NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Interrogated By Cruz, Diplomat Gives False Testimony About Biden’s Billion Dollar Bribe James D. Agresti

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/02/interrogated-by-cruz-diplomat-gives-false-testimony-about-bidens-billion-dollar-bribe/

During a November 30th hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senior State Department official gave false testimony about a billion-dollar bribery scandal involving Joe Biden. The official, George Kent, is Joe Biden’s appointee to be the next U.S. ambassador to Estonia.

At Kent’s nomination hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, questioned him about Biden’s actions in Ukraine that occurred while Kent was overseeing anti-corruption efforts in Europe and working in Ukraine. At the time, Biden was the vice president and serving as President Obama’s point man for Ukraine.

This affair began in March 2014 when Biden gave a speech before the Ukrainian parliament in which he promised that the U.S. would help Ukraine increase its gas production. That same month, a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch placed Biden’s son Hunter on the board of his gas company and began paying Hunter $83,333 per month.

Cruz directly asked Kent, “Did Joe Biden do anything that benefited the corrupt oligarch who was paying his son a million dollars a year?” Kent attempted to dodge the question, but Cruz pressed him, and Kent replied, “He did not.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Elon Musk SUSPENDS Kanye West from Twitter for sharing a picture of a swastika inside a Star of David as his ‘presidential campaign symbol’: Anti-Semite rapper reveals their furious text exchange

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11493895/Elon-Musk-sanctions-Kanye-West-tweeting-picture-swastika-inside-Star-David.html

Disgraced rapper Kanye West’s Twitter account was suspended by Elon Musk on Thursday night after he shared a picture of a swastika interlaced with a Star of David.

The post came hours after an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, when West sparked outrage by declaring his ‘love’ of Nazis and his admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Twitter owner Musk, who reinstated West’s banned account just last month after taking control of the company in October, decided the musician’s latest outburst was the final straw.

West’s account was initially locked for 12 hours, preventing him from tweeting, and later suspended. It is unclear whether the suspension is temporary or permanent.  In recent weeks, West has made a string of vile anti-Semitic comments, leaving his reputation in tatters and causing brands – including Adidas, Balenciaga and GAP – to drop him in droves. As a result, his net worth has plummeted.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THE TWITTER FILES: MATT TAIBBI *****

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1598822959866683394.html

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
8. 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.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Communism’s hundred-year war on humanity We need to connect the pieces to see the big picture: By Don Feder

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/2/communisms-hundred-year-war-on-humanity/

When Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917, it wasn’t just the start of the Russian Revolution, but the beginning of communism’s century-long war on humanity.

The global conflict has included civil wars and culture wars, gulags and killing fields, indoctrination and subversion, planned starvation and ethnic cleansing.

It’s the forever war, fought on five continents, for a system that has failed miserably wherever it’s been imposed, but still never lacks true believers willing to kill for its utopian vision. And (bitter irony) they commit unspeakable crimes in the name of humanity.

We fought communism directly in Korea and Vietnam and covertly throughout the 20th century. It created the sexual revolution and the terrorist war on the West. Critical race theory is its brainchild, wokeism its handmaiden.

The storm unleashed by Lenin and his gang still rages, from China to Caracas, and from Ukraine to American cities.

In China, protests against the regime’s draconian lockdowns (which include the bolting shut the doors of apartments) have quickly spread across the country. COVID-19 controls were the spark, but the protests quickly became demands for democracy and the ouster of Chinese ruler Xi Jinping.

At one demonstration, a local communist party boss warned protesters against being manipulated by “foreign influences.” A man in the crowd shot back: “Do you mean Marx and Engels?”

The Chinese Communist Party has presided over the bloodiest regime in history. Since 1949, it has killed as many as 50 million in the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and all of the other attempts to remake mankind.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Genocidal antisemitism is conquering American campuses Students and faculty have wrapped themselves in the colors of the far-left and Islamist fascism, both defined by their hatred of Israel and Jews. by Kenneth Levin

Posted By on December 3rd, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/genocidal-antisemitism-is-conquering-american-campuses/

The Palestinian war against Israel has been a genocidal antisemitic undertaking from its origins and remains so today. Nonetheless, it enjoys substantial support in the U.S., especially in America’s most important institutional purveyor of antisemitism—academia.

The most popular foreign policy cause on U.S. campuses is Israel’s destruction, and the favorite pastime is attacking Israel’s Jewish supporters. Indeed, among the most popular campus chants is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Campus activists parrot the Big Lies with which Palestinian leaders justify their hatred and murderous aggression: There was a nation of Palestine usurped by the Jews; there was never a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel; and the Jews are alien invaders who forced the Palestinians from their homes.

In fact, there has never been a Palestinian state. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly voted to divide British Mandatory Palestine—a Mandate carved out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I—into Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian Arabs, together with the Arab states, rejected partition and threatened the Jewish population of then-Palestine with annihilation.

In the words of Abdul Rachman Azzad, Secretary-General of the Arab League, “This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

The Palestinian Arab leadership, headed by Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had collaborated with the Nazis on a plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Mandatory Palestine, also declared that the war’s intent was genocidal. Fortunately, Israel emerged victorious and its enemies’ designs were thwarted. The Palestinian Arabs subsequently labeled this outcome their “Naqba,” or “catastrophe.”

The war was accompanied by the flight of some 600,000 Arab refugees, which the Palestinians and their supporters blame on the Israelis. At the time and into the mid-1950’s, however, they typically blamed it on their own leaders and the Arab states for encouraging the war that led to the mass flight.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Operating Illegal Police Stations Worldwide by Judith Bergman

Posted By on December 2nd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19152/china-police-stations-worldwide

China has set up at least 54 overseas police stations in 30 countries, including in the United States (New York), Canada, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, according to a recent report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO.

The police stations are part of China’s campaign to “persuade” Chinese citizens suspected of criminal acts – particularly telecommunications fraud, but also political “crimes” such as political dissent – to return to China to face criminal persecution. China not only threatens the Chinese citizens themselves but also members of their families who have stayed behind in China. Such threats have been continuing for years, as FBI Director Christopher Wray pointed out in 2020, when he mentioned a case from the US in which a Chinese government “emissary” visited a target in the US and told him that he could choose between returning to China or committing suicide.

China’s overseas police stations purport merely to have administrative or consular functions, but function as means of threatening Chinese abroad to return to China, thereby skipping the necessary legal requirements under international law.

Crucially, the police stations operate without the consent and knowledge of the host countries, such as in the Netherlands, where one of the police stations operates out of a plain ground-floor apartment in Rotterdam belonging to a small Chinese handyman business.

Beijing, not surprisingly, has denied all wrongdoing. “The organizations you mentioned are not police stations or police service centers,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian Zhao insisted. “Their activities are to assist local Chinese citizens who need to apply for expired driver’s license renewal online….”

Safeguard Defenders has appealed to countries to take swift action against the police stations.

“Action needs also be taken to protect a quickly growing Chinese diaspora in the target countries, unless the latter are content with having a foreign government police minority groups on their territory, often to the intentional detriment of the target country and its policies, and aimed at intimidating the diaspora into obedience to the CCP anywhere in the world. Dedicated reporting and protection mechanisms must urgently be made available.” – Safeguard Defenders, January 18, 2022.

China has set up at least 54 overseas police stations in 30 countries, including in the United States (New York), Canada, Spain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Argentina and Nigeria, according to a recent report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO. Most of these police stations are located in Europe, with nine such police stations in major Spanish cities, four in Italy, and three in Paris, among others.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Holocaust Justice By Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on December 2nd, 2022

https://jewishlink.news/features/55212-holocaust-justice

“Holocaust and Justice: Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials,” by David Bankier and Dan Michman, Eds. Yad Vashem Publications. 2010. ISBN:
978-965-308-353-0.

A popular misconception about the 13 trials conducted by the International Military Tribunal in Germany between 1945 and 1949 is that the Holocaust was a primary subject of the prosecution. The Nuremberg Trials were the “first time in history, political and military leaders of a country were tried and indicted for crimes they had committed during wartime,” Israeli historians David Bankier and Dan Michman note. As Lawrence Douglas, an American law professor, points out in this volume, the idea that those who commit mass atrocities must be held accountable in criminal courts—whether domestic, international or in some combination of the two—is now universally accepted.

For the unprecedented events, an international tribunal was convened. The creation of these unique legal proceedings raises a number of questions: What was the background that enabled this development, and what impact did these trials have on the postwar world—on international law, on the prosecution of war crimes, on historiography and collective memory, on coping with the past, on media coverage of the trials, on the cinematic image of World War II and the Holocaust? Significantly, the German attempt to annihilate European Jews was not the central focus of the trials, although the “very facts of the persecution of the Jews and their wholesale murder were explicitly mentioned in several instances and implicitly in many,” Bankier and Michman conclude.

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the first Nuremberg Trials, the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Research held an international conference focusing on the issues the trials raised and selected a number of papers presented at the conference by scholars from Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Israel, the U.S. and Canada for this extremely important volume.

The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with Nuremberg Trials—their background, the environment in which they transpired, their judicial character and their long-range influence in the immediate years after the war. The second section focuses on the trials of German war criminals conducted by German courts, and how they were covered by the media and the way in which the Holocaust was portrayed by them.The last section examines the trials in countries Germany occupied during the war: Belgium, France, the Soviet Union, Poland and Italy, in an effort to understand the historical and legal background and the long-term influence on memory of the and how the Holocaust is being represented.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Don’t Be So Sure That The Climate Extremists Have “Won” Francis Menton

Posted By on December 2nd, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-29-dont-be-so-sure-that-the-climate-extremists-have-won

Undoubtedly, the question right now at the top of everyone’s mind is, When is the Manhattan Contrarian’s Energy Storage Report coming out? After all, he previously promised it for September, and then October, and here we are almost in December and we still haven’t seen it.

It’s a fair question. Being a blogger, I don’t have much appreciation for the formalities of the publication process. In blogging, you finish the post, do a quick proofread, press “Publish,” and there it is. With this, it has been rounds of peer review, editing, typesetting, proofreading, and so forth. However, I’m now told that the official issue date will be Thursday, December 1.

After the publication, I’ll have several posts expounding on parts of the Report, particularly those portions that cover topics I have not already beaten to death here on the blog. But for now I want to focus on the most important aspect of this, which is: Don’t get discouraged in thinking that the climate extremists have “won.” They have not.

It does not really matter that the climate extremists at the moment control all of the commanding heights of our culture — the media, academia, most big corporations, and the Executive Branch of the government. What matters is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work. It’s only a question of when and how it fails — and of how big the political blowback will be when that happens. The main Achilles heel of the proposals is the problem of energy storage.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel-critics take their cue from Lapid and Gantz  By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on December 2nd, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-723883

Leave it to two prominent American Jews to call on the White House to censure Israel. In fairness to former State Department Mideast analyst/negotiator Aaron David Miller and one-time US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, what they jointly penned in The Washington Post on Tuesday could easily have been crafted by any of the outgoing powers-that-be in Jerusalem.

Indeed, though Miller and Kurtzer – senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Princeton University professor of Middle East policy respectively – have never been shy about criticizing the Jewish state that both profess to love, they might not have been so openly hostile without encouragement from Israelis in high places. Take temporary interim Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, for example.

Given their own horrifying statements of late, it’s hard to expect critics abroad not to jump at the chance to spew equivalent vitriol. And, boy, did Miller and Kurtzer let it rip.

“As Israel approaches its 75th birthday next year, Benjamin Netanyahu has midwifed the most extreme government in the history of the state, all in an effort to secure legislation to postpone the trial against him or cancel the indictments altogether,” they wrote. “Having brought to life the radical, racist, misogynistic and homophobic far-right parties, Netanyahu is now stuck with them.”

They went on: “He has cut a deal with convicted inciter of hatred and violence [Otzma Yehudit leader MK] Itamar Ben-Gvir and made him minister of national security, with far-reaching authority for the West Bank, Jerusalem and mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel proper. [Religious Zionist Party leader MK] Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the expulsion of Arabs, is in line to run the Finance Ministry, with additional authority over the Civil Administration, which governs the West Bank. And [Noam Party leader] Avi Maoz, who proudly espouses a fierce anti-LGBTQ agenda, has been made a deputy in the prime minister’s office in charge of ‘Jewish identity.’”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Oath Keepers Verdict: A Dangerous Escalation in Criminalizing Dissent New ground is set with every egregious indictment and conviction with dire consequences for the future of political speech and activity.  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 2nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/01/oath-keepers-verdict-a-dangerous-escalation-in-criminalizing-dissent/

One year after the events of January 6—despite their best efforts—federal prosecutors still hadn’t filed a single criminal charge that came anything close to resembling “insurrection” or domestic terrorism. Democrats and regime media were agitated: How could they continue promoting the four-hour disturbance as an attempted coup if the most prevalent offense charged by the Department of Justice a year later was the petty misdemeanor of “parading” in the Capitol? Even the chief judge for the D.C. district court overseeing each January 6 case had publicly expressed her frustration that the government wasn’t producing harsher indictments against Trump supporters.

So Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, swooped in to save face. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers, an alleged militia group, were charged on January 12, 2022 with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the Capitol protest. Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes and 10 others were accused of conspiring “to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States, and by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The law the Oath Keepers attempted to stop, Graves claimed, was the “peaceful transfer of power” vested in both the 12th and 20th amendments.

The indictment was preposterous on its face, something only a grand jury seated in the most Democratic city in the country could countenance. None faced a weapons charge, raising the natural question of how a group of military veterans, most suffering various degrees of service-related disabilities, planned to overtake the government “by force” without a single firearm or explosive device. Despite constant talk in the media about the Oath Keepers’ quick reaction force, individuals who brought weapons with them on the drive to Washington left them behind in a Virginia hotel—legally—so as to not violate the city’s strict gun control laws.

Some militia.