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January 2023

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Israel’s Judicial Reform ‘Controversy’ Is Much Ado About Nothing Israel’s manifold critics, alas, are too preoccupied with their own vomit to care about the truth in this matter. By Josh Hammer

By on January 20th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/19/israels-judicial-reform-controversy-is-much-ado-about-nothing/

Like a dog returning to its own vomit, the supercilious elites of our so-called international community maintain a rather curious fixation. Like clockwork, these elites always find a way of singling out for opprobrium one tiny nation-state, no bigger than New Jersey. That state, of course, is the Jewish state, the modern State of Israel. There is simply no other country on Earth that attracts such disproportionate, and often vehement, disparagement from our would-be moral superiors.

The current hullabaloo, merely the most recent manifestation of this inveterate Jew-bashing addiction, takes the form of the roiling debate over the new Benjamin Netanyahu-led Israeli government’s proposed judicial reform package. Tens of thousands of activists have taken to Israel’s streets to protest the proposal, and newspaper editorial boards from Washington, D.C. to Brussels have condemned the reforms in no uncertain terms. If one were to believe the critics, the government’s judicial reform, if successfully implemented, would make Israel more “authoritarian,” undermine the country’s “liberal democracy,” result in “democratic backsliding” or—egad!—make Israel resemble Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

As Proverbs 26:11 teaches: “As a dog returns to his vomit, so does a fool repeat his folly.” There is no substantive basis whatsoever for these performative shrieks of hysteria. The Netanyahu-led government’s judicial reform package is just and proper, as a matter of both political theory and comparative constitutional law. Ironically, moreover, despite the reflexive condemnations of those purportedly concerned about the health of Israel’s vibrant democracy, the judicial reform package would substantially bolster Israel’s actual democracy by diminishing its juristocracy.

Israel is a fairly young country with still-developing political and legal institutions, but it most clearly resembles the British model of governance (albeit, without a figurehead monarch): a multiparty parliamentary system where parliament is (putatively) supreme, a separation of powers with an independent judiciary, a common law-based legal system and a formally unwritten constitution. But despite Israel’s modeling itself in large part on the British model of governance, and despite modern Britain’s well-established norm of parliamentary supremacy, things began to go haywire for Israel in the 1990s. During that time, Aharon Barak, chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, pronounced a “constitutional revolution” and arrogated to his institution power unprecedented for any supreme court in any Western-style democracy.

As a result of Barak’s “revolution,” the Court usurped a plenary power to overturn any piece of legislation at any time, for any reason whatsoever. At first, the Court found itself bound by Israel’s 13 quasi-constitutional “Basic Laws,” but it soon discarded even that limitation. In recent years, the Court has seen fit to nullify the will of the people—expressed via normal legislation and Basic Laws alike—on such unfathomably flimsy grounds as being “extremely unreasonable” or being “too political.” Unbelievably, the Court now also wields the power to override the elected government’s selections for Cabinet-level ministerial positions, as it did just this week when it vetoed Netanyahu’s choice for minister of health and minister of the interior, Aryeh Deri.

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2023 Started Off On the Wrong Foot For This Rookie Officer Struck by a machete ….. How did the Jihadist who swung it get into our country to begin with? by Michael Letts

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2023-started-off-on-the-wrong-foot-for-this-rookie-officer/

Imagine starting a job and having quite simply the worst day you possibly can. A customer comes in and completely berates you while you’re learning the ropes; a boss ends up chewing out employees over lackluster performance; or something simply goes wrong with the business itself, such as uncontrollable weather conditions.

Well, that’s all child’s play compared to what Paul went through. Paul is a rookie New York Police Department officer that was getting his start on the force on New Year’s Eve. That’s right, probably one of the busiest days you could ever expect. Especially when you’re patrolling around Times Square, one of the most iconic places you can be to celebrate 2023.

But then something hit unexpectedly that threw Paul’s world into turmoil. While working alongside two other officers around 9:30 PM, a 19-year old “radicalized” Islamic extremist struck.

What’s more, he struck with an unusual weapon – a machete. Not a firearm or a knife, but rather a dangerous, sharp weapon that can really do some damage. And boy, did it. Paul ended up receiving a large laceration, as well as a skull fracture. What’s more, even after a fellow officer fired upon him, the suspect actually injured them with a laceration as well.

The suspect was taken into custody, and, thankfully, Paul and the other officer are recovering from their wounds. But I totally feel for this kid, mainly because no one deserves to have a first day like that. An argument over a traffic infraction, sure. Even an altercation in which they need to arrest someone. But an all-out attack? With a machete?

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The West’s Last Chance? Has it already passed? by William Kilpatrick

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wests-last-chance/

Those who make a business of projecting trends often neglect the acceleration factor.  The march of history may be usefully described as “slowly” followed by “suddenly.” Yet we are rarely prepared for those times when history seems to “speed up,” and decades of change are compressed into years or even months.  We assume that current trends will continue, and we are surprised when they don’t.

An excellent book on the subject is Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance.  Blankley, a nationally syndicated columnist who served President Reagan as a speechwriter and senior policy adviser, began the book with an overview of sudden changes in the course of history:  the conquests of Alexander the Great, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Nazi’s rapid takeover of much of Europe.

He then made the case that we are on the brink of another historical reversal of massive proportions—namely, the takeover of Europe by Islam. He suggested that the takeover would be accomplished through demographic changes rather than war and he further suggested that Europeans would mount little resistance to it.

According to Blankley, the lack of resistance would have its source in the fact that demographic changes move slowly and are thus less noticeable.  One can see that an attacking army ought to be resisted, but the threat of rising birth rates seems a much less urgent matter.

Moreover, for much of the world the pre- 9/11 decades were a time of relative calm.  For one thing, the differences between the West and the Soviet Union had been patched up. The liberal elites claimed that it was merely a case of mutual misunderstanding.   The solution to most problems, it was asserted, was to understand the “other.” The best way to do that was to practice “political correctness”—a non-judgmental approach to political and social issues. Ironically, political correctness was the prelude to the highly judgmental ideology of “woke.”

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At Davos, the Rev. John Kerry Signals His Place Among the Elect By Jack Cashill

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/at_davos_the_rev_john_kerry_signals_his_place_among_the_elect.html

John Kerry at Davos

“When you start to think about it, it’s pretty extraordinary that we — select group of human beings because of whatever touched us at some point in our lives — are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet,” said Kerry.

Before getting to the sillier part of his homily, allow me to explain what Neo-Puritanism is and why it has surfaced. The concept is implicit in the very word “progressive.” In the last decade or two, that word has replaced “liberal” as self-definition among the Left. On the Right, we shorthand the Left’s shifting semantics into the more useful “woke,” a word that on the Left originally meant someone who had awakened and seen the light.

At the risk of tautology, progressives, by definition, progress. Unlike old-school liberals who could content themselves with a status quo, progressives move forward. They refuse to rest, refuse to reflect. That much said, few among them have any clue as to what their ultimate destination might be. For instance, who ten years ago thought that “trans rights” would be a hill on which the woke would be willing, if not to die, at least to pout.

Like their seventeenth-century New England namesakes, the woke exist in a perpetual state of anxiety. For the original Puritans, the anxiety derived from a Calvinist theology that spared only the “elect” from eternal damnation. The problem was that no amount of good works could assure one’s “elect” status. Only faith could do that, but even the faithful could not be certain that their faith would suffice.

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Has COVID Backlash Sparked a Movement? By J.B. Shurk

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/has_covid_backlash_sparked_a_movement.html

Friends of freedom generally agree about four points:

(1) Protections for expansive individual liberty and respect for limited government are essential for the promotion of human rights, self-determination, and prosperity.

(2) Over the course of American history, the U.S. government has strayed far beyond the original limitations of its enumerated powers as set forth in the Constitution.

(3) Globalism, international government, plutocracy, rule by “elite” experts, unchecked bureaucracy, and the steady erosion of inalienable rights all work to maximize the power of centralized authority while minimizing the power of individual citizens.

(4) The most important conflict raging today is between individual liberty and coercive State control.

Where defenders of liberty disagree is in their assessment of the future.  Some believe that so much ground has now been lost in humanity’s centuries-long struggle for freedom that centralized government control over each individual is all but certain.  Technology’s rapid intrusion into the private sphere, the exponential expansion of the national security surveillance State, the rise of government-directed mass censorship, the successful efforts of multinational corporations and banks to influence national government directives, and the Intelligence Community’s vast programs for manipulating public opinion on a global scale all lend support to this admittedly pessimistic point of view.  

On the other hand, there are those who see the ebb and flow of human liberty as a natural occurrence, technology as a set of instruments that can just as ably expand freedom as curtail it (conquerors and liberators use the same weapons, after all), and encroaching totalitarianism as a necessary precursor for sparking popular revolt.  From this vantage point, the darker things get, the more likely real change is afoot.  I fall into this latter camp, and I will repeat a couple truths I hold dear: (1) before any system can be overhauled, there must first be a revolutionary shift in social consciousness, and (2) transformational change often occurs when people least expect it.  

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Where did all the far-left organizers at the anti-Netanyahu rally go? The gaggle of radical sponsors at the first anti-judicial reform rally vanished from the second. by David isaac

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/where-did-all-the-far-left-organizers-at-the-anti-netanyahu-rally-go/

The first mass rally against the current Netanyahu government, on Jan. 7, was very left-wing—even radically so, observers from both sides of the political aisle agreed. The demonstration, ostensibly against the coalition’s proposed legal reforms, featured “anti-occupation” slogans and PLO flags, and was headlined “March of Rage,” terminology that could have been on loan from Gaza.

Some protesters openly wondered what one issue had to do with the other. A left-wing journalist voiced fears that center-left protesters, whose concern was defending the Supreme Court, would feel they had been deceived and would stay home the next time.

But something strange happened on the way to the second demonstration: The far-left groups that had played so prominent a role in the first disappeared, to be replaced by one organizer, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel (MQG).

“On the promo poster for the second rally [on Jan. 14], their logo alone appeared. All the other organizations that had been listed on the poster from the first demonstration were gone. It looked like the Movement for Quality Government was solely responsible for the second demonstration,” said Alon Schvartzer, head of the research and policy division for Im Tirtzu, a Zionist NGO.

The second demonstration on Jan. 14 featured only the Movement for Quality Government in Israel as the sponsor.
Schvartzer said that his guess is the change came as a result of pressure by politicians such as opposition leader Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz, head of the National Unity Party, who didn’t want to risk being associated with radical groups and Palestinian flags. “In the next election, they want to appeal to people from the center, not the left, or in this case, the radical left,” he explained to JNS.

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There is evidence, albeit circumstantial, to back Schvartzer’s claim. Neither Lapid, Gantz nor any major opposition leader attended the first rally. The most prominent politician present was Labor Party leader Merav Michaeli, along with a few Knesset members, including fellow Labor member Gilad Kariv. Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Hadash-Ta’al Party, also attended, as did former politician Tzipi Livni.

Shvartzer added that Lapid and Gantz started calling for people to take to the streets in early December. Clearly, something didn’t sit right with them if they didn’t participate in the first mass rally.

The situation changed somewhat during the second rally. Gantz made an appearance, as did fellow National Unity party lawmaker Gadi Eisenkot. Former politician and member of Gantz’s Blue and White faction Moshe Ya’alon also attended. However, Matan Kahana, one of the more right-wing members of Gantz’s party, did not, saying he didn’t want to be seen standing next to Palestinian flags.

The third protest, scheduled for Saturday evening, looks to see the full weight of the opposition parties in attendance as Lapid has reversed an earlier decision to avoid mass rallies. “Come and protect our beloved country from democratic ruin. Yes, I’ll be there too,” he said in a social media video post.

The risk of being associated with radicals has diminished, said Schvartzer, noting the Movement for Quality Government is considered mainstream among left-wing demonstrators. “It’s not a grassroots group but it has succeeded in presenting itself as one of the leaders of big anti-Netanyahu demonstrations in the past year. It has a large budget,” he said.

Unlike the other left-wing groups, the organization is focused on legal issues. It was one of the petitioners to the Supreme Court in the recent Aryeh Deri case, which led the high court to rule against the Shas Party chairman serving as a cabinet member in the Netanyahu government.

Promotional material for the third protest, scheduled for Saturday evening, Jan. 21, again lists as its sponsor only the Movement for Quality Government, or in some cases, adds “and protest groups,” which go unnamed.

While some may have been concerned that the far-left nature of the first demonstration would put people off, such fears proved unfounded. From a crowd of 20,000 at the Jan. 7 rally at Habima Square in Tel Aviv, the numbers swelled to 80,000 at the second.

“The mainstream news channels didn’t talk about the radical left orientation of the first rally,” said Schvartzer. “Instead, they featured the president of the Supreme Court telling us that we need to do something to stop the reforms. So people went to the demonstration and they got that impressive number.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his dissatisfaction with the media at the weekly cabinet meeting the day after the first rally.

“I was simply shocked. I saw posters over the weekend that compared the minister of justice [Yariv Levin] to the leader of the Nazis. They talked about the Sixth Reich [a reference to Netanyahu’s current sixth government]. This is wild incitement that passed without any condemnation from the opposition or the central media channels,” he said.

Makor Rishon investigative reporter Shilo Freid told JNS that Standing Together was the main organizer of the first rally. The stage was decorated in the organization’s color scheme and logo. Its purple signs were seen throughout the crowd. He described the group as a leader of radical leftist activities. He says it isn’t involved with legal issues, but rather is focused on ending the “occupation.” Its website says it’s “a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice.”

Freid emphasizes that the associations behind the rally are heavily funded from abroad. Twenty-seven percent of Standing Together’s budget comes from foreign sources, he said, citing Guidestar Israel, a website providing information on non-profits and operated by Israel’s Ministry of Justice.

Standing Together also received $1,026,222 in 2012-2021 from the New Israel Fund, according to Im Tirtzu’s research. A U.S-based NGO known for financing controversial groups, the Israeli branch of New Israel Fund stepped out of the shadows to openly tout its financial support for the first rally, telling its supporters in an email that it had “assisted with a special grant to the many civil society organizations that took part in the production of the giant demonstration on Saturday night in Tel Aviv.”

The first demonstration’s poster included a host of far-left groups, most unconnected to the issue of judicial reform.
Other groups involved in organizing the first protest were Breaking the Silence (its co-directors Avner Gvaryahu and Yael Lotan were featured speakers), the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Abraham Initiatives. All three enjoy generous financial support from the European Union.

Too many groups to mention were included on the poster advertising the first rally. The fight to block reforms to the Supreme Court is one that affects them directly, Schvartzer noted.

“The Supreme Court is like their second home. It’s where they focus their activities. Some appeal to the court 40 to 50 times a year. Taking away the Supreme Court’s power is like taking away their own because they don’t have the support of the Israeli people,” he said.

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The Whitewashing of Antisemitism, a Hatred of Many Colors by Richard Bernstein

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/19/the_whitewashing_of_antisemitism_a_hatred_of_many_colors_876229.html

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City’s Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head. 

Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.   

Rationalizations for black antisemitism can be strained, as when the spewings of billionaire rapper Ye, the former Kanye West …
Invision

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics.  

In covering and condemning these acts, most major news outlets and politicians from President Biden on down have described antisemitism as almost entirely a sub-species of white supremacy or white nationalism, invoking the mob in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 shouting “Jews will not replace us,” or the murder of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 by a white nationalist fanatic.  

This narrative obscures the complexity and diversity of the sources fueling the spike in antisemitism, some experts say. Right-wing hate groups are playing their usual part, but so too are blacks and members of other minority groups. The non-white antagonists are erased from the public discourse even though it’s generally understood that it’s hard to address a societal problem when society is unwilling to discuss it openly and honestly.  

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D.C. Journalist Proves Biden Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong By Assuming He Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong Eddie Scarry

By on January 20th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/19/d-c-journalist-proves-biden-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong-by-assuming-he-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong/

Missing classified documents are only a problem when a president that the bureaucracy doesn’t like has them.

If the entire news media, plus Biden’s vindictive Justice Department, hadn’t put the country through months of insanity over the petty “confidential documents” drama at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s own scandal of having illegally retained government material when he was a private citizen would be a pretty boring affair.

But they didn’t. They decided to get cute and make this a criminal matter. Now they get the same treatment.

Wait! they claim in unison. This is different! Biden did the right thing and Trump did the wrong thing!

Admittedly, that’s a totally fair and obvious point when you start with the assumption that over the six years Biden was in wrongful possession of government secrets, the material just sat there, untouched and unread (and make the concurrent assumption that the same wasn’t true of the Trump documents). They simply gathered dust, month by month, sound asleep in office drawers and garage boxes, forgotten by Biden, time, and the federal bureaucracy. Then, when one fateful day Biden’s lawyers happened upon the documents, they immediately dialed the National Archives for a swift transfer to the proper authorities.

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Al Gore Attempts Own ‘Greta Moment’ In Unhinged Davos Rant: “Equivalent Of 600,000 Hiroshima Bombs Daily” by Tyler Durden

By on January 20th, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/al-gore-attempts-own-greta-moment-unhinged-davos-rant-equivalent-600000-hiroshima-bombs

Al Gore is testing out his performative Greta mode at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week. The former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate who as early as the 1990’s was dubbed in the pages of The Washington Post as “very boring” and as having a “naturally stiff, wooden persona” momentarily (and very awkwardly) tried to go climate activist beast mode during a Q&A panel.

His attempt this week to pull off a “Greta moment” and shed his notorious stiffness resulted in an unhinged rant wherein he claimed that carbon emissions and greenhouses gases are trapping “as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.”

That’s right, you heard him correctly… six-hundred-thousand Hiroshima bombs every single day – according to his bizarre rant, which he further said is “boiling the oceans” and creating “rain bombs” and “atmospheric rivers” resulting in millions of “climate refugees”. 

“Climate refugees are expected to reach one billion in this century”… he said, before turning to the “xenophobia” somehow unleashed on the world in the process due to the “Hiroshima bombs”. 

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Inside the Facebook Files: Emails Reveal the CDC’s Role in Silencing COVID-19 Dissent Throughout the pandemic, the CDC was in constant contact with Facebook, vetting what users were allowed to say on the social media site. Robby Soave

By on January 20th, 2023

https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship/

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a direct role in policing permissible speech on social media throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Confidential emails obtained by Reason show that Facebook moderators were in constant contact with the CDC, and routinely asked government health officials to vet claims relating to the virus, mitigation efforts such as masks, and vaccines.

For a broader analysis of the federal government’s pandemic-era efforts to suppress free speech—and whether they violated the First Amendment—see Reason’s March 2023 cover story on the ramifications of these emails. This article provides screenshots of the emails themselves.

After Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he permitted several independent journalists to peruse the company’s previous communications with the FBI, the CDC, the White House, and government officials elsewhere. These disclosures, which have become known as the Twitter Files, reveal that government bureaucrats put substantial pressure on Twitter to restrict alleged misinformation relating to elections, Hunter Biden, and COVID-19.

The Facebook Files, which were obtained by Reason as a result of the state of Missouri’s lawsuit against the Biden administration, reveal that the CDC had substantial influence over what users were allowed to discuss on Meta’s platforms: Facebook and Instagram.

The messages reveal an environment where the CDC kept tabs on Meta’s moderation practices and regularly told the company what the agency wanted it to do.

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