ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The ADL Global 100: Index of Antisemitism® An estimated 2.2 billion people – 46% of the world’s adult population – harbor antisemitic attitudes. This is more than double the number of people surveyed a decade ago when ADL introduced the ADL Global 100.

Posted By on January 16th, 2025

https://www.adl.org/adl-global-100-index-antisemitism?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-

About the ADL Global 100

Conducted by ADL and coordinated with Ipsos and other research partners, the ADL Global 100 Index gauges levels of antisemitic sentiments through an index comprised of 11 questions that measure general acceptance of various negative Jewish stereotypes. Survey respondents who say at least 6 out of the 11 statements are “probably true” or “definitely true” are considered to harbor elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes. Respondents were from 103 countries and territories.

Negative attitudes toward Jewish people are one part of how ADL assesses levels of antisemitism. ADL also accounts for the number and nature of antisemitic incidents annually, polls of Jewish communities about their experiences with antisemitism, government policies and other factors. This shows how the fight against antisemitism requires countries to adopt and implement a whole-of-society strategy that involves all levels of government, corporations, academia, civil society and the public.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Scourge — Or Not — Of “Ultraprocessed Foods” Francis Menton

Posted By on January 16th, 2025

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=5edc814ed7

“Ultraprocessed foods.” That sounds really bad. In fact, not just really bad, but really, really bad. Bad on a level with, maybe, “assault rifles” or “cis-heteronormativity.” Definitely, with a condemnatory name like that, “ultraprocessed foods” would be something that no sensible person would ever eat, or at least certainly not in large quantities.

The term “ultraprocessed foods” has been in usage for a while, but the frequency seems to have exploded everywhere in the past few months. Perhaps that has resulted from the naming of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has made a thing about proclaiming a health crisis in the U.S., which he asserts is substantially brought about by our “broken food system.” On November 15 — just after President-elect Trump tapped Kennedy to lead HHS in the new administration — The New York Times had a piece outlining Kennedy’s critiques of the “food system.” Number one on the list of Kennedy’s critiques identified by the NYT was “ultraprocessed food.”

After reading this, I thought it might be time for me to get on top of what this “ultraprocessed food” stuff might be. Is this something that you need to really be concerned about, or is it just another one of the usual scare tactics of the left to try to take more control of your life? The answer, as will not surprise you, is the latter.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Hostage Deal Copes Realistically with a Nasty Situation Israel is still on the way to a win. P. David Hornik

Posted By on January 16th, 2025

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

In the war ignited by the October 7 massacre, Israel set two goals that were incompatible: retrieving all the hostages and destroying Hamas. I’ve only recently, with the help of a couple of analysts who have pointed this out, come to grasp the incompatibility. I was among those who kept believing Israel could achieve both those goals in tandem with each other.

In the 15+ months of this war so far (it’s still being waged as, at the time of writing, I hear explosions from Gaza 25 miles away), Israel has managed to militarily rescue seven hostages. An eighth was found by troops after his captors had abandoned him.

All of the seven who were military rescued were being held in apartments. Reportedly, after the rescue of four hostages from two apartments in June, all the hostages still being held in apartments were moved to tunnels. There, all of them are closely guarded by terrorists, possibly suicide terrorists. These captors can hear Israeli troops approaching and, if they do, will kill the hostages (and possibly themselves as well). That was what happened to the six Israeli hostages murdered in a tunnel in August.

Some say that, instead of prodding Israel into the current hostage deal at this stage, President Trump should have waited a few more days to take office and then have supported Israel in “starving out” Hamas. But “starving out” Hamas would mean the hostages—already on near-starvation diets and in very weakened condition—would get “starved out” too, and would be in further acute danger from a desperate and vindictive Hamas.

In other words, for those who want to see the hostages freed, something like the current deal is the only option.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Ayatollahs Expands Encroachment on US Hemisphere (the Caribbean Sea) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on January 16th, 2025

http://bit.ly/3DW2EU5

Will the Monroe Doctrine be revitalized in the face of the growing military, economic and diplomatic entrenchment of Iran’s Ayatollahs throughout Latin America?! The Ayatollahs aim to undermine the strategic posture of the US in its own “soft underbelly,” and bring “The Great American Satan” to submission. Against this alarming background, can the US afford to persist in its diplomatic option toward Iran, or revert to President Trump’s maximum pressure economic sanctions, which were proven reversible, while refraining from the irreversible regime-change?!

*”After more than four decades of systematic penetration of Latin America, Iran is reaching its full geopolitical potential in the Western Hemisphere, prepositioning military assets and armaments in the region. Tehran’s goal is to bring the fight to the United States…. Venezuela’s Armed Forces is the first Latin American military to have armed drones in its inventory, courtesy of Iran. In 2021, Venezuela began receiving shipments of Iran-made precision-guided short-range missiles that will likely be used to arm the drones….”    

*The Warsaw, Poland-based Defense Industry Europe reports that “Iran’s supply of military systems to Venezuela creates grave concerns in South America. Iranian-made Zolfaghar-class missile boats (a modified version of the North Korean IPS-16) armed with Nasr-1 anti-ship missiles were observed during a July 24, 2023 naval parade in Venezuela [Do the Ayatollahs intend to export the Houthi piracy in the Red Sea to the Caribbean Sea and the Venezuela-Guyana territorial conflict?]. The Iranian defense industry is using straw companies to obtain dual-use components used in their locally manufactured military systems…. Iran is using Venezuela as its front base in South America, intending to target American interests….”

*The Riyadh-based Journal for Iranian Studies indicates that “Iran’s significant and growing presence in Latin America, [is noticed] among governments with adversarial relationships with the United States. [There is] a progression of Iran-Latin American cooperation from diplomatic, cultural and commercial ties to the signing of military agreements and the export of Iranian military technology, notably drones…. to Latin America, which represents a critical region for US national interests and security…. A drone production factory was established [in Venezuela] over a decade ago during Hugo Chavez’s tenure…. These commercial and military agreements help Iran circumvent international sanctions and the 2007 UN arms embargo, providing a venue for Iranian companies affiliated with the [US State Department terror-designated] Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to establish a presence beyond Iranian borders, notwithstanding the sanctions…. Bolivian Defense Minister, Edmundo Novillo, disclosed that the [Iran-Bolivia] agreement entailed provisions for acquiring drones and boats aimed at monitoring regional borders…. [He] underscored Bolivia’s need for maintenance services for its aircraft and helicopters [paid for by lithium], acknowledging the technical expertise offered by Iran in this regard….”    

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites Ilya Shapiro

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ILYA+SHAPIRO&i=stripbooks&crid=15XHIMNH860HR&sprefix=ilya+shapiro%2Cstripbooks%2C82

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a build­ing and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect oppo­nents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
File and fight constitutional lawsuits
Advise Fortune 500 companies
Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ilya Shapiro, Noam Josse The Hypocrisy of Pro-Palestinian Activists They’re not consistent proponents of open debate.

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-israel-protests-pro-palestine-activists-columbia

The post-October 7 conflict on U.S. campuses has been framed as a battle between free speech and hate speech. Anti-Israel protesters claim that universities are stifling their right to expression, while many Jewish and other pro-Israel students respond that “pro-Palestinian” activism has led to violence, intimidation, and a general disruption of educational programs—and they note as well that before October 7, universities had often censored politically incorrect speech.

This framing is mistaken. “Pro-Palestine” advocates are not consistent proponents of free and open debate. Instead, they want to express crude and often menacing sentiments, as Columbia University’s example shows. Columbia students last April insisted that “Zionists” weren’t welcome on campus, even as they denounced other groups’ attempts to air alternative views.

Consider in this light Columbia Law Students for Palestine. The group, which has complained of being censored, also fires off emails to its members intended to discourage them from attending events hosted by pro-Israel students. These so-called SpeakerWatch messages undermine any notion that CLSP is interested in the open exchange of ideas. Ahead of Israeli historian Benny Morris’s Zoom event with Columbia Law students last January, for instance, CLSP lambasted the talk as “justification for Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity.” The group labeled Morris a racist and Islamophobe and urged its members not to support the Zoom meeting and to instead attend events hosted by CLSP.

In March, when Columbia Law School’s Center for Israeli Studies invited a panel of Israeli legal scholars to speak, CLSP sent a long SpeakerWatch decrying Israel’s alleged crimes and disparaging each member of the panel, describing one as “enabling violence against Palestinians.” Instead of suggesting that its followers attend and express their views, CLSP denounced the Center for Israeli Studies for merely hosting the event.

The group’s insistence that its members not attend pro-Israeli speeches, along with its baseless accusations of violence, undermines respectful campus dialogue. In its place, CLSP helps create a climate of fear—one reason why students still feel more comfortable shouting down a professor than expressing an unpopular opinion.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Illegal Immigration Is Killing Small Towns By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/illegal_immigration_is_killing_small_towns.html

Dementia Joe’s disastrous presidency can’t end soon enough.  While he’s busy offering clemency to child rapists and murderers (and teasing the prospect of pardons for the lawfare tyrants who tormented his political adversaries these miserable last four years), his chief operating officer handling the Democrats’ suicidal open borders policy — Department of Homeland (in)Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas — is preoccupied with shielding a million more foreign nationals from future deportation.  This extra protection for Venezuelans, El Salvadorans, Ukrainians, and Sudanese is in addition, of course, to the lawless Biden regime’s ongoing criminal conspiracy to aid and abet international drug smugglers, sex slavers, and black market crime syndicates by resettling millions of illegal aliens (cartel “cargo”) across the United States.  If the Biden White House really wants to insulate itself from the consequences of its own criminality, it will need to issue thousands of additional pardons for its closest friends (and America’s enemies) in the next few days.

Human trafficker Mayorkas has to be one of the most vile demons in a Democrat den brimming with evil spirits.  The DHS devil helped the Chinese Communist Party kill Americans with fentanyl and looked the other way as a half-million or more young children were imported as chattel and sexual playthings for the country’s most repugnant Hell-bound deviants.  Yet the execrable pedophile-enabler never missed an opportunity to stand before cameras with a fiendish smile and defame as “racists” those who object to his criminal depravity.  Mayorkas — who made America only less secure while being charged with an obligation to do the opposite (a default in duty common among the Biden regime’s “America Last” fifth column) — spent his time in office ensuring that Americans are more likely to be the victims of rape, murder, robbery, and other violence.

While the deadly repercussions of the Biden-Mayorkas open borders madness will haunt us for decades, there are countless heartbreaking stories that remain unreported due to the moral limitations of our cowering, censorship-prone, incurious press.  Sanctuary cities’ open invitations to and “free” handouts for foreign nationals are attractive nuisances that have drawn criminal illegal aliens from around the world, but those who follow Democrats’ siren song across our borders and into the homeland do not remain in Democrat-run cities.  

MEDIA Comments turned off

Star CNN Star Reporter Refuses To Apologize to Navy Vet He Threatened To ‘Nail’ as Bombshell Defamation Case Continues ‘We have zeroed in on an American offering outrageous prices,’ CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt wrote

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://freebeacon.com/media/star-cnn-star-reporter-refuses-to-apologize-to-navy-vet-he-threatened-to-nail-as-bombshell-defamation-case-continues/

PANAMA CITY, Fla.—CNN chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt refused to apologize Monday for falsely accusing a Navy veteran of operating in a “black market” to profiteer off Afghans fleeing their homes. Instead, Marquardt gave conflicting testimony, boasted about his Emmy awards, and defended messages insulting the veteran, Zachary Young.

Young slapped CNN with a $1 billion defamation suit over Marquardt’s report, arguing that The Lead with Jake Tapper segment irreparably harmed his reputation and destroyed his company, Nemex Enterprises. Marquardt’s November 2021 reporting singled out Young, portrayed him as an “illegal profiteer,” and accused him of charging exorbitant prices to help evacuate people during the Biden-Harris administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“I don’t feel the need to apologize to him,” Marquardt said repeatedly on the stand Monday. Shortly after, he touted his various honors. “I’ve won a few Emmy awards. That’s kind of the main award in television news.”

CNN anchor Jake Tapper also hasn’t apologized, Young testified last week. Anchor Pamela Brown, however, issued an apology while filling in for Tapper, and the phrase “black market” was removed from the online version of the segment. CNN senior editor Fuzz Hogan, who edited the written portion of the report, testified Friday that the text he approved didn’t include the term “black market” and blamed Tapper and producers for the portrayal.

The liberal network faced several setbacks leading up to the trial. Judge William Henry earlier this month ruled that Young could use at trial Tapper’s disparaging comments about Fox News after its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Jurors during last week’s selection process appeared open to forcing CNN to cough up a 10-figure payout to Young.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Yes, Greenland is Strategic Neither Denmark nor the EU can defend against Russian or Chinese aggression in the Arctic. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yes-greenland-is-strategic/

I love it when Donald Trump makes the media talking heads explode.

If you believed their hyperventilating reaction to this week’s masterful press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the United States Navy was getting warships out of mothballs in preparation for legitimate threats to American security in Greenland and the Panama Canal.

And it wasn’t only in the U.S.

French foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, puffed up like a peacock and beat his tiny chest on hearing the news. “There is no question of the EU letting other nations in the world, whoever they may be, attack its sovereign borders,” the little Frenchman sniffed. “We are a strong continent.”

Outgoing German chancellor Olof Scholz backed up his French bud with words of his own, with talk of “the principle of the inviolability of borders.” Those would be Denmark’s borders, not Germany’s.

The Danish foreign minister, while telling reporters that Greenland “has its own ambitions” and could become independent in the future, was more level-headed in acknowledging America’s very real national security concerns.

“We are open to dialogue with the Americans on how we can possibly cooperate even more closely than we do to ensure that the American ambitions are fulfilled,” he said.

Guess what? Greenland is indeed strategic. FDR realized that at the onset of World War II when he ordered the U.S. Army to establish an air base in the south-east of the country once Denmark had been invaded by the Nazis in 1940. My Dad commanded the coastal artillery unit at the base, known as Bluie-West One – later renamed Narsarsuaq Air Base – as a 29-year old US Army Major.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hegseth Hearings Show Dems Still Don’t Have a Plan The hearings were disastrous… for Democrats. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 15th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hegseth-hearings-show-dems-still-dont-have-a-plan/

The hearings for Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth were disastrous… for Democrats.

The game plan was to ‘genderify’ the hearings by focusing on the infidelity allegations and the question of women in combat, and to let female Dem Senate members take the lead. The outcome was Sen. Elizabeth Warren and a few others scolding a calm Hegseth. The optics of it were bad again… for Democrats.

Usually it’s not too difficult for senators to make a nominee sweat. But that requires doing research and asking probing, damning questions, while remaining in control. Since much of what members of Congress do is hold hearings, this should be a basic skill, and yet somehow they blew it. It’s never a good situation when the interrogators are more flustered than the subject. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a former lawyer (and horribly unpleasant human being) usually maintains better self-control and message discipline, came off as bitterly deranged.

Few people would have been watching the hearings anyway, but the Senate Dems knew they needed just a few moments to go viral and then get picked up late night shows who would spin them up again to make them go viral. It’s telling that those moments didn’t occur. At least not any that are useful to them.

The larger takeaway is that the Dems still haven’t recovered from the election and don’t have a plan. The things they care about, like women in combat, are of very little interest to most Americans. Dems are struggling to bridge a gap on social issues that is no longer pointing in their direction.