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April 2022

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Noura Erakat Unleashed: ‘Zionism Is a Bedfellow of Nazism’ by Andrew E. Harrod

By on April 24th, 2022

https://www.meforum.org/campus-watch/63179/noura-erakat-unleashed-zionism-is-a-bedfellow

“Palestinians have basically said . . . that Zionism is a bedfellow of Nazism and antisemitism,” claimed Rutgers University assistant professor Noura Erakat during an April 13 webinar.

Sponsored by the University of Illinois’s Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CASMES), her presentation (video) on “Unfinished Business: Zionism as Racism and Racial Discrimination,” further established her reputation as one of academia’s leading bigots.

Moderated by CASMES chair Waïl S Hassan, a professor of comparative literature and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, Erakat’s event sparked controversy even before it started. Although promoted as “Co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI),” Vice Chancellor for DEI Sean C. Garrick shot back in a mass email that his office was “incorrectly identified” as a co-sponsor.

“As worded, this title does not invite participation and engagement with all members of our community and does not represent the values of our university,” he wrote. “I am sorry for any additional discomfort or distress some may have felt” for thinking the event “was sponsored or endorsed by the office that is charged with helping us turn the aspiration of belonging into a universal practice.”

Erakat’s reputation as a flamethrower even among antisemites must have scared off the university. And she certainly proved them right.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar’s Foreign Policy By Hugh Fitzgerald

By on April 24th, 2022

https://robertspencer.org/2022/04/ilhan-omars-foreign-policy

While the entire Western world is reeling at the spectacle of Russian atrocities in the Ukraine – the razed-to-the-ground cities, the mass graves full of murdered Ukrainians, the deliberate targeting of civilians with missiles let loose at railroad stations, schools, hospitals, theatres — Ilhan Omar has demonstrated her fealty to Vladimir Putin. She was one of only two House Democrats to vote against sanctioning Russia’s oil industry, while her fellow Muslim member of the Squad, the Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), in the run-up to the invasion argued against providing Ukraine with aid.

Omar has family ties, of an unusual sort, to Russia. Her brother-in-law, Mohamed Keynan, was the chief of staff for former Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Khaire, known for “all but giving” his country’s oil reserves to the energy company Soma Oil & Gas, which is controlled by a Russian oligarch and Putin ally Alexander Djaparidze. Omar’s father was a Soviet-educated colonel in the Somali army during the ’80s under the Russian-backed regime of Siad Barre.

Omar and Tlaib are the two most anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian members of Congress. As such, their defense of Russia is unsurprising. The Palestinians themselves have been among the very few supporters of Russia internationally. PA President Mahmoud Abbas had a warm telephone call with Putin on April 18, in which he declared his firm support for Russia, and Putin, in turn, declared his support for the Palestinians. Hamas, too, has just thanked Putin for his “principled stand” against Israel. In the middle of the Ukrainian conflict, when Putin has been shunned by the civilized world for his war crimes, “Palestine” – both the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza — stood with Putin. Don’t let that be forgotten.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Power and Powerlessness: Globalism’s War on Children    Linda Goudsmit

By on April 24th, 2022

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26175/power-and-powerlessness-globalism-war-on-children

: http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

and website: http://lindagoudsmit.com

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to replace the current Westphalian system of independent sovereign nations with one world planetary governance. One world government, often referred to as the Great Reset and the New World Order, is a totalitarian managerial state that breaches every conceivable boundary. The singularity imagined by globalist technocrats fuses humanity into one nation, one race, one language, one culture, one religion, one digital currency, one educational curriculum, and one gender. 
 
Children are born completely powerless. The primary responsibility of parents is to protect the child and ensure his survival. In the 21st century, parents must protect their children from the grasping managers of the globalist managerial state. Globalism’s war on the nation state is a war on children because children are the foundation and future of every society on earth. Society will never be safe until the children are safe. 
 
Human beings derive a sense of self from the identities they acquire. Being a child, an adolescent, an adult, a man, a woman, a father, a mother, a child, a grandmother, a grandfather, an American, an Italian, a Christian, a Jew, and on and on, all contribute to the sense of selfness of the individual. A human being’s identity is the infrastructure that supports that individual’s sense of selfness and existence in the world. The most primary identity for human beings is their sexual identity. In every language, in every society anywhere in the world, the first exclamation when a child is born is, “It’s a boy!” “It’s a girl!” 
  

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

When ‘white’ becomes an epithet Heather Mac Donald

By on April 24th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/conservatives-name-going-race/

‘Conservatives must rebut the equation between whiteness and evil.’

Since the 1980s, conservatives have warned about the academic left’s “deconstruction” of Western culture. The fetishization of race and sex was shrinking our inheritance to a cartoonish morality play, they alleged. Academic identity politics would not stay put; its foundational conceits would migrate into the world at large.

Such warnings had no effect. Corporations, law firms, banks, tech companies, publishers, museums, orchestras and theater troupes now routinely denounce the alleged racial oppression that is said to be endemic to the United States in particular, and to the West more broadly.

Conservatives have responded in generalized terms: “The left is dividing us! It is betraying the ideal of judging people by the content of their character!” But what is going on is more specific than a generalized strategy of divide and conquer. What is going on is a war on whites. A news story need merely point out that a CEO, say, is white to taint him as a presumptive racist. A police officer identified in the press as white is a marked man.

The same method works for institutions and even ideas. Observe that a European tradition, whether political philosophy, classical music or portraiture, has been predominantly white, and you will have damned it as illegitimate. The inevitability of such a racial balance given Europe’s demographic history does not matter. Nor does the fact that African and Asian cultural traditions are just as racially monolithic.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Georgetown Law Scheduled to Host Antisemite Who Claims Israelis ‘Harvest Organs of the Martyred’ By Nate Hochman

By on April 24th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/georgetown-law-scheduled-to-host-an-anti-semite-who-claims-israelis-harvest-organs-of-the-martyred/

Georgetown Law is hosting Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet and writer with a long history of antisemitic comments, on campus this Tuesday. The event, hosted by the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), features El-Kurd and Harvard Law School attorney Rabea Eghbariah discussing “the ongoing legal battle settler organizations are waging to displace Palestinian families from East Jerusalem,” according to a flyer posted on the Georgetown Law SJP’s instagram.

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El-Kurd’s antisemitic comments, which include attacking “Israeli Jews” as “nothing but spineless colonizers,” tweeting that Israel is a “terrorist, genocidal nation,” and that “Zionists . . . have an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood & land,” calling “Zionist settlers” “the sadistic barbaric neonazi [sic] pigs that claim to be indigenous to our land,” and writing in his book that Israelis “harvest organs of the martyred” and “feed their warriors our own,” led the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to raise concerns in a full profile of the writer on the group’s website. The ADL writes:

An analysis of his social media and his book of poetry, titled “Rifqa,” reveals a troubling pattern of rhetoric which goes far beyond criticism of Israel and into antisemitism. El-Kurd has accused Israelis of eating the organs of Palestinians and of having a particular lust for Palestinian blood. He has compared Israelis to Nazis, negated the historic Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and vilified Zionism and Zionists…his willingness to employ these tropes raises serious concerns.

El-Kurd’s brand of anti-Zionism goes far above and beyond the normal criticisms of Israel — he regularly refers to Zionism in terms such as “murderous,” “sadistic,” “fascist,” and “genocidal,” and has repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany. But at times, the virulent anti-Zionist rhetoric has crossed over into outright antisemitism.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

BIDEN’S WORSENING BORDER CRISIS: SCOTT WALKER

By on April 24th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/apr/22/bidens-worsening-border-policies/

Arrests at America’s southern borders are surging, and the crisis is the worst it has been in decades. According to data released this week from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, border agents made more than 200,000 arrests along the border in March. That is the busiest month in the past twenty years. The United States has made more than one million arrests at the southern border since October 2021. That is the fastest pace of illegal border crossings in at least two decades.

Things will likely worsen in the next month as the Biden administration is preparing to lift Title 42 on May 23, 2022. The Trump administration implemented the policy during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing border agents to quickly turn away people who are arrested trying to enter the United States illegally.

Of the 1.01 million crossings this year, roughly half resulted in the person being expelled under Title 42. Biden administration officials acknowledge that revoking the policy will likely lead to a massive rise in illegal border crossings. Yet they show no signs of pulling back on their plans to lift Title 42.

Ironically, it took a federal judge to force the Biden administration to stop requiring passengers on domestic flights to wear a face mask. Yet, the same people want to open the floodgates to illegal aliens without regard to their health status.

We already see the consequences of failing to deal with the border crisis effectively. At the end of 2021, we learned that drug overdoses surpassed 100,000 last year. Nearly two-thirds of the drug overdose deaths in the past fiscal years were from synthetic opioids— primarily fentanyl.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France’s Macron wins re-election, dodges political earthquake By Mimosa Spencer , Layli Foroudi and Tassilo Hummel

By on April 24th, 2022

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/macron-or-le-pen-france-faces-stark-choice-president-2022-04-24/

Le Pen admits defeat
Macron ministers hail win, vow to listen more to voters
Macron can expect little to no grace period
Opposition turns focus to June parliamentary elections

PARIS, April 24 (Reuters) – French President Emmanuel Macron defeated his far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Sunday by a comfortable margin, securing a second term and heading off what would have been a political earthquake.

Cheers of joy erupted as the results appeared on a giant screen at the Champ de Mars park at the foot of the Eiffel tower, where Macron supporters waved French and EU flags. People hugged each other, danced and chanted “Macron!”.

European leaders also welcomed the news that pro-European Union Macron and not nationalist eurosceptic Le Pen had won.

Pollsters projected Macron securing around 58.5% of the vote. Such estimates are normally accurate but may be fine-tuned as official results come in.

“I am very relieved – it had looked very close and populism was at our door,” 42-year old Alessandro Paleni told Reuters at the Macron rally. But he stressed the president faced a difficult task given how many votes went to the far-right.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Passover Reflection on the Ukraine War Michael Galak

By on April 24th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/ukraine/2022/04/a-passover-reflection-on-the-ukraine-war/

This year’s Passover, what Gentiles sometimes call Exodus, is being celebrated amidst fears the beginning of a third world war is playing out on Ukrain’s flatlands. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, what comes to mind — my mind at any rate — is a connection between the ancient rebellion of Jewish slaves with the struggle of the Ukrainian people against Russian aggression.

The parallels are astounding, despite a long and heated tradition of enmity between two peoples. I am acutely conscious of the blood-soaked history of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, if one can call it that. This is history drenched in Jewish blood:  Koliivshchina rebellion, Khmelnitzky pogroms, SS murders, Babi Yar massacre – to mention just some of the crimes that figure in the mind-numbing magnitude of Jewish persecution, suffering and slaughter. These masacres are condemned to live in infamy in Jewish memory no less than Auschwitz and the Nazis’ other death mills. They are indelibly engraved in the voluminous history of Ukrainian anti-Semitism and I have no right to ignore the massacres or forgive their perpetrators. Ironically, many Ukrainians recognized the value of having the Jewish community as part of Ukrainian society despite anti-Semitism being an integral part of the national psyche. This is reflected in a Ukrainian saying, Yak bida, tak do Zhida – “If in trouble go to a Jew for help”. To put it mildly, Jewish-Ukrainian relations were far from cordial for a long, long time.

And then something happened. Ukraine, traditionally anti-Semitic Ukraine, voted overwhelmingly for a Jewish man, the descendant of a Holocaust survivor, to be their president in time of peace and, as it happens, in war as well. One can argue that Volodymyr Zelensky’s victory was either a protest vote against Ukraine’s all-pervading corruption or, perhaps equally, a reflection of a newly evolved political sophistication. Be that as it may, the unwillingness of the Ukrainians to have Jews as their fellow citizens and neighbors is held by a mere 5 per cent of the population, according to a recent Pew Centre poll. This is a level of acceptance and tolerance which the same polling found to be the highest in all Europe. The same survey indicated that 13 per cent of Russians and 32 per cent of Armenians are not prepared to have a Jew marry into their families or even as a neighbor.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Black Clergy Call on Corporations to Distance Themselves From Black Lives Matter By Chris Queen

By on April 24th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2022/04/23/black-clergy-call-on-corporations-to-distance-themselves-from-black-lives-matter-n1592140

Since the advent of Black Lives Matter in the mid-2010s and especially since the organization went front and center in 2020, corporations have fallen head over heels for BLM.

It’s an easy way for corporations to virtue-signal, and there’s plenty of pressure on companies to show their support or face accusations of racism, true or not.

Corporations have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, but there’s a movement afoot to call on companies to back away from Black Lives Matter. A group of black clergy leaders approached some corporate headquarters in Atlanta this week, urging them to distance themselves from BLM.

“Concerned Communities for America, a non-profit led by Black clergy, delivered a pledge for signing to the headquarters of Papa John’s Pizza and Coca Cola in Atlanta on Wednesday to renounce BLM’s charity operation and the movement’s push to defund police,” reports ADN America. “The pledge asks the corporations to renounce their past support and donations to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which has been embroiled in scandals over the use of donations for lavish personal expenses.”

Leaders of this non-profit seek to make corporations aware of the difference between the sentiment that “black lives matter,” which everyone except ardent racists can get behind, and the organization Black Lives Matter, which promotes Marxism while its leaders live high on the hog and waste donors’ money.

“Woke corporations in their misguided financial support for BLMGNF have failed Black America and the movement but supporting Marxism, and anarchy on the streets and in our communities,” said DaQuawn Bruce, CCA’s executive director. “Our hope is to educate them on how they might support the communities in which they operate while uplifting those who swear to serve and protect.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Folly of English Teachers Who Oppose Reading

By on April 24th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/the-folly-of-english-teachers-who-oppose-reading/

The National Council of Teachers of English wants to ‘decenter’ book-reading and essay-writing as the fundamentals of English class. This is a mistake.  

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has proclaimed that it is time “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Apparently, they don’t teach irony in English classes anymore.

The argument in the statement isn’t new. At the turn of the century, John Dewey, a central figure in progressive education, argued that the industrial revolution necessitated a “new education.” Now, the NCTE argues that “as society and technology change, so too does literacy,” and so we English teachers must focus on videos, gifs, memes, and other media.

They absolutely shouldn’t, though. Society might change, but the cognitive architecture of our brains does not. We need explicit instruction, repeated practice, phonics, a broad base of knowledge, and models to read and reason clearly. As they did centuries ago, students must grapple with rigorous, thematically rich texts to develop the capacity for critical thought, just as anyone must strain against weights to build muscle.

Similarly, technology changes, but great ideas don’t. When I was a student, blogging and Myspace were the hot new technologies. Anything I could teach my current students about the use of social media or software will be outdated by the time they mature. However, the wisdom in great literature and the warnings and exemplars found in historical texts are timeless.

Ultimately, the insular focus on present issues and contemporary media within the NCTE statement is self-defeating. If anything, to face the challenges of the future, students will need the lessons of the past. If we value self-control with social media, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is the perfect warning against enslavement to passions. If we want eloquence, students need models in beautiful prose. If we want them to identify bias, they must familiarize themselves with the arguments and first principles that occur over and again throughout time.

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