RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-new-york-times-slanders-israel-again/

From an e-pal Craig C. “For those who may still subscribe to, or purchase weekly, the NY Times you may wish to read the brilliant column by Meir Soloveichik in the current Commentary Magazine.  After reading it, you may wish to cancel your subscription to the NY Times if you still have one.”

In the summer of 1920, Herbert Samuel, the high commissioner of British Mandate Palestine, made his way to the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to mark the Sabbath with his fellow Jews. He entered the Hurva Synagogue, one of the most exquisite edifices in the Jewish world, with its marble floor and its dome adorned with designs that imitated the starry sky. As the guest of honor, Samuel was invited to read the hafatarah, the prophetic portion, from the magnificent bima, or podium, in the center of the synagogue.

It was the Sabbath immediately following the Ninth of Av, when the destruction of the Temple had been mourned. His Majesty’s representative opened the Bible and proclaimed to the assembled Isaiah’s immortal words: “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people…O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!” On the heels of the 1917 Balfour declaration promising a Jewish home in Palestine, the messianic era almost appeared to be at hand.

Yet the very name of the synagogue in which these Jews found themselves, the Hebrew word “hurva,” means “ruin,” and would seem to have been a strange description of this beautiful building. It reflected the fact that it had been constructed at the site of a synagogue destroyed a century before, burned to the ground by an Arab mob along with 40 sacred Torah scrolls inside. Calling it “Hurva” emphasized that the structure was built on the ashes of what had been before, a vindication of the Jewish love for Jerusalem. Yet the name also hinted at the hatred some may have for Jews who chose to dwell in Jerusalem—even as Jews celebrated the arrival of a Jewish high commissioner to the bima.

In this, the word “Hurva” proved eerily prophetic. The heady days of Samuel’s visit to the synagogue were followed by a series of British “White Papers” limiting Jewish immigration. In 1942, some of Jerusalem’s most important rabbis gathered in the sanctuary to pray for the doomed Jews of Europe who had been left by the British to die.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/media-threat-america-daniel-greenfield/

It’s always bad news for the media.

Verizon is looking to dump the Huffington Post. It’s the latest bad news for the industry in a year that has already seen over 7,200 job cuts across the media spectrum from digital to old-fashioned print.

Why should the rest of the country care about what’s happening to the media industry?

Same reason you should care about what happens when a crackhead can’t pay for his crack.

Like the proverbial crackhead, the media has two survival strategies: stealing and going crazy. These strategies are happening all around us and they’re wrecking the country worse than a million crackheads could.

Unable to make its business model work, the media turned to cannibalism. The print media began merging into bigger conglomerates, and, lately, the failing digital media has gotten merger fever. But the media can’t actually outgrow its problems, and the bigger organizations, after cutting jobs and outlets, still can’t make it work. But the mergers also spurred unionization in print and digital media. While the media bowed to political pressure and signed off on the unions, the costs are killing the media.

Unions aren’t just making it too expensive for the papers and sites they work for to operate, they’re also wiping out freelance journalism. The furor over AB5, a California law that makes it all but impossible for freelance journalists in the state to find work, pitted freelancers against unionized media members.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/22/politico-shills-for-the-deep-state-with-brennan-puff-piece/

President Trump is “obsessed” with former CIA chief John Brennan and is seeking “vengeance,” according to a stirring new report in Politico.

Because of this, reporters Natasha Bertrand (aka Fusion Natasha) and Daniel Kippman say the president is on “a collision course” with the Justice Department’s ongoing probe of the intelligence community’s “actions” in 2016.

AG Barr and John Durham, the federal prosecutor he appointed to conduct the investigation, have recently made some overseas trips to meet with officials in countries that helped the Obama administration spy on the Trump campaign—and this fact is making many current and former intelligence officials very nervous, it appears.

They should be. US attorney John Durham, who recently expanded his investigation, is in the process of requesting interviews from both Brennan and former DNI James Clapper, according to multiple reports.

Barr has said little in public about the investigation, but it reportedly centers on FBI and CIA activities before and during the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. Durham is also reportedly looking into what involvement foreign governments might have had in intelligence-gathering against Trump associates.

But according to Bertrand and Kippman, Barr and Durham are just investigating a “conspiracy theory for which there is little if any evidence.”

The “conspiracy theory” being investigated is the wacky idea that “a key player in the Russia probe, a professor named Joseph Mifsud, was actually a Western intelligence asset sent to discredit the Trump campaign — and that the CIA, under Brennan, was somehow involved.”

Who would ever think such a thing?

Rather than retreating into a life of quiet retirement after Trump was elected, John Brennan quickly became a leader of “the Resistance,” firing off scores of scathing, name-calling tweets hammering the president. He also became a commentator for NBC News and MSNBC where he routinely accused Trump of being a “Russian asset” and a multitude of other sins “without evidence.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/21/media-attempt-to-school-republicans-is-a-disingenuous-fraud/

What we are witnessing with such gems of hysterical mendacity are the pathetic death throes of a discredited political franchise and its rapidly disintegrating narrative.

If you haven’t had your daily dose of petulant surreality, swivel over to read this astounding editorial at what used to be America’s paper of record. This curious effusion warns that “The G.O.P. will not be able to postpone a reckoning on Donald Trump’s presidency for much longer.”

Oh, dear. Are things as bad as that? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. And you know that it is really serious because the cri de coeur not only appears in the leaky flagship of the legacy media (I won’t name it if you don’t mind) but also it appears under the solemn byline of “The Editorial Board.”

Silence, please! The important people are about to speak. Pay attention!

The sobbing editorial is called “The Crisis of the Republican Party,” but it might have been better titled “Whistling Past the Graveyard.”

I always wonder exactly who is the intended audience for such high-and-mighty imprecations. They appear to be addressed to “the GOP,” to “conservatives” (those who still have a “conscience,” i.e., those who have mutated into progressives), to “Republicans.” Here is your last chance, such columns seem to shout, we’re warning you. You are tearing the republic apart (you know they’re upset when they start talking about “the Republic”: I think they’re trying to remind you of Rome circa 44 B.C.).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-free-speech-11571602853

Mark Zuckerberg offered a stalwart defense of liberal values on free speech last week, and it’s a sign of our illiberal times that progressives were his biggest critics. A Joe Biden spokesman accused the Facebook CEO of using “the Constitution as a shield for his company’s bottom line,” and pundits on Twitter raged at his refusal to censor ads for Donald Trump.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s offense was standing up for John Mill’s liberal marketplace of ideas that liberals used to stand for. At Georgetown University and in our pages Thursday, he committed Facebook to uphold a wide definition of free expression. This is good news with major implications for how information is distributed in the 21st century if Facebook honors this pledge.

When Facebook and other social-media sites took off in the 2000s, an elite consensus held that freewheeling debate advanced democratic government and liberal social causes. Then came the 2016 election. Many liberals saw Mr. Trump’s victory as a democratic malfunction and blamed Facebook, though they had previously lionized the platform for its role spreading candidate Barack Obama’s message.

The pressure on the platform to referee America’s political back-and-forth has increased with polarization. Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments seemed aimed at reminding the political left that it suffered most from censorship amid the polarizing episodes in the 20th century, citing the World War I-era prosecution of socialist Eugene Debs.

Today, conservatives are more likely to perceive that their views are suppressed on social media, and Republican Members of Congress have made it a top issue. A recent controversy of note was Facebook’s temporary suppression of a video produced by the pro-life group Live Action.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/17/cnn-staffer-our-obsessive-anti-trump-coverage-wont-stop-until-trump-dies/

A new video released by Project Veritas Thursday shows CNN employees admitting on tape that the network peddles “a bunch of bullsh-t” and that it will not stop hammering the president “until he dies—hopefully soon.”

Part III of O’Keefe’s expose on CNN focuses on the network’s movement away from objective news-gathering towards partisan advocacy.

Once upon a time, CNN was respected as a serious, straight news outlet, but those days are long over, several CNN employees lamented on camera.

CNN insider Cary Poarch told O’Keefe, “I want to chase the facts, like the motto that CNN put out earlier this year, ‘the facts first,’ that’s what I want the news to be. That’s what it should be. That’s what it used to be.”

Multiple CNN staffers were secretly recorded voicing similar concerns.

CNN’s Manager of Field Operations Patrick Davis has been with the network for 25 years and has seen first-hand how its journalistic standards have slid.

“…I hate seeing what we were and what we could be and what we’ve become. It’s just awful…I mean, we could be so much better than what we are…And the buck stops with him (Zucker),” he said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/farewell/

GOODY TWO SHOES IS GOING TO “THE DISPATCH” A “TRUMP SKEPTIC” MAGAZINE  RSK

NR was the first national platform to publish my work, and now — thousands of posts and more than a million words later — I say goodbye. On Monday, I’ll join my good friends Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes at The Dispatch, their new media venture. In true writerly fashion, I sign off even as I’m behind on a print deadline.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/police-do-nothing-as-antifa-thugs-violently-attack-trump-supporters-after-trump-rally-in-minneapolis/

It seems the entire 24/7 news business is still going on about a “violent meme” that depicts Trump in a movie scene from The Kingsman. No one is upset about the original movie, where Colin Firth’s character kills a bunch of conservative Christians in a church, because violence against conservatives and Christians is A-OK with just about everyone except Christians and conservatives. They’re upset that some meme-maker put Trump’s head on the assassin and a bunch of media logos on the victims. For shame. How dare he.

Anyhoo, while they are blathering their outrage about fictional violence, actual violence is taking place against those Christian conservatives no one cares about on the streets of Minneapolis. There is a resurgence of Antifa violence against Trump rally-goers again as the 2020 election nears. At the president’s last rally, the streets were awash in patchouli and other foul things as Antifa rioted and attacked innocent people for wearing Trump gear or attending the rally. The police didn’t appear to be doing much about it.

In this video, a woman is slapped in the face while trying to get through the crowd.