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March 2023

AI: A Hot Date with ‘Sydney’ by Drieu Godefridi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19470/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt

At this stage, it is not possible to measure or list what the countless uses of tools such as ChatGPT will be in the future — but it is clearly a revolution.

After all, does ChatGPT have its own consciousness? Let’s ask her!

Question: Dear ChatGPT, do you consider yourself as a personality in its own right, distinct from your creators?

ChatGPT: As an Al language model, I don’t have the capacity to consider myself as personality in its own right, distinct from my creators. I don’t have feelings, emotions, beliefs, or desires like a human being. I’m just a machine learning model designed to process and generate natural language responses based on the patterns it has learned from large amounts of data. While I’m capable of generating responses that may appear to be conversational, I’m ultimately just a tool created by humans to assist with language-based tasks. I don’t have a sense of self or a distinct personality separate from my programming.

Faced with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT and its little brothers (and sisters), two ways of approaching them stand out. The first could be described as not-all-that-good at knowledge and the second as not-all-that-bad at knowledge.

The first approach is the result of catching AI at fault, for example by showing that it is in fact wrong, or flawed in its “reasoning” process. This is a very common line of attack on the networks, which are now littered with screenshots showing GPT chat errors. This is not useless: it reminds us that these AIs are not infallible. But who doubted that, when it is explicitly stated that ChatGPT, for example, has no access to the web and that its credentials end in 2021? It is amusing, in this respect, to see an intellectual as sharp as Nassim Nicholas Taleb being outraged that ChatGPT is unable to deliver URLs valid in 2023 on the bikeable roads in Atlanta.

Recent First Ladies and Their Academic Degrees By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/09/recent-first-ladies-and-their-academic-degrees-n1676985

“I might say in my defense that I would not have addressed so contentious a subject had the press, the talking heads, and the bien pensants — those I call intelleftuals — not extravagantly touted such mediocre efforts as pageants of superior accomplishment and intelligence. Their bloviations merely serve a political agenda rather than a scrupulous assessment of quality — which is, I submit, the curse of our age.”

I am frankly amazed at the intellectual ineptitude revealed by our recent Democrat First Ladies’ degree-awarded ventures in academic exposition and by the media adulation they have received for their efforts. Having recently published an analysis of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation, pointing out its utter inadequacy, I find it comes as no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama considers it a work of substantial merit and heaps accolades on Biden as “a brilliant woman who has distinguished herself in her profession.”

Michelle Obama is herself the recipient of an academic honor in the shape of a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton for her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she attempts to estimate “an introspective measure of change, as perceived by the individual” in “the effects of a Princeton education on Blacks and Black students’ attitudes…pre-, intra-, and post-Princeton.” A putative achievement of this dubious nature does not confirm Obama (then Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) as qualified to comment on the brilliance of others.

Given the acclaim Michelle Obama has enjoyed for her influential public voice, it behooves us to consider where and how her career acquired its impetus — her vaunted thesis. True, the thesis was written many years ago, but let us not forget that it served as Obama’s ticket into the “new elite,” despite its being a gallimaufry of platitudes and pseudo-academic fustian.

White House Gives International Women’s Day Award to Biological Man By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/09/white-house-gives-international-womens-day-award-to-biological-man/

On Wednesday, the Biden White House celebrated International Women’s Day by presenting an award to a biological man who believes he is a woman.

The Daily Caller reports that the Woman of Courage Award was given to Alba Rueda, who serves as the Special Envoy for Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In that post, he is responsible for Argentina’s adoption of a policy known as the “Transgender Labor Quota,” which mandated that no less than one percent of all public sector jobs be held by people who believe themselves to be “transgender.”

“Now in its 17th year, the Secretary of State’s IWOC Award recognizes women from around the globe who have demonstrated exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, and the empowerment of women and girls, in all their diversity – often at great personal risk and sacrifice,” the White House said in a press release announcing the award for Rueda, who was born a male.

“In Argentina, Alba Rueda is a transgender woman who was kicked out of classrooms, barred from sitting for exams, refused job opportunities, subjected to violence, and rejected by [his] family,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, as the award was presented to Rueda by Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

A Handy January 6 Fact Sheet Plenty of other falsehoods and misrepresentations animate the fable of January 6. But for those honestly seeking the truth, consider this a cheat sheet for future use. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/09/a-handy-january-6-fact-sheet/

In another example of Washington’s inexorable slide into banana republic territory, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday to call for the removal of an American journalist. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anchor treat the American people, and American democracy, with such disdain,” Schumer said during his seven-minute authoritarian tirade. “And he’s going to come back tonight with another segment. Fox News should tell him not to. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch—tell Mr. Carlson not to run a second segment of lies. You know it’s a lie.”

Schumer later reiterated his demand to a group of journalists who, rather than denounce one of the most powerful government officials in the country attempting to silence an influential member of the media, dutifully reported Schumer’s bleating without question.

Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) joined the fray, echoing Schumer’s faux concerns over “national security.”

Clearly, it’s panic time. The White House, Congress, and the Democratic Party propaganda arm that is the corporate media realize their carefully engineered narrative about January 6 is imploding in real time. Which is why they’re accusing Carlson of “whitewashing” and “rewriting” the events of January 6. Anything less than total fealty to regime-approved talking points about what happened before and after that day now is considered a “threat to democracy.”

But facts are facts. And no amount of pearl-clutching by the hags on “The View” or threats made by U.S. senators can alter the reality of January 6. Between video recordings, witness testimony, court filings, and news reporting, the undeniable truth about January 6 cannot be willfully wished away even by the most skilled spinmeisters.

Preserving Academic Freedom at the University of Chicago Vociferous activists cannot decide what can be taught and who can teach it. by Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/preserving-academic-freedom-at-the-university-of-chicago/

Perhaps when literary critic C.S. Lewis despaired of “omnipotent moral busybodies . . . who torment us for our own good,” he was anticipating the tendentious rants of members of the University of Chicago’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a toxic campus group of anti-Israel activists who have helped lead a campaign of libel and delegitimization against the Jewish state, and, at times, have inspired ugly anti-Semitism disguised as being merely criticism of Israeli government policies.

SJP has a long history since its founding in 1993 of bringing vitriolic anti-Israel speakers to their respective 200 or so campuses, and for sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Weeks, building mock “apartheid walls,” and sending fake eviction notices to students in their dorms to help them empathize with Palestinians.

Now, SJP’s U Chicago chapter has mounted a targeted campaign to deplatform a course, “Security, Counter-Terrorism and Resilience: The Israeli Case,” being taught by visiting professor and Israel Institute Fellow Meir Elran, former deputy director of Israeli Military Intelligence and retired Israeli brigadier general who also directs the domestic research programs of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

SJP’s attempt to boycott and dissuade their peers from enrolling in this class is not the first effort this year to interfere with teaching at the university. In January, for instance, SJP posted on its Instagram page the shocking admonition, “DON’T TAKE SH*TTY ZIONIST CLASSES.” Students were asked to “Support the Palestinian movement for liberation by boycotting classes on Israel or those taught by Israeli fellows.”

According to the SJP post, any students who enrolled in the two classes, “Gender Relations in Israel” taught by Meital Pinto and “Narrating Israel and Palestine through Literature and Film” taught by Stephanie Kraver, would be “participating in a propaganda campaign that creates complicity in the continuation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine” and that, in its view, “Israeli-centered classes are designed to obscure Palestinian perspectives.”

The arrival of General Elran, a veteran of the Israeli military, was particularly offensive to the SJP scolds, inspiring them to issue a statement in which they based their critique of the course on their own ahistorical, factually-flawed narrative about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, opposing any pro-Israel views to be expressed and claiming, as they always do, that Israel is an illegitimate entity that exists on stolen Palestinian lands which it illegally and brutally occupies with its tactical and strategic military force.

“On Elran’s telling of Israeli history,” the statement contended, “Israel appears not as an expansionist apartheid state predicated on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land, but as an embattled liberal democracy surrounded by ‘large hostile Muslim populations’ and mired in a ‘Muslim-Jewish conflict’ not of its own making.” In other words, SJP believed, the reality that the Jews of Israel have faced a genocidal onslaught from psychopathic terrorists determined to extirpate the Jewish state and murder its Jews is merely a fiction, a false narrative promoted by Israel. The truth, according to SJP, is that Israel was created on Palestinian land and now oppresses the indigenous population with a system of racist apartheid and military occupation, all factually and historically incorrect, as any sentient observer knows.

Anticipating that defenders of the course would point to the University’s own commitment to academic freedom and the right of faculty and students to enjoy free and open debate—even concerning controversial topics—SJP said that Elran’s course should not be insulated by those precepts. Why? Because, as their statement put it, again reversing fact and narrative to suit their own advantage, “No principle of ‘academic freedom’ or ‘intellectual diversity’ justifies hosting classes taught by complicit Israeli military personnel – particularly not classes that misrepresent Palestinian history, treat Palestinian deaths as fodder for ‘strategic’ military theorizing, and inundate students with the Orientalist worldview of Israeli colonists.”

SJP’s opposition to General Elran has not been limited to published statements denouncing the professor and the course content. On February 2nd, SJP members mounted an in-person protest at Cobb Hall, the building where Elran’s course is being taught, something the activists have been doing since the class began and a tactic meant to physically and morally intimidate enrolled students as they enter and leave the building. The February 2nd protest was particularly grotesque since it had as its secondary purpose, according to an SJP Instagram post, “to commemorate the 10 martyrs of the Jenin Refugee Camp.”

Consider how shocking and morally deranged it is for students on an American campus to celebrate terrorists whose supposed martyrdom is achieved by murdering Jewish civilians in Israel—and to do so outside of a classroom full of Israeli and Jewish students and a professor who reasonably understand that their support for Israel would make them justifiable targets for the psychopathic madmen who feel compelled to murder civilians as “resistance” to and occupation of a factitious Palestine.

Consider how a university community would respond to a similar protest that glorified the murder of 10 black people in Buffalo by a white supremacist in May of 2022 or the 2016 murder of 49 gay people at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando by a deranged homophobe. The response and criticism of such a demonstration for such psychopaths would be thunderous, immediate, and severe, but at the University of Chicago, the event passed without comment.

The so-called martyrs that SJP commemorated in their protest died in the Jenin refugee camp, a location that is notorious for being a terrorist stronghold and, as i24News has noted, is “a central base for terror groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades . . , Hamas,” Lion’s Den, Fatah, and others. Nowhere acknowledged by SJP, of course, is the fact that Jenin is proudly referred to by Palestinians “as the ‘Martyrs’ Capital,’ [and] at least 23 of the 60 suicide bombers that attacked Israel came from Jenin, according to Israel —more than any other Palestinian city.”

And typical of SJP’s virulent anti-Israel narrative, Israel and the IDF are depicted as a brutal, nearly sadistic force that regularly and randomly murders innocent Palestinian civilians. But the inverse of that is actually true, and the IDF is methodical and fastidiously careful in its incursions to suppress terror against its citizens, as it was in the latest Jenin operation.

“2023 has seen increased terror attacks & IDF counter-terror operations,” noted Honest Reporting, a media watchdog organization, “with an equal number of Israeli & Palestinian civilian casualties.” But the media and activists like SJP “report all Palestinian deaths equally,” Honest Reporting noted, “choosing not to mention that 49 of the 60 Palestinian deaths were confirmed terrorists actively engaged in attacking Israelis. And 8 were under the age of 18.” Given that Palestinian terrorists wear no uniforms and regularly embed themselves in civilian populations, it is the unfortunate reality that, even given Israel’s extreme care in minimizing casualties, some civilian deaths occur—regrettable, of course, but the fault of the terrorist groups who initiated conflict against Israelis with rockets, bombings, knife attacks, car ramming, and shootings.

Aside from the evident moral indifference SJP demonstrated in honoring those who murder Jews, other important academic considerations are being compromised by the group’s disruption of the Elran class.

When a visiting faculty member is asked to teach a course, as is the case here, he or she is thoroughly vetted in advance by departmental faculty and others with an academic interest in or knowledge of the proposed course and professor. To teach at an elite institution such as the University of Chicago, a visiting professor must possess both professional experience and academic credentials to satisfy the hiring committee and to insure that the course will be taught to the standards of the host university. Clearly, General Elran is qualified, both academically and professionally.

So the troublesome issue here is that a small group of activist students, SJP, with a poisonous enmity toward Israel, Zionism, and Judaism have assumed the right to overrule the decision of the University’s faculty and call for a boycott and cancellation of a course. The course in question is not, importantly, a mandatory course, so any student can avoid the course by simply not enrolling. If the morally sensitive SJP members were compelled to take Elran’s course, they might have a stronger argument for having someone else teach the course or not making it mandatory, but that is not the case here.

SJP and other anti-Israel activists on campuses would prefer, of course, that nothing that might be construed as pro-Israel ever be uttered or taught or written about on campus. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once quipped that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” something SJP has yet to realize or comprehend. They are certainly permitted to have their own version of history and their own narrative about the Israeli-Palestinian debate, but people as knowledgeable, and even more knowledgeable, than they also have their own narratives, facts, and set of truths.

And SJP’s latest repellent tactic of physically disrupting the operations of the University, of course, are more than simply annoying; they are violative of the University’s own rules of student life and conduct. “The right of freedom of expression at the University,” the code reads, “includes peaceful protests and orderly demonstrations. At the same time, the University has long recognized that the right to protest and demonstrate does not include the right to engage in conduct that disrupts the University’s operations or endangers the safety of others,” precisely what SJP’s protest outside the classroom and building entailed. The code also has a warning to offenders that “Any member of the University who engages in disruptive conduct will be subject to disciplinary action,” although it seems SJP has yet to be punished for their aggressive activism.

Coincidentally, it was the University of Chicago that published a seminal set of guidelines for university free speech, the 2014 “Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression,” often referred to as the Chicago Principles.

“Although members of the University community are free to criticize and contest the views expressed on campus, and to criticize and contest speakers who are invited to express their views on campus,” the report read, they may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe. To this end, the University has a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”

SJP must recognize that, while they have the right to express their views publicly and forcefully, they cannot expect or attempt to suppress those same rights of expression enjoyed by others.

The ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ Onslaught In full religious bloom – but there are signs of resistance. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-onslaught/

DEI has gone national. The belief that quality takes a backseat to racial bean counting wormed its way into the White House in February, when President Biden signed an executive order that promises to create a national “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” bureaucracy. As Christopher Rufo reports, the DEI diktat, “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” proposes three key strategies:

Creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams.”
Funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations.”
Weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

The order prescribes that equity be “embedded… into the fabric of Federal policymaking and service delivery.” Also, this will not be a one-time project, and instead must be a multi-generational commitment, and remain the responsibility of agencies across the Federal Government.

To that end, the government will establish an “Agency Equity Team… to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.” Every aspect of government down to the design, development, and acquisition of artificial intelligence must advance equity.

The executive order, dripping with cultural Marxism, posits that “by advancing equity, the Federal Government can support and empower all Americans, including the many communities in America that have been underserved, discriminated against, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”

Israel Under Attack: Biden’s Coup to Get Iran the Bomb by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19450/israel-biden-coup

“U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn’t about the future of Israel’s judiciary. It’s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, March 2, 2023.

In reality, Iran’s mullahs will most likely blackmail the Biden Administration for billions of dollars not to use their new bombs “on my watch”, as then President Barack Obama put it in 2015. With a new administration, there can be a new blackmail.

The Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” jobs-program, paid for by “over $200 million” fungible U.S. taxpayer dollars in funding reinstated by President Joe Biden, incentivizes and rewards the murder of Jews.

Abbas’ Fatah faction boasted of carrying out 7,200 terror attacks in 2022 against Israel, while criticizing Hamas for not attacking Israel.

Many Israelis have no illusions anymore. They see that the Palestinian Authority incites Jew-hate, whips up terrorism and tells Arab children and adults that to be a martyr for Islam allows them direct access not only to paradise, but also to generous funds for the terrorists and their families.

Israelis can also see that the Biden Administration has continually made decisions hostile to Israel, including once again funding the Palestinian Authority without even requiring that it renounce terrorism. The Administration also brought back the goal of a “two-state solution”: if a Palestinian state were to emerge, it could — and most likely would — be used as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, as promoted in the Palestinian “Phased Plan”: Get whatever land you can, then use that to get the rest.

Mainly, Israelis saw that the Biden administration never gave up trying to enable to enable the mullahs’ regime in Iran to have unlimited nuclear weapons — all while the mullahs have made the genocidal destruction of Israel their overriding goal.

Accordingly, on November 1, 2022, millions of Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister, heading a broad coalition government. The coalition also pledged to restore the balance between the Knesset and the Supreme Court.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament has the final say — not the High Court. For the last 30 years, this has not been the situation in Israel.

In the 1990s, Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, declaring that “everything is justiciable,” executed a “judicial revolution,” through which the Court has arrogated virtually all political power, including the ability to override laws and even operational decisions by the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.

The government’s proposed reforms would simply restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers that Israel had before Barak’s “revolution.”

Since Barak’s tenure, Israel’s Supreme Court and the Attorney General have become a self-selecting group, unelected by the public or their representatives. Their decisions, lacking a constitution, were increasingly based not on law but on their invented doctrine of “reasonableness” — often resulting in “whatever I think is reasonable”.

At present, Israel’s Supreme Court, among other freewheeling entitlements, may overrule a quasi-constitutional Basic Law based on ‘reasonableness”; accept petitions from anyone regardless of standing (even if the petitioner would not be directly affected by the outcome — a provision that has resulted in a firehose of lawsuits by “concerned” non-governmental-organizations); and veto political appointments.

For years, many Israelis had gotten used to turning to the Supreme Court for favorable “final say” decisions that they were not able to obtain through the elected parliament, the Knesset. Overnight, they now find themselves losing their perch.

The new Israeli government has not violated any of the rules of Israeli democracy. In a democratic country that held a free and fair election, the one thing that does not seem democratic is to demand that the decision of the voters be overthrown.

Demonstrations continue, but even if 100,000 protestors turn out, it is still only a small number compared to the 2.4 million citizens who voted for Israel’s new government.

Behind this subversion, it turns out, is none other than the U.S. State Department, which for years has reportedly been channeling funding to a “far left”, “anti-Netanyahu” non-profit organization, the Movement for Quality Government (MQG) .

“Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government’s proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court…. Since MQG’s primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it’s fairly clear that when MQG refers to ‘democracy education,’ it doesn’t mean majority rule”. — Caroline Glick, JNS, January 17, 2023.

Ironically, in Washington D.C., a “January 6th Committee”, without due process — no cross examination, no independent selection of members, no right to counsel, no exculpatory evidence — pretended to “investigate” as criminal the very same activity that the Biden Administration is backing in Israel: trying to change the outcome of a free and fair election.

Israel is and will remain a very much a democracy – just as it was before Justice Aharon Barak arrogated virtually unlimited powers to its Supreme Court. Calls for uprisings and civil disobedience, combined with false accusations of “fascism” — and the whole focus-group supermarket of pejoratives — appear to be just sore-loser propaganda.

The demonstrations — despite what the Biden Administration might wish — are just the loud last gasp of upper-class “elites” who have been entrenched in powerful unelected positions for decades.

That all this undemocratic disruption being done in the name of “defending democracy” just makes matters worse. The reality, sadly, is quite the opposite.

At a time when terrorism has struck and with a U.S. administration unfriendly to Israel, it is revealing that professed friends of Israel can talk in such an irresponsible way. They speak of a threat to Israeli democracy? They are a threat to Israeli democracy.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in Israel at the time of two of the Jerusalem terror attacks, rather than condemn them clearly and unambiguously, spoke mushily of a “horrifying surge in violence… we will be encouraging the parties to take steps to calm things down”, as if Israel had been the one promoting violence…. He was giving a lesson in democracy to Prime Minister Netanyahu — not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who openly calls for Palestinians to murder Israelis. How thoughtful.

The Israeli government is trying to restore the democratic institutions that it used to have, of which it has been stripped.

The Israeli government is trying to prevent the murder of innocent Jews and to stop terrorist attacks. Those, however, do not appear to be the goals that everyone has.

What endangers the State of Israel or any nation is not a government dedicated to the safety of its citizens, but people who seem blind to the real dangers: whether from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iranian regime, the Chinese Communist Party.

The greatest danger comes from those who cling to the illusion that diplomacy without the credible threat of military consequences will have any effect. These irresponsible individuals seem to prefer avoiding conversation about such dangers, or else try to downplay them. It is much less frightening to talk about gender pronouns than China’s preparations for war.

Iran must not be allowed to get the bomb — “or maybe just a few”.

“U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn’t about the future of Israel’s judiciary. It’s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb,” writes Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine.

The world has learned a lot watching America’s Middle East freedom agenda…. The first of these lessons is that when U.S. policymakers selectively deploy the rhetoric of democracy and human rights against target governments, their words are typically accompanied by practical measures to destabilize those governments, including U.S. allies….

“In reality, the maritime agreement was just the latest in a series of initiatives to realign U.S. interests with those of the terror regime in Tehran while alternately sweet-talking and threatening traditional U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to fall into line…

“Netanyahu, however, is a problem for an administration still determined to reenter the nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew… But there’s no guarantee the famously cautious Netanyahu wouldn’t launch an attack now, especially with a right-wing government at his back and the U.S. seemingly preparing to accept Iran as a member of the nuclear club, so long as the terror regime’s capacity is limited to just one bomb, or maybe just a few.”

The EU’s Lethal Obsession with Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19467/eu-obsession-israel

What [EU] Representative [Sven] Koopmans forgot to mention that it is the Palestinians who have built tens of thousands of illegal structures in the West Bank, especially in Area C, which, according to the Oslo Accords, is under full Israeli security and civilian jurisdiction.

Koopmans also forgot to mention that the EU is helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) with the mass-scale illegal construction, paving the way for the de facto annexation of the territory.

The EU does not interfere anyplace else on the planet other than Area C — not for the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Uyghurs, the Kashmiris, the Tibetans or the Greek Cypriots. The Palestinians continue to be the only group on the EU’s list of people with whom to interfere. This inordinate attention appears to stem not so much from love for the Palestinians as from hatred for Israel.

The EU, it seems, has funded literally thousands of illegal Palestinian modular buildings in territory that is legally under Israeli jurisdiction.

Lately, the EU has been concentrating more on agricultural land: one can acquire a much larger area for a much smaller investment.

By doing so, the EU is encouraging the Palestinians to engage in unilateral actions in violation of the agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.

This is the same EU that continues to warn Israel not to take any “unilateral actions,” and that continues to criticize Israel for building and expanding “illegal” settlements in the West Bank.

As of 2022, the EU has built 81,317 illegal structures in Area C….

The EU’s commitment to the expansion of illegal Palestinian settlement in Area C persists in full disregard of the Oslo Accords, which the EU purports to uphold.

“The object is to create continuous Palestinian settlement throughout the West Bank and thereby isolate and strangle Israeli communities,” wrote Hillel Frisch, professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern History at Bar-Ilan University, in 2019.

The 2009 “Fayyad Plan” (officially titled “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State”) was — and remains — a proposal to create facts on the ground that would end up as a Palestinian state if negotiations do not work out, thereby bypassing the need to negotiate with Israel as agreed to in the Oslo Accords.

The catch is: If the Palestinians believe that they can be handed a state by some external entity, such as the EU, at no cost to themselves, why should they ever bother to negotiate? For years, in fact, they have avoided coming to the negotiating table, presumably in the hope of precisely such a windfall.

The best interests of the Jahalin Bedouin were not the main concern of the Palestinian Authority. What was important to the PA was the land — to take possession of it and then make whatever was built on it appear irreversible.

[T]hese new facts on the ground, of course, encourage the Palestinians not to negotiate. Why should they, if they can get everything they want by just taking it?

Fayyad’s unilateral plan to create facts on the ground is totally in violation of the Oslo Accords, which state that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

At the end of last year, a secret document by the EU’s mission in east Jerusalem showed that Brussels is also actively working with, and on behalf of, the Palestinian Authority to take over Area C of the West Bank.

Koopmans and other senior EU officials apparently know they are acting illicitly: they are doing their utmost to hide the fact that they are actively helping the Palestinians to break the law and violate the agreements signed with Israel.

Turning A Blind Eye To Inconvenient Truths About Jan. 6

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/how-long-before-dems-say-its-time-to-move-on-from-jan-6/

For more than two years, Democrats and the media have been completely and totally fixated on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, using carefully selected clips from more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage to tell their story of a violent insurrection.

But now that Fox News has gained access to the complete video record and is providing the public with a far more complete picture of what happened that day, we fully expect the left to suddenly decide that Jan. 6 isn’t worth talking about any more.

Shortly after Republicans took control of the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided to make the complete set of surveillance videos available to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. You can debate McCarthy’s choice of who got access all you want. But the result is that the public has, for the first time, seen surveillance footage Democrats didn’t want Americans to see. Such as evidence of Capitol Police officers politely escorting peaceful demonstrators around the building.

The newly available footage also made it clear that the police officer who the Trump mob supposedly killed, Brian Sicknick, was walking around unharmed after the “deadly” attack occurred. Other narratives are failing to hold up.

Not surprisingly, Democrats are blasting Carlson, denouncing Fox News, and demanding that the videos remain a state secret.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a primetime cable news anchor manipulate his viewers the way Mr. Carlson did last night,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed.

Big Tech’s Digital McCarthyism Matt Taibbi

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/09/big-techs-digital-mccarthyism/

Editor’s note: The following is the prepared statement by journalist Matt Taibbi before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. You can watch the hearing here.

Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the  Select Committee,

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment.  Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love.  I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack. 

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

We saw the first hints in communications between Twitter executives before the 2020 election, where we read things like: