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November 2021

Muslim Congressional Candidate Accepts Money from Islamist Leaders Barbara Sharief’s tour of radical mosques pays off. Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/muslim-congressional-candidate-accepts-money-joe-kaufman/

Broward County Commissioner Barbara Sharief is one of many Democrats vying for the congressional seat (Florida CD20) previously held by now-deceased US Representative Alcee Hastings. Whoever wins the November 2nd Democratic Primary will most likely be the district’s next officeholder, and Sharief has placed herself in a good position for victory. Her support is a matter of controversy, though, as part of it has come from radical mosques and terror-related groups. This includes money contributions, as her latest campaign financial disclosure reveals funds from Islamist leaders. Will Sharief allow her votes in office to be bought by extremists?

Since Barbara Muhammad Sharief has been running for US Congress, she has made it a point to visit all of the radical mosques in the area. During a candidate forum in September, she said she was “extremely blessed” to be able to do so. Sharief spoke at the Islamic Center of Boca Raton (ICBR), which was co-founded by a Hamas website designer and a former assistant to Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, and she spoke at Pembroke Pines-based Darul Uloom, which has been a haven for al-Qaeda operatives and whose imam was thrown off a number of community boards for his public vitriol against homosexuals.

In August, Sharief was the “Special Guest” at an event sponsored by ICNA Relief USA, the US social services division of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). ICNA has numerous links to South Asian terror. For over three decades, the group has harbored former death squad commander Ashrafuz Zaman Khan, allowing Khan to serve in ICNA’s top leadership positions. ICNA has sponsored events promoting the terrorist groups Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hamas. Sharief has taken numerous photos at various events with ICNA Relief USA Chief Operating Officer Abdul Rauf Khan, an individual who has used social media to target Jews and gays.

Virginia Parents Have Had Enough of ‘Woke’ Lies at Their Schools By Asra Q. Nomani

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/virginia-parents-have-had-enough-of-woke-lies-at-their-schools

Asra Q. Nomani is vice president of strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education and a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

A diverse movement of concerned parents has arisen to oppose critical race theory.

Falls Church, Va. — Since Wednesday, October 6, Fairfax County Public Schools staffer Rob Kerr has been teaching a weekly two-hour course to teachers here at Marshall High School called, “AC-1608: How to Be an Antiracist Educator.”

If you happen to be white, look out — through the lens of this teaching, you’re racist. Consider this module in Kerr’s course: “Exploring and Understanding Whiteness,” which includes listening to a podcast by Bettina Love. She is the founder of the radical Abolitionist Teaching Network, whose core philosophy is that America’s schools, and especially its white teachers, are “spirit murdering” black children.

The Fairfax County “Antiracist Educator” syllabus, revealed here for the first time, borrows key concepts from the dour, divisive doctrine known as critical race theory, which holds that all white people are intrinsic oppressors of all minorities and especially black people. Lessons include “the Creation of Racist Systems,” “the building blocks of racism in the United States,” not to mention the ills of “whiteness.”

Education officials and politicians deny critical race theory is taught in K–12 schools, in a pattern of deception that parents are facing nationwide. We’ve heard of white lies, where folks fudge the truth. These are “woke” lies. But we’re now standing up with moral courage as unapologetic parents in a mama bear — and papa bear — movement. And we’re not just standing up against critical race theory. There’s a whole list of dubious woke education polices we’re fighting. These include: the elimination of merit exams for entry into once-elite schools; the elimination even of advanced math; the curating of pornography by some school libraries; and the cover-up of sexual assaults in schools.

Indeed, we’re seeing a “revenge of the parents.”

Karl Marx’s choice for Treasury secretary By Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/karl_marxs_choice_for_treasury_secretary.html

Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency in the Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a Moscow State University alum and recipient of a Lenin scholarship. Omarova wants Americans to have accounts with the Federal Reserve instead of independent banks. The Kazakhstan native is touching off both support and opposition. 

“It’s not every day that we’re presented with a nomination for a Lenin scholarship recipient who attended the Moscow State University and wants to end banking as we know it in the United States,” South Dakota Republican John Thune told reporters. Sen. Pat Toomey wants Omarova to turn over a copy of her thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital,” which was still on Omarova’s CV in April of 2017. 

Banking committee Democrats who hold doubts about Omarova are playing it close to the vest while others are outspoken in her favor. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, prime mover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, touted Omarova’s “impressive qualifications and expertise in banking.” Sen. Sherrod Brown attributed opposition to “red scare McCarthyism” and hailed Omarova as someone who “fled communist oppression.” Republicans and Democrats alike might have their doubts about that. 

Omarova came to the United States on an exchange program with the University of Wisconsin and lamented the fall of the Soviet Union. In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova said “I feel guilty for having left the country at such a momentous time, because obviously they couldn’t hold it together without me.”

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, scholarships were handed out primarily on the basis of fidelity to Marxist doctrine, not academic expertise or merit. A ballpark figure for the contributions of Marx and Lenin to economics is zero, so the thesis should prove a fascinating read. The Soviet Union was an economic basket case, but it’s the American financial system Omarova views as dysfunctional. 

Commemorating the Balfour Declaration By Michael Curtis

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/commemorating_the_balfour_declaration_.html

Before World War I, the area of Palestine was a region of the Ottoman Empire with a small Jewish population. After the start of World War I, the British government began considering changes in the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe, which had entered the war on the side of Germany and the Central Powers in October 1914. Among other proposals, Prime Minister David Lloyd George favored partition of the empire. In the Middle East, the last generally recognized sovereign power was the empire, and the area of Palestine was a district, not a political entity.

The Balfour Declaration was not a declaration but a letter of November 2, 1917, written by Scottish-born Arthur Balfour, former prime minister and foreign secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community.  Balfour, who was raised as a Protestant in the evangelical tradition, had been a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the most important Jewish personality of his day,  since 1906 when they opposed the Russian pogroms.   The Balfour letter was the result of prolonged discussion in the British cabinet and with Zionist leaders, and the subject of several drafts of the letter. Various individuals have been suggested as the primary author, including Lord Milner and Leopold Amery, but there is no definitely acknowledged single writer.

The declaration stated that “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”   In the statement, two factors are clearly understood: nothing should be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The declaration gave rise to conflicting emotions: Jewish hopes and Arab disappointments. Lord Rothschild remarked that “for the first time since the dispersion, the Jewish people have received their proper status by the declaration of one of the great powers.”

The declaration was the first public support for Zionism by a major political power since Cyrus, the Persian king who liberated the Jews from their Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC.

I&I/TIPP Poll: Just 42% Now Think Biden Is ‘Mentally Sharp’ By Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/01/ii-tipp-poll-just-42-now-think-biden-is-mentally-sharp/

Concerns about President Joe Biden’s mental abilities have gone mainstream.

Although the press has largely overlooked Biden’s gaffes, his disastrous performance at a decidedly friendly CNN townhall prompted the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that Biden’s “frequent public confusion about the major issues of the day is a reason for the growing public concern.”

Even the notoriously partisan “Saturday Night Live” has started to use Biden’s mental acuity as a punchline. One of the show’s characters has quipped about how “insiders are also saying that, during meetings, President Biden repeatedly uses the f-word in conversation. More concerning, the f-word he keeps using is ‘forget.’”

Biden’s critics have long pointed to increased verbal gaffes, along with his advanced age (he turns 79 later this month) as problems. But the mainstream press has largely ignored signs of mental decline.

The latest I&I/TIPP poll shows that, despite this, the perception of Biden’s cognitive descent has become widespread.

The poll tried to gauge the public’s perceptions of Biden on several measures, including mental abilities, by asking a random sampling of adults to “indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with the following descriptions of President Joe Biden.” Among the choices given were “mentally sharp,” “energetic,” and “a good communicator.”

The results are not good for Biden.

‘Peace’ Groups Hate the Abraham Accords The more Arab-Israeli ties produce good results, the more people will reject Iran’s malign influence. . By Bryan Leib

https://www.wsj.com/articles/peace-groups-hate-the-abraham-accords-arab-israel-iran-progressives-11635794408?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid flew to Manama, Bahrain, in September to open the new Israeli Embassy, where he stated, “May our people live in peace and prosperity forever.” The ceremony was proof that last year’s Abraham Accords continue to foster peace and prosperity.

Mr. Lapid’s trip, the first by an Israeli foreign minister to Bahrain, showed the emerging Arab and Israeli determination to unite against the threat of Iran. As Mr. Lapid said: “Our opportunities are shared. Our threats are also shared, and they aren’t far from here.”

Iran’s propaganda apparatus sprang into action to condemn the visit: Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said: “This stain will not be erased from the reputation of Bahrain’s rulers. The people of the region will continue to oppose the process of normalization of ties with the Zionist regime.”

Opposing the Abraham Accords has become a diplomatic priority for Iran, and it’s clear why. The more Arab-Israeli ties produce good results, the more the people of the region will reject Iran’s malign influence. And so Iran has campaigned to sabotage new relations.

More than 300 Iraqis, including tribal leaders, attended a Sept. 24 conference in autonomous Kurdistan on normalizing ties between Iraq and Israel. But many who attended were soon forced to renounce the conference after receiving death threats from pro-Iran militias.

Equally disturbing is the Oct. 3 attempt to assassinate businessman Teddy Sagi and other Israelis in Cyprus. Whether Tehran is behind the attack is disputed, but Iran’s record of killing Israelis abroad is long. The hope is that other Israelis will be deterred from venturing abroad to form commercial relations with new partners in the region.

The Evidence Mounts A new NIH letter reinforces the lab-leak hypothesis for the origins of Covid-19. Joel Zinberg

https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-for-lab-leak-hypothesis-of-covid-origins?wallit_nosession=1

The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Covid-19 remains unclear, but recent revelations reinforce the likelihood that the true source was a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

A letter from Lawrence Tabak, the National Institutes of Health’s principal deputy director, to Kentucky congressman James Comer confirms that the NIH funded research at the WIV during 2018–2019 that manipulated a bat coronavirus called WIV1. Researchers at the institute grafted spike proteins from other coronaviruses onto WIV1 to see if the modified virus was capable of binding in a mouse that possessed the ACE2 receptors found in humans—the same receptor to which SARS-CoV-2 binds. The modified virus reproduced more rapidly and made infected humanized mice sicker than the unmodified virus.

Starting in 2014, the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Anthony Fauci, funded the New York-based research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance with annual grants through 2020 for “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” Total funding was $3,748,715. More than $600,000 of that went to the WIV. Three other Chinese institutions received funding as well. The principal investigator was EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak, who, from the onset of the pandemic, has consistently campaigned in public and behind the scenes to convince people that SARS-CoV-2 did not come from the WIV but evolved naturally from animal-to-human transmission.

Tabak’s letter asserts that the modified virus’s becoming more virulent “was an unexpected result” and not “something that the researchers set out to do”—an odd claim, considering that the whole point of manipulating the virus was to investigate things that could make it more virulent. The 2018 research mentioned in Tabak’s letter is similar to earlier WIV research, funded in part by the NIH, that modified viruses related to SARS to see if they could infect human cells. Publications of these studies in 2017 and 2016 were the subject of a contentious Senate hearing in which Senator Rand Paul pressed Fauci to admit that they constituted gain-of-function research, prompting Fauci’s denial and a statement that “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class What explains the media’s obsession with race and power? It has very little to do with social justice and everything to do with class. Batya Ungar-Sargon

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working

If you read this newsletter you are acutely aware of the transformation of the mainstream media over the last decade and, especially, over the past couple of years. But few have offered a fully satisfying answer to the question of why. 

Why is it, for example, that between 2013 and 2019, the frequency of the words “white” and “racial privilege” exploded by 1,200 percent in The New York Times and by 1,500 percent in The Washington Post? Why was the term “white supremacy” used 2,400 times by National Public Radio in 2020?

What changed? Why was there suddenly a relentless focus on race and power? And who—or what—was driving it?

At last those questions have been answered with unusual clarity by Batya Ungar-Sargon in her new book “Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy.” 

Batya, who is an opinion editor at Newsweek, is hard to pin down politically. I first met her in 2018 and I would have described her then as woke. These days I’d call her a left-wing populist. (She’s part of an endangered species: a person willing to change her mind.) But what I appreciate most about Batya, and what I think you’ll find when you read the essay below, is someone who is able to put ideology aside and pursue to illuminate why the news is broken, how it is fueling one war (culture) to distract from another (class), and how that might be changed. — BW

Joe Biden is asleep at the wheel The only thing worse than not showing up is showing up and making a fool of yourself by Dominic Green

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-asleep-wheel-cop26-glasgow/

Did Joe Biden fall asleep during the opening speeches of the COP26 climate jamboree in Glasgow? It’s hard to blame him if he did. A conference dedicated to saving the planet is generating nothing but hot air, some of it carboniferously heavy with the exhaust of the armada of private jets that brought the guests. But it’s Biden’s job to stay awake, look lively and remember his lines.

The footage shows a frail man who’s jetlagged, pushing eighty and trying his best to absorb the torrent of heated eco-bilge that’s being pumped into his ears. But he’s only human. The presidential eyelids start to flutter as a speaker pleads “on behalf of everyone, disabled and non-disabled…to stop the destruction of this magnificent planet.” Biden gives a desperate, hostage-like look at the camera, but there’s no way out. The shutters are coming down. Soon, the president of the United States is heading down, down, down to the Land of Nod.

Yet again, the president’s feebleness is there for the world to see — or not. On Friday, Biden became the first American president in living memory not to go live before the cameras with the Pope. Was it because they’ve fallen out over abortion — or because Biden’s team didn’t want a jetlagged president to embarrass himself and his nation?

Meanwhile, “poopy pants Biden” trended on Twitter after Amy Tarkanian, the former chairwoman of the Republican party of Nevada, suggested that “the word around Rome” was that Biden’s private audience had to be extended because the president had suffered a “bathroom accident” in the pontiff’s presence.

These allegations cannot be substantiated without producing the presidential pants, but their tone shows how close Biden’s public appearances are to low comedy, and how quickly he has soiled his image in the American public’s estimation. He is underwater in the polls, his agenda is stalled in Congress, and when he does eventually appear in public, he blames everyone else.

The putative leader of the West is missing in inaction. On Sunday, after the G20 summit in Rome, the leaders of nineteen G20 states lined up for a photo at the Trevi Fountain. Only Joe Biden wasn’t there.

Ballooning Ivy League Endowment Forecasted To Top $1 Trillion By 2048 Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/31/ballooning-ivy-league-endowment-forecasted-to-top-1-trillion-by-2048/?sh=3d82b6263a37

Why are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton charging $80,000 or more for tuition, room, and board?

The Ivies added $44 billion to their endowments this year, and new estimates show their collective endowment could exceed $1 trillion by 2048.

Organized as charitable non-profits, the Ivy League is a cash generation machine. Their collective endowment now stands at approximately $188.2 billion, which is up from $144 billion in 2020.

Now, critics are questioning whether the Ivies have gamed the federal, state, and local tax systems to operate as educational charities. These schools pay little or no taxes on their investments, endowment gains, and property.

Here are the new endowments by school: Harvard ($53.2 billion), Yale ($42.3 billion), Columbia ($13.5 billion), Brown ($6.9 billion), Dartmouth ($8.5 billion), UPENN ($20.5 billion), and Cornell ($10 billion). (Princeton is the only school not yet reported; however, we forecast their endowment at $33.3 billion, up 25 percent from $26.6 billion in 2020.)

Harvard’s endowment now stands at over $10 million per undergraduate student. Yale is just shy of this number at $9 million. Brown, far behind its colleagues, boasts just over $1 million in endowment assets per undergrad student.

However, the Ivies billion-dollar optics problem is soon to become a trillion-dollar optics problem. The size of their endowments is set grow substantially over the next couple of decades.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com forecast that the collective endowment of the Ivy League could surpass $1 trillion by 2049. This buildup of wealth for supposedly charitable educational purposes will trigger a host of public policy, legislative, and legal arguments. For example, Harvard alone could have $300 billion, or nearly $60 million per undergraduate student in endowment assets, by 2049.