Displaying posts published in

February 2020

Paris Metro Passengers Lauded for Preventing Antisemitic Assault on Young Jewish Man

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/04/paris-metro-passengers-lauded-for-preventing-antisemitic-assault-on-young-jewish-man/Passengers on the Paris Metro who prevented an antisemitic assault on a young Jewish man on Saturday night have been warmly praised by a leading community defense group.

In a statement on Monday, the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Antisemitism (BNVCA) highlighted the role played by passengers who interceded when four men attempted to chase the Jewish man.

The incident took place late on Saturday night at the Jean Jaurès station in northeastern Paris. The 25-year-old man, who wore a kippah that identified him as a Jew, was approached by four men said to be aged between 30 and 40, one of whom asked the victim for a cigarette. When the young man replied that he did not have any cigarettes, the attacker pinned him against the wall of the station, telling him, “You Jews have enough money, you can buy me some.”

At this point, other passengers intervened, blocking the four men and enabling the young Jewish man to safely depart the scene.

Israel Harshly Criticizes European Union Over Rejection of Trump Middle East Peace Plan

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/04/israel-harshly-criticizes-eu-over-rejection-of-trump-middle-east-peace-plan/

The European Union rejected parts of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan for the Middle East on Tuesday, prompting an angry response from Israel which has strongly backed the American proposal.

The plan, announced by Trump last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, was rejected outright by the Palestinians.

The EU, which often takes time to respond to international developments because of a need for unanimity among its 27 members, had said last week that it needed to study the Trump plan before it would give its verdict.

It made its conclusions public on Tuesday in a statement from EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said Trump’s plan departs from “internationally agreed parameters.”

Rush -By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rush/

“There is no one like him. Let’s keep him in our prayers.”   Amen! rsk

I haven’t felt much like working the last couple of days. Or like doing much else. See, Rush Limbaugh is a longtime friend of mine. Like all of Rush’s friends and tens of millions of other Americans, I’m reeling from the sudden diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

Rush is an American original. It is said of some originals that, if you didn’t have them, you’d have to invent them. (Voltaire was talking about God when he said it; Don King, of course, about himself.) Yet no one could ever have invented Rush, because he was inconceivable.

When he burst upon the national scene over three decades ago, popular political media was the preserve of the political left. The thought of anyone, much less an unabashed conservative, carrying a three-hour daily broadcast through monologues teeming with conviction and good cheer — with the occasional phone call but virtually no guests — was not just unheard of. It was not in the realm of perceived possibility.

It took talent on loan from God, for sure. But it mainly took a guy with supreme belief in himself. Belief that was well-founded because it sprang from a unique combination of life-experience, of getting off the floor when life knocks you down, and of a sense of destiny about doing what you’re born to do. Add to that Rush’s abiding faith in the innate goodness of America — of her traditions, love of liberty, willingness to sacrifice, and grasp that human flourishing means learning from our mistakes.

Boris Johnson’s Climate-Change Dilemma By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/boris-johnsons-climate-change-dilemma/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

This November, the United Nations’s climate-change summit — rivetingly titled “COP26” — will happen in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government has announced. Given that polls now indicate a clear majority for Scottish independence north of the border, it’s a good idea to try to strengthen the union by uniting against a common enemy.

The BBC reports:

A ban on selling new petrol, diesel or hybrid cars in the UK will be brought forward from 2040 to 2035 at the latest, under government plans.

The change comes after experts said 2040 would be too late if the UK wants to achieve its target of emitting virtually zero carbon by 2050.

Boris Johnson unveiled the policy as part of a launch event for a United Nations climate summit in November.

He said 2020 would be a “defining year of climate action” for the planet.

The only trouble is that Johnson, who previously described the effect of global warming as the planet being swaddled in “a tea cosy,” has been accused of a lack of seriousness.

 

The prime minister “doesn’t really get climate change,” said Claire Perry O’Neill, the former Tory energy minister, who was recently sacked as the conference president. Conveniently for Johnson, most of his pledges — e.g. banning new petrol and diesel cars by 2035 — are scheduled for when he will no longer be in office.

The Art of Warping Elections Obama Paved the Way By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-art-of-warping-elections/

N o sooner were Democrats’ Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election.

After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million in costs, special counsel Robert Mueller’s much praised progressive “all-star” team of lawyers and investigators found no evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. Trump did not warp the 2016 election, and so he had not unfairly defeated the supposed sure-winner Hillary Clinton. But again those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

If anyone should have found “collusion,” it was certainly the Mueller zealots, then de facto ramrodded by current MSNBC partisan “legal” analyst Andrew Weissmann. (How odd that John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann leak to MSNBC and CNN and then, in the out-phase of their perpetually revolving-door careers, end up rewarded by their receptacles as paid TV analysts).

In the end, the “hunter-killer team” imploded.

Corona and the Chinese ambassador’s Holocaust chutzpah Dai Yuming was being a true loyal Communist diplomat, spewing strategic propaganda with a purpose, part of which is to deflect from some inconvenient truths. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/corona-and-the-chinese-ambassadors-holocaust-chutzpah/

China’s acting ambassador to Israel came under well-deserved fire this week for invoking the Nazi genocide of the Jews to criticize Jerusalem’s preventive measures against the spread of the coronavirus.

At a press conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Dai Yuming said that he felt “bad and sad” over the “errors to limit or even ban entries of Chinese citizens” into Israel “because it actually recalled me the old days, the old stories that happened in World War II, the Holocaust. Many Jewish were refused when they tried to seek assistance. Only very, very few countries opened their doors. One of them is China. I hope Israel will never close their door to the Chinese. In the darkest days of the Jewish people, we didn’t close the door on them. I hope Israel will not close the door on the Chinese.”

Dai’s comments could not have been more outrageous.

The outcry that they unleashed in the press and on social media spurred the Chinese embassy in Israel to express regret. In a statement issued to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Beijing’s diplomatic mission basically claimed that its representative’s words had been misconstrued.

“[W]e would like to clarify that there was no intention whatsoever to compare the dark days of the Holocaust with the current situation and the efforts taken by the Israeli government to protect its citizens,” the statement read. “We would like to apologize if someone understood our message the wrong way.”

Democracy works — Dems vote for “None of the Above” in Iowa by David Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/democracy-works-dems-vote-for-none-of-the-above-in-iowa/#comments

Terry Jones of Monty Python passed on last month, but his spirit was present at the Iowa Caucuses last night as “none of the above” emerged as the apparent winner. The combined efforts of the comedy writers of Tinseltown couldn’t have produced a sillier outcome. A technical glitch delayed the delegate count, but the contingent in this case reveals the necessary: The Democrats don’t have a clue whom they want as a presidential candidate, because the Democratic Party has become a suppurating stew of contending resentments. Do they want a recycled Communist to soak the successful and distribute the spoils to self-defined losers in the form of student-loan forgiveness or subsidized health care or a job-killing minimum wage? Do they want an eco-gender icon who flatters the faddish predilections of young urban professionals? Do they want a feminist standard-bearer with an aggressive redistributionist agenda? Do they want an African-American candidate to embody the rejection of “white privilege” and correct the supposed original sin of slavery? Or do they want an aged, empty vessel whose only qualifiication is a past association with a Democratic Party that once upon a time won elections?

Democratic voters don’t want any of these. No doubt the Iowa Democrats will release results eventually, although challenges and recriminations may persist for a while. But the actual vote, whatever it is, will show a degree of fragmentation among Democratic voters never seen since the party’s founding. The radical vote is big enough to block Biden, a shadow of the crafty, nasty politician who crushed Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debates, a pathetic figure who says what his handlers made him memorize when you pull the string at the back of his neck. Bernie Sanders, the one candidate who came into the primaries with a national reputation and a field organization, lacks the credibility to unite the radicals, and Elizabeth Warren is too shrill, too extreme and too crazy to do anything but siphon votes away from Sanders. The black candidates have withdrawn from the race. Pete Buttigieg may emerge in front of the pack because he’s everyone’s second choice.

Elitist Bill Kristol Becomes a Democrat Celebration! He no longer belongs with us. Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/elitist-bill-kristol-becomes-democrat-rabbi-aryeh-spero/

Here is the announcement that so-called neo-con Bill Kristol has just found solace in the arms of the saintly Democrats: Bill Kristol @Bill Kristol: “Not presumably forever, not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020…. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.”

So, Bill Kristol is now identifying with and preferring the Democrat Party, which promotes the dangerous socialist dystopia; has 120 congressional members endorsing CAIR; is trending in an anti-Israel trajectory; refuses to condemn anti-Semitism in and of itself; accepts ANTIFA; attacks the traditional family and race-baits constantly; condemned our take-out of the foremost jihadist terrorist Soleimani; supports the Iran Deal and the $billions funding the mullahs; pushes for open and unprotected borders; and violated all the bedrock laws of due process in order to nullify the will of the electorate and destroy a President.

Someone lamented that Kristol has a good mind. So, what!; he seems to lack character and has used his mind for the last three years to severely damage our institutions, America itself, and has been a major engine in putting this country through Hell. Good minds are a dime a dozen, but are frightening when used to scheme and plot destruction. Kristol never knew when to stop the destruction he was causing this country.

Is Trump’s Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox? Victor Davis Hanson ·

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68329-is-trumps-unorthodoxy-becoming-orthodox-2020-02-04

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.

Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.

Like David McCullough, Americans’ Ignorance Of History Should Keep Us Up At Night By Eric Rozenman

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/04/like-david-mccullough-americans-ignorance-of-history-should-keep-us-up-at-night/

In academia, including teacher education, an illiberal secular fundamentalism severs connections between schools and religion, morality, and knowledge.

David McCullough, the well-known historian, couldn’t sleep. Of course, people in their 80s often experience some form of insomnia, his doctor, Thomas H. Lee, told him. But the pea under McCullough’s mattress was metaphorical, not physical.

The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of presidents John Adams and Harry S. Truman, among other highly praised works, tossed and turned. Why? Because public figures don’t know American history, don’t understand that despite uncertainties and challenges, “Things worked out — because individuals behaved in certain ways with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right things.”

So wrote Lee, with his patient’s permission, in a Wall Street Journal commentary nearly two years ago. By the time McCullough spoke at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., last Labor Day weekend, his anxiety about historical ignorance had expanded from our leaders to the whole country.

McCullough’s main topic was his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought American Ideals West.” But he confessed that he worried American history isn’t taught much anymore, that subject matter in general does not receive proper attention.