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Our Brezhnev, Our Pravda, Our Soviet Union. . . Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 14th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/our-brezhnev-our-pravda-our-soviet-union/

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication.

By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure.

Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous health and constant hands-on involvement.

“Journalists” sent out false communiques. They spun narratives that Brezhnev was robust, hale, and working long hours on behalf of the Russian people. Any dissenting journalists who sought to report the true, sad state of affairs were in danger of losing their jobs, freedom—or even their lives.

Instead, the “reporters” of Pravda (“Truth”), the official print megaphone of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote lies about Brezhnev’s busy workdays. Pravda’s handlers spun fables about the respect (and fear) the rest of the world held for such a dynamic leader—even as Brezhnev became an ill virtual recluse.

The cynical Russian people shrugged because they had long been accustomed to their lying media and the falsehoods they peddled. And besides, Brezhnev was a doctrinaire Stalinist communist. So his job was not to rock the boat or upset the Russian communist hierarchy.

Instead, he reigned over the penultimate Soviet “era of stagnation,” while an ossified communism increasingly destroyed all incentives and hope, leaving the Russian people poor, cynical, and helpless.

Something similar has happened to a calcified America under President Joe Biden. Like the late-stage Leonid Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only. He has outsourced his administration to a vestigial hard-left apparat from the Obama years.

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The Anti-Semitism Money and Power Network—and How to Smash It by Danielle Pletka

Posted By on July 14th, 2024

https://www.commentary.org/articles/danielle-pletka/anti-semitism-money-power-network/

The mushrooming of anti-Semitic violence and activism on campuses across the United States is not an organic or spontaneous development. Money is flowing from the Arab world to universities, nongovernmental organizations, and professional terrorist sympathizers across the country. That money is paying for, organizing, educating, publicizing, and fanning the flames not simply of Israel-bashing, but of eliminationist Jew-hatred.

It demands a major response. Congress has begun investigating. Hearings in which university presidents have been unable to articulate any kind of standard that would protect Jewish students are driving headlines and major changes in leadership at elite educational institutions. Now key committees are digging into offshore efforts to direct and support campus anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activity. But things are a bit chaotic on Capitol Hill. Congress is moving in scattershot fashion, with multiple bills sponsored by a myriad of members. Little that is lasting can be accomplished in this way.

What is needed now is a systematic survey of the problem, backed by the federal investigative power of agencies like the FBI, followed by a careful legislative response. That, in turn, will raise a host of complex issues that must be addressed if we are to change the game and rip out the anti-Semitism in our institutions at the root.

In our democracy, regulating or even getting to the bottom of financial flows, particularly to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations (NGOs) and educational institutions, is not easy. The constitutional guarantee of free speech rightly colors all inquiries into the nature of foreign support for any group or school.

Questions are raised that are not easily dismissed. For example: Is money from France or Australia the same as money from China or Qatar? Can foreign funding of a university department or chair that has the effect of influencing the curriculum or the nature of study be regulated? What about NGO activity on campus: Does allowing NGOs that support terrorist organizations and their aims on campus constitute material support for terrorism, which is illegal under federal law? Is there a constitutional means of regulating or banning foreign-government-sponsored hate speech? Can Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the grounds of race, color, or national origin, be reasonably applied to donated dollars that seem to tilt the scales in favor of the causes of foreign actors?

First, we need to address the scope of the problem and determine its sources—apart from the frailties of human character that have driven anti-Semitic hatred for as long as there have been Jews. Where has this new anti-Semitism come from? What are the best tools to fight it? What are the roots of this 21st-century version of the world’s oldest hatred?

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A Two State Solution — But on Both Sides of the River Jordan Victor Sharpe

Posted By on July 14th, 2024

https://drrichswier.com/2024/07/10/a-two-state-solution-but-on-both-sides-of-the-river-jordan/

The phrase “Two State Solution” has been embraced by politicians and journalists alike, repeated endlessly, and touted as the panacea for a “just and equitable” solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

It has assumed the repetitious role of a muezzin’s call to Islamic prayer. But it is based on erroneous geography and history, on a mixture of wishful thinking, naiveté and a brilliant Arab propaganda campaign of disinformation and falsehood. To understand why, it is necessary to learn a small but vital chapter of Middle Eastern history.

Shortly after the conclusion of the First World War and the total defeat of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had ruled most of the Middle East from 1517 to 1917, Britain was made trustee by the League of Nations for the whole of the geographical and non-state territory known as Mandatory Palestine. Incorporated within the Mandate was the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which specifically referred to the historical connections of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the moral validity of reconstituting within it the Jewish National Home.

The British Mandatory power, however, arbitrarily tore away 80% of the Palestine Mandate which lay east of the River Jordan in 1921 giving it to the Hashemites, a Bedouin tribe with links to Mecca. Only the land west of the River Jordan remained from the original Mandate territory promised to the Jewish people as a National Home.

Jewish residency was immediately forbidden in all the lands east of the River Jordan, which in time became known as Trans-Jordan and then as the Kingdom of Jordan.

The U.N. Partition Plan of 1947 proposed two states, Jewish and Arab, which were roughly equal in size. But these two states were to occupy only the remaining western geographic area of Mandatory Palestine – from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan – barely 40 miles wide and a mere 20% of what now remained of original Mandatory Palestine.

This plan was accepted by the Jewish leadership with deep reservations, but as a pragmatic solution to the plight of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were being driven from Arab lands at the time of Israel’s rebirth.

The miniscule size of the state was also reluctantly accepted in order to facilitate the absorption of the surviving Jewish remnant languishing in European refugee camps following the Holocaust.

The State of Israel, thus reconstituted in part of its ancient and biblical homeland in May 1948, was immediately invaded by seven Arab armies in order to completely destroy it and drive the surviving Jews into the sea.

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Palestinian vs. Saudi education – ignored by Foggy Bottom Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on July 14th, 2024

http://bit.ly/3WizbdT

*The October 7, 2023 horrific Palestinian terrorism was committed by graduates of the hate-driven K-12 Palestinian school curriculum, which has been a most effective production-line of terrorists, since it was established in 1993 by Mahmoud Abbas. The tightly controlled Palestinian school curriculum, as well as the official Palestinian mosque sermons, constitute the most authentic reflection of the Palestinian culture, aspirations, strategy and policy.

*In contrast, the UAE school curriculum was thoroughly overhauled since the conclusion of the 2020 peace accord with Israel, highlighting peaceful coexistence, and reflecting the peace-driven vision of the UAE.

*Likewise, the substantial expansion of Saudi-Israeli defense and commercial cooperation has reflected the game-changing moderation of the Saudi school curriculum. It has been introduced by Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman in defiance of severe domestic opposition – including within the ruling family – with which the ruling families of the UAE do not have to contend. More on the Saudi school curriculum at the end of this article. 

*In contrast to the oppression of women by Iran’s Ayatollahs, the Saudi Crown Prince has also introduced a dramatic enhancement in the status of women, despite the strident opposition by the fundamentalist, puritan Wahabi establishment, whose support has been critical to the domestic legitimacy of the House of Saud.

*Middle East reality has demonstrated a direct correlation between the intensity of hate education and mosque incitement, on the one hand, and the level of violence, terrorism and hostility toward the Western and Jewish “infidels,” on the other hand. 

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NO POSTING UNTIL MONDAY

Posted By on July 12th, 2024

NO POSTING UNTIL MONDAY

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The Normalization of Terrorism and Jew-Hate by Robert Williams

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20770/normalization-terrorism-jew-hate

It apparently never occurred to either the heads of the UN or the EU to consider that if you are a terrorist organization that commits war crimes, you do not get to choose how a war that you started is waged against you.

If you do not want a “bloodbath,” do not take hostages, hide them among civilians, try to prevent a rescue, then if they are rescued, profess shock at the fallout that you yourself have teed up.

BBC news asked with a straight face if, to spare the lives of the Gazan “civilians” who were keeping the hostages locked up in their homes, Israel had given prior warning before launching its rescue operation. The Israeli spokesman, also keeping a straight face, politely answered that a warning might have endangered the hostages and made the rescue more difficult.

The irony of all this seems completely lost on the political and media elites, who kept insisting that the Israeli rescue operation was somehow immoral. By condemning Israel’s rescue operation, they suggest that massacring and kidnapping 240 people is moral, and an act that should not require a military response.

The new purported Hamas agreement to a ceasefire apparently comes with “a major hurdle: The Iran-backed terror group is now demanding ‘written guarantees’ that mediators will continue to negotiate a permanent truce, once the first phase of the plan goes into effect, the Hamas rep said.”

Essentially, this demand means that Hamas and its handlers, Iran and Qatar, would like to start wars and then have someone else stop them when they do not like how they are going.

In contravention of the Geneva conventions, Hamas has refused to allow the Red Cross to check on the welfare of the hostages. One can imagine why.

To this day, there seems little-to-no interest in the fate or condition of the hostages still in Gaza. Instead, there is denial that the October 7 atrocities even took place, compared to an almost obsessive regard for the safety of, and humanitarian aid for Gazans. When the UN is unable to deliver the aid, Israel, not the UN, is blamed.

The Hamas murders, rapes, burning alive of babies and abductions – all the reasons why Israel was forced to go to war with Hamas to begin with — have retreated into the background.

What seems to matter instead to those who set the political and media agendas is to use the Hamas war once again to demonize the Jews as the world’s most inhuman people for wanting to live peacefully on their historical land without daily massacres from Iran and its proxies — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Houthis — which apparently plan to encircle them in a “Ring of Fire” — “six fronts of aggression against Israel” — as part of Iran’s attempt at hegemony in the Middle East.

Western elites seem happy to assist them in that fight.

Nine months after the Iranian-orchestrated October 7 Hamas massacre of 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians, 116 hostages remain in Gaza, including at least 42 whom Israeli officials estimate were murdered by Hamas, after suffering unfathomable mental, physical and sexual abuse.

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Sociology’s Descent Into Woke Satire A once-great discipline falls into disrepair.Alexander Riley

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://americanmind.org/salvo/sociologys-descent-into-woke-satire/

Most casual observers, especially those with even slight conservative leanings, would agree that sociology is obviously left-wing. But this wasn’t always the case. When I began my sociology graduate work in the early nineties, it was the classical spirit of the discipline that drove me. There was then enough of the residue of what the discipline had been at its origins to enable idealistic souls like myself to imagine that sociology was still about uncovering the objective realities of social life, rather than simply producing a radical mythology that denounced all that existed and preached the necessity of total revolution.

Radical Marxist approaches were certainly there from the beginning. But many of these had at least the patina of intellectual seriousness and required substantive efforts to challenge and dismantle. However much one disagreed with Marx, for example, one could not reasonably call him a fool and a charlatan, at least if one had read him. He was wrong, but not obviously ignorant of basic things and oblivious to the requirements of argument and evidence.

Today’s sociology is so patently devoid of any intellectual rigor that most of it evokes only contemptuous laughter. The arguments advanced, the “evidence” mustered to support its partisan claims, are so weak that it is genuinely amazing to realize that the people making these cases have spent many years in educational institutions and yet have come away from all that with either no understanding of or an utter contempt for careful and rigorous argument.

Sociology Advertises Its Product

For example, the American Sociological Association (ASA) offers a series of video shorts titled “Sociological Insights.” These clips feature sociologists presenting their research in brief, visually engaging morsels. They are intended to provide an introduction to sociological reasoning and analysis. But the viewer who is not already converted to the Woke cult to which the ASA gives its allegiance can be forgiven for thinking, on watching a selection of the videos, that they were made by an enemy of sociology, as a wickedly humorous satire of the discipline.

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Kamala Harris Says Anti-Israel Student Protesters ‘Are Showing Exactly What the Human Emotion Should Be’ By Philip Klein

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-says-anti-israel-student-protesters-are-showing-exactly-what-the-human-emotion-should-be/

There have been many hints at the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris is more hostile to Israel than President Biden. As Democrats take a closer look at her as the most likely replacement should Biden drop out of the race, her views on Middle East policy will undergo closer scrutiny. Now, in an interview with Joan Walsh in the The Nation, Harris makes clear that she sympathizes with the anti-Israel protesters on college campuses — even though she doesn’t agree with everything they said.

Here is the part of the interview that gets to her views on Israel’s war against Hamas:

“Listen, I strongly believe that our ability to evaluate a situation is connected to understanding the details of that situation. Not speaking of myself versus the president, not at all. From the beginning, I asked questions. OK, the trucks are taking flour into Gaza. But here’s the thing, Joan: I like to cook. So I said to my team: You can’t make shit with flour if you don’t have clean water. So what’s going on with that? I ask questions like, What are people actually eating right now? I’m hearing stories about their eating animal feed, grass … so that’s how I think about it.

“Similarly, I was asking early on, what are women in Gaza doing about sanitary hygiene. Do they have pads? And these are the issues that made people feel uncomfortable, especially sanitary pads.”

The young people who have mobilized against the destruction of Gaza are unlikely to be mollified by these answers. What does she say to them?

“They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza. There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it. I understand the emotion behind it.”

Harris is careful to provide herself an escape hatch — to say she doesn’t fully endorse everything the protesters say — but it’s clear that in her mind, she feels that she has to say something nice about the antisemitic protests because ultimately she is trying to win over the pro-Hamas contingent of the party

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‘I Don’t Think’ Biden Can Serve Second Term, George Stephanopoulos Says after Post-Debate Interview David Zimmerman

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/i-dont-think-biden-can-serve-second-term-george-stephanopoulos-says-after-friday-interview/

The ABC host later said he regretted answering the question.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said Tuesday that he doesn’t believe President Joe Biden can serve a second term, four days after interviewing the incumbent following his worrisome debate performance late last month.

“Do you think Biden should step down?” an anonymous person on the street in Manhattan asked the political commentator in a 20-second video posted Tuesday afternoon by TMZ. “You’ve talked to him more than anybody else has lately.”

“I don’t think he can serve four more years,” Stephanopoulos responded as he walked away. The pedestrian replied: “You don’t think he can serve four more years? All right, that’s an answer.”

Hours after the clip was published, Stephanopoulos said he regretted answering the question.

“Earlier today, I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have,” he told TMZ. An ABC spokesperson added, “George expressed his own point of view and not the position of ABC News.”

On Friday, Stephanopoulos conducted a 22-minute post-debate interview with Biden. During the exclusive sit-down, the 81-year-old president failed to allay voters’ concerns about his health and age following the CNN debate on June 27. Biden described his performance that night as a “bad episode” and insisted he has no “serious condition,” but he declined to take an independent cognitive test to prove that claim.

“Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” Biden told Stephanopoulos. “Every day, I’ve had tests. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, I’m running the world. And that’s not — it sounds like hyperbole, but we are the central nation of the world.”

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Abandoning Israel and the Jews Britain’s new Labour government is already playing to a despicable gallery, both within and without Melanie Phillips

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/abandoning-israel-and-the-jews

Five days after Britain’s Labour party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the general election, we can see the outline of what this is likely to mean for British Jews and their country’s relationship with Israel. That outline is not reassuring.

The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is said to have purged his party of antisemitism and has persuaded many British Jews that he has made Labour safe again for Jewish voters. On Sunday morning, he told the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — antisemite, Holocaust denier and fan of Hitler’s wartime ally in the Middle East — that an independent state was the “undeniable right” of the Palestinian people and that “financial support for the Palestinian Authority” was one of his “immediate priorities”. 

He did not tell Abbas that a condition of this financial support was that the PA must stop paying financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Israelis. Nor did he say that a condition of receiving more British taxpayers’ money was that the PA must end its indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children in Nazi-themed demonisation of the Jews, teaching them that their greatest ambition should be to murder Jews and steal all their land. 

Instead, Starmer proceeded to lecture Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin  Netanyahu, that there was a “clear and urgent” need for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as an immediate increase in the volume of humanitarian aid reaching civilians. As for the war being waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon against northern Israel, Starmer warned Netanyahu:

It was crucial all parties acted with caution.

What kind of “caution” does Starmer suggest is appropriate in the face of a threat of genocide by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran? Or to put it another way, with Hezbollah primed to unleash its armoury of 150,000 rockets and other missiles that can reach all of Israel, and with Iran itself along with Iraqi, Syrian and Houthi militias not to mention the terrorist armies of the “West Bank” all primed to attack Israel if it launches all-out war against Hezbollah, does Starmer really believe that Israel actually needs to be told to act “with caution”?