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July 2021

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Recent Petitions Singling Out Israel for Condemnation Are Anti-Semitic by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17519/israel-petitions-antisemitic

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats.

Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups….

“Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.” — Thomas L. Friedman.

There is an old joke about a Hitler rally in which the Fuhrer shouts out a rhetorical question: “Who is to blame for all of Germany’s evils?” And before the crowd can shout “the Jews,” a man in the front row screams out: “The bicycle riders.” Hitler stops and turns to the man and asks him, “Why the bicycle riders?” To which the man responds, “Why the Jews?” …. There is no good response.

Therefore, let us stop pretending that these hateful, one sided and mendacious petitions are anything but what they are: anti-Semitic bigotry, pure and simple. History will judge the bigots behind them harshly. So should all decent people today.

Let there be no doubt that the recent spate of one-sided petitions singling out Israel for condemnation are motivated by hatred of Israel, precisely because it is the nation state of the Jewish people.

The bigots who promote these petitions, and the useful idiots who sign them, cannot possibly be motivated by a concern for universal human rights. If they were, they would focus on nations with really horrendous human rights records, such as Iran, which hangs gays, China, which imprisons Muslim dissidents, Russia, which murders dissenters, Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women, Syria, which gases its own people, as well as Palestinians, and many other nations that face no external threats. Israel, on the other hand, faces existential threats, and acts in self-defense. It does more to protect innocent civilians than any country faced with comparable threats. Yet it is the only country that is subject to petitions by teachers unions, faculty senates, student bodies, and other groups that seem to focus more on Israel than on their own mission to improve the lives of their members.

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Defund the FBI  Republicans need to abandon their longtime, reflexive  loyalty to the FBI. By Julie Kelly

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/defund-the-fbi/

It’s been a gold star week for the men and women of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Nearly six months after the events of January 6, the FBI, under the direction of Joe Biden’s vengeful Justice Department, is accelerating the nationwide manhunt for anyone involved. Since June 23, agents have arrested 17 people from Florida to California. Charges range from assaulting police officers and criminal trespassing to something called “destruction of property in special maritime and territorial jurisdiction and aiding and abetting.”

The dragnet is part of the nonstop campaign of terror unleashed by the Biden regime against the political Right. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who compares January 6 to the Oklahoma City bombing and Capitol protesters to terrorists, pledged the “Capitol breach” probe would be his top priority. Garland last week bragged in a press release that his department reached the “benchmark” of arresting 500 people and warned he would “hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable” for their actions that day. His prosecutors routinely ask the courts to keep the accused behind bars awaiting trials that won’t start until late this year or perhaps even 2022; dozens have been held for months in a D.C. jail that specifically houses January 6 defendants.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, despite assurances his agency treats all protesters the same regardless of partisan affiliation (LOL), is happy to assist Garland in his mission. Wray insists “domestic violent extremists”—code for Trump supporters—pose the greatest security threat to the country.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

When Collaboration Is Capitulation “Consensus” in the American education establishment is not a recommendation. It is a warning. By Peter W. Wood

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/01/when-collaboration-is-capitulation/

In response to my article “Counterfeit Civics,” and in defense of Educating for American Democracy (EAD), Paul Carrese and James Stoner are not only eloquent but also persuasive on one important point: they personally uphold the good intentions of this plan to transform American education. Beyond that we enter into disagreements, both over the general intellectual tenor of EAD and what the alternatives to it might be. They also attribute to me several views that I do not hold.

But let’s start with a point of easy agreement. Carrese and Stoner urge that “Conservatives should read the Educating for American Democracy documents for themselves, not be led by repeated caricatures that give no indication of having studied and digested the entire project.” I agree. In fact, I provided links to those documents in my article for American Greatness and called for a “close” reading of the same. Anyone who recognizes the importance of this major public policy proposal really should devote the time to read it in its entirety, including the footnotes, and not just the Roadmap, but also the full report.

Better still would be to go further by digging into some of the source material and the controversies that underlie EAD. The proposal did not spring up from the deliberations of the steering committee, the six task forces, the two working groups, the advisory council, and the corresponding principal investigators without drawing deeply from the well of collective wisdom in contemporary educational theory and practice. That, of course, is part of the problem. 

EAD represents “consensus”—“a national-consensus, collaborative effort across philosophical and political differences,” as Carrese and Stoner put it. That is to say, EAD represents the views of the same educational establishment that has brought ruin to much of American K-12 education. “Consensus” in this case is not a recommendation. It is a warning.

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Schooled in Hate Teaching black kids in public schools to hate the police. Richard L. Cravatts

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/schooled-hate-richard-l-cravatts/

When some 200 parents crowded into a highly charged, heated Loudoun County, Virginia school board hearing on June 22nd to air their displeasure with curricula and teaching in area schools, they were expressing the same discontent that parents across the country have more increasingly begun to feel as they witness the radical ideology that informs much of public-school education today. Though one teacher did give a powerful statement on how she disagreed with the hijacking of education by a core group of teachers with a leftist, extreme ideology, the school board, and presumably a majority of the district’s teachers, were obdurate in their defense of current practices in public school education.

At hand in this case was a debate about transgender policy proposals requiring Loudoun County Public Schools employees to use students’ preferred names or pronouns. The use of artificial pronouns, randomly chosen by children or adults who arbitrarily decide to shift their gender, and the whole emphasis on transgender rights and how they impact decisions about school bathrooms, among other items, is part of the chronic indoctrination taking place in schools where woke teachers, captivated by paroxysms of tolerance, virtue signaling, and political correctness, have attempted to deflect parental opposition and tailor instruction so that students receive a highly-politicized, radical education—much of what passes for learning being little more than in-school training for activism and a new generation obsessed with race and their role as either oppressed or oppressor,

The scene at the Loudoun County meeting has been playing out with increasing frequency around the country, with parents expressing similar sentiment about their unhappiness with the content and ideology behind much of what passes today as pedagogy. Rather than being understanding of parents’ concerns, teachers and school boards are increasingly combative, pushing back against parental complaints, rejecting suggestions for more transparency with curricula and teaching materials, and expressing outright indignation at the notion that parents—the very taxpayers who pay the salaries for teachers and bloated school system bureaucracies—should push back against the practices of the Nanny State, a society in which the government, not the family, instructs on morality, culture, race, sexuality, and faith—much more than the reading, writing, and arithmetic that public school education was nominally created to teach.

More troubling is the fact that educators keep pushing the boundaries of acceptable content for curricula, widely incorporating, as one current problematic topic, critical race theory (CRT) into teaching so that black students are taught they are victims and oppressed by virtue of their blackness alone and white children taught that they are the privileged oppressors by virtue of the color of their skin.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s 1776 All Over Again Corporatist elite power vs. individual liberty. Joseph Hippolito

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/its-1776-all-over-again-joseph-hippolito/

As the nation prepares to celebrate the 245th anniversary of its independence, Americans face perhaps their biggest existential crisis, one reflecting the issues that led to the Revolutionary War.

That crisis extends beyond critical race theory and Covid-19 vaccination. Those issues merely reflect a far deeper crisis: the demand by the powers-that-be for Americans to think of themselves as subjects rather than citizens.

Silverton, Colo., a town with about 600 residents, provides a succinct illustration. On June 14, Mayor Shane Fuhrman unilaterally banned the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings of the town’s trustees. When 10 people and two trustees responded by rising to recite the pledge, Fuhrman threatened to expel anyone who followed suit.

“To tell members of the public they are not allowed to say the Pledge of Allegiance during public comment and threaten to have them removed … violates every single one of their First Amendment rights,” Trustee Molly Barela told Denver’s KDVR-TV.

Meanwhile, school boards planning to implement critical race theory and transgender policy face passionate resistance from parents and students across the country. In Loudoun County, Va., opposition erupted after the school board fired a physical education teacher who expressed opposition to transgender policy during a board meeting. One parent, a spokesman for a group seeking to recall the board’s members, said the board wanted to stifle the parents’ role in their children’s education.

In response, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe dismissed concerns about critical race theory as conspiracy theories.

Yet critical race theory reflects the Maoist approach to Marxist revolution, as FrontPage Magazine reported in “Beijing’s Lies Matter.” As Mao said in 1963: “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and thrived with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people.”

Black theologian James Cone developed critical race theory while two activists and scholars, Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev, crystallized Marxist thought on “white supremacy” and “white privilege.” Allen and Ignatiev joined the Maoists when splits arose among American communists.

Elsewhere, influencers tell Americans to “trust the science” while demanding mass vaccination against Covid-19. Influencers even advocate “vaccine passports” to ensure compliance by holding shopping, employment and school attendance hostage. On Tuesday, the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan announced that all employees must be vaccinated by Sept. 10 or lose their jobs.

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Celebrating Freedom in the Shadow of Tyranny Amidst the barbecues and fireworks – remembering with gratitude the words of the Declaration. Bruce Thornton

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/celebrating-freedom-shadow-tyranny-bruce-thornton/

This year we celebrate our nation’s birth at a time when the foundational ideas that animated our break with England are under siege throughout our political, business, educational, and cultural institutions. The iconic preamble to the Declaration of Independence–– “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”––is under assault, and tyrannical ambition continues to undermine the infrastructure of our liberty.

We focus so frequently on that world-changing preamble that we forget the bulk of the Declaration is a detailed indictment of George III in terms that evoke Classical tyranny, which Aristotle defined as “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will.” The cost of that tyranny is the weakening both of political freedom limited by the tyrant’s will; and of the independence necessary for self-government and full human dignity.

The Declaration, then, contrasts unalienable rights and political freedom with their opposite, tyranny, laying the foundations of a government that by design checks the excesses of power that destroy both independence and freedom. Rather than depend, as the Left has done since the French Revolution, on the progressive improvement of human nature, the Founders believed that people are by nature driven by “passions and interests,” as Madison called them. These forces motivating human destructive action cannot be eliminated or improved either by greater knowledge or by “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called technocratic oligarchs. Rather, political institutions must divide and balance power so that “ambition counters ambition,” preserving the freedom of all, and forestalling tyranny whether of the minority or the majority.

A century of progressive assaults on the Founders’ architecture has weakened this defense against tyranny. Power has increasingly been expanded and concentrated in the federal government and its agencies. These bureaucracies are insulated from accountability to the people, and unconstitutionally combine the three functions of government––legislative, judicial, and executive––into one institution backed by the coercive power of the state.

Hence the overweening actions of agencies such as the IRS or the EPA, both of which under the Biden administration have seen their powers and funding increase. And who can forget the feckless arrogance of the NIH and the CDC during the pandemic, as it serially revised its diktats, on everything from masks to the virus’ origins, with every shift of the political winds? Or the Small Business Administration and the USDA illegally doling out grants on the basis of race?

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Fauci vs. the Science By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fauci-vs-the-science/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

Dr. Anthony Fauci recently said that disagreement with him is usually just disagreement with the science. He also keeps insisting that even if the guidance from the CDC on masks is changing, “it can’t hurt” to wear masks.

But the science is in flux. For children, maybe it does hurt. In the Journal of the American Medical Association for Pediatrics, a new paper was published suggesting that the evidentiary basis for requiring children to wear masks was weak and that there was evidence that wearing masks caused children to inhale too much carbon dioxide. The normal CO2 limit is 0.04 percent. The upper safety limit is 0.2 percent. Children wearing masks were getting sometimes as much as 1.6 percent. One can only imagine how much worse it would be if it were — as the CDC initially recommended — a test done on children wearing them outdoors during athletic activities. The authors end, “We suggest that decision-makers weigh the hard evidence produced by these experimental measurements accordingly, which suggest that children should not be forced to wear face masks.” Check it out.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Chinese Communist Word Games By Jimmy Quinn

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chinese-communist-word-games/

The most memorable passage of Xi Jinping’s speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s existence is easily this:

We Chinese are a people who uphold justice and are not intimidated by threats of force. As a nation, we have a strong sense of pride and confidence. We have never bullied, oppressed, or subjugated the people of any other country, and we never will. By the same token, we will never allow any foreign force to bully, oppress, or subjugate us. Anyone who would attempt to do so will find themselves on a collision course with a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.

I’ve emphasized a portion of the last sentence of this selection, because it’s gotten tied up in a debate over translation with political implications. The translation above is from the official version disseminated by the Xinhua News Agency.

Some analysts, however, say that Xi’s remarks were far more violent. The China Media Project and NPR, among others, have translated the line like this: “Anyone who tries to do so will find their head broken and blood flowing against a great wall of steel built with the flesh and blood of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people!”

On Twitter, a Xinhua News employee notes that emphasis on the phrase “seems to be gaining traction, w/ some gruesome translations being floated.” But, he writes, “one of those words that gradually lost their literal meaning over the [years], to [Chinese] ears it conveys total failure, not broken skull & blood”

Xi’s bellicose speech, marking the centenary of a singularly vicious regime, would maintain its broadly defiant message no matter the translation of the phrase in question. In any case, the Party’s violent past and present (and Xi’s promise today to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland) do not inspire much confidence that the true meaning of the line is anything other than what we have come to expect from Communist Chinese conduct.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can America’s ‘Woke’ Generation Rise To China’s Growing Challenge?

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/02/can-self-loathing-america-meet-challenge-from-self-loving-china/

As Americans prepare to celebrate 245 years of freedom with diffidence and perhaps even mixed feelings, China’s national fete this week marking the Chinese Communist Party’s 100 years of existence showed no such doubt. America faces a serious challenge from China, but seems too self-obsessed and divided to do anything about it.

It’s depressing to compare China’s celebration of a century of communism with our much more muted planned observance.

Of course, most Americans remain patriotic, despite the recent divisive turn in our politics brought on by the Democratic Party and its sharp shift toward extremism of the socialist kind.

For instance, a RealClearPolitics Opinion Research poll of 1,762 registered voters reveals America’s profound cultural and political schism: Overall, 49% of Americans consider themselves “very patriotic.” If you add those who consider themselves “somewhat” patriotic, the number jumps to 85%.

But virtually all of the patriotism resides on one side of the American political equation. Among Republicans, 68% are “very” patriotic. Democrats? Just 41%. Independents? Even lower at just 39%.

There’s a huge generational split as well. Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation remain intensely patriotic, at 68%. No other age group is even 50%. By race, the picture’s the same: White Americans are 58%, while Blacks (37%), Hispanics (36%) and Asian-Americans (28%) are lower.

A separate sounding of young people nationally by North Dakota State University produced even more alarming findings. It asked more than 1,000 students at campuses around the country if they were “proud to be an American.”

As CampusReform reported, “57% of liberal identifying students answered ‘no.’ This is in contrast to the 73% majority of conservatives who answered ‘yes’ to the same question.”

There’s a rather disturbing split between the two groups when it comes to economics:

… 61% of liberal students have a negative view of the country’s economic system. Only 9% of liberals answered in favor of capitalism, while 30% remained indifferent … 47% had a positive association with socialism, while only 13% felt negatively about it.

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Remembering That Governments Do Not Make Ideals, But Ideals Make Governments Gary M. Galles

By on July 2nd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/07/02/remembering-that-governments-do-not-make-ideals-but-ideals-make-governments/

On July 4, Americans celebrate our Declaration of Independence, which was just as truly a striking declaration of liberty, new in the world. But today, many give less thought to the uniqueness and importance of the ideas and ideals that our country’s founding reflected than to what is on the barbecue.  

To reconnect to those issues, it would be appropriate to turn to Calvin Coolidge, the only president born on the Fourth of July (though both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the 50th anniversary of Independence Day). It is doubly appropriate because Coolidge honored the Declaration’s commitment to life and the liberty to pursue one’s happiness, subject only to the defense of others’ equal, and equally inalienable, rights, more than any of his successors. He also produced remarkable results without sacrificing our freedoms – substantially cutting tax rates, tax rolls and federal debt, while real economic growth averaged 7%, with 0.4% inflation and 3.3% unemployment, during his presidency.  

In particular, Silent Cal’s speech commemorating Independence Day’s 150th anniversary (though ironically on July 5) merits renewed attention, especially as he wrote his own speeches. Consider this abbreviated version:

We meet to celebrate the birthday of America … a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity … still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.

Enough time has elapsed to demonstrate … the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization … They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.

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