CHAPTER 17: Cultural Terrorism Comes to America Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release June 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27763/chapter-17-cultural-terrorism-comes-to-america

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

The upward mobility provided by the capitalist system and meritocracy in the United States created a vibrant middle class. In a land of opportunity, working-class people were no longer reliable revolutionaries. Scott S. Powell, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and writer for The American Spectator, explains the shift in Marxist strategy with a bit of history about Vladimir Lenin. From Powell’s August 15, 2015, article, “The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party”:[i]

The proletariat never did revolt successfully en masse in any advanced industrialized state. Instead, Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders—professional revolutionaries—to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

It was Lenin who introduced the concept of the “popular front” and coined the phrase “useful idiots” in describing the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end.

The Marxists needed to identify a new cohort of rebels to collapse American society from within. They chose academia and anointed its graduating student population of useful idiots to be vanguard leaders for changing hearts and minds in America. What Bolshevik George Lukács was unable to impose in Catholic Hungary, cultural terrorism, has been wildly successful in America; it just needed a different strategy in order to succeed.

The 1969 Woodstock Festival was a watershed event for the counterculture movement in music, drugs, and sexual permissiveness. The sexual revolution was a social and cultural movement advocating sexual liberation and acceptance of public nudity, premarital sex, extramarital sex, alternative forms of sexuality, contraception, pornography, homosexuality, masturbation, and abortion. Significantly absent from any discussion of sexual liberation were love, loyalty, commitment, and respect.

The foundation for the sexual revolution that challenged and defied America’s traditional Judeo-Christian standards of sexual behavior in the 1960s and 1970s had its roots in Alfred Kinsey’s twin books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)[ii] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).[iii] Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute were supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and protected by the U.S. government. Kinsey’s fraudulent research was presented as scientific, factual, and normative. Its catastrophic consequences continue to reverberate in America, advancing Marxism’s intent to collapse from within America’s cultural norms and family infrastructure.

Never again? Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/never-again-3/

In an announcement on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi reminded the troops of their mission.

Referring to the siren during which the entire country stands in silence for two minutes to honor the “six million who were murdered in the ghettos and extermination camps, in the killing fields and the death marches,” he wrote: “For a moment, we will bow our heads and connect with the memory of our people who were persecuted and murdered simply because they were Jews. Then we will raise our heads, proudly carrying on their sacred legacy, and continue to take action to ensure that the national home that they longed for, but did not attain, will stand forever.”

The latter, he stressed, “is our duty, our mission, our promise.”

Given the current circumstances, crafting the otherwise standard annual message must have been cringe-inducing for Halevi. Under his watch, the military not only was caught off guard by the Oct. 7 massacre, but didn’t arrive on the scene of the carnage for at least eight hours.

By the end of that Black Sabbath, more than 1,200 corpses—sexually abused, shot, burned, beheaded and mutilated—were left strewn across southern Israel and another 250 were abducted to Gaza. The desperate cries for help from those who ended up losing their lives still echo, haunting the surviving witnesses and shaking the rest of the country’s confidence.  

While penning the announcement to “IDF servicemen, soldiers, commanders and civilian employees,” did Halevi’s thoughts stray to last year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day—the theme of which was the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—when he assured us that the IDF was “strong and will continue to maintain Israel’s security”? After all, less than six months later, thousands of Hamas terrorists stormed the Gaza border fence and subjected Israelis to atrocities that would have made the Nazis envious.

Faced with no choice but to mention the above, he stated, “These days, we are in a war where, at its onset, we failed in our mission and lost many—civilians, soldiers, civilian rapid-response-team members and security and rescue personnel. Entire lives were cut short in their prime in a war that was also thrust upon us by a wicked enemy who rose up to destroy us.”

The lost narrative of Israel’s history By Ruth King

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/the_lost_narrative_of_israel_s_history.html

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”― George Orwell

The lamentable success and proliferation of the pro-Hamas rallies, excluding the Muslim participants who are faith-driven, is the outcome of fake history perpetuated in academia and media.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 deeded the entire land mass of the Palestine Mandate to the Jews with the proviso that the rights of local Arabs would not be violated by the Jews who lived there since Biblical times.

In 1922, the infamous British White Paper bowing to Arab pressure ceded 76 percent — all the land east of the Jordan River — to the Hashemites with no historical claim to the land, which was named Trans-Jordan and subsequently the Palestinian state named Jordan, closed to all Jewish settlement. The remaining land west of the Jordan River was to become the Jewish state controlled by the duplicitous British, with ensuing White Papers that limited the immigration of Jews.

The British justified their efforts by the following statement: “England … does not want Palestine to become ‘as Jewish as England is English,’ but, rather, should become ‘a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’ 

The bitter irony is that Israel is more Jewish than England is England, now Muslems are well on the way to achieve majority status in that nation.

The resident Jews of Palestine reluctantly accepted the division in spite of murders and terrorist attacks and massacres in 1929 and in the 1936-1939 “Arab Revolt” punctuated by Jihadist, blood thirsty fulminations by all the Arab nations which coincided with increased harassment and oppression of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in those nations.

By 1939, another White Paper clamped shut the gates of Palestine, effectively trapping Europe’s desperate Jews and igniting a sustained and vigorous effort for Jewish independence, which culminated with Britain’s announcement of intent to leave Palestine and refer the issue to the United Nations in 1947.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

 www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Go beyond the hyperbole and bias of headlines and venomous antisemitic chants of campus protests and read about the real Israel cataloged by Michael Ordman. Even during wartime Israel’s research and technology works 24/7 to better the lives and aspirations of citizens in every continent of the globe. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
Ari leaves the ICU. (TY Yanky) Ari Spitz, a Givati Brigade soldier, has regained full consciousness one and a half months after being severely injured in Gaza. He is considered one of the most severe casualties of the war.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/388392  
 
From battleground to bakery. Yedidya Harush has literally fought his way through combining IDF reserve duty with running a matzah-baking factory. Using personal loans, crowdfunding, and a generous JNF grant, he provides a livelihood to his 50 employees, and hand-baked matzah to IDF soldiers and evacuees.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-battleground-to-bakery-one-mans-mission-to-support-his-community-with-matzah/
 
Helping a community to heal. The Jewish National Fund-USA’s Build Together plan has brought volunteers from around the world to help rebuild communities following Oct 7. One such is Moshav Mivtachim where some two-thirds of the 450 residents have now returned home to the pleasant surprise of a refreshed town.
https://www.jns.org/wire/a-community-heals-together-with-american-volunteers/
 
Look who helped Israel against Iranian attack. Saudi Arabia acknowledged that it had helped the newly forged regional military coalition – Israel, the United States, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and France – repel an Iranian attack against the Jewish State. They intercepted dozens of drones heading for Israel.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/artc-saudi-arabia-publicly-acknowledges-role-in-defending-israel-against-iranian-attack  https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/the-gulf/artc-uae-saudi-arabia-privately-shared-intelligence-with-u-s-on-iranian-attack-report  https://www.ynetnews.com/article/h1jlzltga
 
Thanking our friends. Some non-Israeli whose post Oct 7 support for Israel has been no less than heroic. This article thanks Douglas Murray, Sen John Fetterman, Rep Mike Johnson, Rep Richie Torres, Rep. Claudia Tenney, Sid Rosenberg, Floyd Mayweather, John Spencer, Richard Kemp, Pete Hegseth, and many others.
https://www.jns.org/hats-off-to-the-heroes-and-heroines-in-israels-existential-battle/
 
Sylvan Adams talks about rebuilding the South. Philanthropist Sylvan Adams is interviewed on I24 News  a few weeks ago about how his $100 million transformational donation to Ben Gurion University (see here previously) to rebuild Israel’s south devastated on Oct 7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWKoc_hvEVY
 
 
ISRAEL’S  MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Robotic cataract surgery demonstrated. Top cataract surgeon David Chang performed the first-of-its-kind robotic cataract procedure on a porcine eye, using the ORYOM platform from Israel’s ForSight Robotics (see here previously) at the annual ASCRS Ophthalmology Conference in Boston.
https://www.firstwordhealthtech.com/story/5846609   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAO0il3Xwog
 
Using AI in neurological therapy. Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center has partnered with Israel’s NeuroBrave to develop brain-computer interface (BCI) solutions for both complex neurological conditions and patient care. One example is to translate a non-communicative patient’s brainwaves into speech.
https://nocamels.com/2024/04/top-tel-aviv-hospital-using-ai-in-neurological-therapy/  https://neurobrave.com/
 
AI for mental health care. A new platform, called LIV, developed at Israel’s Sheba Hospital in the wake of Oct 7, streamlines intake of patients for mental healthcare. LIV’s GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) “converses” with a prospective patient to generate possible diagnoses and treatment recommendations.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-anxiety-surges-during-war-israeli-genai-platform-can-ease-psychiatrists-workload/
 
Successful trial to grow your own bones. Israel’s Bonus Bio (see here previously) has completed Phase II clinical trials of its BonoFill for facial reconstructions, with a 90-percent success rate. The company is now entering phase three trials in the US. Read how BonoFill uses fat cells from your body to grow new bones.
https://nocamels.com/2024/04/biotech-firm-grows-bone-from-your-own-tissue-for-seamless-healing/
 
European project to cure muscular dystrophy. Technion Professor Shenhav Shemer has joined DREAMS ((Drug REpurposing and Artificial intelligence for Muscular disorderS), a European Union-funded project to discover treatments for rare neuromuscular disorders such as muscular dystrophy, suffered by some 400,000.
https://ats.org/our-impact/technion-researchers-awarded-prestigious-grants-for-brain-research/
 
Healthier fish. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have proved that breeding disease-resistant carp can make fish farming more sustainable and profitable. It can even keep non-resistant fish healthier. The study bred fish with built-in immunity to the common cyrpinid herpes virus that kills 60-80% of infected fish.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/researchers-study-how-to-keep-our-gefilte-fish-healthy/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55133-2#Sec2

Hannah E. Meyers Adults in Blue At Columbia University this week, the NYPD demonstrated again why it’s the best—and taught protesters something about individual accountability and character, too.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/adults-in-blue

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of CompStat, the technology-enabled innovation that turned the gritty New York City Police Department into a modern, transparent, and strategically intelligent public safety force. Every week, commanders from the city’s roughly 100 precincts come in front of top chiefs for a grilling on what’s happening in their command, what they plan to do about it, and if they’re succeeding. It can be terrifying. But the demand for individual accountability—on a podium, exposed under scrutiny—is what created an agency of leaders and the nation’s best police force.

This week, former NYPD captain and current mayor Eric Adams went through a version of this exercise in front of the press as he was grilled on the situation at New York City’s campus protests (especially at Columbia University), how police planned to deal with it, and how it was going. He shared the tactical and strategic planning that went into the arrests of roughly 300 people from Columbia and City College of New York on Tuesday. (An additional 13 from NYU and 43 from the New School were arrested today). He explained the authority granted for these raids by the school administrations—and by the laws allegedly broken, from criminal mischief to burglary.

And, Adams explained: “Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York.” What is the NYPD doing now? “We are processing the arrests to distinguish between who are actual students and who were not supposed to be on the ground,” the mayor said.

It was quite a scene on Tuesday night: NYPD officers entering Columbia’s illegally barricaded Hamilton Hall via an armored vehicle that got them through a second-floor window. Bodycam video illustrates what they encountered inside: physical blockades of furniture, garbage cans, and other objects obstructing their path, which they cut through with electric saws and blow torches. Then they had to deal with the demonstrators, some resisting—“Put it down, you’re gonna get hurt,” a cop told one idiot trying to block him with a makeshift shield—others complying, all amid the steady din of the rioters’ frenzied chanting. Not an easy day’s work: how many of us could handle it, even for a few minutes, without losing our composure? Yet the NYPD accomplished its assignment in an intensely hostile environment without using undue force. And when they were done, they lowered the Arab colors of the Palestinian flag that protesters had raised over CCNY and reinstated Old Glory.

Contrast this professionalism and competence with the squawks of protesters, most of whom have likely never been tested away from the protection of social media, group-based entitlements, and the safety blanket of anonymity. Unlike protesters of earlier generations—Mayor Adams conjured his own participation in bygone demonstrations with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—the current crusaders distinguish themselves by cowering. They hide their faces behind pandemic-era masks, sinched hoodies, and keffiyehs wound tightly around their faces as if to keep out the worst Arabian sandstorm. They demand those who might challenge their ideas, mission, and strategy to stay away. And they block pro-Israel students from coming close enough to ask them a question—or even attend final exams in their vicinity.

Whatever the breakdown may be between outside agitators and enrolled students, these campus crusaders are leaders in the mold of Hamas’s own, who prolong the suffering of Gazans in their perennial dream of destroying Israel and world Jewry from the safety of hideaways throughout the Middle East and Europe. Even October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar is reportedly hiding underground with his family, surrounded by hostages as human shields.

Media reporting this week has been inundated with the petulant accounts of arrestees complaining about how “brutal” they found the experience of being held, finally, accountable for their actions. “As a human chain, draped in keffiyehs and shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, we sang with hushed tones,” recounts Columbia student and arrestee Allie Wong. “As [NYPD] approached from multiple directions, we sang with frail and cracking voices.” And then: “We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls.”

Wong professed herself shocked by the “brutality” of being “arrested, bound and shuttled down to 1 Police Plaza,” where “they threw us in cells like animals—cells where the only toilets women could use lacked any privacy.” (While, she gripes, the NYPD “had a pizza party prepared for arresting officers.”)

For these protesting rag dolls, getting arrested must have been jarringly consequential. You can’t put your hand over the camera when police are taking your mugshot—not like you do on campus when someone critical of what you’re doing approaches to ask you a question. And your fingerprints are permanently yours—as is the recorded account of what laws you have been charged with trampling. Like the officers whose faces, badge numbers, and activities were all fully exposed and documented on video, campus agitators now have their personal identities and actions memorialized for all to see and judge.

This week has thrown into sharp relief for Americans, in New York and beyond, the difference between leadership—which the NYPD showed throughout—and what passes for courage and character among those who sow disorder.

NYPD Leaders Vow to Identify Outsiders Fueling Anti-Israel Protests, ‘Radicalizing Our Students’ Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-leaders-vow-to-identify-outsiders-fueling-anti-israel-protests-radicalizing-our-students/

A New York Police Department leader said Friday that officials believe that an outside organization is likely behind the anti-Israel protests that have roiled college campuses and that have led to thousands of arrests around the country, and they intend to “find out who that is.”

“I just want to say, and I said it before, there’s somebody behind this movement,” NYPD deputy commissioner of operations Kaz Daughtry told reporters after police arrested 56 protesters at New York University and The New School on Friday.

“There is some organization behind this movement. The level of organization that we’re seeing in both of these schools and at Columbia,” he said, adding that officers discovered leaflets at the demonstrations that outlined how to protest or how to commit civil disobedience.

The leaflets told protesters what to do if they were to be arrested and what to say to police.

“There is somebody funding this. There is somebody radicalizing our students,” he said, adding that “we will find out who that is.”

ELECTIONS

Rasmussen:Trump 48, Biden 36, Kennedy 8,West/Stein 1 | RCP Avg: Trump +3.2

America’s Jenga Tower of Power By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/america_s_jenga_tower_of_power.html

A majority of Americans believe that mail-in ballot fraud tainted the 2020 election, but most state and federal officials continue to pretend the results were aboveboard.  A majority of Americans wish to put an end to mass illegal immigration, but the Department of Homeland (in)Security continues to do nothing to protect our borders from foreign invasion.  A majority of Americans are worried about rising inflation, but the federal government continues to print and spend money and issue costly regulations.  A majority of Americans oppose widespread government surveillance programs that intrude upon their privacy, but elected officials continue to give the Intelligence Blob full access to Americans’ most sensitive records and communications, in total disregard for the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches.  A majority of Americans distrust mainstream news sources, but prominent news organizations continue to push ideological propaganda at the expense of truthful and objective reporting.  

These are just a few of the many ways in which America’s most powerful institutions fail to faithfully represent or protect the American people.  As the disconnect between the governing and the governed continues to grow, the dishonest state of our Union will become undeniable: an insular cabal of financial, corporate, political, and bureaucratic “elites” hold 99% of the American people hostage.  When Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell speak about protecting “democracy,” what they want to preserve is an outrageously unbalanced system in which a few control everything and most control nothing.  That’s a little like a Jenga tower of blocks, in which all the weight at the top sits perilously upon a couple of crooked supports.  Eventually, such an uneven structure will collapse.

Most of us already feel America’s Jenga tower wobbling.  The federal government feels it, too.  That’s why it spends so much time censoring Americans’ speech, spying on their conversations, and abusing the criminal “justice” system to batter perceived political enemies.  As with all budding totalitarian regimes that have risen in the past, the U.S. government has abandoned persuasive argument for intimidation and coercion.  It is an ugly factory that produces nothing but nagging regulations.  It is a second-rate club that protects D.C.’s privileged VIPs and shoves the rest of America behind a cheap velvet rope.  It is an ear-splitting bullhorn that endlessly screeches, “Do exactly what we say!”  And the more it nags and shoves and screeches, the more America’s Jenga tower wobbles.

Marx Still Reigns Supreme. But Why? Why and how did this angry, odious, insufferable fantasist become the intellectual lodestar for the global left? By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/04/marx-still-reigns-supreme-but-why/

This week, with the global celebration of May Day and with the ongoing protests on the nation’s college campuses, it is worth remembering that the man who largely inspired both was a hateful, intellectually shallow misanthrope, remembered by history and admired by jesters and dupes largely because of his odiousness.

The First of May is celebrated by socialists around the world, not specifically because of Karl Marx but to honor the anarchists hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Nevertheless, this “International Labor Day” has very much become a Marxist tradition, formerly commemorated with parades and ceremonies by the Soviet Bloc nations and still very much acclaimed by those who still revere Marx and his communist ideology.

Marx is likewise celebrated these days in the pro-Hamas camps on America’s college campuses. The ideology of struggle expressed by the protesters is very much in the Marxist tradition. Reams of Marxist literature have been collected at various abandoned/disbanded protest sites around the country, most notably on the UCLA campus. And, of course, Marxist organizations and agitators have been front and center throughout the demonstrations. As the inimitable Mike Gonzales has repeatedly stated, noting that Marxism is always at the forefront of these types of protests: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”

The question is why. Why is Karl Marx, of all people, so adored and admired by the world’s angry and disillusioned youth? He was but one of hundreds of thousands of 19th-century communists and but one of hundreds of leftist intellectuals and theorists of his era. Why him?

Reconstructing Gaza: The International Community’s Cycle of Impotence The people of Gaza are not going to invite a bullet from Hamas by renouncing them in return for the fool’s gold of international aid. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/04/reconstructing-gaza-the-international-communitys-cycle-of-impotence/

If ever there was an example of the lethal, recurring consequences of the self-proclaimed “international community’s” inanity and impotence, it is their recurrent bouts of vows to reconstruct Gaza.

In their own version of the movie Groundhog Day (sans happy ending), the United Nations, the Biden administration, and other largely western nations have plans for rebuilding and revitalizing post-war Gaza. (Proximity to the Hamas terrorists makes neighboring Arab nations far more pragmatic in their planning.) The international community’s plans—much of them taxpayer subsidized—are expansive, expensive, and will ensure perpetuation of the Hamas terrorists’ cycle of violence against Israel.

And, tragically, this will happen regardless of whether the international community delivers on their promises.

To begin, the tragic recap:

Hamas launches a terrorist attack against Israel and murders, rapes, tortures, and kidnaps civilians;

Hamas holds the kidnapped civilians as an insurance policy and human shields against Israeli retaliation;

Hamas further uses Gaza’s civilians and critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, as human shields;

Hamas directs a propaganda operation through its supporters in the west, including leftists on college campuses, and in various international institutions demand a cease-fire to insulate Hamas against the consequences for their terrorism—as well as the large swath of the Gaza population that approves of their terrorist attack against Israeli civilians;

The international community rebuilds and revitalizes Gaza and insulates and rewards Hamas for its terrorist attack;

And reinforces among the Gaza population that they are correct in supporting Hamas’ hatred, terrorism, and genocidal aims, which are deemed justified, indoctrinated and celebrated throughout successive generations.

Rebuild, revitalize, repeat…