done its utmost to reach a new “nuclear deal” with Iran’s mullahs that would enable them to have not only nuclear weapons, but up to $1 trillion dollars, which would quite certainly not be used for human rights.

America’s negotiators — led by Robert Malley and Russia, mediating supposedly on behalf of the US, as the Americans are not even allowed in the room — have not stopped making concessions.

For months, the Biden administration pressured Israel to accept an off-shore gas deal with Hezbollah-run Lebanon, now effectively a satrapy of Iran. The deal fundamentally alters Israel’s maritime borders, denies Israel tens of billions of dollars and allows Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy, to receive billions of dollars potentially to be used to further threaten Israel.

Lebanon expert Tony Badran explained in detail that the Biden administration wants to “give as much money as possible to Lebanon” — with full knowledge that it will be money given to Hezbollah. Hezbollah is believed to have 200,000 rockets and missiles pointed at Israel. “All land and sea targets of Israel are in the range of Hezbollah missiles, ” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in July. Why is the Biden administration helping an Iranian proxy militia to get rich to destroy Israel?

The Biden administration — evidently unable to see that it was a new wave of Arab terrorism inside Israel that had most likely propelled voters to elect its new government — in a move perhaps unprecedented, then abruptly lobbied to keep some of Israel’s democratically-elected religious politicians out of government. Meanwhile, only last week, the Biden administration begged Venezuela’s illegitimate and brutal dictator, Nicolás Maduro, to sell the US its low-quality crude oil, while denying a loan to US ally Guyana, which is a producer of light, sweet oil.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan hinted that if Itamar Ben Gvir becomes a minister in Israel’s new government, they would not work with him. US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides also made clear to Netanyahu that the Biden administration was opposed to the possible appointment of Bezalel Smotrich as defense minister.

Nides recently gave a speech suggesting that if the new Israeli government deviates from the positions of the Biden administration, the relationship between the United States and Israel could suffer: “I’m confident that these men and women [in the new government] understand the importance of this bilateral relationship and understand that we have shared values ​​and everyone wants to achieve the same thing”. Is that a threat?

Just as the launching of an FBI investigation against the army of a democratic ally of the US has no precedent, the attempt to interfere in the composition of a government of a democratic ally also has no precedent.

Biden last week said that he wanted to upgrade U.S. ties with the Palestinian Authority, and promoted Hady Amr to a new post: special envoy to the Palestinians. Amr met members of the outgoing Israeli government and said that his mission is to “strengthen the Palestinian Authority”. He did not say a single word about the increase of shootings, stabbings, firebombs, and stoning attacks against Israelis in Jerusalem and in the West Bank; on the recent Jerusalem bus stop bombings, or that the PA continues to finance terrorism and murdering Israeli Jews.

The time when support for Israel in the United States was bipartisan is unfortunately over. The Biden administration’s proclamations of friendship toward Israel cannot hide actions of relentless hostility. While the Republican Party now has pro-Israeli positions, the Democratic Party includes representatives who not only hate Israel but do not even try to deny it.

Ilhan Omar wrote tweets saying that “Israel has hypnotized the world”, and adding “may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”. Rashida Tlaib spoke of the “brutal apartheid government of Israel”. Their party did not disavow them.

That there are 57 Democratic house members to ask the FBI and the State Department to launch an investigation into Israel, apparently with a desire to harm Israel, is a reality that Israel must urgently take into account.

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So Michelle Obama was behind Twitter’s ban of Trump all along By Monica Showalter

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/so_michelle_obama_was_behind_twitters_ban_of_trump_all_along.html

Michelle Obama, wife of President Obama, was one of the Democrat outsiders who pressed Twitter to make the unprecedented move to ban President Trump, then a sitting United States president, from that company’s platform.

That’s the latest revelation from the latest installment of the Twitter files, done by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger.

According to Fox News:

Former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter the day after former first lady Michelle Obama and others demanded the company “permanently” remove him, according to the newest “Twitter Files” installment.

On Saturday, CEO Elon Musk and journalist Michael Shellenberger released the fourth batch of Twitter documents that show internal communications by the company’s executives between Jan. 6-8, 2021, including and shortly after the riot at the Capitol Building.

Among the files, Shellenberger reported “internal and external pressure,” including from the former first lady, fell onto the company calling for Trump to be banned from using Twitter.

“Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection,” Obama wrote in a lengthy statement posted to Twitter on Jan. 7.

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Our Parasitic Generation Yes, there is a lot of ruin in great nations. But even America is by now running low on it. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/11/our-parasitic-generation/

“Be assured young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
— Adam Smith

Are we sure that there is all that much ruin left in the United States?

We are $31 trillion in collective debt. The new normal is $1.5 trillion budget deficits. The military is politicized and short of recruits. We trade lethal terrorists for woke celebrity athletes as if to confirm our enemies’ cynical stereotypes. 

Our FBI is corrupt and discredited, collaborating with Silicon Valley contractors to suppress free speech and warp elections. We practice segregation and racial discrimination and claim we do not because the right and good people support it and, anyway, the victims deserve it. The country has seen defeat before but never abject, deliberate humiliation as in Kabul, when we fled and abandoned to the terrorist Taliban a $1 billion embassy, a huge, remodeled air base, thousands of friends, and tens of billions of dollars in military hardware—and hard-earned deterrence.

We are witnessing the breakdown of basic norms essential for civilized life, from affordable food and fuel to available key antibiotics and baby formula. Old Cairo seems safer than an after-hours subway ride or stroll at dusk in many major American cities. Medieval London’s roadways were likely cleaner than Market Street in San Francisco. Speech was freer in 1920s America than it is now.

The Breakdown of Basic Society

Our California always is a preamble to America’s future. Our present is likely your tomorrow. 

Each summer here we impotently expect forest conflagrations. Millions of acres of flames pour more millions of tons of smoke and carbon and soot in the skies. Tens of millions of hated combustion engines cannot begin to match the natural blankets of aerial dirt. 

The state seems to shrug it off, saying wildfires are both inevitable and natural. Old-fashioned forest management and fire-fighting strategies, honed over centuries, are deemed obsolete by our green experts. So, we let fiery nature take its better course. What is the implicit message to those in the way of fires that devour homes and trees? Nature’s way? Natural wood mulch? Or that such fools should not build their cabins or homes where they are not wanted?

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Where’s the Outrage? In any sane world, these revelations would have the public up in arms, literally. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/10/wheres-the-outrage/

Bob Dole ran a pretty poor campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996. It was no surprise, then, that he lost. But let history acknowledge the former U.S. senator from Kansas asked the very best question in the entire election cycle. “Where’s the outrage?” he thundered at a GOP event at the end of October 1996. Back then, the chief issue was the Clinton Administration’s use and abuse of 900 FBI files on their political opponents. Imagine! An American president using the FBI as his secret police! Have you ever heard of anything so outrageous? In America, amidst Our Democracy™? 

Then as now, however, the answer to Dole’s question is simple: Nowhere. There was, there is, no outrage. Then, as now, there are little flutters of enthusiast unhappiness among the rest of the faithful who greet news of outrageous behavior with applause and expressions of solidarity. “You go, champ!” they seem to say, before relapsing into a blinking, weakly smiling repose. (This is the cue for people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney to adjust their hairdos and stride boldly on stage.) 

But the media writ large? Then, as now, it’s crickets as far as the eye can see. 

The biggest story of the day revolves around Elon Musk’s decision to open the window and reveal Twitter’s active role in stage managing the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and very much to the detriment of Donald Trump. Over the past week, extensive Twitter threads posted by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and others have revealed that the company was essentially part of a coordinated Democratic oppo-research and suppression operation and, moreover, one that was actively collaborating—or, to use the preferred term, “colluding”—with the FBI to destroy Donald Trump and assure Joe Biden’s election.

Obviously, this is front-page news in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers as well as top-of-the-hour reporting every night on the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall talk shows that many Americans turn to so they do not have to face reality. 

Just kidding—about the prominence of the story, I mean, not the habit of Americans turning to their digital fentanyl to avoid the truth. 

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Twitter Files: The Real News is that the Left/Dems/Media Do Not Care Move along, nothing to see here. by Larry Elder

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/twitter-files-the-real-news-is-that-the-left-dems-media-do-not-care/

“And what a difference the laptop story suppression made. A survey by The Polling Company found that 17% of Biden voters in seven swing states would not have voted for President Joe Biden had they known about the story. This is nothing short of the biggest election interference in U.S. history.”

New Twitter owner Elon Musk gave reporter Matt Taibbi of Substack access to internal Twitter documents about the media platform’s decision to spike the Hunter Biden laptop story and about how “the Biden team” had a direct pipeline to Twitter executives.

Taibbi tweeted:

“By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’ …

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party … Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However … this system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left than the right.

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Maxine Waters Blew Sam Bankman-Fried a Kiss How can she conduct an impartial investigation of his Ponzi scheme? Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 12th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/maxine-waters-blew-sam-bankman-fried-a-kiss/

Sam Bankman-Fried, according to Victor Davis Hanson, “may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.” He “protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.” Now his dear friend Maxine Waters (D-Incitement), who was caught on video blowing him a kiss in December 2021, will be leading an investigation into his sleazy FTX Ponzi scheme as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee. Waters initially stepped on a rake when she said that she wouldn’t be subpoenaing her pal Sam, but the winsome congresswoman backtracked after a firestorm and insisted that it was a “lie” that she didn’t plan to subpoena him. So will she actually do so? That remains unclear.

CNBC reported Wednesday that Waters “told the panel’s Democrats she doesn’t plan to subpoena former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at a Dec. 13 hearing about the crypto exchange’s rapid demise, according to people with direct knowledge of the conversation.” She “informed committee members of her decision at a private meeting Tuesday with Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler on Capitol Hill, these people said, declining to be named in order to speak freely about the private discussion.”