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January 2024

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Anti-Israel Hooligans Have Lost the Plot Judson Berger

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-anti-israel-hooligans-have-lost-the-plot/

Sooner or later, the anti-Israel agitators will start throwing soup and mashed potatoes at things.

Their antics lately have made as much sense as those of the Just Stop Oil and copycat climate activists, around that point when they decided it was better to piss people off with befuddling stunts (soup, potatoes) while posing obviously false choices to society (e.g., What’s more important to you, the planet or a Van Gogh?) than earnestly advocate their position.

The position of those cheering on Hamas has been heinous from the start. But when they marched on America’s campuses and downtowns with placards declaring “By any means necessary” and “Resistance is justified,” their cause and purpose were painfully clear. Not so today. They began to veer into absurdity last month, when demonstrators marched on a Philadelphia falafel shop co-owned by an Israeli-born chef and accused its kitchen of genocide (incidentally, I visited said falafel shop last week and could find no evidence of the Zionist conspiracy, only perfectly composed hummus). Then during the holiday stretch, demonstrators scrambled to block traffic outside major airports, including New York’s JFK and Chicago’s O’Hare. This, while protesters tried (and failed) to disrupt Christmas itself. Caroline Downey reported on statements made at one New York rally, which we can largely recognize as being composed of English words but read like the output of an exhausted AI bot trained on Daily Stormer content:

“Zionism is antisemitic,” one attendee at the march said. “Hamas, and long live the resistance.”

Whatever you say.

Then there was, as Jay Nordlinger flagged, the effort to target retailer Zara and accuse it of complicity in, again, genocide over an ad campaign that supposedly evoked scenes of Gaza destruction — but didn’t actually, considering the campaign was conceived and put together before the war began. The episode was ridiculous, both at the time and in hindsight. Any logical cohesion behind anti-Israel protesters’ actions could be seen fraying then and there, any core purpose spitting out strands of severed sense like rubber from a fresh-cut balata golf ball. Fast-forward to the end of December, and Jimmy Quinn finds protesters in New York City flat-out endorsing an Iran-backed terrorism campaign:

“Yemen, Yemen, make us proud. Turn another ship around!” is the newest protest chant heard during anti-Israel marches in New York City, clearly referring to the attacks that the country’s Houthi rebels have launched against shipping vessels in the Red Sea.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program is Accelerating Because of Joe Biden As we approach the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Middle East will become more unstable, and Iran will get closer to having a nuclear weapon. Fred Fleitz

By on January 6th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/05/irans-nuclear-weapons-program-is-accelerating-because-of-joe-biden/

According to a new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, Iran increased the rate of its production of near weapons-grade uranium (60% uranium-235) in late November 2023. This increase ended a slowdown of Iran’s 60% uranium enrichment that began in mid-2023 and increased the number of nuclear weapons it could theoretically make and the amount of time to construct them.

Iran’s recent ramp-up of uranium enrichment followed warnings last year that the number of nuclear weapons Iran could construct has become dangerously high.

A March 2023 assessment report by the Institute for Science and International Security indicated that Iran could enrich enough weapons-grade uranium (90% uranium-235) for one nuclear weapon in 12 days. In mid-November, the Institute assessed Iran was capable of making enough weapons-grade uranium “for six nuclear weapons in one month, eight in two months, ten in three months, eleven in four months, and twelve in five months.”

Iran enriching uranium beyond the 60% level is reportedly a red line for Israel and could trigger Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Although it is not clear whether or when Iran will make the jump to weapons-grade enrichment, alarms were raised in mid-November that Iran has taken steps to prevent the IAEA from detecting just such a move when it barred the agency’s most experienced and expert inspectors from entering the country. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi called this “a serious blow” to his agency’s capability to conduct meaningful inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.

This means Iran could start enriching uranium to weapons-grade at any time without being detected.

If Iran took this step, any weapons-grade uranium it enriched would be in the form of a gaseous uranium compound that would need to be processed into uranium metal to fuel a nuclear weapon. This would take about a year. Iran would probably conduct one or two underground nuclear tests before adding a nuclear weapon to its arsenal. Any one of these moves could trigger Israeli airstrikes.

An Enormous Biden National Security Failure

The most damning element of this story is that Iran did not begin enriching uranium to near-weapons grade until Joe Biden became president.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Meets Anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley Cancelation of speaker Dan Kalb shows “how far down the slope we’ve descended.” by Lloyd Billingsley

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/cancel-culture-meets-anti-semitism-at-uc-berkeley/

In the wake of 10/7, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Ivy League universities have been taking heat for campus anti-Semitism. That has also been going on at UC Berkeley, once known as a bastion of free speech. Consider the case of Dan Kalb, an Oakland city councilman and climate activist.

On November 21, Kalb was slated to address undergraduates in an Environmental Problem Solving course, a class he had addressed before. This time, pro-Hamas students responded with a letter stating:

As an Oakland City Council member with a platform advocating for environmental and social justice, affordable housing, and universal access to health care, among other things, it is utterly disappointing and hypocritical for someone of your esteem to be in support of the apartheid state of Israel and the current and ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Students attacked Kalb for his “active role in retweeting and spreading pro-Israeli propaganda, which often equates pro-Palestinian voices as ‘anti-Semitic.’” The letter made no mention of Hamas atrocities, now acknowledged even by the New York Times. Adjunct professor Kurt Spreyer, instructor of the course, told Kalb the students might disrupt the class, so it was better that he not appear.

“If someone wants to go speak about climate change — they are an expert on climate change — what the hell does Israel or Zionism have to do with that?” Kalb told the Jewish News of Northern California. “Why not put a yellow star on our sleeve? How about we do that too?”

Kalb had been “condemning the murderous Hamas terrorists repeatedly,” and in his view “Hamas must be unequivocally condemned and, if possible, dismantled so this never happens again.” When Kalb saw people denying evidence of Hamas atrocities, he said, “That’s not anti-Zionism. That’s anti-Semitism,” and that problem “apparently is not exclusive to the law school.” In fact, UC Berkeley is being sued by Jewish groups and students over “longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism.”

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Owen Jones, Palestinian Patsy Britain’s most famous media commentator is also one of its leading apologists for terror. by Bruce Bawer

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/owen-jones-palestinian-patsy/

I think it’s fair to say that few if any countries in the free world have a legacy media whose leading organs are more thoroughly corrupt than America’s – more devoted, that is, to obediently parroting the deep state’s mendacious left-wing narrative than to the nowadays quaint-sounding goal of uncovering and telling the truth without fear or favor. That said, however, Britain’s establishment news media do have their own distinct deficiencies. While they exhibit rather more ideological variation than their U.S. counterparts – few major U.S. dailies are as far apart politically as, say, the Telegraph is from the Guardian, or the Mail from the Morning Star – the British media possess a peculiarity all their own: to a perplexing extent, their most influential commentators are unusually callow and shallow.

The epitome of this type – and perhaps the single most influential journalist in the U.K. – is Owen Jones. He’s 39, but he looks 29, and – when holding forth on TV, which he often does when not scribbling his weekly column for the Guardian – he sounds barely 19. The son and grandson of card-carrying Communists, he was graduated from Oxford in 2007 and, within a frighteningly short period of time, became a big deal on Fleet Street – not because he’s deeply learned or preternaturally wise or possessed of an unusual felicity of expression, but because, good heavens, the lad can always be counted on to deliver precisely the kind of goods the Guardian and its readers want. (Prior to the Guardian, incidentally, Jones was with the Independent.) His prejudices are simple and clear: he hates capitalism, he hates America, he hates Israel. He buys the whole transgender ideology package; back in the day, he even supported Sinn Fein. He was six when Margaret Thatcher left office, but he has all the right opinions about her. And his sympathy for Muslims – who, in his view, are innocent victims of vile Western bigotry, period – is beyond measure, even though, as a gay man, he’d be subject to capital punishment in at least a half dozen Islamic countries.

Jones has been repeatedly confronted with this self-contradiction, and he’s repeatedly refused to address it honestly.  And while he’s quick to accuse his fellow Brits of “Islamophobia” and of “demonizing migrants” – and we’re talking here, mind you, about “migrants” who’ve abused the welfare system and sent crime rates skyrocketing, and who tell pollsters that they’d rather live under sharia than under democracy – he’s never used his pulpit (as far as I can determine) to draw attention to the mass extermination of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists, and, yes, apostate Muslims in the Islamic world. As for the Muslim “grooming gangs” that have raped tens of thousands of English girls over a period of decades, Jones has dismissed that entire vast reality as a Big Lie propounded by right-wing racists.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard—Out the Frying Pan Into the Fire-Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 6th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/harvard-out-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire/

Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.

Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.

But Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.

In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.

Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop anti-Semitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism.

Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.

One, Gay’s meager publication record—a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own—had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Instead, both plead “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities—except apparently white males and Jews.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Unrepentant DEI at MIT The diversity ideology marches on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unrepentant-dei-at-mit

MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced on Wednesday that the university would soon reveal its inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion (VPEI). If one wanted evidence of the disconnect between university culture and the outside world, Kornbluth’s announcement provides it.

Since October 7, universities have been the focus of nearly unprecedented public attention, triggered by student and faculty support for the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Alumni from schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania charged their universities with complicity in anti-Semitism and demanded that Jews be included in the roster of “marginalized” groups protected by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.

Eventually, however, it dawned on the rebellious donors that the DEI complex was not the solution to perceived anti-Semitism but part of the problem, since the DEI apparatus enforces the progressive world view that the West (now embodied by Israel) is unremittingly racist, colonialist, and oppressive.  The alumni demand for adding “anti-Semitism training” to the DEI portfolio of “anti-hate trainings” turned into its opposite: a demand that the DEI apparatus be shut down entirely. (Harvard donor Bill Ackman’s conversion in this regard has been unusually public.)

It’s been hard to miss this new consensus among university critics. National and state legislators, governors, and other public figures have called for the elimination of DEI administrations. Denunciation of the equity and inclusion bureaucracy is now part of every call to reform of the post–October 7 university—to the point that left-wing defenders of the university are railing against what they view as conservatives’ exploitation of the Hamas campus crisis to defund essential diversity initiatives.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Joe Biden’s extremist spending is a danger to the US

By on January 6th, 2024

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4389558-joe-bidens-extremist-spending-is-a-danger-to-the-us/

Joe Biden says “Extreme Maga Republicans” want to wreck the economy by cutting federal spending. And yet, it is his administration’s blowout budgets that are extreme. Never in this country’s history, with the exception of two emergencies — World War II and COVID — have we spent taxpayer money so recklessly. 

Consider: in just the past three months, the federal debt of the United States jumped by $1 trillion. The U.S. now owes $34 trillion, up from $33 trillion at the end of September. For reference, it took 198 years of borrowing for the government to rack up its first trillion dollars of debt; that milestone was first reached in 1981.   

Putting that gargantuan figure in context, debt held by the public in 1981 amounted to about 25 percent of GDP; today’s debt amounts to more than 100 percent of GDP. Our debt is bigger than the entire economy of every single country in the world but the U.S. and China. 

The Peterson Foundation further puts our debt in perspective, noting that “$34 trillion is enough to cover a public four-year degree for every graduating high-school student for 106 years.”  

This should worry everyone. There’s a reason that Fitch Ratings downgraded United States’ credit rating from “AAA” to “AA+” last year, several years after S&P made the same decision. The last ratings agency still awarding U.S. debt its platinum rating is Moody’s; last year they lowered the outlook to “negative” from “stable,” citing a drop in “debt affordability.”    

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Note From the Campaign Trail First stop: Iowa Matt Taibbi

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.racket.news/p/note-from-the-campaign-trail

SIOUX CITY, IA — I’ve done this gig so many times I have Pavlovian reactions to certain airports, but having never flown here, I didn’t know Sioux City’s three-letter code is SUX. That’s the name of the car that raged-out ex-councilman Ron Miller demands when he takes the Detroit mayor hostage in Robocop. “I want something with reclining leather seats that goes really fast and gets really shitty gas mileage,” he shouts, Uzi in hand.

“How about a 6000 SUX?” a police captain bullhorns back. Miller likes it, but wants cruise control. “I want a recount!” he yells, stepping over bodies. “And no matter how it turns out, I want my old job back!” So the story connects. Who’d have thought?

Anyway, Sioux City’s cool, just never came this way.

I started covering presidential campaigns in 2004. The problem then was the events were fake. Candidate speeches were market-tested piles of words designed to attract the statistical middle of the middle. In post-event asides, aides pretended to socialize and fed you rehearsed spiels over beers about their candidate’s path to victory. Everything was canned. A memory that stands out is plastic clumps of grass scotch-taped to reporters’ seats on Howard Dean’s “grassroots express” charter. It was hard to divine much, traveling in that mechanized sales hell.

Now things are reversed. Reality is altered before you leave the house. Challengers are censored or deamplified, the incumbent “brushes off” debates, vote counts are shady (what’s with Iowa Democrats waiting until Super Tuesday to announce caucus results?), and even ballots are curated. Coverage of everyone but the President and whoever’s currently pushed as the “viable” Republican alternative to you-know-who (“Could Haley Beat Trump? Big Donors are Daring to Dream,” writes the New York Times) is a desert of lies and hit jobs. Even public reaction is edited. A controversial guest essay by lefty legal scholar Samuel Moyn in the Times arguing the Supreme Court should vote 9-0 to return Trump to the Colorado ballot appears devoid of approving comments. I could buy most disapproving, but it looks more like all. Who can tell, without checking for yourself, where public sentiment is now?

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Crimes And Misdemeanors

By on January 6th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/05/climate-crimes-and-misdemeanors/

There is no evidence, only speculation, that human emissions of greenhouse gases are overheating Earth. Despite this, there’s a growing movement to prosecute and incarcerate those who violate the rules set down by the climate zealots. It’s as if the Spanish Inquisition has changed the definition of heresy so that those who have a healthy skepticism of the global warming claims are now the targets of the office of the tribunal.

In jolly old England, “​​property owners who don’t comply with new energy rules may face prison,” says the London Telegraph. “Ministers want to grant powers to create new criminal offenses and increase penalties as part of efforts to hit net zero targets,” the Telegraph continues. “​​Under the proposals, people who fall foul of regulations to reduce their energy consumption could face up to a year in prison and fines of up to” nearly $19,000 in U.S. dollars.
Three guest authors writing in CarbonBrief about “climate misinformation” said that justice for those who dare challenge the global warming narrative includes “bringing in a correction or a collaborative approach after the misinformation has been received, or even putting in place punishments, such as fines or imprisonment.”
Then there’s England’s lunatic Guardian newspaper. One of its climate correspondents has suggested “financial penalties or prison time” for oil company executives for their “40 years of lying about climate change,” as well as “the propagandists they’ve employed and the politicians they’ve funded” who so far “have largely escaped blame.”
The United Nations has wondered if “international criminal law” should “be used against those who promote this dangerous trend” of spreading “climate denial.”

Of course this nonsense isn’t new.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Summons the Furies in Iowa The former president knows his enemies’ lunacy makes his fans love him. So he encourages those enemies, who may end up re-electing him.Barton Swaim

By on January 6th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-summons-the-furies-in-iowa-caucus-primary-desantis-2024-bias-indictment-6cb3750a?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

It was around 1 p.m., and he was scheduled to speak at 6. I had just arrived and was hoping to get a bite before the event. But already some 200 people waited outside the Hyatt convention center in this Iowa City suburb. I feared the line would grow fast, and the campaign had stopped issuing media passes—claiming, credibly as it turned out, a lack of space. I got in line and spent the next several hours talking with Iowans who want to give Donald Trump a second term.

Whether they’ll all caucus for Mr. Trump on Jan. 15 is another question. Some significant minority of the people I spoke with can fairly be called fans of the former president who aren’t otherwise politically engaged. Several said they had rarely or never caucused before. None, however, said they’ll likely support some other candidate if Mr. Trump is on the ballot. People who come to hear Mr. Trump aren’t there to assess him but to see their guy and commune with each other.

The first thing you notice at a Trump rally is the paraphernalia. Four out of five people are wearing some Trump-themed item: red MAGA hats, hoodies and sweatshirts bearing the words “Trump vs. Everybody” and “We the People ARE PISSED,” hats answering “Yes, I’m a Trump girl. Get over it,” beanies with the number 47. In Coralville, these items could be purchased at stands manned by industrious entrepreneurs hoping to make a few bucks off a form of fandom as intense as you might find at a Taylor Swift concert.

By 3:30 the line stretched around the far end of the hotel and into an adjacent parking garage—I would guess 5,000 people. Clipboard-wielding campaign volunteers collected phone numbers; jolly peddlers hawked Trump-themed scarves and gloves; local TV reporters queried fans on their enthusiasm.

I happened to meet eyes with a lithe woman in her 70s, her mostly red attire festooned with Trump buttons. “How many of these haff you been to?” she asked in what sounded like a Swiss German accent. “Ziss is my 42nd!” On the bill of her MAGA hat were embroidered the words “Happy days are here again.”

Mr. Trump frequently derides his primary opponents, especially Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, and his crowds obligingly boo and gesture thumbs-down. But many people at Trump rallies speak favorably about Mr. DeSantis (less so Ms. Haley). What keeps most of them aligned with Mr. Trump is the left’s never-ending campaign to jail, disqualify or otherwise destroy him.

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