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October 2021

Palestinian Prisoners No One Talks About by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17880/palestinian-prisoners-no-one-talks-about

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad prisoners, who have been convicted of terrorism against Israel, received wide coverage because they are being held in Israeli prisons. They are being held in prison because many of them were involved in major terror attacks against Israel, including murder. The international media and the Palestinian Authority (PA), however, refuse to call the prisoners terrorists. Instead, they call them “militants” or “political detainees.”

While the world’s attention remains focused on the Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, there is hardly any mention of prisoners and detainees held by the PA security forces in the West Bank

A Palestinian who goes on hunger strike in a Palestinian prison can only dream of being noticed by a foreign journalist or a human rights organization in the US and Europe. A Palestinian who declares a hunger strike in an Israeli prison, on the other hand, has nothing to fear. He or she knows very well that within minutes the whole world will learn about his “grievances.”

A report by the Committee of the Families of Political Detainees revealed that the Palestinian security forces committed 217 “violations” against Palestinians just during September.

If Abbas cares so much about Hamas and PIJ prisoners, why is he ordering his security forces to arrest and beat Palestinians for being affiliated with the two groups? If he thinks that these prisoners should be released from Israeli prisons, why doesn’t he first release those who are being held in Palestinian prisons?

A final, damning question: Why are the Palestinian security forces arresting or interrogating prisoners shortly after their release from Israeli prisons? How can the PA condemn Israel for arresting these men, but later arrest them on suspicion of belonging to Hamas or PIJ?

In public, Abbas demands that Israel free all the prisoners; but when Israel complies, he rushes to arrest them for “security reasons.” The Palestinian prisoners were lucky when they were in Israeli prisons: they attracted the attention of human rights organizations and journalists around the world.

Those who are now being held in Palestinian prisons are undoubtedly wishing that they could be sent back to Israeli prisons, where they would be better treated and win international sympathy.

A recent hunger strike by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) prisoners held by Israel caught the attention of many journalists and media outlets. Reports about the hunger strike appeared in newspapers around the world and were included in dispatches by major news agencies.

Ground Zero of Woke Universities are making themselves not just disliked and disreputable but ultimately irrelevant and replaceable. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/24/ground-zero-of-woke/

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.  

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions. 

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose. 

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities. 

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor. 

High Stakes in Virginia This is only one battle in a much bigger war. Thomas Sowell

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/high-stakes-virginia-thomas-sowell/

Although Virginia has been a politically blue state for years, this year’s election has the Democrats’ governor facing a serious challenge.

One of the reasons is that many Virginia parents are outraged by the “woke” propaganda their children are being subjected to in the public schools — and the governor has sided with the education bureaucrats and the teachers union.

Very few politicians in any state dare to go against the teachers unions, which have millions of votes and millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

This is one battle in a much bigger war, and the stakes are far higher than the governorship of Virginia or the Democrats and Republicans. The stakes are the future of this nation.

When school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people, that is a danger to all Americans of every race. Anyone at all familiar with the history of group-identity politics in other countries knows that it has often ended up producing sickening atrocities that have torn whole societies apart.

If you have a strong stomach, read about the 1915 atrocities against the Armenians in Turkey, “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans, or the reciprocal atrocities between the Sinhalese and Tamils during their civil war in Sri Lanka.

Do not kid yourself that this cannot happen in America. The relations between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka were once held up to the world as a model of intergroup harmony.

24 Hours in the ER A reminder that humanity prevails even in COVID hell. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/24-hours-er-katie-hopkins/

Good friends say I’m stubborn as hell. My own mother has slightly less choice words for it — pig-headed, she says, and I guess she knows best.

Either way, as a result of my unwillingness to acknowledge I am struggling, or asking for help last week, I ended up in the back of an ambulance headed to the ER.

I knew I was sick. Even after I regained consciousness, vomiting on my bathroom floor, I thought sleep and a NyQuil would sort me out…pig-headed, you see.

I was wrong. Do not fear, this is not a splurge about myself and the inner workings of my intestines or nasal passages. Nor is it a self-pitying lament about how jolly hard it can be on the road. My affliction was my old adversary, meningitis, returned to remind me I am mortal and need to be a great deal more grateful to be alive.

Rather, this is a glimpse into the inside of an American ER, and a peek into the inner workings of a hospital, in the grip of the COVID storm.

The ambulance men were brusque on arrival, finding my British accent indecipherable and unable to fathom how I had washed up at a hotel on the Oklahoma border without car or a loved one to get me to the hospital. Impatient with my feeble answers, they marked me down as homeless and warned me the hospital was swamped, I should be prepared for a 6-hour wait, and that I should watch my back because “this place is COVID soup.”

Dr. Dog Torturer Fauci funds barbaric torture of beagles in a Tunisian lab. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/dr-anthony-fauci-funds-torture-beagles-tunisian-lloyd-billingsley/

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” the non-profit White Coat Waste project told reporters. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies,” all to test an “experimental drug.”

White Coat Waste also claimed that some of the dogs had their vocal cords removed so their barking would not disturb the attending scientists. Rep. Nancy Mace fired off a letter to the National Institutes of Health, calling the cordectomies “cruel” and a “reprehensible misuse of taxpayer funds.” Mace is a South Carolina Republican but signatories to her letter included Democrats Cindy Axne, Steve Cohen, Jimmy Gomez, Josh Gottheimer, Ted Lieu, Mike Quigley, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Terri Sewell and Eleanor Holmes Norton, plus more than a dozen Republicans, including Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Maria Salazar.

In a related cause that could use more bipartisan support, Dr. Fauci and his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are also under fire for funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The NIAID boss denied funding such research, but now the NIH admits a “limited experiment” to test if bat coronaviruses were “capable of binding” to a human receptor. That contradicts Fauci, the nation’s chief white coat supremacist, who has escaped scrutiny on a number of fronts.

Arming the Taliban—But Not Cops? Lawmakers take aim at a program equipping police with military-surplus gear. Dorothy Moses Schulz

https://www.city-journal.org/equipping-cops-with-military-surplus-lawmakers-taking-aim-at-1033-program

Can anyone forget the images of Taliban fighters riding around Kabul on U.S. vehicles, wearing U.S.-supplied uniforms, and carrying U.S.-made rifles? In addition to stranding people in Afghanistan, the Americans also abandoned Humvees; trucks and armored vehicles, including Mine-Resistant Ambush Protection (MRAP) vehicles valued at about $800,000 each; artillery; aging but operable helicopters and attack aircraft; drones; artillery and mortars; and millions of rounds of ammunition. No one is quite sure how many of these items were disabled or are too sophisticated for the Taliban to operate. Estimates of their value range from $24 billion to $83 billion. Whatever the true figure, U.S. agencies and a few independent investigators agree that close to one-third of what Washington spent on the Afghan defense forces went for war matériel now held by an enemy we ousted 20 years ago.

Contrast the relative apathy shown by many over Taliban possession of this equipment with the ongoing furor over the $7.5 billion worth of decommissioned military gear that the Department of Defense provides to U.S. and territorial police departments under the 1033 Program, which many on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures want to curtail or eliminate. The 1033 Program was meant to save tax dollars by passing off the Pentagon’s excess equipment to local police, who receive the items for free except for shipping costs. The program was part of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, though there have been similar programs since the end of World War II. An earlier version of the program under President George H. W. Bush in 1990 and 1991 sought to aid police departments in fighting the war on drugs. Under President Bill Clinton, counterterrorism was also included among the program’s goals.

According to the Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which operates the program as part of the Defense Logistics Agency’s Disposition Services, about 8,000 of the nation’s 18,000 police agencies have received military-grade equipment, subject to approval by their states. Much of the cast-off gear is office equipment, clothing and uniforms, tools, and radios.

It is the “controlled equipment,” including armored vehicles, weaponized aircraft, rifles and grenade launchers, that has led to demands to rein in the program. The outcry over images of police riding on armored vehicles, wearing night-vision goggles, and carrying military-grade firearms during the 2014 Michael Brown protests led President Barack Obama to issue Executive Order 13688 in 2015, limiting what the Defense Department could transfer. Prohibited items included tracked armored vehicles; weaponized aircraft, vessels, and vehicles; .50-caliber firearms and ammunition; bayonets; camouflage uniforms; and grenade launchers. In response, LESO reported that police had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers, and 1,623 bayonets by April 1, 2016.

But the prohibition was short-lived. In August 2017, President Donald Trump revoked EO 13688, again permitting the transfer of tracked armored vehicles, bayonets, and utility knives—with the rationale for the last two being that officers kept these in their vehicles for use during emergency situations. The program had discontinued transfers of grenade launchers in 1999, prior to Obama’s executive order—a policy that remains in effect today.

Gallup: Biden’s 11-point approval rating drop is the worst of any president since WWII

Jeffrey Swindoll

Oct 23rd, 2021 10:14 pm

President Joe Biden is on a historic run … but not the good kind.

Biden started 2021 with a 56% approval rating. He’s now down 11 points (44.7%) in the third quarter of 2021 — the worst drop of any U.S. president since World War II.

Epic Fail: Vaccination Rates Now Lower Than When Biden Took Office

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/25/epic-fail-vaccination-rates-now-lower-than-when-biden-took-office/

President Joe Biden continues to insist that his vaccine mandates have been a roaring success. The truth is far different. In fact, the only thing the mandate seems to have increased is the labor shortage and supply-chain crisis.

“It’s working. We’re making progress,” Biden said recently, pointing to the fact that daily cases had declined 47% and hospitalizations were down 38% in the previous month and a half.

Somehow, the army of media fact-checkers failed to notice that Biden was, shall we say, misleading the public.

First, Biden’s employer mandates still haven’t taken effect, since the federal rules governing companies with more than 100 workers have yet to be released. Biden’s mandate covering federal contractors doesn’t take effect until Dec. 8.

Second, the decline in new COVID cases started at the end of August, nearly two weeks before Biden’s Sept. 9 pronouncement, and hospitalizations and deaths have followed suit, as expected.

This bell curve pattern is the same thing COVID has demonstrated in the past – before vaccines were available or were widespread. Last winter, for example, new COVID cases peaked at the start of January and then plunged, at a time when a comparatively tiny fraction of the public was vaccinated.

The other inconvenient truth for Biden is that vaccination rates are no guarantee that COVID rates will decline. The United Kingdom, to cite on example, is right now experiencing a surge in COVID cases, even though 73% of its population is either fully or partially vaccinated.

In contrast, new COVID cases have been steadily falling in Mexico in recent weeks, where only 40% of the population is fully vaccinated and another 14% partially so.

London’s Khan to Provide £25k Grants to Rename Streets in Latest BLM Push

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/10/24/londons-khan-establishes-25k-grants-rename-streets-latest-blm-push/

London’s leftist mayor Sadiq Khan is making £25,000 grants available to change street names in a Black Lives Matter-inspired diversity drive.

The so-called “Untold Stories” grants are to be backed by a £1 million fund of public money, which campaigners will be able to use to hire consultants, remunerate impacted residents, and so on throughout the renaming process — which is not as simple as might be supposed, having an expensive knock-on effect on emergency and postal services, for example.

They will be administered by the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, established by Mayor Khan after the BLM violence sparked by the death of George Floyd in America crossed the Atlantic to decide whether monuments and memorials to historic figures deemed “problematic” by the modern left should be removed.

“London’s diversity is its greatest strength but for far too long our capital’s statues, street names, and buildings have only shown a limited perspective on our city’s complex history,” Khan asserted, in comments reported by The Telegraph.

“I’m determined to do everything I can to ensure our public realm presents a more complete picture of everyone who has made London the incredible city it is today,” he vowed.

Obama campaigns for McAuliffe in Virginia, making an ass of himself By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/obama_campaigns_for_mcauliffe_in_virginia_making_an_ass_of_himself.html

Terry McAuliffe, memorably characterized as “the unkillable cockroach of the Democratic Party” by PJMedia’s Stephen Kruiser, is not faring well in the polls in his campaign for governor of Virginia. Apparently, neither is New Jersey’s Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy, who’s also running for a second term as governor and who at last count had just a six-point lead, plus a toxic endorsement from The Nation, which declared him “the most progressive governor in America.”  That won’t go over well in Jersey City or Weehawken.

Democrats think these elections are important to their wretched 2022 prospects in Congress and have whipped out their big guns — not flailing Joe Biden, of course — but Barack Obama. New Jersey’s a blue state that’s been the hardest hit by Democrat COVID policies, including the seeding of nursing homes with COVID patients, a man-caused disaster that killed off thousands of elderly people. It’s also been subject to tax hikes. Virginia’s a purple state and Obama’s the man who expanded Washington’s bureaucracies and handed its bureaucrats gargantuan salaries; creating Virginia’s Washington suburbs and turning the historically red state blue. Obama is there to remind such voters of all those good times.

He’s back, and spewing his banal platitudes as well as Trump hate, in the perfect picture of leftist establishment hypocrisy.

Start with the first forked-tongue idiocy, from Fox News:

Former President Barack Obama traveled to New Jersey on Saturday to campaign for Gov. Phil Murphy and claimed that he understands why Americans are questioning when COVID-19 mandates will end.

“The science says it’s the right thing to do,” Obama said in reference to COVID-19 mask and vaccine requirements to a crowd of Murphy supporters in Newark. “You do it because you’re not just protecting yourself, but people you love, people who are vulnerable. But, you know, I don’t know how folks just decide everything’s got to suddenly be political.”

“But I understand why people want to know when this is all going to end,” Obama added

It’s as if 2020 never happened. His argument, like a lot of them coming from him, is old and hackneyed. It’s what officials were saying back in March 2020 when the pandemic began. The nursing home seedings were just beginning and the bodies were being rolled out, but according to Obama, anything that comes out of the mouth of an incompetent, power-hungry bureaucrat with a one-size-fits-all mentality is ‘science.’