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Iran: The Chained Volcano by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 2nd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18947/iran-chained-volcano

Today’s Damavand [volcano] s made of a new generation of Iranians who don’t give tuppence about the Islamic Republic’s arcane narrative, and prefer life in the modern world, warts and all, to the North Korean-style society that “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei is trying to impose on Iran.

The uprising was triggered by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old woman on a family visit to Tehran.

Within 24 hours of her death, allegedly as a result of beatings by security agents, Amini’s name was known to almost all Iranians and, within 48 hours, it had become a symbol of resistance to tyranny across the world.

By the time of writing this column, we had received the names of 84 people, including nine women and six children, killed by security, while semi-official figures put the number of arrests at over 1,800.

The uprising has spread to over 300 towns and cities, some of which are witnessing protests for the first time in recent history.

Early in its existence, the Khomeinist regime established self-preservation as its highest goal. Khomeini called it “the obligation of obligations” (oujab al-wajebat in Arabic), asserting that to protect the regime, even Islam could be set aside.

Regime protection forces, excluding the national army, number over 600,000 men. Islamic security is organized in nine different units, at least four of them trained and equipped for crushing street protests.

All security units, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), benefit from numerous advantages, notably salaries that are 30 percent higher than comparable ones in the national army.

The latest uprising is different from previous ones in a number of ways…. This time, the almost unanimous call is for regime change.

Until this writing, Khamenei, who shed tears for the death of George Floyd in the United States, has been silent on the eruption that threatens his regime.

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Time to Outlaw Counting by Race? Reversing the stipulations of many government programs by outlawing their methodology would be a big step in ridding ourselves of such mischievous overreach. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 2nd, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/01/time-to-outlaw-counting-by-race/

Speaking recently in South Korea, Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, publicly celebrated America’s “strong alliance” with “the Republic of North Korea.” Apparently Kim Jong-un thought that was as funny as I did, because the chubby dictator responded by firing off some missiles just as Madam Vice President was packing her bags. People don’t like it when Kim starts firing missiles because you never know what sort of payload they may carry or where they might land.

Madam Vice President is made of stern stuff, though. She shrugged off both her exhibition of bone-crushing ignorance and the modern world’s equivalent of minatory saber-rattling. Indeed, back home, she heard that Hurricane Ian had flattened large swaths of Southwest Florida, destroying the homes and businesses of untold thousands. There she was, publicly declaring that the Biden Administration would be doling out aid to victims “based on equity,” directing funds first and foremost to “communities of color.” 

You can’t make it up, but then you don’t have to. Bidenland does all the heavy lifting. 

Recently, we were told that the government (i.e., the taxpayers) will be footing the bill for billions upon billions of dollars in student loan debt. The following week, after someone figured out how expensive it would all be and the lawyers began salivating over the obvious illegality of the scheme, the administration began quietly walking back the plan to make Peter, who paid off his student loans, also pay for Paul’s.

It’s sometimes hard to keep up to date on all the wonderful things happening in our country, partly because the administration has been aggressively partnering with various media companies to censor news they don’t like, which is more and more of it. Just Friday, it was reported that some 20 conservative media sites—including the New York Post, Just the News, Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, the Epoch Times, and Breitbart—were flagged as peddling “disinformation,” i.e., stories that the administration did not like regarding the 2020 presidential election. Particular individuals, all of them conservative, were also flagged as having disseminated “disinformation.”

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Restoring Free Speech at Our Universities Charles Lipson

Posted By on October 2nd, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/09/30/restoring_free_speech_at_our_universities_148260.html

Now that the autumn semester is well underway, it is worth asking whether students have a chance to participate in free and open debate. The short answer is “No, they don’t.” They don’t have a chance to explore unpopular ideas and controversial opinions. They are “protected” from ideas that might make them uncomfortable. What’s being stifled here is more than speech. It’s their education and, with it, their preparation to live in a tolerant society, where fellow citizens hold different views.

As Hanna Holborn Gray, one of America’s finest university presidents, once observed: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” She was absolutely right.

Unfortunately, today few universities follow Gray’s advice, and they bear a heavy responsibility for their failure. Promoting free discourse is central to their mission. It’s not only the best way to educate students, it is also the best way to encourage innovative research and to model serious engagement with differing views, a beleaguered value in today’s Western societies.

Students don’t need reminding how intolerant their campuses are. They already know. If they hold unpopular opinions, they keep their heads down. If they hold dominant views, they are all too eager to shame those who differ rather than debate them. Faculty and administrators are among the worst bullies, and they hold real power over students.

Whole departments display this intolerance. That’s especially true in the humanities and social sciences, but the infection has spread to the sciences. Increasingly, departments won’t hire or admit anyone who doesn’t swear allegiance to a specific political agenda. That’s not hypothetical or hyperbolic. Many now require applicants to submit written statements explaining in detail how they contribute to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

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The new loyalty oath imposed on Jews by Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Posted By on October 2nd, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/the-new-loyalty-oath-imposed-on-jews

On college campuses, in progressive organizing spaces, in some professional contexts, and even among friends, Americans are increasingly being told their Zionism is disqualifying. For many Jews, that means an aspect of their own identity makes them persona non grata in spaces where left-wing views are paramount. For non-Jews, maintaining until-recently mainstream, pro-Israel opinions means risking social stigmatization and professional harm. Although this problem has begun to gain some visibility, it’s time Americans understood the extent of the social pressure to self-censor or else face the mob.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jews keeping their Zionism hush-hush weren’t eager to be interviewed. However, 32 Jewish and non-Jewish students and young alumni, academics, communal and advocacy group figures, governmental leaders, activists, and creatives contributed to this article. Taken together, what follows is a portrait of profound societal changes.

These changes, it must be noted, affect all Jews in these spaces because they are greeted with suspicions and assumptions about their support for Israel that they must either dispel or confirm. And this manifests in various ways.

In 2015, University of California, Los Angeles, student Rachel Beyda was expecting to be confirmed without incident to the student council’s judicial board but was met with a bizarre question from a member of the council: “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Beyda was asked, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” After a lengthy discussion of Beyda’s Jewish identity, from which Beyda was excluded, her nomination was voted down. (This was only reversed when a faculty adviser to the council stepped in.)

The incidents that make national headlines give the public a rare window into the discrimination regularly wielded in left-of-center institutions. For example, there was an explosive controversy about whether one can be both a feminist and a Zionist, which the Women’s March’s then-leader Linda Sarsour answered firmly in the negative. Jewish lesbians were ejected from Chicago’s Dyke March for carrying a Pride flag emblazoned with a Jewish star because some attendees were uncomfortable with the symbol’s association with the Israeli flag. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) was “demonized by extremists as a white supremacist, as a supporter of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, [and] genocide” for condemning Hamas’s terrorism. The Washington, D.C., chapter of the environmental group Sunrise Movement refused “to participate in a voting rights rally” alongside three Jewish groups. An undergraduate at the State University of New York, New Paltz, was expelled from a “sexual assault awareness group” she co-founded over an Instagram post describing Jews as indigenous to Israel. And the list goes on.

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A political ploy to curb free speech By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 2nd, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-political-ploy-to-curb-free-speech/

 In an act of chutzpah characteristic of the Israeli left, Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party has petitioned the Central Elections Committee (CEC) to declare Channel 14 a “propaganda platform” for Likud, headed by opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the petition, submitted to the CEC on Wednesday by Economy and Industry Minister Orna Barbivai and Energy Minister Karine Elharrar, the right-wing news outlet, owned by billionaire Yitzchak Mirilashvili, “is a real threat to the basic principles” of Israeli elections, as it is “fully harnessed in favor of a candidate and a party, without balance and contrary to every standard of reasonableness, fairness and common sense.”

Barbivai claimed that the move isn’t intended to “influence the content of the broadcasts,” but to demand transparency—to report to the public that the “content constitutes election propaganda.”

Elharrar accused the outlet of “posing as a news channel [but whose] entire purpose is improper propaganda” for Netanyahu.

“Allowing the channel to continue deceiving the public is a real danger to the press in Israel and to democracy as a whole,” she said.

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When the Democrats lose the House in November, several FBI investigations will reveal things we can scarcely imagine. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 1st, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/thoughts-on-the-cultural-revolution-in-our-midst-part-three/

Investigators will hone in on what transpired under the last four FBI directors: McCabe (lied four times to federal investigators and oversaw fake FISA warrants); Comey (leaked confidential memos of private presidential conversations, feigned amnesia 245 times while under oath before a congressional committee, and used the FBI as an extension of the Clinton campaign’s smear efforts); Mueller (absurdly under oath claimed that he knew nothing of the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS, both synonymous with lying and both jumpstarted his own investigations); and Wray (oversaw the Virginia school board meetings surveillance, the Trump home raid, the leg irons on Peter Navarro, the performance-art nocturnal wake-up of James O’Keefe, and the cell phone grabs of former Trump advisors).

The party that formerly railed about the “military-industrial complex” now finds the Pentagon’s chain of command the most efficient way of mandating woke indoctrination, politicizing the armed forces, and weeding out the politically suspect.

The army may be 50 percent short of its annual recruitment targets (we wonder why?), the public may express historical negative appraisals of Pentagon efficacy (in a recent poll only 45 percent voiced real confidence in the U.S. military), the Pentagon diversity/equity/inclusion czar may spout racist diatribes, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs may be hunting the white-rage unicorn while overseeing the worst military disaster of the last 50 years in Afghanistan, the retired 4-star cohort may routinely and with arrogance violate Article 88 of their own Uniform Code of Military Justice, but no matter: we are told it is diverse and uses the right pronouns. That fact is surely worth a $15 billion carrier or two, or deters the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and leaves the Iranians terrified. The pride flag in Kabul was worth a division?

The now revolutionary party that always preached about the sanctity of the radical, activist Warren Supreme Court, now wages war on individual justices.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: REGARDING KEN BURNS

Posted By on October 1st, 2022

I’ll skip the requisite fulsome praise for Ken Burns. Yes, he has made some great documentaries. And yes, his documentary on the Holocaust has devastating information on our nation’s indifference to the plight of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

 However, he is a polemical dolt for the inference that there is moral equivalence between Jewish refugees seeking asylum before the Holocaust, and those undocumented pouring into our border states.

For elucidation: Jewish refugees desperate to flee Europe would gladly have gone to any and all of the nations that are the locus of the present border surge.

They would have welcomed any harbor and accepted political harassment and economic woes, shacks for homes, lack of potable water, deplorable hygiene, and political strife rather than Hitler’s plan for the Jews disclosed in Mein Kampf in 1925. By 1933 it was a best seller.

 No such document or genocidal agenda exists in any single nation south of our broken Southern border. Rsk

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‘Palestinian’ President Called Biden’s Secretary of State, “Little Boy” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 1st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/palestinian-president-called-bidens-secretary-of-state-little-boy/

“Abbas humiliating Blinken though is a sign of the PLO’s arrogance and Biden’s weakness.”

In his remarks at the State Department last year, Biden told Secretary of State Blinken, “The message I want the world to hear today: America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”

America is back. To the ritual humiliations of the Obama administration. It’s not just that China, Russia and Iran are humiliating us. Even the lowest creatures on the totem pole, Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist leader funded by the United States, humiliates Blinken.

And Blinken blinks and asks, “Please sir, may I have some more.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told a group of Palestinian Americans last week that he scolded US Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to pressure Israel to make peace.

This comes after the Biden administration has repeatedly condemned and pressured Israel, and fought to secure Israel’s capital of Jerusalem for the terrorists by running a rogue diplomatic operation.

While Abbas has not shied away from publicly vocalizing his frustration with the Biden administration over the past year, his remarks during a private meeting with representatives of the Palestinian diaspora on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York appeared to go further and included the belittling of the United States’s top diplomat.

“I told Blinken, ‘You little boy, don’t do that,’” Abbas told the Palestinian Americans, speaking in Arabic. Some details of the meeting were first published by the Haya Washington Arabic news site.

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Biden Administration’s Gift to Russia: Iran Nuke Deal by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 1st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18945/biden-russia-iran-nuke-deal

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has stunningly made it clear to US lawmakers that the Biden administration will not stand in the way of Russia cashing in on the $10 billion contract as well as Russia-Iran nuclear cooperation. And the State Department spokesman Ned Price reiterated the Biden administration’s stance by pointing out: “We, of course, would not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects that are part of resuming full implementation of the JCPOA”.
“The Biden administration is so desperate for a deal with Iran they’ll broker a $10 billion payoff to Russia and waive their own sanctions to make it happen.” — US Representative Darrell Issa, Washington Free Beacon, May 2, 2022.
In addition, the Biden administration is trusting Russia to conduct the nuclear negotiations on behalf of the US; to be the sole country to oversee compliance of the nuclear deal, and to keep Iran’s highly enriched uranium — able to return it to Iran if the mullahs request it, or possibly even use it themselves.
Fifty bipartisan US lawmakers urgeed the Biden administration “not to permit Russia to be the recipient of Iran’s enriched uranium nor to have the right to conduct nuclear work with the Islamic Republic, including a $10 billion contract to expand Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. We should not let war criminal Vladimir Putin be the guarantor of the deal or the keeper of massive amounts of Iran’s enriched uranium. Iran supports the illegal war in Ukraine and has been supplying Russia with drones used to kill Ukrainians.”
“This Iran Deal if and when it is announced will be a massive win for Vladimir Putin.” — US Senator Ted Cruz, Fox News, March 9, 2022.
“Mr President, you’re the only one in America doing business with the Russians, stop doing business with the Russians. Don’t have them negotiating for us, walk on this deal.” — US Senator Jim Risch, Fox News, March 9, 2022.
The Biden administration nevertheless appears determined to give Russia the biggest gift ever: an Iran nuclear deal, complete with enriched uranium for nuclear bombs to be used whenever Russia or Iran decide.

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Gullible Corporate Media Falls for Race Hoax After Race Hoax, Learns Nothing By Ben Bartee

Posted By on October 1st, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/benbartee/2022/10/01/gullible-corporate-media-falls-for-race-hoax-after-race-hoax-learns-nothing-2-n1633835

You might be forgiven for mistakenly believing race hoaxes couldn’t possibly get more brazen, or morally depraved, than actor Jussie Smollet’s theatrical rendition of a midnight MAGA lynching in sub-zero downtown Chicago.

That fateful 2019 winter eve, Smollet hired his two Nigerian bodyguards to play the roles of white supremacists, who allegedly attacked Smollett while on his way to Subway in the middle of the night.

The white supremacists, wearing ski masks, allegedly yelled “f****t Empire n*****r, this is MAGA country” from across the street, then crossed the street to grab Smollett.

They proceeded to pour bleach on him (which was somehow still liquid in freezing temperatures), beat him up, wrapped a noose around his neck, and mysteriously disappeared into the night nearly as quickly as they came.

(Smollett undoubtedly got the bleach idea from the iconic scene in the 1997 film American History X in which neo-Nazis, led by Edward Norton, pour milk over a Latina grocery store clerk.)

Everyone knows the white man can’t help but go around slipping nooses on black people everywhere he goes, like Johnny Appleseed.

“You hadn’t noticed it before?” Roberts interjects (the hardest question, by the way, she asks the whole time, despite the palpable absurdity of Smollett’s fantastical account).