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December 2023

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China’s Increased Bullying of Philippines to Test US Resolve by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20259/china-bullying-philippines

Despite the allegedly warm atmosphere of the San Francisco Summit between China’s Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and US President Joseph Biden, the Chinese dictator reportedly told Biden, “that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China but that the timing has not yet been decided,” and “that China’s preference is to take Taiwan peacefully, not by force.”

It is clear that Xi is doubling down on his claim of sovereignty over almost all of the South China Sea, starting with Taiwan, and understands that he might have only a few “good” months left.

American and Chinese military leaders have communicated by video link on December 21, after a hiatus of more than a year. Hopefully, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown took the opportunity to raise the issue of China’s bullying of Philippine vessels in the South China Sea with his Chinese counterpart, General Li Shang-fu.

The latest aggressive move by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took place when a Chinese Coast Guard boat deluged three Philippine vessels with water cannon on December 9 and 10. This assault resulted in severe engine damage to one of the Philippine vessels necessitating it to be towed to home port.

Another vessel found itself rammed by a Chinese boat. That incident took place near the Second Thomas Shoal, an island in waters also claimed by China. CCP bullying in 2023 also included threatening maneuvers by Chinese ships against Philippine maritime exploration for hydrocarbons and natural gas, as well as frequent harassment of Filipino fishermen. In a more serious encounter in February 2023, a Chinese patrol boat lasered Filipino sailors. China’s maritime aggression against Philippine efforts to resupply a military contingent on a marooned vessel on an island in disputed waters of what Manila calls the West Philippine Sea.

China’s repeated targeting of the Philippines appears possibly related to Manila’s decision to grant the US expanded military presence in the Philippines, by granting the US military access to four additional air and naval facilities, raising the number to nine. The newly installed Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. reversed the his predecessor’s policy: appeasing China.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Hitler Wasn’t Available: New York Times Runs Article by Hamas Official Robert Spencer

By on December 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2023/12/25/hitler-wasnt-available-new-york-times-runs-article-by-hamas-official-n4925006

The New York Times wants you to weep for the people of Gaza, and for what Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, which Gazans cheered in large numbers, has brought upon them. In service of that goal, on Christmas Eve the Paper of Record ran a weepy piece by a prominent Gazan, someone who has witnessed the Israeli incursion firsthand. Did the Times give this plumb editorial space to a “moderate” Gazan, a known foe of the Hamas regime, one of those “innocent Palestinians” who have nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Hamas? Uh, not quite.

“I Am Gaza City’s Mayor. Our Lives and Culture Are in Rubble,” was written by Yahya R. Sarraj and published in the Times on Sunday. The Times identifies the author in terms that make him sound like an airy, inoffensive intellectual: “Dr. Sarraj is the mayor of Gaza City and a former rector of the University College of Applied Sciences there. He wrote from Gaza City.” 

Yahya R. Sarraj, you see, is no terrorist, he’s a mild-mannered professor. But what the Times doesn’t bother to remind its hapless readers about is the fact that Hamas controls Gaza, and no one can hold the position of being mayor of the largest city in the Gaza Strip without being either an active Hamas member or entirely sympathetic with the terror group’s outlook and goals. Sarraj even alludes to this matter-of-factly in his piece, writing: “One of my major goals after the Hamas administration appointed me mayor in 2019 was to improve the city’s seafront and foster the opening of small businesses along it to create jobs.”

Sarraj spends the bulk of his article doing his best to move the reader to rage against Israel. “As a teenager in the 1980s,” he says, “I watched the construction of the intricately designed Rashad al-Shawa Cultural Center in Gaza City, named after one of Gaza’s greatest public figures, and its theater, grand hall, public library, printing press and cultural salon.” 

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fight This Information War with KISSes By J.B. Shurk

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/fight_this_information_war_with_kisses.html

I believe in the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.  I do my best to boil events down to their essential truths and then hammer those truths again and again.  Repetition is my weapon of choice.

The reason I stick to this strategy has nothing to do with who is reading.  It has to do with the nature of the war we are already fighting.  Never before in human history have people been so bombarded by lies and propaganda from their own political leaders.  The information warfare that the U.S. government and other Western nations use against their own peoples is meant to conquer minds with direct programming instead of directed bullets.

How do you counter-program people who have been indoctrinated for years, if not decades?  You KISS them, so that they’ll KISS others, and a steady flow of simple truths can begin to crack the glass of our invisible cage.  The whole thing sounds quite dirty and promiscuous, but constantly reminding ourselves what is actually true in a blizzard of lies is an admirable pursuit.  Crafty French diplomat Talleyrand, who managed to keep his head through both the French Revolution and the reign of Napoleon, observed, “Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts.”  The Marxist globalists who use censorship and propaganda as shield and sword are Talleyrand’s ardent disciples.

The size of the information war being conducted against us is astounding, and because the formerly free press has been conquered and conditioned to support the State, news outlets willing to report the truth are few.  When the corporate news cartel controls 95% of the information flow and the Department of Homeland Security is effectively censoring the remaining 5%, it becomes essential for those of us who see this war as it really is to sound a little like broken records.  Using labels such as “Deep State,” “Uniparty,” “Marxist globalists,” “ruling class,” and “elites” is a form of subversive branding meant to align us against a common enemy.  “Make American Great Again” is more than a jingle or campaign slogan; it is an attempt to cut through artificial political divisions so that abused citizens can find common purpose.  Rejecting “woke” dogma, “political correctness,” and other Marxist distortions of truth is a form of mental armor that defends against the government’s unabating propaganda.  Repetition of simple truths must meet the repetition of outrageous lies head-on.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel in the Shadow of American Decline The real existential danger to Israel. David Goldman

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-in-the-shadow-of-american-decline/

Strictly speaking, Israel’s Gaza war is not a tragedy, but rather a hideous accident. Many wars wait for years to happen until they can’t be stopped. Those are the tragedies. This one never should have happened. Israeli intelligence had the plans for the October 7 Hamas attack a year in advance, as well as urgent warnings from lower-echelon officers just before the event. But the top military and political leadership brushed them off.

This fits a venerable pattern. Stalin had the plans for Operation Barbarossa from his spy Victor Sorge; U.S. Naval Intelligence had warnings about the attack on Pearl Harbor; and the FBI had the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of 9/11, but failed to fit them together. Intelligence services are not rewarded for timely warnings, but for serving their masters’ political agendas, and Israel’s fabled spies turned out to be no different than their counterparts in other countries. Believing that $40 million a month in subsidies from Qatar and other economic concessions would keep Hamas quiet, the Israeli government refused to consider anything else.

There simply is no contest between 300,000 regular troops from the Israel Defense Forces and 30,000 to 40,000 lightly armed Hamas irregulars, any more than there was a contest between ISIS and the American army and its proxies. Whether Hamas is entirely or largely extirpated from Gaza depends on the extent to which Israel can resist American pressure to vitiate its operations. The outcome will not be much different in any case. Whatever happens, most of Gaza’s two million residents will spend the next couple of years in tent camps while the rest of the world dickers about what to do with them. Their living conditions will be similar to those of the more than 200,000 Jewish refugees who lived in tent cities for up to two years after they were expelled from Arab countries following the 1948 war.

For all the horrors of the October 7 attacks, they did not constitute an existential crisis for a country with the region’s most powerful military and an extraordinary capacity for national solidarity in the face of external threat.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Power of Deterrence is Disappearing Only one thing will restore it. by Bruce Thornton

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-power-of-deterrence-is-disappearing/

Since the savage attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, one of Iran’s terrorist proxies, the Houthi, have launched drones and ballistic missiles 100 times against our military and commercial shipping in the Red Sea, through which 10% of global trade passes. Twenty-five crewmen of one ship have been held hostage for over a month.

The U.S., with two Carrier Battle Groups in the region, has not responded with significant force, content to play defense by knocking down missiles and drones, but not destroying the launch sites, stores of missiles and drones, or other military assets. Such hesitation bespeaks in part a fear of “escalation,” a scare-word redolent of the appeasing “Vietnam syndrome.” But why aren’t Iran and its proxies afraid to escalate against an enemy many orders of magnitude more powerful?

Of course, we all know that electoral political calculations are hamstringing the Biden team, already fretting over the president’s tanking poll numbers and the Biden family pay-to-play scandals circling the DNC like buzzards. But to restore our power of deterrence, we must start destroying military assets, especially Iran’s, the funder and director of several terrorist groups responsible for most of the region’s mayhem.

These attacks by Iran’s proxies, moreover, are not spurred by outrage over the Israelis’ existence or right to defend themselves. They are opportunistic tactical moves against the U.S. and the West, and their “rules-based international order” that protects global trade and security. Iran and its new BFFs Russia and China are exposing the West’s weaknesses and failure of nerve.

It’s also showing the rest of the world that their triumvirate of tyranny is a better bet to take over global hegemony than suicidal Western nations that skimp on defence spending, splurge on redistributing money, obsess over apocalyptic “climate change,” and dismantle its vital energy industry that provides cheap, abundant fossil fuels.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

It’s DEI or Bust for the American College of Surgeons By Richard T. Bosshardt

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/its-dei-or-bust-for-the-american-college-of-surgeons/

The organization has launched a diversity, equity, and inclusion tool kit to ‘help’ doctors, advocating principles that have no place in medicine.

America’s surgeons are not woke enough, according to the American College of Surgeons (ACS). Such is the message of the leadership to fellows of the ACS. In a previous column on this site, I described how the ACS doubled down on anti-racism and DEI at its annual Clinical Congress in Boston this October with courses in its educational program for surgeons. To underscore its ongoing commitment to anti-racism and DEI, the ACS just launched its DEI Toolkit and continues to promote this ideology as though its life depended on it.

To say this is puzzling is an understatement, especially given recent trends. Diversity, equity, and inclusion departments throughout the country are being shut down, DEI administrators are being handed their walking papers, and the ideologies of anti-racism and DEI are being increasingly recognized for their illiberal, divisive, and fraudulent nature. Take anti-racism. Even Ibram X. Kendi, who coined the term, is incapable of defining this in a coherent manner. When asked to define anti-racism, he offered: “Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies leading to racial equity that are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” This is a classic circular argument that no critically thinking person would accept.

And, yet, the American College of Surgeons has grabbed onto the ideology of structural racism and just won’t let go. After embracing anti-racism and DEI in 2020 and promoting the ideologies at the 2023 annual Clinical Congress in October, the leadership of the ACS is seeking to further embed anti-racism and DEI in the college and into surgical practices. The tool kit is an exhaustive, some might say exhausting, compilation of everything related to pushing the narrative of systemic and structural racism as the source of disparities including minority representation within the ACS and clinical outcomes in minority surgical patients. If it promotes anti-racism and DEI, it is in the tool kit. Time and space do not permit a thorough dissection of the entire tool kit, but a few examples will suffice to demonstrate the profound ideological tone.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Leftists Scratch Their Heads As More Abandon Their Ranks

By on December 27th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/27/leftists-scratch-their-heads-as-more-abandon-their-ranks/

The only thing more uplifting than watching several prominent liberals drift rightward is the cluelessness of those on the left as to why it’s happening.

This drift is obvious enough, since it includes journalists once heralded by the left such as Matt Taibbi (who won a Young America’s Foundation award) and Glenn Greenwald, and Democratic politicians, including Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (whose speech at a Daily Caller award ceremony drew many loud cheers from the conservative audience), and Sen. John Fetterman (who recently declared that “I am not a progressive”).

Celebrities such as Russell Brand, David Chappelle, and Bill Maher (who “has been riding an asphalt roller over the far left,” according to Townhall) are part of the shift, as are a handful of prominent business leaders, Elon Musk for instance.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that surveys show once tried-and-true liberal constituencies – Hispanics, Asians, blacks, working class, and the young – are abandoning the Democratic party.

It’s not as though these people are suddenly small-government conservatives. They just are waking up to the fact that the left is a cesspool of hatred and intolerance and are looking for the exits.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

American Schools and Foreign Money A House bill, the Deterrent Act, seeks more disclosure about donations from overseas.

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-money-american-universities-congress-higher-education-china-russia-3e0c099d?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Congress is debating how to address the intellectual corruption of America’s elite universities, and one idea is to require that academic institutions disclose funding from U.S. adversaries.

The House this month passed the Deterrent Act, 246-170, to shine a light on the billions of dollars that flow from foreign entities to U.S. colleges and universities. Some donations are well-intentioned, but China’s Communist Party and others have used money as a lever to push propaganda, filch research, and censor free exchange. Often the terms of these cash infusions are confidential.

Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires schools that receive federal funds to report twice a year to the Education Department any gifts from, and contracts with, a foreign source of more than $250,000 a year. But the statute’s loose language—and lack of enforcement—has led institutions to ignore the rules.

A 2019 report by a Senate Homeland Security subcommittee found that foreign-government spending on U.S. schools was “effectively a black hole.” It drilled into the Chinese government’s sponsorship of more than 100 Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses. These programs are funded, controlled and largely staffed by a branch of China’s Ministry of Education known as Hanban.

The report found that “nearly 70 percent of U.S. schools that received more than $250,000 from Hanban failed to properly report that amount” to DOE. Most Confucius institutes on campus have since been closed.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The DEI Rollback of 2023 States start to limit programs that sow racial and political division.

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dei-wisconsin-oklahoma-state-universities-88ecc684?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on campus has proliferated in recent years, but there are signs it’s finally meeting resistance. The latest good news is from Wisconsin, where public universities will pare back some DEI programs and freeze them going forward.

Under a deal shaped by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state approved $800 million in pay raises for university staff and for plans to build a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. In exchange, the university will freeze all DEI hiring, eliminate a third of DEI positions on campus, and create an endowed chair to teach “conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism” at UW Madison. At least now there will be one conservative.

That’s a step forward at a school that has as many DEI staffers as history professors, according to Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation. The DEI infrastructure is entrenched, but after an initial negative vote and negotiations, the UW Board of Regents approved the deal 11-6.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called the deal “obnoxious” and “B.S.,” according to WISN-TV. But lawmakers have an obligation to taxpayers not to fund policies that practice racial favoritism or promote hostility to equal opportunity.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Endangers U.S. Troops Three more American service members are hurt, as U.S. bases became enemy drone catchers.

By on December 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-troops-injured-iraq-iran-houthis-strike-biden-administration-4773fa27?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

It was going to happen sooner or later: American service members would be seriously hurt as Iran-backed militias conduct lethal target practice against U.S. bases in the Middle East. When will President Biden do his duty as Commander in Chief and protect Americans deployed abroad?

Iranian proxies have attacked U.S. forces in the Middle East about 100 times since October, and on Monday an explosive drone made it past U.S. defenses at a base in Iraq. Two Americans were wounded and a third is in critical condition.

The Administration conducted retaliatory strikes on three facilities used by Kataib Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy group responsible for the attack. Defense secretary Lloyd Austin issued a statement saying his “prayers” are with the wounded. Which is nice, but Mr. Austin isn’t a chaplain. The U.S. defense chief’s job is to deter such attacks and defend his troops from being too-easy targets for Shiite militias.

The White House response was worse. The National Security Council’s Adrienne Watson issued a statement announcing the reprisal and insisted that the “President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way.”

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