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December 2020

Black on Black Indifference By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2016/02/08/black-on-black-indifference/

Name a black American politician, academician or celebrity who has publicly condemned the atrocities of Boko Haram, Al Shabab or Al Qaeda Affiliates.  When did you see a protest march  by Black Lives Matter in solidarity with their murdered Nigerian sisters and brothers?  Has there been any black voice from any black group concerning the 219 schoolgirls who are still missing from the original 276 black girls kidnapped in Nigeria in  2014?  Has Oprah organized a campaign to raise awareness of this ongoing crime among all school-children here and in So. Africa where she has created her own school?  Have there been any demonstrations on American campuses concerning the targeting by Boko Haram of black Nigerian students – killing boys and kidnapping, raping and impregnating girls?  Which academic groups have organized to pressure our government or the UN to take action to stop the slaughter of thousands of Nigerian civilians, their villages burned by the vicious Muslim group whose name translates as “Western Education Forbidden.”  Point to a lead op-ed in the NYTimes written by Cornel West, Alice Walker, Al Sharpton or Spike Lee in the last year that has drawn world attention to the horrific slaughter led by Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Al Qaeda Affiliates or Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa.

To the east of Nigeria is Sudan and the newly formed South Sudan which gained its independence from the militantly Islamic north in 2011.  The South, comprised of Christian and other native religions has suffered starvation of thousands of its people along with rape, forced cannibalism and the massacres of thousands. Since 1955, more than two million people have died, tens of thousands have been kidnapped and enslaved and five million have been displaced in what was the longest running civil war among all nations.  Has the UN established an agency similar to UNRWA, the only relief organization dedicated solely to the needs of Palestinian refugees, kept in that status for more than three generations to sustain anti-Israel political hatred.  Have Europeans and Americans donated billions of dollars to help Christian Sudanese as they are threatened and menaced by Arabization and Islamization?  Has any Muslim organization offered food, medical care, social service welfare to the thousands of blacks victimized by Islamic violence in South Sudan?  The  Islamist persecution of blacks has spread all over Africa to countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania –  has the Pope issued a plea for world leaders to intercede in this human tragedy?

Enemies of the country By Martin Marcus

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/enemies_of_the_country.html

Who are the enemies of the United States?  It is a long list.  I define “enemy” as someone who would commit a serious federal crime or look the other way when it occurs.

On 3 November 2020, there was a presidential election in which voter fraud was alleged in at least six states.  Was there voter fraud?  In the previous three presidential elections, the total number of votes was between 127 million and 129 million.  In this election, it was 155 million.  This is a 20 percent increase.  The increase for Trump is expected.  He did a great job as president.  The increase for Biden can only be explained as voter fraud.

The people who performed the voter fraud are enemies of the country.  They voted on behalf of others, including dead people.  They brought in suitcases of ballots to be counted after poll watchers were expelled.

They fed ballots into machines multiple times.  They counted invalid ballots.  They programmed voter machines to change the tallies and to reject ballots, so that poll workers could put in what they wanted.  People who do such things are felons.

If one suddenly had an extra million dollars in his possession, the government would see this as sufficient evidence to look for a crime.  Biden’s sudden “popularity” is also sufficient evidence to launch an investigation.  Every district attorney in the contested states should be looking for voter fraud.  The fact that they do not means that they are enemies.

Reducing the Consequences of Fraud in National Elections By Phillip G. Pattee

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12

/reducing_the_consequences_of_fraud_in_national_elections.html

Thanks to the rampant fraud apparent in the 2020 presidential election, United States citizens have diminished trust in the electoral process.  Changes will be necessary to restore faith in the electoral outcome.  Voter ID laws, purging the deceased from voter rolls, blockchain technology with redundant servers, improved cyber-security, and the like are all possible ways to reduce fraud and should be pursued.  Nevertheless, there is potential that some will still attempt to illegally game an election system that they could not win legitimately.  While it may not be possible to eliminate election fraud entirely, it is relatively simple to reduce the payoff for the effort to become less effective.

The Electoral College’s design is that each state casts its votes for president and vice president based on the outcomes of elections within that state in a manner that the state’s legislature directs.  Each state is afforded the number of votes equal to the whole number of senators and representatives for the state, with the District of Colombia also receiving three total votes.  Because each state has two senators and at least one representative, a feature of the Electoral College is that it provides those least populous states with three votes, whereas an allotment based strictly on their population would only allow them one electoral vote.  Because of this attribute, there are times when the popular vote breaks for one candidate and the electoral vote for the other.  Some consider this an undesirable artifact of an outdated election system and propose eliminating the Electoral College, replacing it with a national popular vote.

Within the current Electoral College, fraud in one location is limited in its effect on the national outcome.  The only electoral votes affected are from that state where the fraud occurred.  The votes from other states are unaffected.  This is an essential feature of the Electoral College — it provides a firebreak against the consequences of fraud.  In the hypothetical election where the electoral vote is equally divided at 269 for each candidate, one fraudulent popular vote would only change the election outcome if the popular vote in one state was equally divided.  It is significantly more challenging to change election outcomes with the Electoral College in place. Fraud must occur in numerous close elections — as in the battleground states this year.  At issue here is that in most states the winner of the state’s popular vote receives all the state’s electoral votes.  The potential to illegitimately gain 16 to 20 electoral votes is still temptingly worthwhile.

The Joys of Paris in Coronavirus Days by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16884/paris-coronavirus

One remembers lazy afternoons spent discussing the fate of mankind and providing answers to non-existent existential questions, and warm evenings visiting exhibitions of structuralist paintings with no structure, rounding up all that at sunrise with a generous bowl of onion soup in the fruit and vegetable market in Les Halles.

Having nowhere to go and nothing interesting to do, being in Paris these days feels like being in Moscow in the 1960s when the only excitement was provided by rumors about the arrival of new supplies of potatoes or a one-day availability of hot chocolate in Cafe Pushkin.

The roots of this unbelievable population control, something even Lenin could not dream of, may be found in the culture of dirgisme (overall control) that assumes the governments know best even when they admit they don’t.

“You are lucky to be in Paris at this time,” says a friend phoning from New York. “Here, we are like rats in a box, going round and round.”

In the past few weeks I have heard similar lamentations from friends in London and Berlin, not to mention Beirut and Tehran.

Why are Palestinian leaders rejecting Arab-Israeli peace? Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/why-are-palestinian-leaders-rejecting-arab-israeli-pea

Palestinianism is a form of identity politics intended to make Arab Palestinians think of themselves as victims of Israel, Jews and their supporters, and to promote terrorism.

In order to understand why Arab Palestinian leaders, led by the PLO and Hamas, reject the Abraham Accords and efforts to promote peace between Israel and its neighbors, and why they refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist, it is necessary to understand their ideology: Palestinianism.

Palestinianism is not a national movement. It is an anti-Jewish movement conceived and dedicated to opposing the right of the Jewish people to reestablish their historic homeland in Eretz Yisrael. 

Although demanding “self-determination” and statehood, and promoting a vague “Palestinian national identity,” their agenda is focused on and committed to destroying Israel. Nearly the entire contents of the PLO and Hamas covenants are devoted to this genocidal goal, and are the basis of Palestinian law and culture.

Palestinianism is essentially a form of identity politics intended to make Arab Palestinians think of themselves as victims of Israel, Jews and their supporters, and to promote terrorism.

Suggesting a “two-state solution,” or “two states for two nations,” therefore, begs the questions: Are Palestinian Arabs a nation, or a people? On what is “Palestinian national identity” based? How will creating a terrorist-run state serve the interests of peace and Palestinians? Although considered a legitimate expression of nationalism, Palestinianism has neither a long, nor distinguished history, which explains why the peace process between Israel and Arab Palestinians has failed and will continue to fail.

‘We Will Squash Them’: The Persecution of Christians, November 2020 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16882/persecution-of-christians-november-2020

“They tried to force some of our Christians to convert to Islam. They also tried to force my wife and our four children to convert to Islam, but when they refused to convert, they shot my wife in the head while our four children were cut into pieces with a Somali sword. — Morningstar News, Democratic Republic of Congo.

“Islamic militants turned a village soccer field in northern Mozambique into an execution ground when they beheaded more than 50 people during three days of savage violence…. More than 2,000 people have been killed and about 430,000 left homeless in the region since 2017.” — Barnabas Aid, Mozambique.

For two months after kidnapping a deaf and mute Christian teenage girl her, five Muslim men repeatedly gang-raped and tortured her. All this time, police ignored the parents’ pleas to intervene. It was only when a local authority took up the case, and only after months of court meetings, that the girl was located and returned to her parents. One of the kidnappers insisted the girl had willingly converted to Islam and married him. — British Pakistani Christian Association, Pakistan.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of November 2020:

The Slaughter of Christians

Indonesia: On Nov. 27, Islamic terrorists beheaded a Christian priest and killed three other Christians by slitting their throats in Lembantongoa village. During the raid, a Salvation Army church and six Christian homes were also torched. While acknowledging that an Islamic militant group was responsible, authorities claimed that the attack was not “religiously motivated.” One human rights researcher said that this “latest strike was a ‘clear escalation’ of violence against Christians.”

Constant’s Liberty, Ancient and Modern Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/constants-liberty-ancient-and-modern/

Benjamin Constant’s writing is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era.

As this most peculiar year wends its petulant and morose way to the end, I find myself returning to some signal apostles of liberty. The unrelenting static of our time can make it difficult to appreciate what those sages of yore had to say. But as we continue to quiver obediently in place, bemasked, shunning our fellows almost as assiduously as we shun common sense, I think back to some anatomists of the totalitarian impulse—George Orwell, for example, who would have been surprised to discover that his searing portrayals of tyranny have been adopted as how-to manuals by the new lobotomized Left whose maliciousness is exceeded only by its ignorance. 

I think, too, of the Swiss-born French writer Benjamin Constant, whose famous essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819) is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era in which Constant wrote.

I first encountered Constant’s work years ago at a conference about the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, another apostle of freedom who has much to teach a culture besotted by self-appointed “experts” and insatiable purveyors of “policy.” (I recommend in particular Oakeshott’s brilliant essay “Rationalism in Politics.”)

One of the first things that struck me about Constant’s essay was its optimism (“naïveté” would not be the right word for so nuanced a thinker). With the carnage of the Napoleonic wars still fresh in Europe’s memory, Constant nonetheless assured his readers that he discerned a “uniform tendency towards peace.” The imperatives of war, he thought, must at last give way to the subtler though ultimately more efficacious imperatives of commerce. “[A]n age must come,” he argued, “in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”

Tell that to the Kaiser, to Hitler and Stalin, to Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh, not to mention all the ayatollahs, imams, and African butchers who succeeded them!

Trump: The American David By Scott S. Powell

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/trump_the_american_david.html

One of President Trump’s most prescient statements to the American electorate leading up to the November vote was, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, I’m just in the way.”  The question that everyone should want to fully grasp now is, who is the “they” that Trump has repeatedly referred to, and what do they want to do to you and to America?     

This “they” goes beyond the Democrat Party and Joe Biden.  Biden is not only a weak political leader, but many are just now learning for the first time after the election, because of pre-election media censorship, that Biden family corruption ranks up there with the Clinton family crime syndicate.  A recent poll by McLaughlin & Associates now shows that 4.6% of the Joe Biden’s supporters would have voted differently had they known about Biden family corruption. The media ignored and censored two separate Senate committee reports in September, documenting the details of large payments from numerous foreign government-related entities to Hunter Biden and holding companies under his control, with most fund transfers coming from relationships that originated while Pops Joe served as vice president in the Obama administration.

What this says about the power brokers behind Biden who knew everything about him is that they prefer a weak and compromised leader, who is easier to control and influence so as to assure that their interests and goals are carried out. They own Joe Biden.     

No wonder we are where we are.  There is no way that a majority of reasonably well-informed Americans can embrace what the Democrat Party has become — a party that has accommodated the radical Gang of  Four’s Islamo-Marxist hatred of America and aligned its interests with Antifa and Black Lives Matter — facilitating wholesale destruction of property and prolonged disruption of commerce in major cities across the country.  Winning an Electoral College majority was all but impossible without media dishonesty, omission and censorship, and massive vote fraud.

Andrew McCarthy Misses the Point in the Michigan Election Audit By Bart Marcois

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/mccarthy-misses-the-point-in-the-michigan-election-audit/

You would think elections officials would want an investigation because it would exonerate them. But they don’t. What are they hiding?

I have admired Andrew McCarthy since I was a diplomat in the Middle East, and he filed the indictment against Sheikh Omar for the 1994 bombing of the World Trade Center. He has been right, and courageous, about many things in the years since then. But he is wrong about the massive election fraud in November, and especially about the Allied Security Operations Group report signed by Russ Ramsland that focuses on the role of the Dominion Voting Systems machines in Antrim County, Michigan.

In “A Whopper of An Election Rigging Claim,” McCarthy clarifies the misunderstanding about the reported 68 percent error rate. But he goes on to accuse Ramsland, wrongly, of many other errors. It seems as though McCarthy is basing his criticism on reporting in the Detroit Free Press, and he fails to understand several important matters. Let me point them out in no particular order.

Error Rates

McCarthy clarifies that the “68 percent error rate” means 68 percent of events in the log are reports of errors. It does not mean that 68 percent of the votes were put in an error category, and then adjudicated. The ASOG report, however, never made the erroneous claim: it was a misinterpretation that went viral.

I reached out to Ramsland and asked him to comment on the reported error rates. 

“We simply reported the facts that of approximately 15,000 lines of event reports, approximately 68 percent of them are reported errors and this is not acceptable,” Ramsland told me. “It does not mean that 68 percent of the votes are incorrect. There could be one to even as many as four errors reported in connection with every vote that goes to adjudication.”

Joseph Epstein, In Brief Peter Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/26/joseph-epstein-in-brief/

To think that a single op-ed could elicit such an effluence of opinion and such a diluvium of print is to recognize that Epstein, who will turn 84 in January, has lost none of his touch.

Joseph Epstein has made some news recently, mainly as a target of the cancel culture. The English Department at Northwestern University, where he holds emeritus status, erased him from its website and did all but lapidate him for his crimes against wokery. 

This story is the least of reasons for one to become familiar with Joseph Epstein. He is among the best American essayists—a stylist who seems effortlessly witty, generous, and graceful in both small and large matters. 

I came to know his writing when he served as the editor of The American Scholar, from 1975 to 1997. He turned that once stodgy magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society into a delight for many, though he riled some readers with his caustic comments on academic feminism and for granting a platform to conservative scholars. Joyce Carol Oates published a letter in the New York Times in 1991 calling Epstein an “embarrassment” to the publication and urging his resignation. PBK kicked him out six years later, and replaced him with Anne Fadiman, who brought a bien-pensant sensibility that restored The American Scholar to dull respectability. 

Epstein, however, continued to write essays and stories, and to publish one collection after another:

Charm: The Elusive Enchantment

Wind Spirits: Shorter Essays

Fabulous Small Jews (stories)

The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff and Other Stories

A Literary Education 

The Ideal of Culture

Essays in Biography

Friendship: An Exposé

Narcissus Leaves the Pool

Snobbery: The American Version 

Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits

I list these titles of but a fraction of his 24 books in no particular order.