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June 2021

Biden Administration Rewards Terrorists: Abbas and Hamas by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17413/biden-administration-rewards-terrorists-abbas

Ironically, the same Abbas who told Blinken that he (Abbas) is committed to a peace process with Israel is the same Abbas who also wants to see his Israeli “peace partners” put on trial at the ICC.
Now comes Blinken and announces that the reopening of the consulate in the city. Here is how the Palestinians understand his gestures: If you fire 4,000 rockets and missiles at Israel, you get a US embassy in Jerusalem and millions of dollars of US taxpayer money. It works! The solution, then, is to keep on doing it!
By reopening the consulate, Blinken is telling both Hamas and Abbas that the US does not recognize Jerusalem as the united and undivided capital of Israel.
Blinken has also sent a message to Abbas and Hamas that former US President Donald Trump’s formula of “peace for peace” in the Middle East is off the table; they no longer need to worry.
Abbas and Hamas are rubbing their hands because, the way they see it, the Biden administration has just achieved their goal of scrapping Trump’s peace plan, “Peace to Prosperity: A vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.”
By rewarding Abbas, Hamas and the anti-normalization camp in the Arab world, the Biden administration has bludgeoned its declared objective of reviving a peace process in the Middle East. It has demonstrated decisively that corruption and dictatorship pay. It has shown that terrorism pays – to the tune of millions of dollars. Palestinian incitement and violence against Israel are unlikely to recede in the context of such an encouraging outcome.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s May 25 announcement that the Biden administration will ask Congress to allocate $75 million in aid to the Palestinians and that Washington will reopen the US Consulate in Jerusalem — which previously had served as a de facto embassy handling US relations with the Palestinians — is sending the wrong message to the leaders of the Palestinians.

First, these overtures signal Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that the US will support and lavish funding on any Arab leader who seriously abuses not only his own people but also his neighbors. This policy would also include leaders such as Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Xinping in China and Supreme Guide Ali Kamenei in Iran, as well as other despots.

One pretext for the war that Hamas initiated was that Abbas had cancelled parliamentary elections to have been held this month and July. The real reason the elections were canceled was that they would have resulted in another victory for Hamas.

Hamas won the last parliamentary election in 2006 due to the Palestinians’ frustration over the rampant political, administrative and economic corruption in Fatah, the dominant faction of Abbas’s PA.

The Biden administration — by offering Abbas more money and reopening the US diplomatic mission that deals directly with the Palestinians — is actually rewarding Abbas for those attributes.

New York Times Publishes Photo of Girl Killed by Israelis Who Was Also Killed by Israelis in 2017 By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/05/31/new-york-times-publishes-photo-of-girl-killed-by-israelis-who-was-also-killed-by-israelis-in-2017-n1451060

It was supposed to be heartbreaking: on Friday, the New York Times published a front-page series of photos with the headline “They Were Just Children,” little Palestinian Arab children who had supposedly been murdered by the evil Israeli war machine during the latest round of Hamas jihad attacks. The only problem was that one of the photos, prominently featured on the top row, was of a little girl whom Palestinian Arab propagandists, using the very same photo, had reported murdered by the Israelis in January 2017. It was just the latest example of the fact that Israel’s atrocities are so many and so brazen that Palestinians have to fabricate evidence of them – and the establishment media eagerly plays along.

The Times photo imbroglio came just over a week after Palestinian Arabs on Twitter claimed that a photo of another little girl depicted the victim of an Israeli airstrike; it was actually a photo of a Russian child model who has never been anywhere near Gaza and is still very much alive.

Shortly before that, a supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.

This deception has been going on for years. It is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.

No One Will Pay for COVID Crimes Against Humanity Big Tech censors and the credentialed public health class, not anti-maskers, are the real Neanderthals, the 21st century’s version of the Flat Earth Society. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/31/no-one-will-pay-for-covid-crimes-against-humanity/

It appears that Anthony Fauci’s 15 months of fame are just about up.

The ubiquitous infectious disease “expert” who became a household name and the most powerful man in the country—or is it the world?—last spring, finally wore out his welcome, even by the friendliest of hosts. For the first time in recent memory, the doctor did not make his morning rounds on the Sunday talk shows. Last week’s weekly press briefing by Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force, featuring Fauci, only earned 19,021 views, a 50 percent drop in viewership since April.

The American public, for the most part, is suffering from Fauci Fatigue; his favorability rating has dropped from 68 percent one year ago to 54 percent now. Forty percent of U.S. voters say they’ve lost confidence in Fauci over the past year. His latest tap dance about the origins of the virus while defending the trustworthiness of Chinese researchers does little to restore confidence in his integrity or self-proclaimed expertise.

House Republicans introduced a symbolic but futile bill to oust Fauci from his role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Some even imagine Fauci and his fellow COVID-19 propagandists and profiteers will face charges for the incalculable damage they have inflicted on the country under the guise of virus mitigation.

But I have bad news for anyone hoping Fauci will pay a price for his incompetence, misdirection, and in many instances, straight-up malfeasance: he won’t.

Just like any number of official doomsayers, especially those who feed off the public trough, Fauci will never be held accountable for what he’s done. Last March, I compared Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx to Michael Mann, the famous climate scientist and author of the infamous “hockey stick” model that showed a massive spike in global temperatures purportedly caused by human activity. The Penn State University professor is considered a rock star for his nonstop climate fear-mongering which has influenced public policies around the world, all in service of chasing the global warming bogeyman that has yet to decimate all the coastal cities, kill off all the polar bears, or melt all the glaciers—just to name a few environmental catastrophes we were promised.

The COVID Censorship Consensus A monopoly on disinformation. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/covid-censorship-consensus-daniel-greenfield/

“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made,” Facebook conceded, after the theory of a Chinese lab leak gained fresh currency.

It was not the first time that an idea suppressed by the Silicon Curtain had been revived despite the best efforts of the Big Tech monopoly to suppress it.

But Facebook warned that it will go on censoring to “keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,”

Wherever these new facts and trends emerge from, it won’t be from its platforms.

The social media monopoly isn’t admitting that it was wrong. What it’s actually saying is that it’s up to high level authorities to decide what is true and what people can be allowed to say.

The Big Tech giant’s warning contains a series of admissions about how it sees the role of its platforms and the people who use them. Facebook, Instagram, and its younger cousins are not places where a new consensus can emerge by discussing serious issues. It’s where the proles are expected to listen to whatever they are told what to think and to do by their betters.

Facebook isn’t the place where influential people discuss ideas. Like network television or the New York Times, it’s meant as a top-down medium that tells a passive public what to think.

It’s hard to think of any greater expression of contempt by a company for its user base.

At the heart of Facebook’s COVID-19 censorship regime is the conviction that ideas are dangerous and during a pandemic people should not be allowed to make up their own minds.

Memorial Days of Biden and Barry Aversion to victory, kindness to deserters, strength through “diversity,” and mass murder of American soldiers as “workplace violence.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/memorial-days-biden-and-barry-lloyd-billingsley/

The last American president with actual combat experience, in a conflict where the United States proved victorious, was George H.W. Bush. During World War II, Bush served as a pilot with Torpedo Squadron 51 (VT-51) and on his 58th mission he was shot down by the Japanese and rescued by a U.S. submarine.

Joe Biden never served in the military but from 2008-2016 he was vice president to the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The former Barry Soetoro never served, and for the Obama-Biden team, the role of the U.S. military was not to defeat America’s enemies.

“Troops risking their lives need to be told that their goal is to ‘defeat’ those trying to kill them,” former Secretary of State Robert Gates explained in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of State at War. But when Gen. Stanley McChrystal announced a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon “bridled,” and blasted the U.S. military as “in revolt” and “insubordinate.”  As it happens, Donilon was an advisor to Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988, and in 2012 Donilon orchestrated the move to put Biden at the head of China policy.

The previous year, Obama ordered SEAL Team Six to take out al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden. Vice president Biden opposed the raid on bin Laden, and his boss did not always take a hard line on terrorists.

Back in 2009 in Afghanistan, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl deserted his outpost and wound up in custody of the Taliban. In 2014, the composite character president traded Bergdahl for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay. They included Mohammed Fazi, who massacred minority Shiites; Khairullah Khairkhwa, close to Taliban founder Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden; and Abdul Haq Wasiq, the Taliban’s deputy intelligence minister and close confidant of Mullah Omar.

Once freed, they joined the Taliban’s political office in Qatar. In effect, the Obama-Biden team traded Pvt. Slovik for the German high command. Also worth recalling is the Obama-Biden response to terrorist attacks on American soil.

Mysterious Explosions Remind Iran That Mossad Neither Slumbers Nor Sleeps The Mullahs’ hallucinations. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/mysterious-explosions-remind-iran-mossad-neither-hugh-fitzgerald/

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh claims a great “victory” in Gaza, and Iran’s Supreme Leader similarly gloats over the lesson the “axis of resistance” has taught the Zionists. Both men are hallucinating, overlooking the reality that Hamas’ weapons stockpiles, especially its rockets, have been greatly depleted, much of its extensive tunnel network has been destroyed, its command-and control centers, intelligence offices, weapons warehouses, all razed to the ground. During the 11-day conflict, the IDF destroyed more than 6,500 terrorist targets, including Hamas and PIJ operational headquarters, weapon production sites and arsenals, and over 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Hamas’ infamous grid of terror tunnels. At least 225 terrorists were killed in the strikes, including 25 senior Hamas and PIJ commanders. The Israeli military predicts that it will be many years – some say it could be as many as 10 years – for Hamas to return to its prewar strength.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Mossad neither slumbers nor sleeps. A few days after Israel announced it had shot down an Iranian armed drone on its border with Jordan, the world learned of a mysterious explosion at an Iranian drone factory in Isfahan. The report is here: “Report: Facility in Iran Used for Drone Manufacturing Hit by Explosion That Injured Nine, Days After Israel Downs Iranian UAV,” by Sharon Wrobel, Algemeiner, May 24, 2021:

An explosion was reported at a complex in Iran that houses a drone factory, several days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled to European foreign ministers parts from an Iranian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that had been downed during clashes with the Hamas militant group.

The explosion, which reportedly occurred on Sunday at a petrochemical factory complex in Isfahan, injured at least nine workers. According to The Guardian, the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA), which it said is located in the complex owned by Sepahan Nargostar Chemical Industries, produces a variety of aircraft and drones for Iranian and pro-Iranian forces.

The Faded Flag A portent of the dangers that lie ahead for our exceptional nation. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/faded-flag-bruce-thornton/

When I put out my flag for Memorial Day, I noticed how faded it was. At a time when we honor those who died defending our country and its freedom, this year my faded flag seems a portent of the dangers that lie ahead for our exceptional nation.

Nations decline the way one of Hemingway’s characters went broke: slowly, then all at once. In just four months, the Biden administration’s policy proposals, executive orders, and “woke” rhetoric suggest that we will continue to draw ever closer to that moment of “all at once.”

Many signs of decline have been evident for decades, punctuated by brief moments of revival. The Sixties and Seventies were a low point in our national morale, a time when the “best lacked all conviction, and the worst were filled with passionate intensity.” The protests over the war in Vietnam, the riots and terrorist bombings, the specious Watergate scandal, the oil crisis, economic stagflation, and the general assault on traditional virtue, faith, and morality––the Nietzschean “revaluation of all values”––  culminated in the presidency of Jimmy Carter with its rhetoric of doubt and retreat evident in his inaugural address. There he mourned the nation’s “recent mistakes,” counseled us not “to dwell on remembered glory,” asserted our country’s “recognized limits,” and preached that it “could only do its best.” He reprised these defeatist sentiments later in the “crisis of confidence” speech.

But Carter’s one term of failures––particularly his feeble and appeasing response to the Iranian Revolution, the violent occupation of our embassy in Tehran, and the taking hostage of its staff–– was followed by Ronald Reagan and his “morning in America” confidence and optimism. Reagan revitalized the economy, and his actions signaled to the world and our Soviet rival that the “crisis of confidence” was over, and America had recovered its nerve. He brought moral clarity to the Cold War by rejecting détente and coexistence, and stated instead, “We win, they lose.” A few years after he left office, the Soviet Union was relegated to the “dustbin of history” the Soviets had predicted for the democratic West.

In the Roaring Nineties that followed, however, the anti-American left was still tramping on its “long march through the institutions.” Many of today’s toxic ideas like “cancel culture” and “systemic racism” were incubated during those years in the universities, whence they infected public schools, entertainment, and the Democrat Party. More immediately dangerous, the extravagant optimism of the “end of history,” the triumph of liberal democracy over Soviet communism, reinforced the idea of a “New World Order,” the transnational, multilateral “rules-based international order” that presumably would transcend the parochial, and dangerous, interests and passions of diverse sovereign nation-states.

Time For An Honest ‘Kitchen Table’ Discussion Over Federal Spending And National Debt Lew Uhler, Peter Ferrara and Joseph Yocca

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/01/we-need-an-honest-kitchen-table-discussion-over-federal-spending-and-national-debt/

America is gripped with numerous problems induced by Biden and Co.: New Middle East wars; gas shortages; overrun borders, and; displaced pipeline workers, to name a few. But right up front remains the specter of government spending, out-of-control debt, and rising inflation.

Much like millions of American families who gather at their kitchen tables to consider money and budget issues, America desperately needs a national, honest, and relevant discourse of how our politicians are managing our taxpayer budget and spending, and national debt.

At the American family level, of course, spending more than you bring home is cause for grave concern. Upon the first signs of trouble, ordinary people must adjust or face ever-growing severe economic troubles. Why shouldn’t the same sober, honest economic review apply to our federal, state, and local government spending?

After all, governments don’t actually produce the revenue they spend. They take that productivity from real Americans, off real kitchen tables. And that fact has profound consequences for the American family and our economic future.

For instance, the recent Biden $1.9 trillion bailout spending bill will cost the average family of four in America almost $15,000. That’s right, the $1,400 per family “Covid Relief” check from Uncle Sam will cost you $13,600 in higher taxes and more debt. Meanwhile, we pay the unemployed more to stay home than return to vital small businesses and the productive sector.

A Truly Fraudulent Presidency

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/01/this-isnt-the-man-voters-put-in-the-white-house/

Earlier in Joe Biden’s presidency, we wondered if his wife Jill was running the White House, and in effect the country. It’s still not out of the question, but it’s beginning to look more like Chief of Staff Ron Klain, unelected and not confirmed by the Senate, is the real president. This should make all Americans uncomfortable.

Klain, who was the vice president’s chief of staff when Biden held that office, has been called “the man executing Biden’s mission” (which seems to be carrying out the Cloward-Piven model that advocates manufacturing a political and economic crisis so that politicians can accrue more power in order to fix it, and use that power to kill off capitalism). He’s also been called Biden’s “co-pilot and fixer.” 

Yes, those descriptions could be used to define the chief of staff for any president of any party. There are times, however, and this appears to be one of them, when a chief of staff wields too much authority.

Klain is no statesman. He’s a confirmed “political animal.” Anyone who thinks that’s a benign label that could be applied to any Washington operative, consider that the Democrats are doing their best to transform America from a civil society into a political society, where government intervention into private affairs is the rule rather than the rare and unwanted exception.

While the Washington press corps and much of the U.S. media are playing the role of Biden’s publicists, the London Times reports, in what has to be an accidental indictment of the White House arrangement, that Klain is “the driving force behind the actual president,” an “operator who knows the business of government inside out.” The reporter who wrote the story, one Sarah Baxter, wants readers to meet “President Klain,” who also happens to be Biden’s “brain.”

The Texas Voting Melodrama Joe Biden says it’s ‘an assault on democracy.’ The facts say otherwise.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-texas-voting-melodrama-11622495406?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As the Texas legislative session drew near its end Sunday, lawmakers appeared set to pass a bill overhauling the state’s elections, until Democrats did one final maneuver: They snuck out of the building. “Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly,” a Democratic leader in the state House told his caucus in a 10:35 p.m. text message.

The extraordinary move deprived the House of a quorum, killing the bill for now, at the cost of undermining the legislative process. But what do you expect after months of Democratic alarms about “voter suppression”? President Biden on Saturday called the Texas plan “un-American” and “part of an assault on democracy.” At least this time he didn’t say it’s worse than Jim Crow, which was the political bomb he lobbed at Georgia’s bill.

The reality is more prosaic. To start with the controversial, the 67-page bill would roll back Covid-19 innovations like Harris County’s drive-through voting and 24-hour voting. Those options were used disproportionately last year by black and Hispanic residents. But when did emergency procedures amid a 100-year pandemic suddenly become the new baseline? It’s hardly crazy to think polling-place shenanigans might be more likely at 3 a.m.

The bill says that on the last Sunday of early voting, polling places may not open until 1 p.m. This is a political mistake, at minimum, in that it’s being spun as an attack on black churches that have a “souls to the polls” tradition. One lawmaker supporting the bill argued: “Those election workers want to go to church, too.” But some people take care of their religious obligations on Saturdays, and in any event Texas repealed most of its blue laws in 1985. Lawmakers would be wise to drop this provision.

Under the bill, Texas would still offer some two weeks of early voting. Mr. Biden’s beloved Delaware won’t have any early voting until 2022, when it will get 10 days. The Texas bill would also raise minimum hours. In the final week, counties with 100,000 people must currently open their “main” polling place 12 hours on weekdays and five hours on Sunday. That population threshold would drop to 30,000, and six hours would be mandated on Sunday.