Displaying posts published in

July 2020

Why are Palestinians Committing Suicide? by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16213/palestinians-suicide

Last year, Palestinian activists took to the streets of the Gaza Strip to protest economic hardship and demand that Hamas provide solutions for soaring unemployment and poverty rates. The protests, held under the banner “We want to live!,” were brutally suppressed by Hamas’s security forces and militiamen.

Such calls by human rights organizations are dismissed out of hand by Hamas leaders, whose only concern is the iron grip of their power.

Hamas, after 13 years of criminal negligence, rejects responsibility for the wellbeing of its people. Astoundingly, it continues to succeed in convincing the world that Israel is to blame for the misery of its own people. This convenient and toxic lie enables it to continue receiving money and weapons from its friends in Iran and Hezbollah to tighten its death grip on the Gaza Strip.

For Hamas, jihad (holy war), not a decent life for its people, is what matters. Tragically, it seems that young Palestinians in Gaza are getting the message — loud and clear.

The Palestinian terror group Hamas is making a serious effort to prevent journalists from reporting about a surge in suicide rates in the Gaza Strip. Hamas does not want the world to know that young men and women living under its rule in the Gaza Strip, have, as a result of economic hardship and oppression, been taking their own lives.

In the past week alone, four Palestinians from the Gaza Strip reportedly committed suicide in separate incidents — by gunfire, pills, self-immolation, and jumping from a tall building. The suicides have embarrassed Hamas, whose leaders decided to take strict measures to stop the news from leaking to the media.

Thirteen years after its violent takeover of the Gaza Strip, Hamas is still seeking to present a rosy picture of the situation there. Hamas wants to show the world that life for many Palestinians under its Islamic rule and repressive measures is wonderful.

Companies Must Answer For Their Support Of The Radical Black Lives Matter Org

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/09/companies-must-answer-for-their-support-of-the-radical-black-lives-matter-org/

“There are plenty of organizations working to help blacks and other minorities succeed in this country but aren’t bent on turning the U.S. into a socialist hellhole. Corporate executives should take the time to learn about them.”

Several companies have been bragging recently that they’re providing financial support to the official Black Lives Matter organization to burnish their PR image. No doubt they’re getting Woke points for doing so. But do the executives at those companies have any idea how radical this group is and what it’s trying to achieve?

The Daily Signal reported earlier this week that at least 18 corporations have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.

The list includes: DoorDash, Deckers, Amazon, Gatorade, Microsoft, Glossier, 23andMe, AirBnB, Unilever, Bungie, Nabisco, Dropbox, Fitbit, Developer Digital, Skillshare, Square Enix, The Game Co., and Tinder.

The Daily Signal notes that other companies said they were giving to Black Lives Matter, but didn’t specifically say it was to the foundation.

Private companies are free to give their money to whomever they want. But you’d think that the executives at these corporations would have done the least bit of due diligence before forking over the funds.

So, here are some questions for these companies, and any others that are giving money or encouraging donations to the BLM foundation.

Do your shareholders and employees know that their company is supporting a group run by “trained Marxists”?

Seven Antifa Agitators Face Federal Charges After Portland Riots By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/08/seven-antifa-agitators-face-federal-charges-after-portland-riots/

According to a release from the United States Department of Justice, “the Hatfield Federal Courthouse has been a repeated target of vandalism, sustaining extensive damage.”

Rowan Olsen, 19, of Portland, is charged with disorderly conduct, creating a hazard on federal property, and failing to obey a lawful order; Shant Singh Ahuja, 28, of Oceanside, California, is charged with destruction of federal property; and Andrew Steven Faulkner, 24, of Beaverton, Oregon; Gretchen Margaret Blank, 29, of Seattle, Washington; Christopher Fellini, 31, of Portland; Cody Porter, 28, of Portland; and Taimane Jame Teo, 24, of Eugene, Oregon, are charged with assaulting federal officers.

Since May 26, protests in downtown Portland, Oregon, have been allowed to devolve into riots by nightfall. The nightly criminal activity has included “assaults on law enforcement officers, destruction of property, looting, arson, and vandalism,” according to court documents.

Federal law enforcement officers were deployed over the holiday weekend to restore order.

“U.S. Marshals Service deputies and officers from the Federal Protective Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection working to protect the courthouse have been subjected to threats,” the DOJ release states.

The antifa militants have thrown “aerial fireworks including mortars; high intensity lasers targeting officers’ eyes; thrown rocks, bottles, and balloons filled with paint” at officers while they were performing their duties, according to the release.

‘Hamilton’ and Cancellation Was the Broadway show’s 2015 debut really so long ago? James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamilton-and-cancellation-11594243514?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The video debut of a Broadway hit is finding commercial success but also a social-media backlash for its positive portrayal of men who helped found the greatest nation on earth.

Todd Spangler reports this week in Variety:

“Hamilton” delivered for Disney Plus — with the musical movie of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s reimagining of the founding father’s life spurring a spike in app downloads over its July 4th weekend debut.
The movie premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service on Friday, July 3. From Friday through Sunday, the Disney Plus app was downloaded 752,451 times globally…

Samantha Vincenty writes in Oprah Winfrey’s magazine:

But reaching a wider audience also brought a deluge of criticism amid the praise—including concerns about how the work lionized the United States’ slave-owning founding fathers and didn’t accurately portray history.

Hamilton supported the manumission of slaves but did not press for abolition. Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, argues in an op-ed for CNN that times have changed since the play’s 2015 debut:

“Hamilton” is a minefield of mixed messages: Is our takeaway about its main character that he is a revolutionary hero or flawed philanderer? Is its strategy of non-traditional casting a triumph that allows people of color to “rise up” or are they undermined by the irony of how their embodiment as founding fathers ignores the fact that most of the characters they play were slave owners?
“Hamilton” was the perfect play for the Obama era because it fed into Democratic liberalism’s shift away from heroes like Thomas Jefferson — who represented a figure of rugged pastoral individualism — to Hamilton, the master banker/whiz kid financial planner. Miranda crafts “Hamilton” as an immigrant “who gets the job done,” an outsider. But Hamilton in reality faced none of the discrimination wielded against immigrants that he is drawn as a model for…

I Cited Their Study, So They Disavowed It If scientists retract research that challenges reigning orthodoxies, politics will drive scholarship. By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cited-their-study-so-they-disavowed-it-11594250254?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal that claims to publish “only the highest quality scientific research.” Now, the authors of a 2019 PNAS article are disowning their research simply because I cited it.

Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings. Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police. These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.

In September 2019, I cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony. I also referred to it in a City Journal article, in which I noted that two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Messrs. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. Even under the study design proposed by Messrs. Knox and Mummolo, they wrote, there is again “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”

My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.

China Advances Heading for direct conflict with the USA? Michael Ledeen

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/china-advances-michael-ledeen/

China and Iran have unleashed a harsh domestic repression against protesters, as natural disasters sweep across the two countries. China took an early lead:

Waters in 116 local rivers rose one to ten meters (3.3 feet to 32.8 feet). State news agency Xinhua quoted Chongqing city officials on July 2 saying that water levels of 12 rivers are higher than the upper limits, meaning the banks may burst at any time.

At least one person has died, and one is missing, the report said, adding that almost 60,000 have been affected by the floods in the city.

Local authorities in one area in Chongqing have warned those who live on the fourth story or below in buildings close to rivers to be prepared to evacuate.

Authorities are warning civilians to pay close attention to local rivers and streams. As of the beginning of the month, some 304 rivers had reached perilous levels.

And in Iran, official death totals due to coronavirus have reached a new high. Given that ALL Iranian data are probably falsified, the new death totals are especially dubious. They are both big countries, and do not dread a sudden or dramatic drop in population. Au contraire, the new data suggest that the threat to stability in Iran is diminishing, and therefore that internal stability is increasing.

WHERE ARE THE LIBERALS ON MODERN DAY BLACK SLAVERY IN AFRICA?

https://mailchi.mp/peaceandtolerance/when-did-the-left-first-go-woke-when-they-betrayed-black-slaves?e=c4e6370125

On this very day in 1997, Dr. Charles Jacobs, then the president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, an organization at the forefront of the war against modern-day black slavery in Africa, published a biting op-ed in The Boston Globe: “Where are the liberals?”

Back then, the world was slowly coming to grips with a stinging fact: that Arabs and Muslims own black men, women, and children as chattel property in Mauritania and Sudan — today.

The problem, however, was that all of the activist and media elements which one would think would jump to free modern-day black slaves — including the anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s — simply weren’t there. Even worse, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — the people who had produced the original reports of slavery which alerted Dr. Jacobs and others to its horrors — simply refused to help.

Furthermore, so-called black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, world-famous figures with massive community and media clout, either directly rebuffed efforts to help tell the world, or backed off at the behest of actively hostile parties such as Louis Farrakhan (who preferred to blame the Jews).

Though a few brave and decent people in the mainstream media, such as at Dateline NBC and even The New York Times, did do their part in broadcasting the images and accounts of slavery, such instances of righteousness were few and far between — and today, are just about extinct.

What, then, astounded Dr. Jacobs and his allies was that it was conservatives and evangelical Christians who actually took up the fight. While liberals waffled and worried about offending Arabs or “dividing” the black community (against Farrakhan), conservatives stood up. Pat Robertson’s 700 Club became a forceful mouthpiece for the abolitionist movement. They were likely the first national television show to broadcast footage of heroes like John Eibner and Baroness Caroline Cox buying back the freedom of black Sudanese slaves — they even trashed Farrakhan as “an absolute charlatan”!

Liberals, however, save for a precious few decent Democrats like Barney Frank and the late Donald Payne, were silent.

That is what led Dr. Jacobs to ask, “Where are the liberals?”

When Did the Left First Go Woke? When They Betrayed Black Slaves Leftists: still cheating on black slaves with their masters. Ben Poser

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/liberals-betrayal-black-slaves-africa-frontpagemagcom/

Twenty-three years ago yesterday, in 1997, Dr. Charles Jacobs, a frequent FrontPageMag contributor and president of the pro-Israel educational non-profit Americans for Peace and Tolerance, published a biting op-ed in The Boston Globe: “Where are the liberals?”

At the time, Dr. Jacobs, a human rights campaigner and Jewish activist, was the president and research director of the American Anti-Slavery Group, an organization at the forefront of the war against modern-day black slavery in Africa.

By 1997, thanks to his relentless activism and that of the heroic black journalist Sam Cotton (may his memory be a blessing), the world was slowly coming to grips with a vile fact: that Arabs and Muslims own black men, women, and children as chattel property in Mauritania and Sudan — today. Dr. Jacobs himself had come to this news inadvertently. One day in 1990 he picked up a copy of The Economist on a flight home, and flipped to page 42 where he found a one-page editorial entitled “Slavery: By any other name.” What he read shook him to his core: “In Sudan chattel slavery is spreading fast, as a consequence of the civil war between the black Christian and pagan southerners and the Arab, Muslim north.… In February 1988 a [black] child could be bought for $90; so many slaves are available [two years later] that the price has now fallen to $15.” A child cheaper than a pizza; Jacobs took the magazine home with him and was never the same.

The problem, however, was that all of the activist and media elements which one would think would jump to free modern-day black slaves, including the formidable anti-apartheid coalition of the 1980s, simply weren’t there. Even worse, organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — the people who had produced the reports of slavery which originally alerted Dr. Jacobs and others to its horrors — simply refused to be of much help.

The Beginning of the End of Whites in South Africa “White South Africans will be resilient to the end. Their only regret is the speed with which it now comes.” Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/beginning-end-whites-south-africa-katie-hopkins/

“It’s been a rough month,” says Jess.

Coming from a one-man mountain with more shrapnel scars than most, things must be looking bleak in South Africa.

And it’s worse than any of us can imagine. Eighty-four farm attacks since lockdown began, twelve white farmers slaughtered from their land. The footage of the aftermath of one of the attacks circulating on Telegram and sent to me — too brutal to share. Only monsters could do such things to the elderly in their own homes.

As many of us celebrated the 4th of July this weekend, there were three murders in two days, one of them so unspeakably cruel that even those hardened to the news of torture of farmers by black gangs have found themselves white-knuckled at the speed of the horror.

When these massive men like Jess feel it, we need to stop and listen. They are the first people I would run to if I needed protecting: strong, sturdy, unflinching. These strong South Africans are part of the land, they have it coursing throughout their blood just as the sunshine and water spills through the crops and trees on their soil.

Hearing the horrible news I want to grab my little daysack — sitting ready with my passport and power plugs — pull on my boots and go. I am desperate to head back to their country, somehow leap into the struggle and to help the murdered be heard. For now I share their pictures with you, hopelessly trying to reanimate them as individuals, instead of more bodies on a pile.

Liberals reserve tickets to Trump’s New Hampshire rally to try making venue look empty The group Blue Revolution is sharing an RSVP link to Trump’s rally in Portsmouth, N.H. Saturday on social media telling followers to reserve spots and not show up.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/liberals-reserve-tickets-trumps-nh-rally-try-making-venue-look-empty

A liberal-leaning group and individuals are using social media to encourage Trump opponents to reserve tickets for the president’s upcoming reelection rally in Portsmouth, N.H., in an attempt to make the venue appear empty.

“Get your tickets and don’t go,” one Twitter user wrote Monday.

The “Make America Great Again! Rally” is scheduled for Saturday and follows one in late June in Tulsa, Okla. In advance of the rally, TikTok users reserved tickets and didn’t show up to reduce crowd size.

“If you have two minutes of your day to troll the president….Reserve two tickets and laugh knowing that’s two seats not filled,” another person tweeted about the New Hampshire rally.

“Just booked 2 tickets to Trump’s rally in NH that I won’t be going to,” a different user posted on Twitter.

Another user told his followers to put “incorrect information” in for the RSVP but use a real phone number.

A liberal Facebook group called Blue Revolution, which has more than 60,000 members, posted the RSVP link for Trump’s rally scheduled for Saturday and encouraged its members to reserve spots.