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Covid Puts the ‘I’ in the High Holy Days Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur aren’t the same without communal prayer. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-puts-the-i-in-the-high-holy-days-11600383609?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Lord Sacks was chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, 1991-2013.

This year the Jewish High Holy Days will be like no other. Usually the synagogue is packed on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, with a buzz of noise that is not all prayer. The haunting call of the shofar, or ram’s horn, summons Jews to judgment. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we are on trial—giving an account of our lives, confessing our sins endlessly, going through every letter of the alphabet, including not a few offenses many of us wouldn’t have had the time, energy or inclination to commit. It is powerful, purgative, and ultimately purifying. We need this annual reset of our lives.

The sense of closeness and intimacy that comes with the crowd makes these days what they are: “The glory of the king is in the multitude of people.” Yet that won’t be present this year. Almost everywhere, prayers won’t be like that at all. Some synagogues’ doors will remain closed. Others will have social distancing, face masks, restrictions on communal singing, and other necessary precautions that restrict the number of people present and their proximity to one another. For a community-minded faith like Judaism, this almost feels like an amputation. The services are bound to feel hollow and lacking in atmosphere. This isn’t how the Days of Awe are supposed to be.

In this respect, Judaism has much in common with other faiths. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and others have had to cancel or restrict public prayer when believers needed it most. All religious leaders have struggled to provide the comfort of faith, the uplift of prayer and the solace of sacred space. Yet Judaism, like other faiths, has proved creative in finding alternative ways to create moments of inspiration.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Whoops—We Found 1,666 Ballots Once more, New Jersey’s bad example is a lesson for everyone else.

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whoopswe-found-1-666-ballots-11600384516?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

New Jersey’s July 7 primary is two months in the rearview mirror. But officials in Sussex County, home to 140,000 people in the state’s northern tip, announced on Monday that they had discovered 1,666 ballots “in a bin that was mislabeled.” Whoops.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China, Once Germany’s Partner in Growth, Turns Into a Rival ‘China is not a developing country, not at all. It’s an established, top-notch manufacturing country’ By Tom Fairless

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-once-germanys-partner-in-growth-turns-into-a-rival-11600338663

An informal partnership that kept Germany’s economy tethered to China’s for decades is unraveling, threatening Berlin’s—and Europe’s—post-pandemic recovery as the Asian giant stages a powerful comeback.

The relationship that saw Germany provide China with the machines to power its economy helped the German economy recover rapidly after the financial crisis. But German business leaders say the model is no longer working as China turns from partner to rival.

Germany should see its gross domestic product shrink by between 5.8% and 7.1% this year according to German public- and private-sector economists—better than most other Western economies but much worse than China’s expected 2.5% growth.

While Germany’s exporters are benefiting from a recovery in international trade, they aren’t getting the lift from China that they did a decade ago. In July, German exports were up from June but still 11% lower from a year earlier. China’s exports have exceeded last year’s levels for two months.

This divergence, economists and German business leaders say, is partly the result of Beijing’s strategy to encourage manufacturers to produce more sophisticated machinery that is more competitive with high-end German capital goods that were previously unmatched.

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The EU: Hizballah’s Intersectional Partner by Richard Kemp

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16519/eu-hizballah-partner

The reality is, should the EU get its way, contrary to its claims to try and uphold the Good Friday Agreement, its demands would harm future prospects for peace and stability in Northern Ireland by undermining and destabilising the union.

Where does Hizballah get the weapons and explosives it is reportedly providing to the New IRA? Iran. The EU has been at the forefront of supplying funds to Iran, including cash used for its terrorist proxies across the Middle East and beyond.

The EU’s bungling foreign policy does not proscribe Hizballah in its entirety, mulishly maintaining a fictitious separation between “political” and “military” wings, despite the terrorist group’s own insistence that there is no distinction. Meanwhile Hizballah has attempted large-scale terrorist attacks in Britain, France and Germany….

[T]he EU falsely claims to uphold peace in Ireland while itself facilitating the greatest threat to that peace.

Intersectionality has become a cynical craze among woke activists determined to promote division and undermine the fabric of Western society. But long before these Johnny-come-lately militants launched their campaigns of disruption, cancelling all who disagree, doing their best to get dissenters fired and tearing down historic statues, other militants were putting their brand of intersectionality into action to kill, maim and destroy the targets of their own hatred.

Sinn Fein’s campaign of violence against the British state and the people of Northern Ireland, fronted by the Provisional IRA, lasted 30 years until their comprehensive infiltration by British intelligence, especially the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch, forced them to lay down their arms under the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Sinn Fein-IRA’s intersectionality included close cooperation with a wide range of fellow terrorists, including the Basque separatist movement, ETA. For many years, Sinn Fein-IRA also colluded with terrorist gangs in the Middle East, themselves masters of intersectionality, sometimes crossing the Shia-Sunni divide as they still do today.

Perhaps the most significant of these unholy alliances involved Colonel Muammar Gadaffi’s regime in Libya. Gadaffi helped re-energise IRA terrorism in the mid-1980s by supplying cash and weaponry, including rifles, pistols, machine guns, rocket launchers, surface-to-air missiles, flamethrowers and high explosives. Four massive arms shipments from Libya — totalling more than 100 tons — made it through to the IRA strongholds and a fifth was intercepted by the French navy. These bombs and guns were used to murder large numbers of innocent people in Northern Ireland.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Why I am Suing CNN by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures.

So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment.

So I am suing them for a lot of money, not in order to enrich myself, but to deter CNN and other media from maliciously misinforming their viewers at the expense of innocent people. I intend to donate funds I receive from CNN to worthy charities, including those that defend the First Amendment.

Every American will benefit from a judicial decision that holds giant media accountable for turning truth on its head and for placing partisanship above the public interest.

I love the First Amendment, I support the First Amendment, I have litigated cases defending the First Amendment. I have written and taught about the First Amendment. And I was a law clerk for the Supreme Court when it rendered its landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which “protects media even when they print false statements about public figures, as long as the media did not act with ‘actual malice.'”

But I also understand the limitations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is designed to promote the marketplace of ideas. It is not a license for giant media companies to deliberately and maliciously defame citizens, even public figures. So when CNN made a decision to doctor a recording so as to deceive its viewers into believing that I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said, that action was not protected by the First Amendment. Here is what CNN did.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Two Campaign Workers for GOP Opponent of Minn. Rep. Ilhan Omar Shot, One Fatally, Amid Deadly Crime Wave By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/17/two-campaign-workers-for-gop-opponent-of-minn-rep-ilhan-omar-shot-one-fatally-amid-deadly-crime-wave/

Two campaign staffers for the Republican congressional candidate running against Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar were shot in Minneapolis on Monday, one of them fatally.

A teenager and another individual who worked on Republican Lacy Johnson’s campaign were both shot outside of a gas station on Minneapolis’ north side. Andre Conley, a 17-year-old outreach coordinator for Johnson’s campaign, was killed in the attack. The other outreach coordinator was taken to the hospital in serious condition and is expected to survive.

Minneapolis has seen homicides spike 87 per cent in the wake of the George Floyd riots and the city council’s efforts to “dismantle the police.”

The staffers were not performing campaign duties at the time of the incident, the Johnson campaign said. According to police, one or more assailants opened fire on a group of people standing in front of the gas station and then fled on foot.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Left’s Moral Compass Isn’t Broken In order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass. Dennis Prager

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/lefts-moral-compass-isnt-broken-dennis-prager/

All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken.

And all of my life, I was wrong.

Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.

I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.

This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms — what we call “Judeo-Christian” — that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.

But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”

It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class — worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Social Media is Not the Cause of our Social Dilemmas Exposing the character rot of social media users. Jason D. Hill

Posted By on September 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/social-media-not-cause-our-social-dilemmas-jason-d-hill/

Jeff Orlowski’s documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix is an interesting panoptic exploration of ways in which human minds are allegedly twisted, manipulated, and directed by social media to produce outcomes by programmed algorithms whose creators, in the end, must have had nefarious  motives. On the surface, we may cast them as players in a medieval morality play between good and evil. The evil operatives are the gnomic know-it-alls who somehow must have known that with the invention of the “Like” button on various social media pages and media outlets, they could send recipients into waves of euphoria — while those receiving a “thumbs down” could be sent into paroxysms of rage or, more commonly, paralyzing depression. The social media creators in the film, however, claim that they only wanted to “spread positivity and love in the world.”

The basic thematic thrust of the documentary is predicated on a dubious premise: the idea of an addictive media, the manipulative machinations of its architects and their unwillingness to confront their culpability in creating an addictive social media culture, and the latter’s contribution to the polarization of our society and the proliferation of “fake news.”

This film, which purports to gain some philosophical respectability by an identification with the anti-conceptual moniker, “surveillance capitalism,” presupposes a world of mindless victims; automatons in need of global marketplace regulation from “data extraction” invisible vectors that somehow predict our behaviors and, well, coerce us to do things that we would not do had our brains not been improperly hijacked by the artificially-driven analytics.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hell hath no fury like peaceniks who get upstaged Though it’s hard to keep track of their disparate gripes, their response to the Abraham Accords makes it easy to spot their hypocrisy.  By  Ruthie Blum

Posted By on September 17th, 2020

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/hell-hath-no-fury-like-peaceniks-upstaged/

Israeli protesters gathered on Sunday night along the highway to Ben-Gurion International Airport, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to board a flight to the United States.

With their usual chants of “crime minister” and other trite anti-Bibi mantras, these self-anointed guardians of freedom and democracy – members of the so-called “peace camp” – were livid that the premier was on his way to Washington, DC.

That the purpose of his trip was to sign the U.-brokered Abraham Accords – a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates and declaration of peace with Bahrain – didn’t matter to them. On the contrary, it became another excuse for their outrage.

A mere two or so hours earlier, Netanyahu had announced that the steep and steady rise in coronavirus morbidity made a three-week countrywide lockdown necessary. As if this weren’t sufficient cause for exasperation, even among his supporters, his detractors took the opportunity to rail against him for going off to a “cocktail party” at the White House, leaving Israelis ill in every sense of the word, thanks to his government’s failed COVID-19 policies.

Yes, they insist, he is responsible simultaneously for the increasing mortality rate and disintegrating workforce – for opening up the economy too soon on the one hand and for not “having a proper plan” to prevent the spread of the virus on the other.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Who is the ‘oppressed minority’? Police officers! Gamaliel Isaac

Posted By on September 17th, 2020

https://www.wnd.com/2020/09/oppressed-minority-police-officers/

Exclusive: Gamaliel Isaac notes most cops’ actions are ‘driven by crime and not by race’

Since the Black Lives Matter riots, corporate and academic indoctrination of staff into believing that they are unconsciously racist, that blacks can’t be racist and that police and the system is racist, has been increasing. Employers such as my own list alleged black victims of police racism to justify their indoctrination training. A typical list might consist of the following names: Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Dion Johnson, Michael Brown, Rayshard Brooks, Atatiana Jefferson, Tamir Rice and George Floyd. These institutions don’t explain why a racist act by a policeman implies anything about whether or not their employees are racist. In addition, if we examine the tragic stories of the people in these lists we discover that they are generally cases of self defense and not racism.

In the tragic case of Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend shot a policeman before he and his fellow officers shot back. Tony McDade pointed his gun at a policeman before the policeman shot back. Dion Johnson tried to grab a policeman’s weapon, and in the struggle that followed he was shot. Rayshard Brooks fired a taser at a policeman before he was shot. Atatiana Jefferson pointed a gun at a policeman before he shot her. Tamir Rice pointed a toy gun, whose orange barrel had been removed so that it looked like a real gun, at officer Loehmann who then shot Tamir. Officer Loehmann explained his actions with: “I knew it was a gun, and I knew it was coming out.” Michael Brown ran toward Officer Darren Wilson and wouldn’t stop despite repeated commands to get down on the ground.