ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris won the debate — and it wasn’t close The vice president was controlled and effective where Trump was angry, defensive and rambling Charles Lipson

Posted By on September 11th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/politics/kamala-harris-won-debate-philadelphia-2024/

If Kamala Harris is elected president — and that’s a big “if” since the race is still tight — she won it on the debate stage in Philadelphia Tuesday night. True, her answers were often vague, but they were also inspirational and forward-looking. She avoided the “word salads” that have so often marred her (rare) comments without a teleprompter. She was clear and articulate throughout. 

Harris showed the skill of a professional politician as she avoided being pinned down on her most extreme policy pronouncements from 2019-2020, often denying she ever made them. Trump could have pressed her on those but seldom did. 

Harris effectively stressed her winning position on “women’s right to choose” and damned Trump for his position. (She misstated his views on in-vitro fertilization, but he rebutted her on that.) She also underscored her support for Obamacare, a smart position nationally, and tied it to John McCain’s vote, a smart position in the swing-state of Arizona. 

Most important of all, Harris displayed the control, sureness and coherence voters demand of their president and commander-in-chief. Demonstrating her ability to occupy the Oval Office was job number one in the debate — and Kamala Harris accomplished it. 

Donald Trump, by contrast, hurt himself time and again. He was constantly angry and defensive, qualities that engage his rallies but alienate all Democrats and many Independents, especially women. On the plus side, he repeatedly emphasized his main points on immigration, crime and endless wars — all winning issues for him. He made a strong case that he would encourage fracking, a vital issue in Pennsylvania, and that a Harris administration would kill it. (She denied it.)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s True Enemy: Hamas, Not Netanyahu by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20925/israel-enemy-hamas

More than 30 years ago, these “elites,” overwhelmingly on Israel’s political “left” (think “peace,” as if most people in democracies do not want peace) played a significant role in convincing the Israeli government to sign the Oslo Accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by Yasser Arafat. The assumption back then was that if you bring Arafat’s PLO from the Arab countries to Gaza and the West Bank and help them create a government and police force, the Palestinians would renounce terrorism and give up their dream of destroying Israel.

The Palestinian Authority, established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1994, had no intention of making peace with Israel, and still has not.

Palestinian leaders continue to praise terrorists as “martyrs” and “heroes” and pay monthly salaries to their families.

Many Israeli “elites” chose to turn a blind eye to the Palestinian leaders’ support for terrorism and incitement of violence and hatred against Israel. Some Israeli peace activists continued to argue that Abbas who, since 2014 has refused to resume peace negotiations with Israel, is somehow a credible peace partner.

“He [Arafat] did not negotiate in good faith; indeed, he did not negotiate at all. He just kept saying no to every offer, never making any counterproposals of his own.” – Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted by Benny Morris from interviews in late March and early April 2202.

The Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip in 2005 to enable the Palestinians to create a Dubai on the Mediterranean, instead enabled Hamas and other terror groups to turn the coastal enclave into a huge base for Jihad (holy war) against Israel. With the help of Iran, the terror groups smuggled weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt in tunnels dug under the border, and were taught to manufacture rockets and missiles. The Gazans also built a vast network of tunnels throughout the Gaza Strip, with many extending into Egypt.

It turned out the belief of Israeli “elites” that the expulsion of Jews from the Gaza Strip would contribute to peace with the Palestinians was a catastrophic mirage.

The Palestinians did not see the “disengagement” as an indication that Israel wants peace. Instead, many Palestinians viewed the withdrawal as an Israeli display of weakness and retreat in the face of rockets and suicide bombings. The thinking among the Palestinians became, “Oh, it’s working! So let’s do it more!”

In a similar way, Iran, Qatar, Hamas and Hezbollah have been gaining more confidence from the current anti-government protests in Israel, especially since the Biden-Harris administration began pressing Israel to make concessions, but never Hamas, Hezbollah, Qatar or Iran.

“Continue to exert psychological pressure on the families [of the hostages], both now and during the first phase [of the ceasefire] so that public pressure on the enemy government increases…. Arab forces should serve as a buffer to prevent the enemy [Israel] from entering after the war in Gaza ends, until they [Hamas] have reorganized their ranks and military capabilities.” — Hamas document, written in March for the terrorist group’s leader Yahya Sinwar, discovered on a computer allegedly belonging to him that was seized by the IDF.

ISRAEL, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The BBC’s Israelophobia is even worse than you think A new report exposes the true, shocking extent of the BBC’s moral decay.Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/09/the-bbcs-israelophobia-is-even-worse-than-you-think/

Remember when the BBC went nuts at Nigel Farage over comments made by some of the candidates for his Reform Party? It was in the run-up to the General Election. Farage was taking part in a BBC debate. Presenter Fiona Bruce huffed and puffed at him for half the show about three candidates who’d said nasty things about immigrants, including calling them ‘savages’ who should ‘get off [their] lazy arses’. Looking back, we can see what a load of old cant that was, for the BBC employed far worse bigots than those Reform racists. It employed people who openly praised the worst act of Jew murder since the Holocaust.

A new report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October is a sobering read. It’s outright jarring in parts. Some of it is pretty ‘dog bites man’. Anyone who’s watched any of the Beeb’s pained output since 7 October will not be surprised to learn it has exhibited a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. But they’ll be horrified – I hope – to read that the BBC used journalists who had ‘shown sympathy for Hamas’. Including one who described Hamas’s pogrom as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who appeared to mock the Jewish State even as its citizens were being raped and murdered, saying that ‘Israel… is crying in the corner’.

The Beeb has done many awful things of late. There’s its Brexit-bashing. Its indoctrination of schoolkids with bollocks about ‘white privilege’. Its gratingly woke podcasts, including one asking how ‘white women’ can avoid becoming ‘Karens’. Its transformation of Doctor Who into naff LGBTQ propaganda in an effort to stir the throng from its supposed bigoted stupor. But this – its association with journalists so anti-Israel that one defended a Lebanese reporter who had said ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’ – is surely the worst. We’re paying for this fascist-adjacent nonsense?

The new report is called ‘The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas War and the BBC’. It was overseen by Trevor Asserson, the British-Israeli lawyer. He deployed around 20 data scientists and 20 legal minds to analyse no fewer than nine million words of BBC output from the four-month period of 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024. The researchers claim to have identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Time and again after the 7 October pogrom, they say, the BBC’s output soft-soaped Hamas’s atrocities while depicting Israel as ‘militaristic and aggressive’.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep State Is Past Its Shelf Life By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/the_deep_state_is_past_its_shelf_life.html

At the Economic Club of New York, President Trump announced: “I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”  Elon Musk is eager to get involved with the project.  In one fell swoop, every other reason for re-electing Donald Trump took a back seat to the tantalizing possibility of turning his second term into an Office Space sequel.  

No government since the Byzantine Empire has been in more desperate need of immediate downsizing.  Can you picture the billionaire boys putting on their “efficiency expert” hats and shearing the bloated federal workforce one incompetent functionary at a time?  Commissioner Musk: “So what is it that you would say you do here?”  Crickets.  President Trump: “You’re fired.  Bring in the next one.”  If that’s all those two did for four straight years, round two of Trumpalooza would be a colossal success.  

Most of the federal blob is dead weight.  Its chief purpose is to hook so many families on a federal paycheck that tens of millions of Americans will never stop voting for its continuing expansion.  Even worse, it’s a Janus-faced monstrosity with internally conflicting mission objectives.  We’ve got departments dedicated to fomenting wars abroad and departments dedicated to stopping them.  We’ve got agencies tasked with confiscating taxpayers’ income and agencies tasked with providing economic relief.  Committees are organized to study “problems,” but those problems can’t be officially solved because doing so would mean that committee-members are out of jobs.  That possibility becomes the only “problem” that needless federal workers decide to solve, and they “solve” it by doing absolutely nothing.  The end result is that an unknowable number of ghost programs dedicated to issues that arose decades ago are still bouncing around the bureaucratic ether for no other reason than to keep the federal blob paid and happy.  There’s probably some group out there still ostensibly studying whether the popularity of compact cassette tapes will adversely affect the 8-track cartridge industry — and still probably another group filing seasonal reports on the likelihood that 8-track will end demand for cassette tapes!  It’s madness.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Bringing ‘Dark Money’ Operatives Out of the Shadows Thorough and enlightening, ‘Arabella’ exposes how billionaire leftists and their ‘charities’ use influence and money to ‘manipulate’ people and lobby government. By Dustin Bass

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/10/bringing-dark-money-operatives-out-of-the-shadows/

The term “dark money” gets thrown around a lot, and when politicians make claims about “dark money” coming from the lurid corners of opposing political party backers, it is hard to take such vague claims seriously. When an exposé is conducted by a research group that focuses solely on “dark money” matters, the claims become clearer, the culprits are brought into the light, and, most importantly, the money is followed. Scott Walter, “dark money” hawk and president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), has accumulated a wealth of information on “dark money” sources from the left.

In his new book, “Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America,” Walter guides the reader through this network of billionaires and multi-billion dollar charity organizations who use their 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) tax statuses to funnel money toward social and political movements, ranging from abortion to climate change to lobbying against the appointment of conservative judges. The billionaires involved include some of the most famous Americans, like Warren Buffett, Mark Zuckerberg, and the most usual suspect, George Soros. Charity organizations include the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, OpenSociety, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Sierra Club. But how do all of these organizations and individuals coordinate? It starts with a group called Arabella Advisors.

The “Tentacles” of Arabella

“We need to understand more thoroughly how these tentacles of Arabella operate across America,” Walter writes early in the book. He notes that though a majority of these donors and their organizations originate in Washington, D.C., their influence is felt throughout the country at statewide and local levels. Upon digging into organizations with harmless-sounding names like “Arizonans United for Health Care, Floridians for a Fair Shake, Keep Iowa Healthy, New Jersey for a Better Future, and North Carolinians for a Fair Economy,” one realizes just how harmful and deceptive these groups are, but furthermore, just who is pouring money—from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of millions of dollars—into them. As Walter suggests, these “pop-ups” are merely tentacles, of which there are so very many. As he further notes, “Think of almost any left-wing position, and Arabella money—usually a lot of it—can be found promoting it.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Outcry for Syria’s Palestinians Where is it? by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-outcry-for-syrias-palestinians/

Yarmouk was a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria totally destroyed by the Assad regime during the Syrian Civil War. The death and destruction were far more extensive than what has happened in Gaza, but for reasons which deserve to be pondered, Yarmouk’s fate never received anything like the attention that has been given to the war in Gaza, where the IDF has been falsely accused of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” More on how Yarmouk was reported on, and why its destruction received so little attention, can be found here: “The Yarmouk double standard: Why is there no outcry for Syria’s Palestinians? – opinion,” by Robert Hersowitz, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2024:

Yarmouk, where 160,000 Palestinians had once lived, was a vibrant refugee camp, bustling with activity: shops hawking their wares, food stalls selling falafel and shwarma, children playing soccer. But then came the indiscriminate bombings, the constant artillery and sniper fire, and, gradually, widespread famine and disease.

Their homes destroyed, their streets in ruins, and with no basic services, tens of thousands of Yarmouk’s Palestinian residents fled to neighboring lands or were internally displaced. Nearly 4,000 of them were killed during the violence.

You’re probably thinking that I’m talking about Gaza. You would be wrong, however. Yarmouk is just outside of Damascus – in Syria. It was once that country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp until it was totally destroyed by Syrian government troops during the bloody civil war that began in 2011 with the ruthless repression of anti-government protesters. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 617,000 people – 164,000 of them civilians – have been killed since the war’s start.

And yet, in the US, even as the Palestinian (and overall civilian) death toll climbed, there were no rallies against the Bashar Assad regime in our public squares. No protest encampments on university campuses. No grassroots calls for a ceasefire. There was only a deafening silence.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Money that Fuels Jew-Hate at a Top Jesuit University Can you guess the source? Jules Gomes

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-money-that-fuels-jew-hate-at-top-jesuit-university/

A prestigious Jesuit university, which receives millions in funding from the hardline Islamic regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is facing accusations of promoting pro-Hamas propaganda and fomenting antisemitism through its Gaza Lecture Series.

Georgetown University, which has thus far received $934 million from Arab-Muslim sources, is being slammed by Israel for inviting UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to deliver the October 28 presentation in the series titled “Anatomy of Genocide in Gaza.”

In an August 30 tweet, Israel blasted Georgetown, noting that the UN representative “justified the October 7 massacre and has spread countless antisemitic blood libels against Jews.

“And the cherry on top? This event will be held in October, exactly one year after the most horrific massacre against Jews since the Holocaust,” Israel lamented.

The Jesuit school boasts of campuses in Washington D.C. and Qatar.

Academics Condemn Georgetown’s Antisemitism

Several academics joined Israel in condemning the school, which promotes itself as the “oldest Catholic Jesuit university in the United States,” for the antisemitic stance of its lecture series.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bibi’s Fault? The answer should be obvious. Cal Thomas

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bibis-fault/

President Biden says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to win the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas.

As the saying goes “with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

In his first statement since the recovery of six hostages murdered by Hamas, including American-Israeli Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Netanyahu refused all entreaties by the U.S. administration and other governments and protesters in Israel and the U.S. to agree to a ceasefire as a way to gain the release of the other hostages. What critics forget is that Hamas has refused all ceasefire offers, largely I suspect, because it knows the world will keep pressuring Israel to”do more” and not the terrorists to do less.

Too many seem to have forgotten, or ignored, the real culprits. It was Hamas that kidnapped and murdered innocent Israelis and took hostages last October. It is Hamas that has a covenant which calls for the creation of an Islamic state in all of Palestine and the obliteration of Israel. How do you negotiate with an enemy who believes their god has given direct orders to eliminate the Jewish state by any means necessary?

The answer should be obvious, but it isn’t to many who have the false view that what Israel does or does not do matters to her enemies. Pressuring Israel has also been the incorrect approach over several U.S. administrations and Labor governments in Israel. Hamas and other terror groups get land, ceasefires, prisoner exchanges and financial help, but give nothing in return.

A Wall Street Journal editorial puts the blame where it belongs: “(the hostages) were killed in Rafah, where Biden and Harris delayed Israel’s entry with threats and by withholding weapons.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Now Available: The first practical guides for students on Free Speech Academic Honesty in the Age of AI Charles Lipson

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

I want to let you know about two new books, published just in time for the new school year.

Free Speech 101: A Practical Guide for Students 
 
Academic Honesty 101 in the Age of AI: A Brief, Practical Guide for Your Papers, Exams, Labs, and Citations, 

Both books are the first of their kind for college students. Their tables of contents are below. (Both books have “live links” above to their Amazon sites.)

Free Speech on Campus: A Much-Needed Guide for Students

Although there are lots of books about free speech, none of them has been directed at the students who need them most. 

Free Speech 101 is.

It is specifically meant for students. It is designed to help them understand and respect the rules that govern speech on campus and, equally important, appreciate why those rules matter so much for their education. 

The First Guidebook for Academic Honesty in the Age of AI

The second book, Academic Honesty 101 in the Age of AI, is the first to explain with what it means to do honest work now that artificial intelligence is readily available to students.

Students need to know that different teachers will set different rules for how their students can use AI tools for particular classes and assignments. And they need to know that, powerful as AI is, it sometimes provides them with the wrong answers and invented citations. The message is to use AI with care, use it only in ways their instructors permit, and be transparent about its use in any assignment.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

For Republican Candidates, Media Hit Jobs Are a Fact of Life By Becket Adams

Posted By on September 10th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/for-republican-candidates-media-hit-jobs-are-a-fact-of-life/

Media outlets took J. D. Vance’s words out of context and made him look heartless as a result. Should we be surprised?

The press’s coverage of Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has a peculiar quality to it.

Marc Caputo, national political reporter for the Bulwark, last week put it well: The reporting is not merely “negative” but “reliably” so.

Case in point: The Associated Press on September 5 grossly misrepresented the Ohio senator’s response to a school shooting in Georgia in which four people were murdered.

“JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” said an AP headline.

The Hill likewise declared, “JD Vance calls for tightened school security, calls school shootings a ‘fact of life.’”

Here’s what Vance actually said (my emphasis):

I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able.