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March 2022

Carnage in Beersheba and a badge of dishonor  By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-702251

A study presented this week at the “Conference on Politics and Arab Society in Israel”— held on Sunday and Monday at the University of Haifa, in conjunction with the Israel Democracy Institute and the New Israel Fund — shows a steady erosion of public trust in law enforcement and the judiciary. The research, conducted by professors Gideon Fishman and Arie Ratner at the university’s department of sociology, covers the 22-year period beginning in 2000.

What the two academics revealed isn’t a hot news flash to most Israelis. But it’s been particularly apparent since Tuesday afternoon.

That’s when 34-year-old Muhammad Alab Ahmed abu Alkiyan, an Israeli citizen from the Bedouin town of Hura — a married father of five, three of whom have special needs — slaughtered four innocent Jews in Beersheba and seriously wounded two others.

Let us start with the police, who were nowhere to be found during Alkiyan’s car-ramming and stabbing spree that left dead Chabad Rabbi Moshe Kravitzky, 48, Laura Yitzhak, 43, Doris Yahbas, 49, and Menahem Yehezkel, 67.

China Closer to Dominating Southeast Asia by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18355/china-southeast-asia

“China has fully militarized at least three of several islands it built in the disputed South China Sea, arming them with anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile systems, laser and jamming equipment, and fighter jets in an increasingly aggressive move that threatens all nations operating nearby… that buildup of weaponization is destabilizing to the region.” — US Admiral John C. Aquilino, Associated Press, March 21, 2022.

“Relevant construction activity that China is undertaking does not target or impact any country and there is no intention to militarize.” — Communist Chinese President Xi Jinping, in 2015, The Times, March 21, 2022.

“[T]his presents a security risk to all countries in southeast Asia… where China has now built itself the capacity to control the skies and control the sea lanes through that region very effectively… It reflects the overall growth of the Chinese military… control of the South China Sea would be a major step for the PRC in prosecuting a military campaign against Taiwan. It certainly makes it much harder for the United States for example to get its military forces closer to Taiwan… it really becomes a mechanism to control all of southeast Asia, this is a region of ten countries, 650 million people… if you are the military dominant power in the South China Sea you dominate south east Asia. That at least was the strategic thinking of the Japanese in the Second World War and I think it is the strategic thinking of China right now.” — Peter Jennings, Executive Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, interview with ABC Radio Australia, March 22, 2022.

The drill coincided with China’s announcement of its annual military budget for 2022, according to which China will be increasing its defense spending by 7.1% to $230 billion, up from a 6.8% increase the year before…. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has found that China consistently under-reports its actual defense budget.

China, however, is not transparent about what its defense budget includes — and does not include.

“Beijing conducts dozens of operations in its neighbors’ EEZs every year which, if civilian in nature, are illegal or, if military, are exactly what China claims other countries are not allowed to do in its own EEZ.” — Greg Poling, Center for Strategic and International Studies, rfa.org, March 1, 2022.

While the world is preoccupied with Ukraine, China continues to make aggressive moves in the South China Sea, almost the entirety of which China claims to be part of its territory.

Palestinians: The ‘Criminal’ Pastor Who Met with the Rabbi by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18326/palestinians-pastor-rabbi

Appeals by heads of the Christian community in Bethlehem for the release of Shahwan from prison have been completely ignored by the PA leadership, which appears afraid of a backlash from Islamists and other radical groups if it dares to release the pastor. The appeals have also been ignored by many journalists who mostly chose to focus only on stories that reflect negatively on Israel.

Even more alarming is that the Palestinian Authority, which now has close relations with the Biden administration, is punishing a Palestinian Christian for the “crime” of meeting with a Jew.

If the PA is going to incarcerate every Palestinian who meets with settlers or does business with Jews, it will have to build enough prisons to hold tens of thousands of its people. Moreover, if the PA considers meetings with Jews to be a crime punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, why are its leaders continuing to hold public and secret meetings with Israeli officials?

If PA President Mahmoud Abbas himself is prepared to travel to the Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin to meet with Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz, whom the Palestinians have repeatedly condemned as a “war criminal,” why isn’t a pastor allowed to meet with a rabbi?

This incident is yet another example of the endemic hypocrisy of the PA regarding its dealings with Israel.

The Beit Al-Liqa incident is also further proof of the PA’s discrimination and mistreatment of the Christian minority.

It is much easier for the PA to arrest a Palestinian pastor than, say, the head of a Muslim clan. The Christians are not going to take to the streets to riot and attack Palestinian security officers when one of their men is arrested. Muslims, by contrast, would not hesitate to attack the PA and confront its security forces.

All this is happening while the Biden administration continues to engage with the PA about the need to revive the peace process and the PA’s purported commitment to the so-called two-state solution, while ignoring the persecution of Christians and major human rights violations committed by the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Johnny Shahwan, a Palestinian Christian from the Bethlehem area, has been in a Palestinian Authority (PA) prison for the past two weeks. Shahwan, a pastor who runs the Beit Al-Liqa (House of Encounter) in the town of Beit Jala, just outside Bethlehem, was arrested for meeting with a Jew who previously served as a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

Lysenko: A cautionary tale for the West By James Mullin

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

“Follow the Science” seems to have replaced “Go with God” as humanity’s go-to prayer. At least, the left would have us think so. But science is a much more complicated construction than leftists want you to realize, and there was a not very distant time and place where “Follow the Science” led to the needless death of millions.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who rose to prominence (and eternal infamy) in the 1930s. Lysenko was, you might say, an unelected bureaucrat in the Soviet system—if you can say that when the system itself is an unelected dictatorship. He was an agronomist and biologist. I almost said geneticist, but he surprisingly didn’t believe in genes. That is remarkable because he lived over 50 years after the epic (and accurate) studies and theories of the Augustinian Catholic monk, Gregor Mendel.

Lysenko, like most scientists, would have labored in relative faceless, harmless obscurity (see Dr. Bunsen Honeydew) and eventually had his science thoroughly repudiated, except that the State catapulted him to prominence and authority. (I know what you’re now thinking here—that I’m writing about the charismatic Dr. Anthony Fauci—but actually not so. Hang in there). Stalin himself loved this guy and his foundationless theories, and essentially put him in charge of Soviet agriculture—a placement that would leave millions of Ukrainians and Russians dead from starvation.

The Power of Terrible Ideas By Rael Jean Isaac *****

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/the_power_of_terrible_ideas.html

While many have criticized the current enthusiasm for judging the past by the standards of the present (and condemning those past leaders who did not meet them), few have noted how many currently dominant beliefs are totally disconnected from reality and have a profoundly destructive impact.  I propose to discuss two of them here: ideas about the nature of mental illness which have produced what Charles Krauthammer called “an army of broken souls foraging and freezing in the streets” and the conviction that our planet is in existential danger from human-induced climate change. The latter has led to a wholly unwarranted, hugely expensive crusade to eliminate fossil fuels.  The chief effect has been to strengthen the leverage of those countries, many of them enemies of the West, that continue to produce these fuels, which remain essential to the functioning of industrial societies.

In the 1960s, a mad idea was born, the notion that there is no such thing as mental illness. Incredibly, it would become the foundation for public policy.  The idea sprang independently from two maverick psychiatrists at opposite ideological poles, on the right U.S. psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, an unsparing libertarian, and on the left the British Ronald Laing.  Szasz disposed of mental illness by verbal sleight of hand: “Mental illnesses do not exist; indeed they cannot exist because the mind is not a bodily part or bodily organ.”  (Never mind that the brain is the bodily organ that malfunctions in mental illness.) Psychiatry is “a form of quackery because it offers cures for which there are no diseases.”  Laing treated schizophrenia, the most disabling mental illness, as a “voyage of discovery”; “we find that a person who is labeled insane is often the sanest member of his or her family.”

The Real ‘Reset’ Is Coming The prophets of the new world order sowed the wind and they will soon reap the whirlwind of an angry public worn out by elite incompetence, arrogance, and ignorance. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/23/the-real-reset-is-coming/

Joe Biden believes the Ukraine war will mark the start of a “new world order.” 

In the middle of the COVID global pandemic, Klaus Schwab and global elites likewise announced a “Great Reset.” 

Accordingly, the nations of the world would have to surrender their sovereignty to an international body of experts. They would enlighten us on taxes, diversity, and green policies. 

When Donald Trump got elected in 2016, marquee journalists announced partisan reporting would have to displace the old, supposedly disinterested approach to the news. 

There is a common theme here. 

In normal times progressives worry that they do not have public support for their policies. 

Only in crises do they feel that the political Left and media can merge to use apocalyptic times to ram through usually unpopular approaches to foreign and domestic problems. 

We saw that last year: fleeing from Afghanistan, the embrace of critical race theory, trying to end the filibuster, pack the court, junk the Electoral College, and nationalize voting laws. 

These “new orders” and “resets” always entail far bigger government and more unelected, powerful bureaucracies. Elites assume that their radical changes in energy use, media reporting, voting, sovereignty, and racial and ethnic quotas will never quite apply to themselves, the architects of such top-down changes. 

So we common folk must quit fossil fuels, but not those who need to use corporate jets. Walls will not mar our borders but will protect the homes of Nancy Pelosi, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. 

Expansionist Islam Is Putin’s war distracting us from another threat? William Kilpatrick

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/expansionist-islam-william-kilpatrick/

While the world justifiably worries about the expansion of Russia under Vladimir Putin, another world power is slowly expanding its reach.

It’s called Islam.  Unlike Russia, Islam is not one large land mass, but it does cover a lot of territory. There are 57 member nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) making the OIC the largest voting bloc in the United Nations.

The world’s attention is currently focused on Russia, but it would be unwise to forget about Islam.  Whereas the population of Russia is about 145 million and declining, Islam’s global population is approximately 1.8 billion and growing.  

It’s becoming clear that Russia under Putin is expansionist.  But it’s difficult to know to what extent.  Will Russia be satisfied in neutralizing Ukraine?  Or does it hope to reassert control over its former satellites in Europe? Or does it seek to control all of Europe?

Coincidentally, some of the territory that Russia covets was once controlled by Islam, and many Muslims believe that any territory once conquered by Islam still belongs to Islam.

Like today’s Russia, Islam is expansionist.  Subjugating the entire world under the rule of Allah is, arguably, the chief purpose of Islam.  And history confirms that gobbling up land in order to spread the faith is precisely what Islam has always done.

Within 100 years of Muhammad’s death, Islam had conquered all of North Africa and Spain as well. And the conquests continued for many centuries.  About half of the world’s great empires were Islamic empires and some of them were of immense size and power.

Modern Day Brown Shirts Suppress Free Speech at Yale Law Why the heckler’s veto is wrong and why universities must prevent its use. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/modern-day-brown-shirts-suppress-free-speech-yale-richard-l-cravatts/

As further confirmation that universities have devolved into islands of repression in a sea of freedom, some 120 Yale Law School students seriously disrupted a March 10th event. Sponsored by the Yale Federalist Society, the event featured Kristen Waggoner, lead counsel for the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), and Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association (AHA), appearing together on the panel to discuss (ironically, it turns out) free speech issues. 

Yale’s LGBTQ students had already mobilized their opposition to the appearance of Waggoner, particularly because ADF, they claimed in a flyer they distributed, “is an organization designated by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] as a hate group” and that the Federalist Society’s invitation to Waggoner provided “a veneer of respectability [that] is part of what allows this group to do work that attacks the very lives of LGBTQ people in the US and globally.” Once it has been predetermined that the organization for which Waggoner is lead counsel was anti-gay, it no longer mattered what she would say at the event. The moral scolds at Yale Law School had already decided she should be canceled and forbidden from giving her opinions about anything at all.

Preventing someone with opposing views to even speak, to make his or her opinions known and heard by the campus community, means that the disruptors are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate beliefs and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence. Students, even graduate law students, are certainly not omniscient nor do they know the single truths about a range of topics guest speakers bring into debates. Their experience is insufficient to make them credible arbiters of what may be said, and what must not be said, on university campuses. 

They do not have the moral right or intellectual capacity to gauge what is bad speech and what is good speech.

Yes, Ketanji Brown Jackson Accused America of War Crimes. The Media is Lying About It. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/yes-ketanji-brown-jackson-accused-america-war-daniel-greenfield/

Fact checks were an Orwellian farce before all this. Now they’re just editorials that try to tell you that black is white and white is black.

The media’s hysterical efforts to spin Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record has escalated into an insistence that she didn’t say the things she said.

Jackson had filed a petition on behalf of Gitmo terrorists (she claims that federal public defenders don’t pick their clients, but she continued to be involved in Gitmo cases on a pro bono basis even after moving on to a law firm) and in a petition on behalf of the terrorists, which named President Bush, Rumsfeld and others, accused the United States of America of acts that “constitute war crimes and/or crimes against humanity”.

There’s zero ambiguity in this regard. It’s there in black and white.

The Border Is Open, and al-Qaeda Is Calling on Jihadis to Come In And most Americans don’t even know there’s a jihad threat from which they need to be saved. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/border-open-and-al-qaeda-calling-jihadis-come-robert-spencer/

Old Joe Biden’s handlers have essentially erased the Southern border, and as a result, illegals are streaming in at a rapid clip. Even the New York Times, a reliable Leftist propaganda organ, admitted last October that “migrants were encountered 1.7 million times in the last 12 months, the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960.” A new record could be set in 2022, as the UK’s Daily Mail reported Thursday that “more than 170,000 migrants are waiting on the Mexican-side of the U.S.-Mexico border to cross and claim asylum” once the Biden administration trashes, as it is expected to do, Title 42, a Trump-era provision that allowed illegal migrants to be expelled during the COVID-19 hysteria. And as all this is unfolding, al-Qaeda has published a new online magazine encouraging jihad terrorists to immigrate to the United States and commit massacres here. It looks as if yet another Biden-caused disaster is in the offing.

Those 170,000 migrants, according to the Daily Mail, will be just the beginning: “The U.S. could be just hours away from another wave of mass migration if the Biden administration lifts Title 42.” Who are these people who will stream in? What is their background? Come on, man! Nobody knows, and apparently, no one in the Biden administration cares. They’re coming here, they’ll go on welfare, they’ll vote Democrat, and that’s all that matters. Criminals? Terrorists? Maybe — indeed, probably — but who cares?