Displaying posts published in

March 2024

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Zone of Disinterest at the Oscars Josh Levs

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.newsweek.com/zone-disinterest-oscars-opinion-1878405

When a British writer-director accepted an Oscar Sunday night for Zone of Interest, a fictional movie set against a backdrop of the very real Holocaust, he showed that his own grasp of reality is dangerously lacking.

In repugnant, victim-blaming remarks, Jonathan Glazer said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of Oct. 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza.”

Note to Glazer: No one is hijacking your Jewishness or the Holocaust. That idea is an antisemitic myth popular among some deluded people who call themselves “progressive.” It’s a myth that fuels terrorism and attacks on Jews all over the world.

The differences between the real world and the imaginary one that Glazer described could not be more stark. In his imaginary world, an “occupation” somehow “led to” the October 7 terrorist attacks. In the real world, Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, and the Palestinian Authority has long controlled Palestinian areas of the West Bank. Hamas, backed by Iran, carried out the most unimaginably evil terrorist attacks of modern times because years of brainwashing children in UNRWA-backed schools and training them to seek Jihad have created a radicalized population that celebrates the slaughter of Jews with candy and fireworks.

In Glazer’s imaginary world, the Holocaust is “hijacked.” In the real world, Jews (the people of Judea) have spent centuries trying to return to Israel, their indigenous homeland that they were expelled from by empires—long before the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were killed. The largest population in Israel is made up of Jews who had to flee Arab nations (not Europe) for their lives, losing everything.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islam in…Iceland? Allah’s final frontier. by Bruce Bawer

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/islam-iniceland/

I’ve been writing about Islam in Europe for a quarter century, but I’ve never written a word about Islam in Iceland, and at one point I was naive enough to believe that I would never have to. Pretty much everywhere else you go in Western Europe these days, there’s at least a hint of an Islamic presence and hence, to at least some degree, a sense of being in the presence of a hostile and alien threat. It was never like that in Iceland. In no other Western European urban center have I ever felt as safe as I have in Reykjavik. It’s a clean, charming city of 120,000 in a remote island country of 370,000, and until recently virtually everybody there was Icelandic. It’s like one big family – except it’s not really that big. When I walked the streets, at any time of day or night, the sense of security was palpable; indeed, it was less like wandering around a city than like wandering through the comfortable (if chilly) rooms of a well-secured home. There are high-trust societies and there are low-trust societies; Iceland was as high-trust as you can imagine. And a big part of the reason for that was the extremely low level of immigration – especially Muslim immigration.

Well, that’s over. No, that feeling of security hasn’t disappeared overnight; but it’s definitely taken a hit. On March 7, a session of the Allting – Iceland’s parliament – was interrupted by three foreign men in the visitors’ gallery who have apparently settled illegally in the country and who, in a language that was clearly not Icelandic, shouted out demands that the government provide them with homes, residency permits, and a right to be joined in Iceland by their families. (If they’re this arrogant when there are so few of them, what would it be like if their relatives – and their relatives, and their relatives – came and joined them?) One of the three, who was barechested – not a common sight in Iceland, except, of course, at one of the country’s highly popular geothermal spas – climbed up onto a railing and seemed to be preparing to leap down onto the floor of the chamber, or perhaps, alarmingly, onto one of the legislators.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

When the Moon Turns Red: China’s Plan to Annex Space by Gordon G. Chang

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20480/china-russia-moon-base

“Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.” — Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, to the author, March 2014.

The free world should view Chinese and Russian progress with alarm. China’s regime, for instance, has made it clear it intends to annex space.

Ye Peijian made it clear that Beijing intends to exclude others from the moon, among other places, if it is in a position to do so.

The American-led Artemis program also contemplates a base at the south pole. NASA, unfortunately, has been pushing back Artemis timetables.

Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits “national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means,” but when has a treaty obligation ever stopped the People’s Republic from doing whatever it wants?

China, with Russia’s help, wants to build a base on the moon.

If the Chinese regime succeeds in building the first facility there, it will try to deny to others the ability to land on the lunar surface. The People’s Republic of China in fact intends to annex the near parts of the solar system.

As Richard Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Center pointed out to this author, Chinese control of the moon would confer control of Cis-Lunar space, the portion of space between the Earth and the moon. Control of Cis-Lunar space would give a country the ability to shoot down or otherwise disable deep-space satellites, which are essential for, among other things, the early warning of ballistic missile attacks.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Leftist language lies By Eileen Kilgore

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/leftist_language_lies.html

“If you doubt me, consider B4U-ACT, a non-profit defined as therapists, researchers, and “MAPs” who “promote a science-informed understanding about people… with an attraction to children or adolescents.” What are MAPs? Minor-Attracted Persons, AKA child molesters. ”

For those on the Left, words aren’t simply a way to communicate, they’re a means to an end. The liberal agenda is to use language to manipulate and obfuscate, and they are very good at it. The result? Nothing is concrete. Even “truth” is relative. It no longer points to facts but opinion.

Leftists dislike black and white. It’s all about gray. They call conservatives and Christians intolerant, saying their moral beliefs aren’t “inclusive.” Last month 26 House Democrats sent an angry letter to Speaker Mike Johnson about pastor Jack Hibbs’ Jan. 30th prayer to Congress. In the letter, Hibbs was called a “racist Christian nationalist” with “a long record of spewing hateful vitriol toward non-Christians, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community.”

Liberals are for tolerance except for those on the right, who aren’t allowed to speak. There is no such thing as “let’s agree to disagree.” Tell a liberal you don’t support gay marriage, the LGBT or abortion rights and their heads will explode. Why? Because to them there is one truth — theirs — and to prove it, they will even change language.

It has been going on for years: Illegal alien to illegal immigrant to undocumented worker to migrant. Gay pride to pride. Sexual preference to sexual orientation. Transexual to transgender. Liberal to progressive.

Continue reading →
MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The NIH Sacrifices Scientific Rigor for DEI Its First program pushes institutions to hire medical researchers based on their ideological commitment. John Sailer

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nih-sacrifices-scientific-rigor-for-dei-f828a6c7?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.”

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.

The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements” for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley. It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico, which I discussed in these pages. Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.

That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

Continue reading →
HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden Shrinks the U.S. Military The President’s Pentagon budget reveals the armed forces in a state of managed decline.

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-defense-budget-pentagon-u-s-military-china-russia-israel-ukraine-ba7fd46b?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden opened his State of the Union address last week invoking Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941. This week he rolled out a military budget fit for 1991, the twilight of the Cold War. Will Congress step up to defend the country amid compounding threats?

The President’s $850 billion request for the Pentagon in 2025 is a mere 1% increase over 2024. That’s a cut after inflation, the fourth in a row Mr. Biden has proposed. What’s happened in the past year? Israel was brutally attacked and is now fighting a war for survival. Iranian proxies have fired drones and rockets at U.S. troops in the region more than 100 times, and its terrorists in Yemen have taken a global shipping lane hostage.

Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a bloody slog that he could still win. North Korea is ratcheting up its belligerence toward South Korea, which the U.S. is bound to defend. China announced recently a 7.2% increase in defense spending. One recent think-tank report estimates Beijing is fielding high-end equipment five to six times faster than the U.S.

Mr. Biden thinks this is an acceptable moment to put American defenses on a diet, and the Administration says it’s merely complying with budget caps negotiated last year with Congress. Yet few priorities escaped the axe.

The U.S. Army will contract, and not because America is relying less on land forces, which are in high demand in Europe and the Middle East. The Army is asking for 442,300 troops, though the Biden Administration requested 485,000 as recently as 2022. The healthier number for the missions required is 500,000. Shrinking the force is no substitute for fixing the underlying problem, which is a struggle to find recruits.

The U.S. Navy will purchase only six ships and retire 10 early, which would shrink the fleet to 287 ships in 2025 from 296 today. Perhaps the most egregious choice is the Administration’s decision to purchase only one Virginia-class attack submarine, instead of a planned two.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Gaslight The Public About The Disastrous Biden Transcripts

By on March 13th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/13/media-gaslight-the-public-about-the-disastrous-biden-transcripts/

Soon after the transcripts of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden were released, the mainstream press — as though handed talking points by the White House — said they weren’t nearly as bad as Hur had made them out to seem in his report.

“Paints a nuanced portrait,” says the Washington Post. “Transcript shows nuance,” says The Hill. “The interview transcript is more complicated,” says the Associated Press. “Shows memory lapses, but also detailed exchanges,” says NBC News.

CBS News even dismissed evidence of dementia — “Biden appears to be reaching for words he cannot find. Twice, the phrase ‘fax machine’ eludes him, and he confuses Iraq and Afghanistan for Iran” — by saying that such “missteps appear to be common lapses for Mr. Biden who for years has struggled with names and dates in public speaking engagements.”

So, you see, no problem here.

But read the transcript yourself. It’s not “complicated,” or “nuanced.” As we suspected, it provides the perfect context for Hur’s contention that Biden is an old man with memory problems.

For example, we counted 37 instances where Biden says “I don’t remember” during his interviews with Hur. That’s a lot of nuance.

The transcript also shows that Biden flat-out lied to the public about Hur bringing up Beau’s death, or that Hur asked him when he died. What actually transpired should be deeply troubling to anyone who cares about the nation.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bari Weiss: The Holiday from History Is Over A free society is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it. Reflections and videos from my time on the ground in Israel.

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/bari-weiss-the-holiday-from-history-is-over?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPT:

Like everyone paying close attention to this war, I am thinking about the future or death of the two-state solution. I am thinking about Hezbollah in the north and when that front might explode. I am thinking about the impossibility of a nuclear Iran. I am thinking about the Red Sea and Rafah and the young men setting out to those places. I am thinking about the innocents killed in Gaza. I am thinking about the women and children trapped there by terrorist leaders and the kidnapped Israelis still held there—all of them hostages. 

But the questions that echo inside me since I returned home—flying from a country living inside history to a country where many people believe we are still outside of it, immune to it—are more basic ones.

Questions like: What would I do? What would the people I know do if we were thrust into a near-death experience? If we had to fight for homes and our families, and the homes and families of our fellow citizens? The kind of seriousness I saw in ordinary Israelis—where does it come from? Does courage emerge spontaneously out of necessity? Or is there a quiet wellspring inside some people or some cultures waiting to be tapped? Do we have that here in America? Would we answer the call if it came? Or would we be like the Americans in this recent poll who admitted that they would flee rather than fight? 

Those are questions whose relevance grows more urgent by the day for those of us living in the free world.

I asked Haviv Gur if he thinks that a similar waking-up moment will come for America and Americans.

“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there was a long period of time when there was nothing in the Pacific that could have stopped a Japanese landing in California. And that sense of vulnerability created what Americans still today think of as the greatest generation,” Gur said. “Everyone should feel safe all the time. But crisis is a powerful and profound and often extraordinarily positive influence on our lives.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hannah E. Meyers Second Thoughts in New York Facing community pressure, some progressive black leaders are reevaluating their soft-on-crime positions.

By on March 13th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/second-thoughts-in-new-york

When David Soares was elected district attorney in 2004 in Albany County, New York, he enjoyed united support on the left; even the radical Working Families Party had endorsed him. A childhood immigrant from Africa, Soares doesn’t lack for “lived experience.” Over nearly 19 years in office, he’s consistently backed progressive criminal-justice reforms. But Soares is now demoralized, seemingly near tears when he tells me that no one will talk about the victims of violence, who—in Albany, as in New York City—are disproportionately young black men.

As DA, Soares has seen firsthand the role that 2017’s Raise the Age law, which significantly scaled back punishments for 16- and 17-year-old criminal offenders, played in worsening crime. Since that law passed, youth gun crime statewide has doubled—and youth gun victimization has nearly tripled. About 75 percent of violent felony cases now get handled in family court, which returns teens to the streets, where they often commit new crimes or become victims themselves of tit-for-tat gang warfare. “We witnessed the murder of a young man at the hands of another young man that had gone through the family court Raise the Age process . . . a minimum of three times,” Soares told local legislators in July. “This was a system that was never designed to handle or deal with violent—super, super violent—youth.”

Legislators have responded to his alarm with vitriol. Earlier this year, the New York State Senate’s counsel disinvited Soares from testifying at a hearing, worried that he (a black man) would talk about black crime victimization. Agency leaders, journalists, and reform advocates have denounced him for highlighting the concentration of violence in black communities and the role of misguided laws in enabling it.

Perhaps even more disheartening for Soares are calls from prominent leaders, who thank him for speaking out—but refuse to do so themselves. As Soares notes, an unprecedented proportion of New York’s leaders today are African American. Accounting for only about a fifth of New York City’s population, and a smaller percentage of state residents, blacks are now especially overrepresented at the top of its public-safety-related agencies. The lieutenant governor, attorney general, parole board chairman, Senate majority leader, and Assembly speaker and majority leader—all are black. Downstate, Mayor Eric Adams is black, as are the deputy commissioner for public safety, heads of the mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the Department of Probation, the NYPD’s outgoing commissioner and its current second and third in command, the U.S. attorneys for the Southern and Eastern Districts, the district attorneys of Manhattan and the Bronx, the public advocate, and the city council chairwoman. Shouldn’t they feel secure enough to confront the issue?

But for true-believer progressives, who wield tremendous political influence, certain ways of evaluating crime policies are viewed with genuine contempt: pointing to the unintended negative consequences of reforms, stressing the need to use data to evaluate policies, and acknowledging how individual accountability and culture play vital roles in crime prevention.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Martin Kulldorff Harvard Tramples the Truth When it came to debating Covid lockdowns, Veritas wasn’t the university’s guiding principle.

By on March 13th, 2024

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FHarvard-Tramples-the-Truth.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.

What were the results during the spring of 2020? With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarized in a July 7, 2020, report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden.

Continue reading →