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March 2022

HISTORY Comments turned off

Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2022: Yoram Ettinger

By on March 15th, 2022

Purim 2022 will begin in the evening of Wednesday , March 16 and ends in the evening of Thursday , March 17
Purim 2022 will begin this evening of March 16 and ends tomorrow evening. There is no one better to explain the relevance of this Jewish holiday than my friend Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger. rsk

1. Purim is a Jewish national liberation holiday – just like Passover and Chanukah – which highlights optimism, commemorating the transformation of the Jewish people from subjugation to liberty. It is celebrated seven days following the birth and death date of Moses, who is a historical role model of liberty, leadership and humility.

Purim is celebrated (on March 17, 2022) at a time when the relatively cold and stormy winter shifts into the relatively warm and pleasant spring.

2. Remembrance is at the core the Purim holiday, and the Scroll of Esther – which narrates the Purim saga – is also named The Book of Remembrance.

The aim the hero of Purim – Mordechai who became the chief advisor to the King of Persia – was to alert the assimilated Jewish community of Persia, that forgetfulness and detachment from their Jewish roots lead to oblivion, while the systematic nurturing of remembrance of historic roots is the foundation of productive action, and a prerequisite to growth, security and respect by fellow human beings.

The pre-Purim Sabbath is called The Sabbath of Remembrance, commemorating the deadly threat of the Amalekites, who aimed to annihilate the Jewish people upon deliverance from Egypt.

Commemorating deliverance from lethal threats, aims to avoid wishful-thinking and dwell on a realistic view of the world, which is replete with threats.

Furthermore, the main events and personalities of Purim are connected to major Biblical milestones.  For example, Queen Esther – the Purim heroine -was emboldened by the legacy of Sarah the Matriarch, and the deliverance of the Jews of Persia by Mordechai was inspired by the legacy of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, and by the determination to rectify the flaws of King Saul.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

A free lunch for Amnesty’s anti-Semitism Ruthie Blum

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/a-free-lunch-for-amnestys-anti-semitism/

 It’s not clear what it will take for critics of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to admit that it wasn’t he who turned support for Israel into a “wedge issue” in the United States between Democrats and Republicans. The current government in Jerusalem, formed precisely to oust him, certainly won’t acknowledge it, especially not while boasting of repairing the ostensible damage to “bipartisanship” wrought by its predecessor.
Given the increasing radicalization of the Democratic Party, embodied in but not exclusive to “The Squad,” it’s odd for anyone at home or abroad to believe the nonsense. Even the “anti-Israel is the new pro-Israel” camp knows that it’s false.
In fact, members of this group have no desire to cross the literal and figurative aisle. It’s the liberal Jews in America and Israel who don’t grasp that the Jewish state itself—not one policy or another—has become a bone of contention, an issue to be debated.
If any skepticism remained about this situation, the Women’s National Democratic Club (WNDC) dispelled it last week, when it hosted Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien and listened attentively while he said that Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state.”
Yes, the WNDC, a self-described “hub for civic engagement, learning and political action in the heart of the nation’s capital … a meeting place for Democrats, Independents and Progressives to come together in order to protect and promote our democratic values … [and] advance shared political interests,” invited O’Brien to address a ladies’ lunch.
Thanks to Jewish Insider, which covered the March 9 event, O’Brien’s remarks can’t be brushed under the carpet. Not that the 20 attendees in person and another 30 via video would have considered his words outrageous enough to warrant keeping under wraps.

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ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

NEW POLL: Biden In Trouble With Voters On Job Approval, Inflation, Ukraine By American Greatness

By on March 15th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/15/new-poll-biden-in-trouble-with-voters-on-job-approval-inflation-ukraine/

A new poll conducted by Insider Advantage for the Center for American Greatness shows Biden in big trouble with voters. 54% of likely voters disapprove of Biden’s job approval versus 42% who approve. Worse, this survey shows that only 36% approve of his handling of Ukraine. Other highlights from the survey are the 64% of people who believe high gas prices should be solved by eliminating Biden’s restrictions on pumping American oil and gas.

Perhaps most troubling, and portending more difficulty in the future for the country is the question that asked, “How much is rising inflation in the cost of goods and services impacting you and your family?” 85% of respondents said that inflation is having a “significant” impact on them and their families. Inflation, of course, is bad for the country, especially the middle class. But the politics of it spell trouble for Democrats whose policies have increased and accelerated the inflation currently beggaring the nation.

There is bad news for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections too. 48% of respondents support a Republican controlled Congress versus 40% backing Democrats. That’s an ominous sign pointing towards a Republican sweep.

What’s more with inflation already causing tangible pain for nearly all Americans and with Biden’s sanctions regime ensuring that inflation will accelerate and last longer, the current administration looks to have a rocky road ahead.

The poll results can be found here: Insider Advantage – Center for American Greatness National Poll.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wokester’s Delight: USA Today declares Dr. Rachel Levine its 2022 ‘Woman of the Year’ By Monica Showalter

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/wokesters_delight_usa_today_declares_dr_rachel_levine_its_2022_woman_of_the_year.html

Who’s the best woman? USA Today has declared a string of wokesters for its 2022 ‘Women of the Year’ honors, and one of them is Dr. Rachel Levine.

Seems you need to be born a man to achieve excellence in womanhood these days. Being an actual woman is no longer enough.

The awards are absurd, given that not many of the women on the list have actual accomplishments  — they’re there because they’re victims, like Simone Biles, radical activists like Janet Murguía, promoters of bad things like recreational marijuana, like Roopali Desai; people who deny the obvious, like fashion editor Nina Garcia who credits her Colombian heritage rather than the opportunities America gave her with her success as an American fashion editor; or else women who have had some sort of role in inventing or promoting things that don’t really work all that well, such as electric cars and the Moderna COVID vaccine. Naturally, Kamala Harris, whose chief achievement as a woman has been to sleep her way to the top and serve as an affirmative action placeholder for the Biden administration as well as impeachment insurance for corrupt old Joe, is on the list. And in Levine’s case, it wasn’t even necessary to have xx chromosomes, let alone merit, just that masculine energy it takes to seek promotions in order to be the alpha dog.

Levine in fact is a political hack who drew attention — and promotions — based on transgender status and nothing else. Why this person is ‘woman of the year’ is rather insulting to actual women, who apparently no longer measure up to USA Today’s standards for what it is to be female. In its hagiographic thumbnail, USA Today writes:

Levine, 64, a trained pediatrician, became the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official last March when the Senate confirmed her as assistant secretary of health. Levine has spent her professional life in medicine – as an academic, a clinical researcher, a primary care physician and as Pennsylvania’s physical general and secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health – but she admits her current role has proven to be the most challenging.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Catching the Windbag By Fred O’Brien

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/21/catching-the-windbag/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932–1975, by Neal Gabler (Crown, 928 pp., $40)

America needs more Kennedy biographies about as much as it needs more Kennedys. As the family’s mystique peters out into ineffectuality, alcoholism, and anti-vaxxism, the assumption that any Kennedy should and will be a winner at the polls has dissolved — even in Massachusetts, where Joe Kennedy III (a grandson of Bobby) lost convincingly to Ed Markey in the 2020 Democratic Senate primary. For Bay State voters, it must have felt like that liberating moment when you finally throw out the old address book with your ex’s number in it. Nonetheless, the family still keeps biographers busy (this book is the first of a planned two volumes; don’t say you weren’t warned).

The author of Catching the Wind — Neal Gabler, until now mostly a Holly­wood historian — is nothing if not meticulous. He has, for example, catalogued each of the dozen or so times Ted’s parents moved him to a different prep school, as well as the weight fluctuations that plagued him even in childhood. Then there’s this entry in the index: “Kennedy, Edward Moore ‘Ted,’ womanizing of, xxxi, 82–83, 88, 89, 395, 538, 547–49, 550–52, 554, 581, 601–2” — and on this topic the author makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but eventually just gives up; there’s considerably more information on Ted’s love of sailing.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Joe Biden’s Policies Made This Energy Crisis By Bill Hagerty

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/how-joe-bidens-policies-made-this-energy-crisis/

President Biden’s statement that his administration ‘can’t do much’ about high gas prices is an abdication of duty.

P resident Biden has found a new scapegoat for continuously increasing gas prices.

Last Tuesday, when asked what his administration can do about record-high gas prices, the president replied: “Can’t do much right now. Russia is responsible.” This flippant response is both demonstrably inaccurate and an insult to the working Americans whose paychecks have been increasingly depleted every week since the Biden administration took office.

The truth is that the Biden administration has spent 14 months waging a war against American energy production, and we are now seeing the consequences. With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, Biden’s advisers, too stubborn to admit that Biden’s war on American energy was a mistake, have decided to use the Ukraine crisis to cover up this historic blunder. What’s more, President Biden — with his war on American energy increasing our dependence on Russian oil and the price of that oil — has funded Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The facts clearly reveal what has happened, and they stand in stark contrast to the false narrative that the White House is peddling. The truth is that American gas prices have steadily and substantially increased over the past 14 months because of President Biden’s myopic policies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The False Narrative of Israeli Neutrality in Russia’s Ukraine Invasion By Lahav Harkov

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-false-narrative-of-israeli-neutrality-in-russias-ukraine-invasion/

The nation is not ‘sitting on the fence,’ but is playing an important mediating role.

Jerusalem — “We condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid said this week, during an official visit to Romania. “[The invasion] has no justification, and we call on Russia to stop the shooting and the attacks and solve the problems around the negotiating table.”

Additionally, Lapid said, “Israel will not be a route to bypass sanctions imposed on Russia by the United States and other western countries.”

But Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has been a bit vaguer in his messaging. He’s spoken about “solidarity with the people of Ukraine” and is careful not to mention Russia when he talks about the war. In fact, he doesn’t talk about war; his messages speaking out against the bloodshed mostly say “the situation” — which is a more commonly used catch-all in Hebrew than in English, but still fairly weak — and recently, “the fighting.”

Israel also hedged at the U.N. when the war in Ukraine began. The U.S. gathered signatures for a Security Council resolution from countries that are not on the council in order to show a united front against the Russian invasion, even though Moscow would inevitably veto it. Israel declined to sign. Days later, Lapid said that Israel is “on the right side of history,” and announced that Israel would vote in favor of the resolution against Russia in the U.N. General Assembly — and it did.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Who’s Stoked for CNN+? By Kyle Smith

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/whos-stoked-for-cnn/

CNN will charge six dollars a month for more stuff nobody watches.

C an you feel the excitement? It’s already blockbuster season on the screens. Batman! Bullock! And, um . . . Blitzer!

There’s so much media chatter attending the launch of CNN+ on March 29 that incoming boss man David Zaslav (soon to be CEO of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, today known as WarnerMedia) might as well be Cyrus, warlord of all gangsters, summoning the troops to the park to inquire of all comers, “Can you dig it?” The urgent, let’s-disrupt-the-industry panel discussions have been convened at South by Southwest. The trade papers have printed leaked details. The billboards have sprouted all over Midtown Manhattan. CNN+ stands a chance to be the most dazzling new infotainment product since Ozy Media.

CNN+! CNN . . . plus? As in, we didn’t have enough CNN and needed to plus it up? Does anyone not actually employed by the company agree with this? And unlike the old CNN, which nobody considered himself to be paying for because it was part of a large lineup of cable channels, CNN+ is gambling that people are going to get out their credit card and splash out a dedicated, separate fee for it. On top of all the other things TV watchers are already paying for.

CNN+ is being offered for $5.99 a month. Disney+ charged $6.99 a month when it launched and offered an exciting slate of brand-new and much-discussed series such as The Mandalorian, not to mention a huge library including scores of the most beloved blockbuster movies ever made.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ukraine Cannot Be Asked to Sign Its Own Death Warrant By Dan McLaughlin

By on March 15th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ukraine-cannot-be-asked-to-sign-its-own-death-warrant/

The war in Ukraine appears right now in stark terms: A revanchist Russia seeks the extermination of the Ukrainian state, and the Ukrainian people, with their blood up in a fit of wartime nationalist fervor, are in the mood to fight to the last ditch for their nation. So long as Russia offers Ukraine no option but its annihilation as an independent state — at best, surviving with a foreign-imposed puppet regime — things are likely to continue along those lines. A man who is cornered with no way out will fight on until crushed, and perhaps beyond that in a protracted insurgency. American and European voices offering a “realistic” argument for Ukraine accepting peace terms to avoid further death and destruction have to reckon with the fact that, since time immemorial, there have always been things people feared worse than war.

The diplomatic dilemma in constructing an “off ramp” is that it has to satisfy both sides. As Jim Geraghty argues, it really is not apparent thus far that Vladimir Putin really wants one, or at least is willing to offer one in terms that are a remotely realistic appraisal of the mood of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the people he represents.

For all of the Churchillian rhetoric surrounding Zelensky and Ukraine right now, it still makes sense for Ukraine to accept peace terms that are, in effect, an admission of defeat. Russia may be bogged down badly and embarrassing Putin and his military on the world stage, but it is still the larger, greater power, it has already occupied Ukrainian territory, the entire war is being fought on Ukrainian soil — not Russian — and Russia has nukes and the sort of leader whose willingness to use them can’t entirely be ruled out. Much as it will batter Ukrainian national pride and the prestige of its allies to admit this, any negotiated settlement will put Russia in a better position than before it entered the war. Compared with the status quo ante, Ukraine’s borders will be reduced. And it may be compelled to distance itself in some ways from the United States and Europe. Zelensky is already floating the possibility that a deal could involve permanently renouncing Ukrainian ambitions to join NATO. Strategic ambiguity will be officially dead, as if the war hasn’t already pronounced a time of death. Ukraine may have to accept being forced further into Russia’s parlous economic orbit and away from the European Union.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Romney’s “Treason” Smear of Tulsi Gabbard is False and Noxious, But Now Typifies U.S. Discourse The Founders limited “treason” in the Constitution due to grave concerns it would be weaponized to criminalize dissent: exactly how the term is now routinely used. Glenn Greenwald

By on March 15th, 2022

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/romneys-treason-smear-of-tulsi-gabbard?s=w

The crime of “treason” is one of the gravest an American citizen can commit, if not the gravest. It is one of the few crimes other than murder for which execution is still a permissible punishment under both U.S. federal law and the laws of several states. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were so concerned about the temptation to abuse this term — by depicting political dissent as a criminalized betrayal of one’s country — that they chose to define and limit how this crime could be applied by inserting this limiting paragraph into the Constitution itself; reflecting the gravity and temptation to abuse accusations of “treason,” it is the only crime they chose to define in the U.S. Constitution. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution states:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Treason was the only crime to be explicitly defined and limited by the Founders because they sought “to guard against the historic use of treason prosecutions by repressive governments to silence otherwise legitimate political opposition.” In other words, the grave danger anticipated by the Founders was that “treason” would radically expand to include any criticisms of or opposition to official U.S. Government policy, activities they sought in the Bill of Rights to enshrine as an inviolable right of U.S. citizenship, not turn it into a capital crime.

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