The immoral inversion of victim and perpetrator Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-immoral-inversion-of-victim-and-perpetrator/

Dozens of demonstrators gathered on Saturday night at the entrance to the southern Israeli city of Arad to express solidarity with their friend and neighbor, Aryeh Schiff.

Schiff, 70, was arrested the previous week for killing 36-year-old Bedouin Muhammad el-Atrash, who had broken into Schiff’s car and was driving off when Schiff and his wife awoke to the noise. Schiff promptly drew a pistol and fired twice in the direction of the vehicle.

The first thing he did when he realized that the thief had been hit was to call the police and an ambulance. EMTs who arrived on the scene evacuated el-Atrash to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheva, where he was pronounced dead from a bullet wound to the head.

Meanwhile, Schiff fully cooperated with police, acknowledging in his initial interrogation that he had not fired a warning shot in the air. He claimed, however, that he had aimed at the wheels of the car, not the driver.
“All my life, I will have to live with the fact that I killed a person unintentionally,” Schiff told the Beersheva Magistrate’s Court last Tuesday. “My grief is deep for taking a person’s life. … [W]hen I shot, I had no intention of killing him. I am very sorry for the tragic event. I have already received my punishment.”
When the court ruled to release him on house arrest for the duration of the investigation, police and prosecutors appealed. They claimed that video footage of the incident told a different story—one showing that Schiff had purposely pointed his pistol at the driver.

Chanukah Guide for the Perplexed 2020 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Historical context.  Chanukah, the holiday of light, is narrated in the four Books of the Maccabees, The Scroll of Antiochus and The Wars of the Jews. The Greek Empire was split into Greece-Seleucid/Syria-Ptolemaic/Egypt following the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE), who held Judaism in high esteem. In 175 BCE, the Seleucid/Syrian Emperor Antiochus (IV) Epiphanies claimed the Land of Israel, and suspected that the Jews were allies of his Ptolemaic/Egyptian enemy.  Therefore, he aimed to exterminate Judaism and convert Jews to Hellenism. In 169 BCE he devastated Jerusalem, massacred Jews and prohibited the practice of Judaism.

A 166/7 BCE rebellion was led by members of the Hasmonean (Maccabee) family, which included Mattityahu, the priest, and his five sons, Yochanan, Judah, Shimon, Yonatan and Eleazar, who established Jewish independence until 37 BCE.

The success of the Maccabees on the battlefield was consistent with the reputation of Jews as superb warriors, who were frequently hired as mercenaries by Egypt, Syria, Rome and other global and regional powers.

When ordered by Emperor Antiochus (Book of Maccabees A: 15:33) to end the “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Akron, Shimon the Maccabee responded: “We have not occupied a foreign land…. We have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

Chanukah according to David Ben Gurion, Israel’s Founding Father and first Prime Minister, a modern-day Maccabee: “The struggle of the Maccabees was one of the most dramatic clashes of civilizations in human history, not merely a political-military struggle against foreign oppression…. Unlike many peoples, the meager Jewish people did not assimilate.  The Jewish people prevailed, won, sustained and enhanced their independence and unique civilization…. It was the spirit of the people, rather than the failed spirit of the establishment, which enabled the Hasmoneans to overcome one of the most magnificent spiritual, political and military challenges in Jewish history….” (Uniqueness and Destiny, pp 20-22, David Ben Gurion, IDF Publishing, 1953).

Dominion Voting Systems Received $120 Million From 19 States And 133 Local Governments To Provide Election Services (2017-2019) Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/12/08/dominion-voting-systems-received-120-million-from-19-states-and-133-local-governments-to-provide-election-services-2017-2019/?sh=bb6046a620f5

Key points:

Dominion Voting Systems is the second largest vendor in the non-transparent and entrenched election system industry where three vendors control 88-percent of the market.
Recent Dominion contracts with major counties and cities across America set service agreements for years or even decades—helping lock-in the company’s dominant market position and prevent competition.

Dominion Voting Systems was paid $118.3 million to provide election services during the past three years, according to public records. Their revenues came from 19 states and 133 local governments including counties, cities, and even a couple of school districts.

Since presidential election of 2020, Dominion has come under wide public scrutiny, particularly in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—critical toss-up states with close winning margins.

In their Dunn & Bradstreet filings, Dominion claimed annual sales of $36.5 million with contracts in 22 states and 600 local jurisdictions. However, the Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative estimated that Dominion was in 1,645 jurisdictions with $100 million in annual revenues (2018).

So, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com tracked Dominion’s revenues using state and local government spending disclosures, i.e. their checkbooks. (Dominion is a private company and, therefore, is not required to disclose financials. However, public bodies must be transparent, because they spend taxpayer money.)

Compiling the records required open record requests in 49 of the 50 states and in 11,400 local governments. Only California, which we are suing, rejected our sunshine request.

Here is a state-by-state description of our findings. (Download our raw payment data spanning 2017 through 2019.)

Judge who tossed Michigan case a stereotypical activist judge By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/judge_who_tossed_michigan_case_a_stereotypical_activist_judge.html

News broke on Monday that a federal district court judge in Detroit – an Obama nominee – dismissed Sidney Powell’s Michigan lawsuit. Her ruling was what one would expect from an activist judge, in that it was entirely partisan. We need to hope and pray that the Supreme Court has better caliber justices.

Contrary to what naïve people believe, most progressive judges are not dedicated to applying the law impartially in the search for justice. They are partisan hacks who decide in advance which side should win and then retrofit legal principles to make their decisions appear valid. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the paradigm of the modern judge.

One of Ginsburg’s intellectual heirs sits on the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Here’s what you need to know about Judge Linda v. Parker: She spent only five years in private practice and the rest of her career working for the government. She worked in the District of Columbia Superior Court, the EPA, the U.S. Attorney’s office for Michigan, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, and as a judge. Obama nominated her to the Federal District Court in 2013.

Parker is a Swamp creature whose fealty is to the government and leftism. She’s also clearly an activist, not a scholar:

Unfortunately, Sidney Powell’s Michigan lawsuit got assigned to Judge Parker. The suit raises serious concerns about the election in Michigan, especially in Detroit.

Americans can’t let the left steal the 2020 election By Rick Hayes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/americans_cant_let_the_left_steal_the_2020_election.html

The left is famous for ignoring the law.  Hillary, Comey, and Biden are perfect examples of unapologetically tossing away any pretense that laws matter.  

And because the left has no respect for the law, the United States is on the verge of having a presidential election stolen from the American voter’s hands.

So significant are the consequences that anti-American forces normally acting behind the scenes are out in the open, flagrantly telegraphing their future moves to finally overthrow the Trump administration.

Americans are deluged day in and day out with declarations that the election is over.  Says who, the propaganda forces that help steal the election?  Americans are well aware that currently, Joe Biden is ahead in the current election count; the American people can see the numbers. 

What Americans are saying is that the numbers are fake.  The numbers do not add up to reality — a reality that saw one candidate draw tens of thousands of voters at multiple events while the other candidate couldn’t muster up more than 300 even with help from Obama and Bon Jovi.  

It’s a reality that saw one candidate inspire gras-roots flotillas and 90-mile-long caravans while the other candidate generated more followers from the opposition than supporters.

Terrorism: A Warning from Iran to Europe by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16840/terrorism-iran-europe

Now they [the Europeans] find themselves locked into what they know is a phoney and highly dangerous nuclear agreement that simply consigns confrontation with a nuclear-armed Iran to future generations.

They [the Iranian leadership] look at Europeans, as well as Americans, with contempt, as weak and decadent, lacking the courage or resolve to stick up for their own interests…. President Trump gave them pause for thought, especially when he ordered the death of Qasem Soleimani…. They have higher hopes of Biden, whom they expect to be more supine.

We can be sure the Supreme Leader has rejoiced at the results of his message: cowering in Europe, with only weak and token response, accompanied by a desperate, pleading assurance that the targets of his aggression are still his friends. If ever there was a lesson that appeasement fails and strength succeeds, surely this is it.

European governments must now show their own strength or face continued Iranian coercion — coercion that will be witnessed by malign actors around the world from Moscow to Beijing to Pyongyang, with obvious implications.

Can the Europeans really afford to allow such an egregiously hostile and manipulative regime as Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons?

Last month the trial began in Belgium of Assadolah Assadi and three other Iranians accused of planning a bomb attack in Paris in 2018. Since 2015 Assadi had been the most senior officer of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Europe, at the time operating under diplomatic cover at the Iranian embassy in Vienna. He is the first Iranian government official to be tried by an EU country for terrorist offences, despite numerous attack attempts on EU soil ordered by Tehran.

Defense Is on the Ballot in Georgia With a majority, Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders would resume cuts to vital military spending. By Senator Dan Sullivan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/defense-is-on-the-ballot-in-georgia-11607381546?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Senator. Sullivan, an Alaska Republican, is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support. He is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.

The stakes in the Georgia U.S. Senate races on Jan. 5, 2021, between Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and their respective challengers, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are very high for a host of reasons. One that has not received enough attention is the readiness of our military. The U.S. faces rising threats from China, Russia and Iran, and continued robust funding of our military is clearly at stake in Georgia, which will decide the Senate majority. Nowhere is the divide between Democrats and Republicans more important.

For decades the Democratic Party has staked out a position of diminishing the importance of U.S. military readiness. President Jimmy Carter slashed defense spending in the first three years of his term. This created a hollow force, only to have the Soviets and Iranians take advantage of America’s weakened presence in the Middle East, which forced Mr. Carter to increase spending at the end of his term. President Bill Clinton cut the size of the military by a third, reversing a decade of progress under the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

More recently, Barack Obama and Joe Biden oversaw a 25% reduction in the military budget during their second term. The cuts were more than numbers—they dramatically undermined our military’s combat readiness and the morale of our troops.

It’s never been about Trump; It’s always been about first trashing then crashing America By A. Dru Kristenev

https://canadafreepress.com/article/its-never-been-about-trump-its-always-been-about-first-trashing-then-crashi

No, the hate and retribution had never been about Donald Trump until he had the wherewithal to get in the middle of the fray, God bless him.

EVERY legislator capitulating to censored press reports and advising President Trump to accept compromised election results (despite concrete lawsuits pending in six states) is complicit in the attempted coup. That includes democrat, republican, independent or other politically allied individual holding office, or standing in the wings to take or influence office.

Demonstrable evidence of voter fraud in more than half the states signals the true nature of the fight to save our compound constitutional republic.

President Trump is the current catalyst for the final assault against the Constitution

This battle has never been about Donald Trump’s nature or capability to serve in the White House though that mantra has been invoked by media and politically motivated characters across the fruited plain. President Trump is the current catalyst for the final assault against the Constitution. As the representative for independent-thinking Americans, who are the majority, his alternating flamboyant and bombastic public persona is being used to inflame hate-filled rhetoric that has translated into urban violence and acceptance of election manipulation to overthrow the republic.

The 2020 election cycle is the clumsy culmination of decades of political, educational and media corruption instituted to undermine the American culture of liberty. Where the left has been successful is in censoring information, otherwise known as lying by omission, and disseminating falsehoods—example: stating that 39 cases challenging election results have been dismissed, to which Rudy Giuliani replied that President’s Trump’s legal team had only filed three cases.

No Science Justifies Bans on Indoor or Outdoor Dining Nonetheless, political leaders of both parties continue to one-up each other with preposterous rules to restrict both indoor and outdoor dining. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/07/no-science-justifies-bans-on-indoor-or-outdoor-dining/

In a video that is simultaneously gut-wrenching and infuriating, a Los Angeles restaurant owner exposed the hypocrisy of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s order to ban outdoor dining in his city.

Angela Mardsen, the owner of Pineapple Hill Grill and Saloon, showed a large outdoor dining area erected for a movie studio about 50 feet from the now-shuttered outdoor section of her restaurant. “I’m losing everything,” an emotional Marden said. “Everything I own is being taken away from me and they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio. We cannot survive, my staff cannot survive.”

Her video went viral with millions of views; it earned a retweet by the president’s son. “It’s like these politicians are trying to destroy all small businesses,” Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted Friday. “Ridiculous!!!”

But government decrees to close bars and restaurants—especially service outside—are more than ridiculous. They are cruel, unconstitutional, and devastating to the hospitality sector, the nation’s second-largest private employer. 

In a December 7 letter to congressional leaders, the National Restaurant Association detailed the “stark” condition of the industry. More than 110,000 restaurants have permanently closed their doors this year; 10,000 establishments have shut down in just the past three months, according to the trade group. November’s unemployment rate for the leisure and hospitality sector is 15 percent, more than double the national jobless rate. Restaurants and bars account for one-fifth of the total job losses in the United States since February 2020.

It’s a wretched situation on both an economic and personal level—particularly since not one executive order is backed by science. 

In fact, closing dining venues is a wholly unscientific mitigation strategy that has no proven impact on halting the spread of COVID-19. One would think that nearly a year into the pandemic, such a drastic measure would be backed by reams of data and real-life examples. Surely hundreds of case studies now are available to justify permanently destroying tens of thousands of small businesses and millions of jobs, right?

Wrong. 

28 Members of Arizona Legislature Call for the Decertification of the 2020 Election By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/07/28-members-of-arizona-legislature-call-for-the-decertification-of-the-2020-election/

In a joint statement Monday, 28 members and members-Elect of the Arizona Legislature called for the decertification of the 2020 election.

“The election should not have been certified with the number of irregularities and allegations of fraud,” said House Majority Leader Warren Petersen. “Especially troubling to me are the allegations surrounding the vendor Dominion,” the lawmaker added. “It is imperative that a forensic audit occur immediately of the equipment and software. Upon any showing of fraud the legislature should immediately convene to decertify the vote.”

After being presented compelling evidence of election fraud in last week’s hearing with President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, Representative Walter Blackman said in his statement that the outcome of the election “is far from certain.”

“In the past week seemingly conclusive evidence has come to light through successful litigation that the outcome of the 2020 election is far from certain, and at the very least, further investigation is necessary to
ensure the integrity of Arizona’s election results,” Blackman said. “It is imperative that Secretary of State Hobbs rescind her certification of the election until these matters have made their way through the court and voter confidence is restored.”

“Ensuring the integrity of Arizona’s 2020 election isn’t just a matter of sound public policy, it is a civil rights imperative. There are few elements of our society more foundational than the right to free and fair elections and when that right is called into question it is our responsibility as leaders to ensure that confidence in the electoral process is restored. To this end, Arizona must decertify the 2020 election so that the numerous election irregularities may be properly adjudicated and the people of our great state may once again have faith in their right to vote,” said Representative-Elect Jake Hoffman.