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June 2022

What does the BDS movement really stand for? Unadulterated hate Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/opinion/what-does-the-bds-movement-really-stand-for-unadulterated-hate/?utm_source=

Those Jews who defend or join it should see how a new “mapping project” conducted by a Boston BDS group is illustrative of the anti-Israel movement’s animus for Jews.

As a Pew Research Institute study recently revealed, the overwhelming majority of Americans have little or no idea what the debate about the BDS movement is about. With 84% of those polled confessing ignorance about the topic, that left only 11% to express an opinion about it one way or the other. Those who understand the anti-Semitic nature of BDS activism may take some cold comfort from the fact that its supporters haven’t made all that much headway in the public square. But the fact that only 6% opposed it, while a mere 5% backed it, is a frightening result when one considers the consequences of the way many on the left-wing of the Democratic Party are buying into exactly the sort of intersectional ideology that is the foundation of BDS lies about Israel.

That’s the context for the news that a Boston BDS group is promoting a “Mapping Project” that is supposed to illustrate “how local support for the colonization of Palestine is structurally tied to policing, evictions and privatization locally, and to U.S. imperialist projects worldwide.”

Targeting the Supreme Court Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been sitting on a bill to protect the Justices’ families.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/targeting-the-supreme-court-brett-kavanaugh-nicholas-john-roske-ruth-sent-us-roe-v-wade-11654725919?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The arrest early Wednesday of an armed man outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland home is a depressing sign of the fanatical times. Violence in the name of politics now threatens the judiciary, and Washington’s remaining adults have an obligation to act with dispatch to protect the Justices, their families and the Court as an institution.

Californian Nicholas John Roske, 26 years old, was arrested at night dressed in black. He allegedly had a suitcase, backpack, a Glock 17 with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, a tactical knife, hammer, screwdriver, crow bar, zip ties and duct tape.

According to the Washington Post, Mr. Roske told police he “was upset over the leaked draft of an opinion that would overturn the constitutional right to abortion” in Roe v. Wade. The man allegedly said he came to kill Justice Kavanaugh “thinking it would give his life purpose.” He has been charged with attempted murder.

We warned after the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that a fanatic could attempt a violent act against one of the Justices, and here we are. The draft opinion suggested there is a 5-4 Court majority to overturn Roe, and it’s all too easy to imagine some 21st-century John Brown thinking he could prevent the ruling by assassinating a Justice. Now comes a dangerously close call.

Violence and Drug-Related Gang Killings in Philadelphia How long before the entire city becomes a “bad neighborhood”? Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/violence-and-drug-related-gang-killings-thom-nickels/

Philadelphia’s South Street used to be the place where all the “hippies met.” It was largely a conglomerate of French-themed restaurants, New Age bookstores, art theaters, cafes and boutique leather and craft shops. That has changed over time.

The street’s bohemian accents slowly died out, replaced by a crass commercialism—the news media now calls South Street “an entertainment zone”– that began to attract wilder groups of people. “Real” Philadelphians learned to avoid the area, leaving it to “Let’s Party Like it’s 1776” T-shirt wearing tourists, and to rough crowds who saw it as the place “to be” on the weekends.

But South Street was not the place to be on Saturday, June 5th at around 11:30 PM. That’s when a trio of young hooligans got into a fight not far from a Rita’s Water ice stand. According to (the liberal publication) Billy Penn, a person sitting at a nearby outdoor restaurant screamed, “They about to shoot!”

Shoot they did. Three people were shot to death — two men and a woman — and nearly 14 injured, some of them bleeding in the streets. At this writing, police have yet to identify the victims but they believe that one of the shooters may be among the dead. The city declared the South Street shooting to be the deadliest in 2022 and the largest recorded in the city for nearly a decade.

When I first heard about the shooting, I was sure it was not like those creepy loner, mentally ill mass murders in other parts of the country, but that it fit right in with Philadelphia’s street crime drug culture and drug turf wars and everything that goes along with that.   

Globalists Try to Sell ‘European Unity’ But dubious happy-talk can’t hide the real lesson of the Ukraine war. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/globalists-try-sell-european-unity-bruce-thornton/

The sponsors of “moralizing internationalism,” as historian Corelli Barnett called it, are busy trying to spin the Russo-Ukrainian war as a crisis that has renewed European unity. For globalists, Russia’s return of Europe to its benighted past of invasions, destruction, and slaughters––horrors that the “rules-based international order” supposedly ended––has instead strengthened and highlighted two show-case institutions of that order, the European Union and NATO. Globalists claim that rather than an indictment of globalism’s failures, the war is restoring both institutions and confirming the superiority of supranational institutions in keeping order and creating prosperity.

But all the spin can’t hide the real lesson of the war: that the centrifugal, conflicting nationalist self-interests that wrecked the League of Nations and reduced the UN to an arena for maximizing those interests, remains the critical factor in interstate relations.

A good example of this dubious happy-talk about “unity” appears in a recent column by Thomas Freidman, a long-time Davos man and cheerleader for technocratic, antinationalist globalism. Take this sentence: Russia’s brutal invasion “explains why practically overnight, Germany’s government dispensed with nearly 80 years of aversion to conflict and maintaining the smallest defense budget possible, and announced instead a huge increase in military spending and plans to send arms to Ukraine.”

The key word, of course, is “announced.” Action is another thing. As James Snell writes in Spectator World: “And yet, as the war ends its first hundred days, German weapons deliveries to Ukraine have very visibly failed to materialize. For more than a month, the delivery of fifty Flakpanzer Gepard self-prepared anti-air systems has been authorized by Berlin. They have not arrived. Nor have the seven 155mm howitzers of German manufacture which have been promised. No German tanks, long a subject of Ukrainian requests and promises from other countries, are on the way.” According to documents leaked to the newspaper Die Welt, “deliveries from Berlin to Kyiv have slowed to a crawl, and then a trickle––all of this deliberately.”

YouTube’s Selective Ban On ‘Stolen Election’ Videos

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/09/youtubes-selective-ban-on-stolen-election-videos/

The New York Post reports that YouTube deleted a video it posted about the Jan. 6, 2021, incursion into the Capitol building.

“In the video, Aaron Mostofsky, son of a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, explains why he was compelled to come to the Capitol, namely ‘to express … [his] opinion as a free American … that this election was stolen’,” the Post says.

YouTube’s censors says they deleted the video because “it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all,” and that “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud … changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed.”

Early in May, YouTube deleted a video of Donald Trump’s speech to the Heritage Foundation because Trump said the 2020 election was rigged. The censors told Heritage that “violated our policies pertaining to elections misinformation.” 

The Post argues that YouTube owner Google is effectively carrying out the Biden administration’s censorship campaign.

“The administration’s domestic-terror strategy had called for ‘enhancing faith in government’ by countering ‘dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence,’ and vowed to ‘collaborate on addressing terrorist content … with technology companies.’”

Meet the Censored: Kara Dansky Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-kara-dansky?s=r

The feminist author of The Abolition of Sex has become the ultimate example of a new propaganda phenomenon, which denounces leftists as right-wing when they say unpopular things.

Two years ago, in February of 2020, the Washington Post published a piece called “Conservatives find unlikely ally in fighting transgender rights: Radical feminists.” The essence of the article was to describe groups like the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF, full of people with decades-long track records as leftists or feminists, as not merely in temporary agreement with conservatives on trans issues, but actual converts to the entire conservative cause.

The piece described WoLF as “fringe activists” who “argue that advancements in transgender rights will come at the expense of women’s rights” and have been “shunned” by modern progressives, who call them “a discriminatory, right-wing group disguised as feminist.”

The piece was one of countless examples in which leftist or independent critics of mainstream fixations — from Russiagate to the campaign of Joe Biden to war in Ukraine — are reclassified as right-wingers and Trump supporters. The far left, libertarians, Greens, and other assorted malcontents used to be just ignored by popular media, but now they don’t even enjoy that privilege. The new instinct has a clear and effective purpose, to create the illusion that there is no intramural debate on one side of the aisle, that disagreers are actually enemies in disguise.

Democrats Wanted To Intimidate Justices. Now It’s Getting Dangerous By: David Harsanyi

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/08/democrats-wanted-to-intimidate-justices-now-its-getting-dangerous/

An attack not only on separation of powers, but also basic norms of civility.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Those were the words of the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful elected officials in the nation, in March of 2020. After spending years cynically delegitimizing the high court, Schumer had moved to openly threatening life-time appointed judges, by name, because he feared they would knock down the concocted constitutional right to an abortion.

Initially, Schumer refused to walk back those remarks. His spokesman ludicrously claimed the statement was “a reference to the political price Republicans will pay for putting them on the court.” Of course, the senator hadn’t singled out the Republican Party, or any Republican. He called out the two newest justices by name. “You” and “you.”

Yet, it is almost surely the case that the coverage of a California man carrying a weapon and burglary equipment near Brett Kavanaugh’s home, reportedly there to murder the Supreme Court justice over the leaked opinion in Dobbs, will not be tied to the rhetoric of Democrats like Schumer. CNN political reporters will not walk from one Democratic senator to the next, asking them if their rhetoric is responsible for inciting a man to show up at the Supreme Court justice’s home with a tactical knife, a Glock, ammunition, pepper spray, and zip ties. We will not have a national conversation about the specter of leftist violence.

Why Biden Needs to Fight, Not Appease, the Enemies of Peace by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18596/biden-fight-enemies

While Hamas and the Houthis target Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, in addition to that, continues to act against the interests of its own people. PA President Mahmoud Abbas appears to be encouraged by the unconditional support he is receiving from the Biden administration, to the point where he feels free to continue denying his people good governance and judicial due process.

All signs now indicate that most people in the region are fed up with the anti-peace camp in the Arab and Muslim world, especially with Iran’s proxies Hamas, the Houthis and Hizbollah, all of which have offered the region, including the Palestinians, nothing but violence and bloodshed.

Whenever Abbas feels encouraged by the US, he sees that support as a green light, this time from the Biden administration, to impose more suppression on his people and to whip up violence in the region.

Does the Biden administration really want as its legacy that it backed, encouraged and funded unscrupulous, violent regimes – the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party, the state sponsor of terrorism Iran, the illegitimate rule of Venezuela’s Maduro – and the corrupt government of Mahmoud Abbas?

Meanwhile, Iran’s proxy, Hamas — whose charter calls not only for the elimination of peace but also of all Jews — continues to urge Arabs and Muslims not to normalize their ties with Israel.

Iran, among other atrocities, imprisons attorneys for defending human rights, executes minors, and criminalizes human rights activism. If that is how Iran’s regime treats its own people, what makes anyone think it will treat other countries — in the region or in Europe — any better?

And in a rare occurrence, according to the veteran Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, demonstrators in Iran have recently been publicly calling for regime change.

The Pakistani minister, however, is mistaken if she thinks that firing a journalist will support the rights of the Palestinians. Such myopic measures only support and embolden the enemies of peace, stability and human rights in the Middle East: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey and Iran.

People who say they care about the Palestinians can genuinely support them by defending journalists and human rights activists who are being persecuted, harassed and even killed by the Palestinian Authority. People who claim they are “pro-Palestinian” can truly help the Palestinians by coming to the West Bank and defending freedom of speech and the press, and teaching Palestinians about democracy and respect for human rights. Spreading hate against Jews does not make one “pro-Palestinian.”

The Pakistani government’s decision is a big prize to despots and tyrants in the region, such as Iran and its many proxies, and a severe blow to attempts to build bridges between Arabs and Muslims and Christians and Jews.

A sure-fire way for Biden to get immediate and full cooperation from the Saudis would be, on his planned visit, to commit to entirely eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The US has the capability, apparently just not the will. To begin with, any country that is officially on the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, period. It is what all serious discussions in the region are about. For everyone in the region except fundamentalist Qatar — and including the Iranian people, the mullahs’ regime is a mortal threat.

If Biden, as the leader of the Free World, would totally remove this threat, it would not only go a long way to preventing a nuclear war and regional arms race, and persuade the Saudis to export more oil, but after the threat is eliminated, it would send a message of deterrence to Russia, China, North Korea and other adversaries about what they could expect, and turn Biden’s poll numbers around overnight.

These increased efforts to foil peace are the main reason that the Biden administration needs to work toward strengthening and expanding the entities in the Middle East who want peace. President Joe Biden’s planned visit to Saudi Arabia is a praiseworthy first step. Saudi Arabia may not be perfect — no country is — but at least it not aggressively trying to take over its neighbors.

It is crucial that the Biden administration throw its full weight behind encouraging Saudi Arabia to be a leader for peace, stability and, as it has been doing, if slowly, advancing human rights.

Any efforts to cozy up to Iran will only be seen as hugging and empowering ruthless despots. It is more important to seek allies, wherever they can be found, that are eager to discard aggression and violence. Failing to do so will just plunge the region into a massive war — which Iran, its terrorist groups and the US administration unfortunately seem to be working toward day and night.

The enemies of peace in the Middle East are continuing their efforts to destroy any effort to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab and Muslim countries.

The enemies of peace want Arabs and Muslims to remain in a continual state of war with Israel. They want more violence and bloodshed, not Arabs and Muslims and Jews working together in various fields, including technology or anything that might bring economic prosperity.

Democrats Admit the True Purpose of J6 Hearings By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/matt-margolis/2022/06/07/democrats-admit-the-true-purpose-of-j6-hearings-n1603715

The Democrats’ partisan January 6th Committee hearings are going prime time this week, and Fox News is getting flak from the usual left-wing suspects.

“Fox News won’t air the January 6 hearings because they prefer their sedition made fresh on-site,” Hillary Clinton quipped on Twitter. I think she should hire a new joke writer.

“FOX won’t televise the hearings of the greatest Crime in Presidential history,” tweeted Rob Reiner. “Our Democracy is hanging by a thread.” Cry me a river, Meathead.

The fact is, there’s only one reason why any network will air the hearings of these pointless, blatantly partisan hearings—and it has nothing to do with the so-called insurrection. It has to do with helping the Democrats in the upcoming midterms.

This isn’t a guess. They’ve already admitted to this. “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message,” reads the headline at the New York Times about the hearings—showing absolutely no shame that government resources are being used for blatantly partisan purposes.

“With their control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats plan to use made-for-television moments and a carefully choreographed rollout of revelations over the course of six hearings…to persuade voters that the coming midterm elections are a chance to hold Republicans accountable for it,” the report explained.

UN Will Justify a Mirror Image of Putin’s War by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18597/un-putin-war

Putin went to war to turn into reality his much repeated insistence that Ukraine is an illegitimate state that has no right to exist and is inseparable from the rest of Russia. Similarly, the UN mandate allows it to question the very existence of the State of Israel. Unlike all other UN inquiries, this one has no historic time limit and enables the commission to range right back to the foundation of the state. The commissioners won’t be bold enough to explicitly declare that Israel has no right to exist, but you can be certain that will be the subtext running throughout its report.

[E]ven before the notorious 2009 Goldstone Report, the UNHRC justified and encouraged Hamas violence, and that has played a crucial role in efforts to vilify and isolate Israel as well as incite greater bloodshed in the Middle East and attacks against Jews around the world.

[L]ike Putin in Ukraine, Hamas’s war against Israel aims to conquer the territory of a sovereign democratic state that it believes should not exist.

Both Hamas and Putin’s Russia, like most dictatorships, habitually plead self-defence as their justification for aggression. Putin pretends that NATO is a threat to Russia, yet he understands it is a defensive alliance that has no hostile intent; Hamas claims Israeli aggression while knowing that Israel would not and has never used force except in defence of its sovereign land and people.

Hamas and Russia share totalitarian values; both are kleptocracies, both ruthlessly repress internal opposition and both readily resort to violence — be it political assassination, terrorism or all-out war.

The chair of the UN commission, Navi Pillay, has indirectly played into the Israel-Nazi theme, supporting and justifying the viciously anti-Israel UN Durban Conference at which fliers were handed out with a picture of Hitler captioned with an assertion that if he had won there would be no Israel. Durban is just one of Pillay’s numerous credentials against Israel, set out in detail by the NGO UN Watch in a submission to the UN. Her indisputable anti-Israel bias is shared by her two fellow commissioners, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, as outlined in an article by David Litman earlier this month in JNS.

The funding level for this commission of inquiry is the second-highest of all 33 such investigations the UNHRC has ever conducted (after a probe on Myanmar). The budget for the first three years alone is $11.81 million followed by $5.47 million each year for an indefinite period. These eye-watering figures are an indication of the lengths the UN is prepared to go to push forward and publicise its anti-Israel agenda.

[L]ike Putin’s mock trials such as the one that recently convicted opposition leader Alexei Navalny… the UNHCR commission’s findings were certain from the moment it was convened.

Commenting on the Russia-Hamas talks, Walid al-Mudallal, a professor of political science at the Islamic University of Gaza, said that while Moscow would be unlikely to supply weapons and finance directly to Hamas, “such support can be done in indirect ways, through Iran and Hizballah, which have forged an alliance with Moscow…”

Just like Putin, Hamas’s “protection” was merely a sham, with the threat from Israel to Muslims and holy sites nothing other than fiction.

On June 13, among its wide range of anti-Israel findings, including accusations of apartheid (a calumny originally dreamt up in Moscow), the commission will deem Israel guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As Putin supported the UN General Assembly resolution establishing the commission, he will support its report — for it will be a report that legitimises and justifies a mirror image of his aggression against Ukraine.

These future wars launched from Gaza will not only be enabled by weapons and funding supplied via Iran, including Russian weapons. The most important enabler will be the UNHRC with its trumped-up and provocative reports on Israel that provide political cover for Hamas violence. It should be a matter for international outrage when later this month the UNHRC supports the aggressors in a conflict and condemns the defenders while the deadliest European war since 1945 rages on.

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s Permanent Commission of Inquiry into Israel, due to make its initial report on June 13, has a mendacious mandate worthy of Vladimir Putin himself. Putin went to war to turn into reality his much repeated insistence that Ukraine is an illegitimate state that has no right to exist and is inseparable from the rest of Russia. Similarly, the UN mandate allows it to question the very existence of the State of Israel. Unlike all other UN inquiries, this one has no historic time limit and enables the commission to range right back to the foundation of the state. The commissioners won’t be bold enough to explicitly declare that Israel has no right to exist, but you can be certain that will be the subtext running throughout its report.