RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virus-lab-theorys-new-credibility-11622066808?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence to dig deeper into the origins of Covid-19, a reversal after he reportedly ordered a State Department investigative unit shut down. Mr. Biden is trying to cover for his embarrassing closure of the investigation because the dam has finally broken on the evidence that the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The shame is that it took so long because the suspicious facts have been apparent from the start.**

In January 2020, international media began reporting about a virus spreading in the Chinese city of Wuhan. “The coronavirus could result in a global pandemic,” said Sen. Tom Cotton on Jan. 30, 2020. “I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

The world would learn more about Covid-19—and the WIV. But it was always reasonable to ask if the virus came from a nearby lab that handled dangerous viruses. On Feb. 6, 2020, Botao Xiao of the South China University of Technology posted a paper concluding the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” But the Chinese government strictly controls research into Covid-19’s origins, and the molecular biomechanics researcher withdrew his publication.

The Communist Party then went on offense, with Beijing’s ambassador to the U.S. declaring that lab-leak theories were “absolutely crazy” and could “fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia.” After Mr. Cotton responded by calling on China to “open up now to competent international scientists,” the media chose denial: “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” (Washington Post) and “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins” ( New York Times ).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-reverse-defunding-the-police-amid-rising-crime-11622066307?mod=hp_lead_pos5

One year after the movement to “defund” law enforcement began to upend municipal budgets, many American cities are restoring money to their police departments or proposing to spend more.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would reinstate $92 million for a new precinct after scrapping the project last summer. The mayor of Baltimore, who led efforts as a city councilman to cut the police budget by $22 million last year, recently proposed a $27 million increase.

After attacks on Asian-Americans and a rise in homicides in Oakland, Calif., city lawmakers in April restored $3.3 million of the $29 million in police cuts, and the mayor is now proposing to increase the department’s budget by $24 million. Los Angeles’s mayor has proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.

In the nation’s 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year’s budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1% to nearly 6%.

Many U.S. cities are led by Democrats who supported protesters’ calls to defund the police—a term that activists have used in different ways, including to push for simply shrinking the size of police forces but also shifting resources from law enforcement to social services. The demonstrations, led by Black Lives Matter and allied groups, followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-legacy-of-george-floyds-death/

It is right to condemn excessive police force. To turn Floyd into a hero of a racialized morality play is inane.

T oday marks one year since the death of George Floyd in police custody — I can never get used to invoking the term “anniversary” in connection with such dark events. There is, as one has come to expect, no shortage of vaporous talk about Floyd’s “legacy.” We should not, however, conflate the man with the event.

Floyd should not have died as he did. For their complicity in his demise, four former Minneapolis police are being held accountable, beginning with Derek Chauvin, who was convicted last month. Still, a stubborn fact remains: Floyd bore significant responsibility for the tragedy that unfolded.

There was probable cause that he committed a crime. He was not profiled or otherwise singled out for harassment by police officers acting on suspicions rooted in “systemic racism.” To the contrary, a local food-store merchant complained to police that Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill. That complaint was based on a report by the young black cashier who handled the transaction and whom Floyd willfully put in an unfair position — either speak up or be personally liable for the store’s loss. Before calling the police, store employees, including the cashier, twice implored Floyd (who was parked outside) to come inside and settle the problem that he had caused. He refused. And although Floyd had serious health issues — e.g., an enlarged heart, hypertension, narrowings in major passages near his aorta, and a recent bout with COVID — he continued to abuse illegal narcotics and was at the time ingesting a potentially deadly combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Floyd was a tragic figure, but not an admirable one. What happened last Memorial Day was not his first run-in with the law — far from it. In the decade beginning in 1997, when he was 23, he was arrested at least nine times. Several of these resulted in criminal convictions, generally for small-time narcotics and theft offenses. The resulting prison stints were usually short. But not all of them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/bidens_unconscionable_validation_of_antisemitism.html

It is hardly a new phenomenon that the American left has over time become so radical that a vicious form of anti-Semitism has become its norm.  The Democrat party could, once upon a time, be counted upon to firmly support Israel against its enemies here and abroad, but no more.  The party now openly embraces proud anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and AOC.

Just the other day, Tlaib harangued Biden for thirty minutes on the tarmac at Detroit Airport.  She supports the terrorist organization Hamas and was furious that Israel was so effectively defending itself.  Biden praised her “passion” without a word of support for Israel.  Biden had recently handed over $234,000,000 to the Palestinians, which they promptly used to attack Israel.

Iran was and is completely on board, using Hamas as its proxy.  And even as twenty to thirty percent of their rockets fell on their own people, Hamas, as usual, using its civilian population as human shields, the Democrats still supported the terrorists.  They even voted against sanctioning foreign entities that provided financial aid to Hamas!  They voted against providing additional funding to Israel for the Iron Dome missile defense system.

The despicable AOC and her Squad have introduced a resolution that would block arms sales to Israel.  As any sentient person should know, there is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas.  And as everyone should also know, the destruction of Israel is the essence of Hamas’s charter.

Throughout the Hamas/Israel violence, Biden offered no support for Israel beyond his mild “Israel has a right to defend itself.”  In effect, he succumbed to Tlaib’s shrieking pro-Palestinian rant.  So, with the permission granted by default to anti-Semites everywhere, attacks on Jews are occurring everywhere.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/heading-to-new-york-with-trepidation-and-a-star-of-david/

I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m actually nervous—as a Jew—about my upcoming trip from Tel Aviv to New York.

For one thing, the United States has been safer for the tribe than the rest of the Diaspora. For another, it’s pretty ridiculous to fear anti-Semitic assault in America after spending the past two weeks running for cover from Hamas rockets in Israel.

The worry is especially odd, given the many decades I’ve spent trying avoid and protect my family from Palestinian rock, Molotov-cocktail, suicide-bombing, stabbing and vehicular attacks. But there’s clearly something about the dangers one knows and has come to expect that make them less daunting, or at least more manageable.
Growing up in a rough Manhattan neighborhood the 1970s, I was no stranger to perils that felt familiar. The area around our apartment on the Upper West Side was rife with junkies, muggers and deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients. The subways, filled with vagrants, were filthy and covered in graffiti.
The stations, particularly at night, were so menacing that even the cops were hesitant to police them. Central Park, though passable in the daylight hours, was the site of rapes and murders after dark. Riverside Park was iffy at all hours.
And don’t get me started on Times Square, where drug dealers and prostitutes aggressively solicited passersby.
I took all of the above for granted, instinctively crossing the street before reaching a corner at which certain thugs hung out, for example, and knowing when not to “eyeball” the wrong group of girls sparring for a fight.
And though my complexion often made me somewhat of a sitting duck, my Jewishness never was an issue. Indeed, by the time that I moved to Israel at the age of 19, I had experienced a total of two anti-Semitic incidents.
The first took place at an Italian diner in the Bronx, where my best friend and I ate breakfast every morning on the way to school. The year was 1973, and it was the height of the Yom Kippur War.
The owner of the establishment—who, up to that point, had been very chummy with us—began to rant against Israel. While my friend promptly engaged him in a counter-argument, I was taken aback by the hostility in his tone, and I coaxed her off the premises.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/ex-cair-director-hassan-shibly-posts-video-telling-joe-kaufman/

This past January, following his wife’s accusation of domestic violence against her, Hassan Shibly resigned his leadership position within CAIR, a Hamas-linked group founded in June 1994. Shibly was Executive Director of CAIR’s Florida Chapter. Today, Shibly describes himself as a self-employed attorney, but his embrace of Hamas groups continues. This month, as a new Mid East conflict erupted, Shibly has promoted Hamas-related charities and cranked up his own extreme rhetoric. He has even gone so far as to post an anti-Semitic video calling for the Jews in Israel to go back to Europe. CAIR or no CAIR, Shibly is out and about spreading terror.

On December 20th, Imane Sadrati created a GoFundMe page to advertise her claim that she had suffered physical and mental abuse at the hands of her then-husband Hassan Shibly, beginning when she was pregnant with her first child. It was a huge scandal for Shibly, separating him from his beloved job at CAIR and tarnishing the star he had become in Islamist circles. It was just over a year prior that he had successfully fought the US government in the courts on the constitutionality of its terror watch list, a list that Shibly himself had his name on. Unlike his alleged domestic violence, though, he could blame the watch list on “Islamophobia.”

While much of this exposes the true face of Shibly, it is his extreme hatred for Israel that really defines him. In November 2006, he labeled Hezbollah “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization.” In August 2014, he tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In April 2017, he used Facebook to laud Palestinian terrorist Marwan Barghouti as a “hero.” And in May 2019, he used CAIR’s Tampa office to meet with convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operative, Hatem Fariz. According to the indictmentagainst him, Fariz “was a PIJ member” who conspired “to commit offenses against the United States…”

Recent events have, once again, triggered Shibly’s rage.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/05/25/austin-city-hall-is-now-occupied-by-a-tent-city-with-machete-wielding-security-n1449682

Mayor Steve Adler’s Austin is still getting worse. He led the explosion of homeless camping citywide and the defunding of police.

Police are leaving in droves, crime is spiking hard, and homeless camping spread serious blight all over the city. Now that blight is concentrating downtown, thanks to another of Adler’s addle-brained decisions.

If you walk or drive around city hall in Austin, Texas, now, you’ll see a new tent city. It sprung up after voters in the city overwhelmingly voted to reinstate the ban on camping on public land on May 1.

Even during the ban, camping at city hall was illegal. Adler and the then-unanimous Democrat city council took care of itself that way, while allowing the rest of the city to become a trash heap and a disease and fire hazard.

Now, because the voters have spoken, the ban is being phased back in citywide.

But city hall is occupied. A tent city with its own machete-wielding “security” squats on space on which it has always been illegal to camp.

Mayor Steve Adler is doing nothing about it.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/25/americas-public-enemy-no-1-crime-goodwin/

“Another part of the experiment has prosecutors, politicians and judges, their hearts bleeding with social justice demands, setting the accused free and emptying prisons. The results are in, and they are grim. It turns out that human nature, when it fears no consequences, is emboldened in savage ways. ”

On the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, it is beyond dispute that the case sparked new appraisals of race relations and policing. It is also beyond dispute that the protests and unchecked riots that followed Floyd’s death sparked an epidemic of crime that continues to engulf American cities. 

The statistics are familiar, yet still shocking. The nearly 20,000 gun-related homicides last year were the most in decades, and one researcher found that 51 of the 57 largest cities saw increases. New York’s body count was up by nearly 40 percent. 

Violent crime soared by a reported 74 percent in Seattle, 55 percent in Chicago and 54 percent in Boston. This year is on pace to be far worse, signaling that 2020 wasn’t an outlier so much as the start of a deadly new trend. 

From sea to shining sea, America is witnessing the breakdown of public order and safety. Unfortunately, recent days brought a new dimension to that breakdown — the incidents of anti-Semitism roiling New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. 

It is not a coincidence that the same places where violence and murder are soaring are the same places where it is not safe for Jews to display their religion in public. The ancient hatred has come out of hiding and piggy-backed on the collapse of public order to bare its fangs. 

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Olawale Daniel, founder of TechAtLast International, once said: “The most dangerous and powerful people in the world do not carry guns or shoot missiles; they write code to surveil and suppress opposing views.” There is no question that a commanding personality can become demagogic, especially when emotion supplants reason, and the goal is nefarious. But a demagogue only becomes dangerous when accompanied by a willing state, a compliant media and a culture of conformity that does not permit dissenting voices. So long as people are free to exercise their natural rights to speak, write, assemble and pray, people will remain the master and politicians the servants.

For four years the Left ranted about the risk to democracy, with a “demagogic” Donald Trump in the White House. They spoke of his coarseness, exaggerations, and his non-PC speech. Ignored were the facts he diminished government’s impact on individuals through deregulation and reduced government’s resources through lower taxes. A charismatic personality can camouflage a bad leader, as the world learned in the last century, with Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and Mao, but it can also magnify a good leader, like Churchill, FDR or Ronald Reagan. 

It is the suppression of voices that should concern lovers of freedom. In 1950, when the United States was experiencing a “Red Scare” and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was starting his infamous hearings, President Truman sent a special message to Congress on August 8: “…we must be eternally vigilant against those who would undermine freedom in the name of security.” Three years later, in the March 1953 issue of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: “Restrictions of free thought is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one Un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” Over the years, free expression allowed man to grow and expand his horizons. Freedom, progress and wealth are its progeny. It is a never-ending process, which will continue so long as man is able to think, speak and act freely.

In his concurrence in Whitney v. California (1927), Justice Louis Brandies wrote: “Man feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” When universities ban books for fear of hurtful language, they do damage to those they purport to protect. When politicians repress opposing views with threats of investigations and inquiries, they do irreparable harm to our Constitution. When tech companies shut down social media accounts for those they dislike, they set precedents that affect all mankind. When mainstream media reports only the news that fit their narrative, they promote ignorance rather than knowledge. During the Trump years, the response of the Left was far more dangerous than anything Mr. Trump said or did, for they blocked dissent and suppressed speech. It is not just Mr. Trump who was treated in this manner, but those who supported him. This was done under a hypocritical flag of moral righteousness, abetted by mainstream media and a cultural environment that celebrated wokeness, and which canceled history and opinions when they did not conform to a predetermined narrative.