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April 2023

Why Palestinians Cannot Resume Peace Talks with Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19574/palestinians-israel-peace-talks

Once a Palestinian leader makes such a serious (and false) allegation against Jews [such as “violent storming of the al-Aqsa Mosque”], he is telling the Arabs and Muslims that the Jews… should therefore be fought against, not welcomed as peace partners.

If you tell your people (again, falsely) that the Israelis are perpetrating “war crimes,” “desecrating mosques” and “stealing land,” what will the Palestinians think of you when they see you sitting with an Israeli? They will denounce you as a “traitor” and call for your death.

By describing the Jews as “colonizers,” [Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad] Shtayyeh is seeking to send a message that the Jews have no religious or historical connection to their homeland, Israel.

In the eyes of Shtayyeh and many Palestinians, all Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea are “colonizers” and “settlers.” These Palestinians see no difference between a Jew living in a Jewish community in the West Bank and a Jew living in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. For them, all Jews are foreigners who have no connection whatsoever to Israel and Jewish holy sites and no right ever to live there. Period.

Palestinian leaders such as Shtayyeh are straightforwardly saying that they see Israel as one big illegal settlement that must be eradicated… [and not] as a place for anyone other than Muslims.

[C]ontrary to the false claim made by Shtayyeh and other Palestinian leaders, the Jews who visit the holy site have never set foot inside the al-Aqsa Mosque.

One of those who have failed to call out the Palestinians for their antisemitism and lies is US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“Palestinians and Israelis alike are experiencing growing insecurity, growing fear in their homes, in their communities, in their places of worship,” Blinken argued.

If the Palestinians are “experiencing growing insecurity,” it is because they are enabling terrorists to operate freely against Israel within their own communities. If the Palestinians want to live in their homes in security and without fear, they could stop terrorists from planning and executing terror attacks against Israel. If the Palestinians want to feel safe in their worship places, they could stop attacking and harassing Jews….

The Israeli army does not send its soldiers to Palestinian cities for fun. The only reason Israeli troops enter Palestinian cities and towns is to arrest terrorists or foil terror attacks that are being planned.

The Israeli security forces are actually forced to launch these counterterrorism operations because the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, are not fulfilling their obligations under the terms of their agreements with Israel to prevent and combat terrorism.

Instead, Abbas and the Palestinian leadership continue to glorify terrorists and to reward them and their families financially through the infamous “Pay-for-Slay” program. These are payments for killing Jews – like Murder, Inc.

In a place such as the West Bank that has lived off handouts from Europe, the US, Qatar and Iran, and where the Palestinian Authority never bothered to build any kind of industrial or self-sustaining economic base, paying people to murder Jews has, in a poor region, become a booming jobs program.

Every day, every Jew in Israel literally walks around with a bounty on his or her head. If you are a Jew in Israel, every day is “hunting season.”

In the world of Palestinian leaders, a terrorist is entitled to murder or wound Jews, but when the Jews manage to foil the attack or kill the terrorist, the Jews should be condemned for perpetrating “crimes” and “violating international law.”

What is more bizarre is that Blinken, who did not utter a word to refute the lies coming out of Abbas’s mouth, instead chose to praise the Palestinian leader: “I also appreciate, Mr. President, your consistent and resolute stance against terrorism.”

For the Biden Administration, a Palestinian leader who glorifies terrorists as “heroes and martyrs” and pays their families monthly salaries deserves praise for his “stance against terrorism.” If this US position was not so dangerous, it would be a sad joke.

If the Biden administration wants to understand why Palestinian leaders cannot resume any “peace process” with Israel, Blinken and the State Department would be advised to listen to the anti-Israel statements and lies of Abbas and Shtayyeh. These lies include charges that Israel is committing “war crimes,” “extra-judicial killings,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “apartheid.”

As long as Palestinian leaders continue to incite violence against Israel and Jews, these leaders will never return to any negotiating table with Israel.

Naïve Americans and gullible Europeans keep giving these leaders every incentive to continue their program of “Murder, Inc.” by rewarding them with “free” money for terrorism — with no strings attached. Under those terms, who wouldn’t continue killing Jews — or anyone? It is a gold mine.

Finally, these leaders might simply find it more comfortable to perpetuate the drama of the “cause” rather than the anonymous, less-than-heroic tedium of running a state. Unless, of course, that state could entail driving out the Jews.

As the Biden Administration continues to state its commitment to a “two-state negotiated solution” between the Palestinians and Israel, Palestinian leaders are pursuing their campaign to vilify Israel and demonize Jews. This campaign, which is manifest mostly in the rhetoric of the leaders and the Palestinian media, mosques and schools, has made it impossible – not to mention personally dangerous – for any Palestinian leader to seek a negotiated and peaceful settlement with Israel.

How Fashionable to Prescribe the Cruellest Cuts Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/04/how-fashionable-to-prescribe-the-cruellest-cuts/

Suppose I decided one fine day to self-identify as a non-binary pineapple. Je suis un ananas. Mes pronoms sont Ze, Zir, Zirs et Zirself. I forgot to mention, a French pineapple.

You might understandably think I’m mentally unbalanced. But, being a kindly sort of person, you might humour me. If your young son or daughter came home from school one day claiming that they were pineapples, you would not humour them for long. Maybe five minutes, before you told them not to be silly and to go wash their hands before having something to eat and drink.

Children are suggestible but I found both as a child and as a parent that a sharp dismissive grounding retort, particularly from a dad, was usually enough to dispel unfounded anxieties and delusions. Before you knew it, little Johnny or Jill was playing happily if young or preoccupied with juvenile pursuits if older. What you don’t do is to indulge fantasies beyond a playful and indulgent few minutes. What you certainly don’t do is to affirm fantasies; unless it’s Santa Claus. Unfortunately our society, or an influential segment of it, including the political class, sees virtue in affirming dangerous and debilitating fantasies in children and teenagers.

When a child or teenager believes they have been assigned the wrong biological sex; that really they are a male with female anatomy or a female with male anatomy, then they are living a fantasy. That must be our assumption. There is a gulf of genetic difference between males and females going way beyond surface appearances. If the fantasy persists, the only reasonable conclusion is that the youngster concerned is mentally troubled and in need of professional help; help which is squarely aimed at ridding the affected youngster of their delusion and bringing them back to reality. That isn’t the prevailing zeitgeist among officialdom.

‘Splintered’ Court Ruling Throws J6 Prosecution Into Chaos True justice will only be served when gutless judges on the district court finally start to toss this bogus charge or the higher court delivers a well-deserved smackdown in a final decision.  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/10/splintered-court-ruling-throws-j6-prosecution-into-chaos/

A Massachusetts man on Friday was charged with a felony related to his participation in the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mark Sahady already faced misdemeanors for his nonviolent and brief jaunt through the building that afternoon, but the Justice Department decided to add the common “obstruction of an official proceeding” charge to Sahady’s case on April 7.

That same day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw Sahady—and more than 300 January 6 defendants charged with the same obstruction felony—a potential lifeline. In what one judge described as a “splintered decision,” a three-judge panel narrowly reversed a lower court ruling that tossed the obstruction count against three Capitol protesters. D.C. District Court Judge Carl Nichols dismissed the charge last year largely based on the argument that the statute “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.”

A fair reading of the law proves Nichols is correct. Passed in 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, section 1512(c)(2) closed a legal loophole related to evidence tampering. The law applies to “whoever corruptly . . . otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” It’s a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

When he signed the bill into law in 2002, President George W. Bush, as I explained here, noted that the word “corruptly” would compel the government to prove a defendant’s “criminal state of mind” and the overall provision must not infringe “on the constitutional right to petition the Government for redress of grievances.”

But that hasn’t prevented Attorney General Merrick Garland from weaponizing the statute in exactly that way for more than two years. Dozens of defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman,” spent months in solitary confinement and was denied bail before Garland’s prosecutors successfully tormented him into pleading guilty to obstruction. Judge Royce Lamberth, who repeatedly denied his release, sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison.

The Opening of the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv The profound significance. by Rachel Avraham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-opening-of-the-azerbaijani-embassy-in-tel-aviv/

With the grand opening of the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv, a new reality is being fostered in the Middle East and this new reality is a great asset to the West. Lev Spivak, who heads Aziz, an Azerbaijani Israeli cultural organization in Israel, stated in an exclusive interview, “I think it is good that they opened the embassy. We waited for many years for this to happen. It will also influence political relations. It will open many more doors for cooperation.” Camilia Ioffe, a famous Israeli Azerbaijani opera singer, concurred: “What happened is historic. This is good for both states. There will be exchanges between the peoples for various things.”

The grand opening of the Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv definitely assists the West’s struggle against the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is because it helps to form a strategic alliance between Turkey, Israel and Azerbaijan, who can stand together united against the mullahs in Tehran. With the assistance of this strategic alliance, South Azerbaijanis can be empowered to secede from Iran together with all of the other ethnic minorities in the country, which includes Balochs, Kurds, Turkmen, Ahwaz, Lors, etc. In the end, this strategic alliance can empower Iran’s ethnic minorities to divide up Iran into a series of little countries, while giving whatever sliver is left to the heir of the Pahlavi dynasty, who is presently in exile via popular mass protests assisted with external support. This then will forever put an end to the masses of Iran chanting “death to America” and “death to Israel.”

Today, America’s position towards Tehran is much closer to Israel’s position. A nuclear deal is presently off the table and tensions between America and Iran are at an all-time high, after the International Court of Justice ruled that it has no jurisdiction over the $1.75bn in frozen assets from Iran’s central bank held in a Citibank account in New York, even as they ordered the US to compensate Iranian companies who had their assets frozen. The United States argued last year that the case should be dismissed because Iran had “unclean hands” and the asset seizures were a result of it sponsoring “terrorism,” stressing that the money was being given in compensation to the victims of the 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other terror attacks linked to Iran.

Given that the opening of the new Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv helps to strengthen a regional axis against Iran, the Iranians are outraged by it. Since the grand opening of the Azerbaijani Embassy, it has been reported in the media that Iran is up in arms, after Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen called for a “united front against Iran” and Baku was silent about it. This comes after an Iranian was found to be responsible for attempting to assassinate an Azerbaijani MP, the Azerbaijanis detained 40 people suspected of spying for Iran and the Azerbaijanis closed down their embassy in Tehran, after it was targeted in a brutal terror attack, which killed a security guard. At the moment, relations between Baku and Tehran are quite tense, with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev outspokenly supporting the right of South Azerbaijanis to be educated in their mother tongue in the wake of violent protests against the Ayatollahs regime, of which many Azerbaijanis support.

Former Israel Consul General to Turkey Eli Shaked added in an exclusive interview regarding the new Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv: “This is a strategic cooperation between two countries that share a common threat coming from Tehran. Even though Azerbaijan is a Shia country, nevertheless, they feel that Iran is challenging them with its religious fanaticism. They are not interested in having such a radical religious influence on their population. From the Israeli point of view, Azerbaijan is a big and important country in the area bordering Iran. So, it is a common interest by the two countries to have good relations and cooperation, not only military but also strategic. Let us hope for the best. It is a crazy world and a crazy Middle East.”

Prominent French historian Dr. Maxime Gauin noted however that the cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel does not only revolve around Iran: “One of the challenges of Azerbaijan in the liberated territories is to improve agriculture and to export as soon as possible. Israel has hi-tech agriculture, but limited space. So there is a beginning of a deal that Israel will provide the technology and Azerbaijan will provide the goods. This is a long term strategy that will continue even if the mullahs collapse. Another issue is that Azerbaijan played a key role in the reconciliation between Turkey and Israel. This can serve as an important triangle for the national security of the two countries.”

Spivak noted that the new Azerbaijani Embassy in Tel Aviv will also open up the door for further cooperation between the two countries in the field of higher education: “Previously, Ambassador Mukhtar Mammadov was the chief of staff in the ministry of education. This can be very helpful for the exchange of students. Azerbaijanis can come to study in Israel and Israelis can come to study in Azerbaijan. There can also be cooperation between the universities initiated.” Ioffe also noted that there can be more cultural cooperation: “I think that there will be more opportunities not only in the musical arena, but also for actors, opera, ballet, etc. The first ballet was written in Azerbaijan, so Azerbaijan has much to offer related to this.”

Naturally, having a Shia majority country open up an embassy in Tel Aviv and establishing normal relations with the Jewish state sends a positive message to the entire region, stressing the importance of continuing the Abraham Accords and having additional countries make peace with Israel. This will greatly assist the Jewish state as it hopes to expand the Abraham Accords to include Indonesia, Somalia, Niger and Mauritania. And by expanding the list of countries seeking peace in the Middle East, the United States will benefit from a more secure atmosphere in the region, especially as this helps to reduce Iranian influence in the wake of the Iranian-Saudi reconciliation agreement.

Rachel Avraham is the CEO of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy and an Israel-based journalist. She is also the author of “Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab Media.”

Xi Running Circles around Biden Welcome to the steep decline of U.S. power and prestige. by Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/xi-running-circles-around-biden/

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man!” Joe Biden said at a rally during his presidential campaign in 2019 as he downplayed China’s threat to the United States.

Since he became president, Mr. Biden himself has been out to lunch when it comes to confronting the multipronged military, economic, and diplomatic challenges that China poses to the vital national security interests of the United States.

President Biden, for example, turned the other cheek for several days in February while China’s spy balloon was maneuvering over sensitive military installations across the continental United States before the balloon was finally shot down. The president claimed at the time that the spy balloon was “not a major breach.” He recklessly signaled to America’s number one adversary that invading sovereign U.S. airspace for days to conduct an intelligence operation over several U.S. military installations is no big deal to America’s commander-in-chief.

Contrary to the Biden administration’s assurances that it successfully blocked China from gathering any valuable intelligence, NBC has reported that China’s spy balloon “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites,” according to NBC’s sources.

The spy balloon is just one part of the Chinese regime’s increasingly aggressive strategy to test the Biden administration’s resolve, which has proven to be seriously wanting.

Last month, the Chinese regime announced a 7.2 percent increase in its military budget, more than double the rate of increase that President Biden has proposed for his fiscal 2024 defense budget. In particular, President Biden’s defense budget is woefully inadequate in addressing China’s expansion of the size of its naval ship fleet to the point that it already surpasses the size of the U.S. naval ship fleet.

Moreover, as U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, noted last February during remarks he delivered on the Senate floor:

“The Chinese Air Force now flies fifth-generation aircraft armed with air-to-air missiles that outrange our own. The entire People’s Liberation Army conducts advanced and realistic training. And our own top cyber officer, General Paul Nakasone, says the improvement in Chinese cyber capabilities is ‘unlike anything [he has] ever seen.’”

UNC Doctors Slam ‘Hurtful’ Surgeon Who Denounced Affirmative Action In Medical Schools By: Kenny Xu

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/10/unc-doctors-slam-hurtful-surgeon-who-denounced-affirmative-action-in-medical-schools/

Dr. John Calhoon was smeared as ‘racist’ after he emphasized merit as the primary indicator of success in the surgery profession.

As it turns out, it is nearly impossible today not to trigger woke health care.

In January 2023, the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), a society of the leading heart surgeons in the nation, held a conference where the outgoing president, Dr. John Calhoon, emphasized merit as the primary indicator of success in the profession.

“Affirmative action is not equal opportunity,” he wrote in a PowerPoint presentation. The “best metric is whether someone does good.”

He also wrote that “defining people by color, gender, religion only tends to ingrain bias and discrimination.” 

This is of course true. Studies by Harvard University professor James Dobbin found that most diversity trainings and workshops have little to no effect on the perceptions of colleagues toward one another. They may even be counterproductive, with some studies reporting greater animosity toward other races out of annoyance at the heavy-handed nature of courses. 

Immediately, medical news outlets called Calhoon a racist, white privileged, and other monikers of derision, but they weren’t the only ones. The Society for Thoracic Surgeons condemned Calhoon’s slide in a statement, describing his talking points as “inconsistent with STS’s core values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Mind guards at some surgery clinics also issued their own internal responses, and my organization Color Us United has found a particularly egregious one.

Jail Him, Or They Lose Kevin McCullough

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2023/04/09/jail-him-or-they-lose-n2621719

They’ve tried literally everything short of ordering a hit on him, and he still stands. They have exhausted every avenue, option, and possibility, and they are left with a bag of nothing.

They tried a fake dossier, a made-up narrative that the media put on repeat. They accused him of a high crime for a transcript of a phone call. They accused him of advocating violence when his words said precisely the opposite. Now they are trying to say he obstructed justice when he, in fact, followed the request of the FBI to the letter. Now they are trying to say that another phone call is evidence of a felony when again, his exact words prove otherwise. Now they have indicted him for something that if a crime is even evident (and clearly it is not), the statute of limitations ran out years ago. They tried to argue he avoided paying taxes, only for the record to show he followed the tax code with precision. They want to argue now that he intends to defraud the government of what he owes in taxes, even though during his four years in public office, he refused his $400k salary and returned it in full to the government coffers.

No elected leader has been more maligned, lied about, and attempted to be neutralized as they have with former President Trump.

I was reflecting on some things over this somber holiday weekend. I am intrinsically interested in relooking at history and seeing what lessons we learn from it. Hence my thoughts scurried to the 2016 cycle, where this imminent fear of Trump created this panic in America’s political left. The ensuing desperation dragged them into the utter gutter of criminal political action. 

From Global Warming to Global Cooling to Global Warming Mark Lewis Mark Lewis

https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/04/10/from-global-warming-to-global-cooling-to-global-warming-n2621739

Here is an interesting quote: 

“Snows are less frequent and less deep.  They often do not lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days and very rarely a week.  They are remembered to be formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance.  The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months every year.  The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do now.  [This] change…in the spring of the year is very fatal to fruits…I remember that when I was a small boy, say 60 years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter.” 

That was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1799, before fossil fuels dominated the energy industry, and when the earth’s population was far smaller than it is today.  From all indications, there was indeed notable warming in the 18th century from the previous “Little Ice Age” period.  

But let’s move ahead to the 20th century.  The weather changes, of course, and Paul Ehrlich, who was always wrong about everything he ever said, told us in 1969, “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.”   Twenty years passed, no blue steam, people were still on the earth.  I guess we were lucky.  And Ehrlich was rich.

Global cooling was the craze then.  Here are a few representative quotes from the 1970s:

Boston Globe (1970): “Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century”

LA Times (Oct. 24, 1971): “New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder” 

Brown Science Dept. to the White House (1972): “Deep concern with the future of the world…falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age.”

What Happens To A Country That Loses Its Mind?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/11/what-happens-to-a-country-that-loses-its-mind/

To see biological males win “woman of the year” awards and others compete against women in sports, and at least one paid to promote sports bras, it’s obvious the American mind has slipped a few gears. But our current troubles are about more than celebrating what is clearly a mental illness that needs to be treated. We have lost our way almost entirely across the board.

The locus of our insanity, one could argue, is Washington, D.C. The federal government developed a habit long ago of spending beyond its means. But the foolishness has reached new levels.

The federal debt is heading to $31.7 trillion like a freight train at full throttle with no brakes. Spending is outpacing revenue by more than $1.5 trillion. Social Security is headed for collapse sooner than its appointed guardians had expected, but the collective vision among our “leaders” on the Potomac doesn’t go beyond the next election. So nothing is done.

Despite the obvious problems, the Democrats want to tax higher and spend more. The supply of vacuity seems endless.

Washington is also at the axis of weaponized government. Free speech is being crushed, dissent from the left’s political agenda is considered an imprisonable offense, and court rulings are to be ignored if they offend progressive sensibilities (yes, we know, two words that don’t belong together). The Democrats see the IRS not as just a revenue collector but also as a truncheon with which to discipline those who refuse to live under their boots. Parents who grouse at school board meetings? They are of course terrorists who must be watched.

It’s no coincidence that we’re living in riotous times. The damage seems to build with every news cycle. But to listen to the Democrats and their communications department, also known as the mainstream media, the only riot in U.S. history was on Jan. 6, 2021. In their twisted minds, rampaging, killing, burning and looting in the name of George Floyd, or some imagined resistance to fascism, are just benign elements of mostly peaceful protests. Democrats have even contributed money to bail out the “protesters.”

Wartime Intelligence Leaks Can Sink Allies If Ukraine’s air defenses are now at risk, the U.S. bears some of the blame.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/classified-document-leak-russia-ukraine-war-offensive-u-s-intelligence-dfda36c9?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The leak of classified U.S. documents related to the Ukraine war looks like a debacle at many levels—undermining the confidence of allies in the U.S., revealing how much the U.S. knows about Russia’s military deliberations, and above all betraying the weakness of Ukrainian air defenses.

The source of the leak isn’t known, which is disconcerting on its own. The documents first appeared on social media, and the press hasn’t been able to verify their authenticity. But the obvious alarm among U.S. officials suggests that much of the leaked intelligence is accurate. The Justice Department and Pentagon began a criminal investigation last week, for what that is worth.

The leaks are especially damaging because they disclose secret U.S. judgments about the progress of the war. It’s not the same as betraying the location of troop movements, but it’s close. The disclosure of how much the U.S. knows about Russian military plans could be a death sentence for sources in Russia.

The most troubling leak is that Ukraine’s air defenses could be defeated by May, which would give Russia air superiority and a huge tactical advantage. The Kremlin hoped air dominance would help it achieve an early victory, but Ukrainian air defenses held up well against the initial assaults.