NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lincoln Memorial steps vandalized with ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti, red paint

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/lincoln-memorial-steps-vandalized-with-free-gaza-graffiti-red-paint/ar-AA1lNZIn

“National Park Service conservators have begun the process of removing the paint this morning, though it may take multiple treatments over several days to remove all of it,” Park Police added. “The steps on the west side of the Reflecting Pool are closed to visitors while the conservation work takes place.” 

It is not immediately clear who was behind the incident.

Dozens of anti-Israel protesters were arrested on Tuesday after staging an illegal rally inside the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., an act led by activist Linda Sarsour, according to reports. 

Last Monday, a protest calling for a cease-fire led to over 40 arrests at the Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Fox5 DC reported. 

The pro-Palestinian protesters were illegally demonstrating inside the Congressional space, according to authorities. 

Just after 10 a.m., a Capitol spokesperson told Fox 5 that the demonstrators arrived, with one man even climbing a statue in the atrium, before being charged with resisting arrest. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Yielding to Temptation: Colorado’s Supreme Court Blocks Democracy to Bar Trump on the 2024 Ballot

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://themessenger.com/opinion/colorado-supreme-court-bars-trump-from-ballot-14th-amendment-january-6-disqualification

The Colorado Supreme Court has issued an unsigned opinion, making history in the most chilling way possible. A divided court barred Donald Trump from appearing on the 2024 presidential ballot. 

For months, advocates have been filing without success in various states, looking for some court to sign off on a dangerous, novel theory under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. They finally found four receptive jurists on one of the bluest state supreme courts in the land.

Even on a court composed entirely of justices appointed by Democratic governors, Colorado’s Supreme Court split 4-3 on the question. The majority admitted that this was a case “of first impression” and that there was “sparse” authority on the question. Yet, the lack of precedent or clarity did not deter these justices from making new law to block Trump from running. Indeed, the most controlling precedent appears to be what might be called the Wilde Doctrine.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Netflix and the Erasure of History It was good while it lasted By Edward Ring

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/20/netflix-and-the-erasure-of-history/

Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
– Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New Ebonics Movement and the Elimination of Whiteness Mainstreaming mediocrity and demonizing excellence. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-ebonics-movement-and-the-elimination-of-whiteness/

The Back to Ebonics movement has been around for a couple of decades. It gained some traction in the seventies during the era when everything Black was pronounced as beautiful. Emerging from the ugliness of segregation and Jim Crow laws which did see the systemic evisceration of the dignity of Black individuals, the Black is Beautiful slogan was understandable from the standpoint of psychological preservation. Ebonics—the Black Vernacular that is believed to capture the unique and singular way many Blacks speak—was regarded by many as a means of also protecting the dignity of Black self-expression.

Few in academia, or in mainstream society for that matter, took the Ebonics movement very seriously. Everyone knew that if any Black person wanted—at minimum—a job as a hotel receptionist, a customer service agent in a call center, or a clerk in a retail store, he or she would need to speak standard English. The latter was the lingua franca of business and commerce, and that was not about to change. If Blacks aspired to achieve economic parity with their compatriots, then they would have to become bilingual.

Lately, the Back to Ebonics movement has morphed into a devoutly nasty and pernicious new form. It has transmogrified into a hegemonic call to replace standard English as the norm. It regards requiring Black students to use standard English as anti-Black linguistic racism. Blacks required to speak standard English are believed to experience violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization. The leader of this movement, a Black professor at the University of Michigan by the name of April Baker-Bell, has sponsored a document to abolish what she calls “White Mainstream English.” She believes that Black students who are forced to write their papers in mainstream English are victims of Anti-Black Racism.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Letter To My Harvard Classmates Andrew I. Fillat

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/20/a-letter-to-my-harvard-classmates/

Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. He has two degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard

The following is a letter, edited for relevance to a broader audience, sent to Section D, Harvard Business School (HBS), Class of 1972. The first year at HBS is spent entirely with one’s section. Its purpose was to explain my resignation as section secretary after the Harvard Board affirmed support of Claudine Gay as its president, and antisemitic intimidation remains unpunished.

To my section mates:

On the Dec.4 congressional hearing the university president, its meaning, and its fallout: There is no question it was political theater. But that does not invalidate its usefulness. The state of higher education is now front-and-center and that is very much needed. Too many colleges have devolved into political, social, and ideological activism at the expense of education and training its graduates to exalt open-mindedness, critical and analytical thinking, acceptance of history and classics and the extraction of lessons from them, and a search for truth. HBS, through its case method, is the exemplar of benefits of this approach. But that seemingly ends at the river’s edge. (The HBS is across the Charles River from the university.)  Universities are graduating students with grossly insufficient skills to do productive work; ask anyone you know who is in management at a company how it is to deal with undergraduates that have been hired in the last decade. This does not bode well at all for U.S. competitiveness on the world stage.

On free speech: I believe that the requirement for free expression at universities emanates not from the First Amendment but from the core mission of any secular educational institution. Freedom exists to create an environment described above that is focused on education. Yet Harvard and other universities already undermine themselves with support for “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and speech codes that serve only to shut down exposure to ideas students reflexively do not like. Worse, speech or mob protests that are clearly intimidating, harassing, or threatening are diametrically opposed to open discourse and inquiry, not to mention how they deprive the targeted students free and safe access to the education they are paying for. Leaders of these efforts must be held to account, but to date no punishment has been meted out.

On punishment: I happen to know that President Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended discipline and was rebuffed by the faculty committee with sole authority to punish student behavior. As to Harvard and Penn, it is not known what disciplinary procedures exist or what has been recommended. But the case of Roland Fryer, a black professor at Harvard who was arguably unjustly defenestrated by a faculty committee led by Gay is instructive. The details of this have become public, and it shows that Gay can be extremely forceful when pursuing her convictions.

On DEI: The extensive diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy built at great expense and so avidly supported by Gay during her career exposed its corrupt ideology when it immediately abandoned the Jewish minority in the face of antisemitic demonstrations.

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

China’s “Unrestricted Warfare” Against the US by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on December 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20238/china-unrestricted-warfare
• The Chinese Communist Party, led by China’s President Xi Jinping, has, over the years, by espionage, intellectual property theft, hacking, spying and militarizing artificial islands, initiated a bitter conflict between China and the US.
• China appears determined to “neutralize” states that might challenge its claim to the South and East China Seas. If successful, China’s naval assets will dominate a large portion of the world’s commercial sea lanes, if the US is unable — or unwilling — to knit together a serious formal military alliance of democratic states in the Indo-Pacific.
• Rather than fight a war, China apparently is hoping to envelop the US in Latin America by establishing Chinese-controlled ports and numerous bilateral Belt and Road Initiative projects in Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil and Argentina.
• Is the US ready?
China is fully engaged in a multi-front war against the United States. This “unrestricted warfare” against America has several dimensions: technological, space, military, political, economic, digital, psychological, informational and diplomatic. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) openly declared a “people’s war” against the US in a May 14, 2019 edition of the People’s Daily.
The CCP, led by Chinese President Xi Jinping, has, over the years, by espionage, intellectual property theft, hacking, spying and militarizing artificial islands, initiated a bitter conflict between China and the US.
CCP propaganda, however, claims that China is supposedly only responding to America’s instigation of a “new cold war” against the People’s Republic of China (PRC), depicted as a policy to “contain China’s rise.”
The two all-encompassing themes of the CCP’s offensive are China’s Global Security Initiative (GSI) and a Global Developmental Initiative (GDI).

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden’s 2024 election insurance policy might surprise you

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/bidens-2024-election-insurance-policy-surprise-you

Democrats are marching through various stages of grief as they contemplate President Joe Biden running for reelection in 2024. They have variously been hopeful, worried, frantic … and now they’re getting downright angry.

Far-left columnist Harold Meyerson, editor of the liberal magazine American Prospect, is furious that more Democrats have not jumped into the race. His latest piece asks, “Are the Democrats sleepwalking to disaster?” Disaster, of course, being the election of Donald Trump, who will bring the U.S. – according to Meyerson – to the “brink of authoritarian rule.”

The former Washington Post writer says Biden has been an “excellent president,” but is concerned that he is “the candidate least able to defeat Donald Trump.” Meyerson is certainly not alone; a rising chorus of Democrat voices are urging Biden to step aside,including now, apparently, Barack Obama. The New York Post reports that the former president “knows this is going to be a close race” and “feels that Democrats very well could lose.”

The question is: who might replace Biden? Meyerson lofts Gavin Newsom as a possibility but notes that the California governor “lacks appeal to working-class voters (California has the lowest share of white working-class residents of any state save Hawaii).”

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. Francesca Block

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-us-public-schools-teach-antisemitism?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last fall, Siriana Abboud put a new poster on the wall of her pre-K class at a public school in Midtown Manhattan that, she claimed, would teach her four- and five-year-old students about the human body.

The poster showed four sketches of differently shaped noses—two small, one hooked, and another with a nose ring.

“Why do people have different noses?” a headline above the drawings asked.

Underneath, kids posted their answers:

“I think it’s because of your ancestors,” one wrote.

“Where you are from,” scribbled another, with a smiley face and a heart.

Next to these replies Abboud penned her own answer:

“I think it’s based on your ethnic identity. In art, we can often tell ethnicity from the bridge of your nose.”

One senior educator in the district, who is Jewish, told The Free Press she was “appalled” by the poster. “It’s clearly connected to the ethnic tropes of Jews having big noses. Quite frankly, it reminded me of Nazi comics. I had a visceral reaction to it. It was antisemitic.”

The poster Siriana Abboud put up in her pre-K class last year.
But Abboud, a twentysomething who teaches pre-K at PS 59, Beekman Hill International School, wasn’t punished or disciplined by the Department of Education for the poster, a source who knows Abboud told The Free Press. In fact, last December, she won the Big Apple Award, the highest distinction for a city teacher, for being a “liberation-inspired educator” who “raises societal expectations of the critical work of young children.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Crossing the Line: Justifications for Terror Brendan Craig

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/crossing-the-line-justifications-for-terror/

“As a historical scholar once put it: first, they said, You have no right to live among us as Jews; then they said, You have no right to live as Jews; the Nazi regime simply reduced the historical anti-Semitism to its logical endgame: You have no right to live. Once a nation and its citizens cross that line, once they can see the “other” as less human, or simply not human at all, then no atrocity is unthinkable.”

There are no innocent British: I struggled, as a ten-year-old in 1975, to understand the news reports on our television; why my parents were so upset, particularly my English mother. “Disgusting,” they would murmur. “What kind of people could do this?” Every other week, it seemed back then, a new IRA bombing would make headlines. In September 1975 an IRA bomb exploded in the lobby of London’s Hilton Hotel. Two people were killed and sixty-three injured, many suffering limbs blown off and other horrific injuries.

There is an excellent book by a former IRA member, Eamon Collins, called Killing Rage, in which he explains the cold rationale behind the IRA’s terror tactics. The fact was, while there were some attempts to target British soldiers and military targets, the IRA hard-liners argued that all Brits were complicit in the long-running abuse of Irish nationals, and no tears should be wasted on collateral victims. The cause was all. And any means was justified by the end goals.

There are no innocent Chinese: It is unfortunate that the West has learnt almost nothing about Japanese atrocities of the 1930s. Unlike the Holocaust, Japan’s shameful past has been effectively papered over, in part because of the tremendously successful efforts of the US since the war to rebuild Japan as a modern Western ally.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

WHO is None Too Keen on Jews Stephen Buetow & Kira Baccal

Posted By on December 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/12/who-is-none-too-keen-on-jews/

The World Health Organization (WHO) is a United Nations agency whose primary focus is to improve global public health. It claims to be politically impartial and to use its technical expertise to bring scientific evidence to bear on international issues whose politics impact health. However, the WHO r over-reaches this scope of practice and fails to uphold its founding principles, including egalitarianism and neutrality in global health governance. The 2023 Israel‑Hamas war is the latest reminder that the WHO, in its 75th anniversary year, perpetuates anti‑Israel bias and anti-Semitism.

Like any form of racism, anti-Semitism is an intolerable moral evil of concern to all people who value human dignity and justice. By anti‑Semitism, we mean Jew-hatred, as codified in the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition, and not a reasoned debate about or legitimate criticism of Israeli government policy.

Indeed, political divisions are evident in Israel itself. They accommodate calls to increase respect for Palestinians’ right to health without delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist and dehumanizing Jews and Israelis, including the 20 per cent of Israeli citizens who are Arabs. Contemporary expressions of Jew-hatred include anti-Zionism. Amid increased anti-Westernism, it weaponizes the anti‑Semitism  that is surging worldwide.

Anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism because, as British commentator Melanie Phillips explained in 2019, to treat Israel “as a Jew among nations to be uniquely vilified, slandered, and exterminated” is anti-Semitic. This article demonstrates how the WHO exemplifies such bias, acts against the sovereign equality of states, and promotes Israel’s disengagement rather than cooperation in confronting health emergencies in crises like the Israel‑Gaza war. We will discuss how WHO’s treatment of, and communications about Israel, differ from its diplomatic response to other states and conflicts. WHO’s condemnation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and international pressure for a ceasefire serve as a case study.

Differential treatment of Israel