ISRAEL Comments turned off

Dangerous Fake Peace What Israel has to insist on. by Dr. Shmuel Katz

Posted By on March 31st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dangerous-fake-peace/

Unfortunately, the history books are filled with stories addressing failed peace agreements which resulted in major setbacks to the involved nations.

The classic example is the peace agreement between Nazi Germany and the British Prime Minister Chamberlain, who showed his people the document of “Peace in Our Times” which was signed by Hitler and encouraged Hitler to advance his expansionist dreams, which resulted in World War II.

The failure of the Oslo Accords was another important example of a failed attempt to reach a peace agreement. One of the most important reasons for the failure of the accords was the lack of education for peace and reconciliation in the Arab schools and in the media.

This serious problem was enacted by design. When the leader of the PLO Yasser Arafat was asked by his people, why did he agree to proceed with a track towards a peace agreement with the state of Israel in 1993, he responded by referring to the deceptive actions of the Prophet Muhammad as they were related to his presumed peace agreement with the tribe of the Quraysh in Mecca, which was called the Treaty of al-Hudaybiya. Once Muhammad felt strong enough, the treaty was violated, he killed the Jews in the city of Kaybar and he ended up expanding his control on multiple tribes in the region.

As Israel is dealing with the terrorist organizations of Hamas in the Gaza strip and with Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is very clear, that these terrorist organizations have no intention to advance the situation toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict. This is in line with their hope to implement an imposed world domination, by which they will be able to force their religious ideology on everyone across the globe.

The fact that Hamas is a part of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah is a part of the axis of evil, which is led by the Shiite Iran, do not fight each other at this time, is related to the fact that they are fighting a common enemy composed of the state of Israel and the Western society led by the USA.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Reflections on the Dismantling of the Dept. of Education How we can foster not just scholastic high achievers but civic-minded patriots too. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on March 31st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-the-dismantling-of-the-dept-of-education/

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to dismantle the Department of Education, there are a few issues to bear in mind – ones which, if properly attended to, will ensure that America remains a global educational force with which to contend.

In reverting the education of our youth to the individual states that make up our nation, and against the backdrop that some states are fiscally more advanced than others, the question remains: how does the United States remain true to its commitment to provide a first-class education to its youth without compromising any of its quality, where that quality is tied to economic status on a state level? The ethical issue at stake here is that the quality of each American student ought not be constrained by an accident of birth. Students born into poor families and living in poorer states have just as much potential and cognitive capabilities as those born into affluent families living in high-income districts.

Although there are some exceptions, high-income school districts tend to spend more money on education per pupil and have better outcomes, while low-income districts tend to spend less and have worse outcomes. Without entering into a debate about the ethicality of publicly funded education, it should be fairly obvious that in order for the United States to surpass those 40 countries President Trump has identified as being ahead of us educationally, our nation needs to ensure that talented and capable students trapped in poorer states should have as much of an equal chance to matriculate through K-12 as their more affluent compatriots.

The President has derided our education system and has stated that the country performs the worst globally while spending the most per pupil. President Trump declared: “We’re last, we’re number 40 but we’re number one in cost per pupil.”

One issue that needs to be investigated is exploring how and why such funds are allocated in ways that do not increase performance. It should go without saying that if we wish to remain competitive with other nations that are outperforming our students in several domains including reading, writing and mathematics, then the government ought to ensure that dollars are spent in a way that can directly correlate to excellent outcomes.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

Media, Please Grow Up- Climate Skeptics and Lukewarmers are Never Given Equal Time

Posted By on March 31st, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/31/media-please-grow-up/

When did high school newspaper editors take over Western media? Decades ago, of course, and we’re unhappy to report that it seems they’re never going to grow up. The latest evidence? The early peak bloom of the cherry blossom trees along Washington’s Tidal Basin is being blamed on global warming.

The press has latched onto the man-made global warming narrative and it won’t let go.

The Washington Post couldn’t wait to inform its tell-us-what-to-believe readership that this year’s “peak occurred several days earlier than the long-term average, as human-caused climate warming hastens the onset of spring flowering.”

To its credit, the Post noted that reader comments “reflect a mix of opinions on the impact of climate change on the timing of cherry blossoms reaching peak bloom in D.C. Some commenters acknowledge that climate change, particularly the Urban Heat Island Effect, is causing earlier blooms, while others express skepticism or frustration with the focus on climate change.”

Maybe that’s the owner’s influence.

Meanwhile, ABC News said early last week that “in recent years, the peak bloom date for the cherry trees at the Tidal Basin reservoir is occurring earlier than it did in the past. Seasonal shifts, including milder, shorter winter seasons and spring warmth beginning earlier due to human-amplified climate change, are impacting when the cherry trees reach peak bloom, data shows.”

The data show no such thing. Anyone can infer from the numbers that “human-amplified climate change” is to blame (or credit, depending on the point of view), but they prove nothing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump-Musk: Revolutionary Method, Restoration Plan by Amir Taheri

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21511/trump-musk-restoration

The ultimate goal of this new oligarchy is to privatize government, a concept that is anathema to European intellectuals who regard the Hobbesian state as an earthly version of divinity.

To Americans, however, the Leviathan, though accepted as a necessity, has always been regarded as a potential threat to freedoms that their ancestors sought as they fled from European tyrannies.

Whether their restoration scheme works or not remains to be seen. But to question its legitimacy is a sign of sour grapes by European gurus who witness their politically correct world crumbling around them.

“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election, which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.

France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs, as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin, and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The answer to the question may be simple: Trump is doing what he is doing because he promised to do those things and has a contract with the 78 million Americans who voted for him.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It was the woke elites who ‘purged’ America’s museums, not Donald Trump Don’t believe the media hysteria: Trump’s executive order on history and truth deals a welcome blow for sanity. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/29/it-was-the-woke-elites-who-purged-americas-museums-not-donald-trump/

This month’s Doublespeak Award goes to the BBC. President Trump is spearheading a ‘purge’ of America’s top museums, it breathlessly reports. The madman in the White House has instructed the Smithsonian Institution to put back all ‘memorials and statues’ that were ‘improperly removed’ from federal property in recent years, the Beeb says. Hold up. Call me a stickler for linguistic accuracy, but isn’t a purge when you tear monuments down, not when you put them back up?

Yes, a new Orwellian diktat has dropped: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reversing a purge is a purge. What the BBC and others are madly calling Trump’s ‘purge’ is outlined in his latest executive order. It’s titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’. It ‘targets’ the Smithsonian Institution, which oversees 21 museums in the US, 17 of which are in Washington, DC. It tells the Smithsonian to cut out the ‘anti-American ideology’, resist any exhibitions that ‘divide Americans by race’, and restore monuments that were toppled or hidden away in the service of woke ideology over the past five years.

Shorter version: stop purging. Imagine how drunk on the Kool-Aid of anti-Trumpism you would need to be to describe a plea to museums to stop erasing American history and stop hiding American artefacts as a ‘purge’. The clue is in the name, people: the order is about ‘restoring’ things, not purging them. It says the Smithsonian and its museums were once ‘global icon[s] of cultural achievement’, but of late they’ve fallen under the sway of ‘a divisive, race-centred ideology’ that depicts ‘American and Western values as inherently harmful’. And that stops now, it says.

Come on, this is not a McCarthyite stab at cleansing museums of ‘progressive’ thinking – it’s an effort to reverse the McCarthyism of those woke ideologues who cleansed DC’s wonderful museums of their traditional mission and even of some of their objects.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

Genesis 1:28. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Michael Ordman discloses Israel’s baby boom even during wartime. This fact is heartwarming when major nations are experiencing a population loss. It is a spiritual call that Judaism will survive and thrive.  And indeed, Israel subdues famine, thirst and illness with myriad  dazzling technologies and therapies. Read it all.  rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR

Israel’s baby boom. (TY Dov) In the midst of war, Israel is experiencing a baby boom. Unlike post-war birth surges, Israel had a 7% increase in births since Sep 2023, with 181,000 babies born in 2024. Maternity wards are overflowing even with economic and security challenges. And the highest increase is in front line towns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-SYj6orAwk

https://israel-currents.quora.com/Israeli-Jewish-Birth-Rates-Boom-In-Response-To-War

https://theettingerreport.com/2025-jewish-demographic-momentum-in-israel/

From Nova party to Mea Shearim. When Hamas attacked the Nova party revelers on 7 Oct 2023, Barak Nixon hid in a chemical toilet stall for 8 hours. He promised that if he got out of there alive, he would become religious. He subsequently moved to Mea Shearim, the ultra-orthodox area of Jerusalem. This is his story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_DeWoSuGMc

Off-road security vehicles for Samaria. Israel’s Settlements and National Missions Ministry delivered 21 off-road “Ranger” vehicles to Jewish farmers in the Samaria region. The vehicles were provided in cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command, which includes Judea and Samaria.

https://www.jns.org/edited-pub-wed-israeli-govt-supplies-off-road-security-vehicles-to-samaria-farmers/

Iron Dome latest tests. Israel completed comprehensive flight tests of the Iron Dome missile defense system. The exercises, conducted by the Israel Missile Defense Organization and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, evaluated the system’s effectiveness against advanced threats, including rockets, cruise missiles and drones.

https://www.jns.org/israels-iron-dome-missile-defense-system-passes-most-significant-ever-flight-tests/

Ambassadors tour southern Israel. Dozens of ambassadors from foreign countries in Israel participated in a tour of southern Israel. It exposed them to the damage caused to the Gaza Envelope and rehabilitation efforts. Ambassadors included from the Netherlands, Argentina, Guatemala, Belgium, Greece, Cyprus and others.

https://www.jns.org/wire/dozens-of-ambassadors-tour-southern-israel-witnessing-impact-of-war-on-the-gaza-envelope/

Riding for resilience. More than 100 bicyclists are participating in the ninth annual Geerz “Israel Charity Ride” from March 23-25 – a two-day mountain-biking event aimed at raising funds to offer relief and resilience-building opportunities for 450+ children affected by trauma due to the war.

https://www.jns.org/wire/riding-for-resilience-100-plus-bicyclists-unite-to-support-mental-health-for-israeli-youth/

New hotels open in a war. In 2024, despite the war and thanks to grants provided by the Israel Ministry of Tourism to entrepreneurs, 483 new hotel rooms were added to the hotel supply across the country, and four new hotels were established, expanded, or converted. During 2025, 18 new hotels are expected to be added.

https://www.israel21c.org/new-hotels-opening-in-israel-this-year/

MEDIA Comments turned off

Rhetoric, Lies, and the Media: A Quintilian Perspective on Modern Journalism The media distorts reality, twisting Trump’s actions into tyranny while excusing its own abuses—an artful exercise in deception and bias. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/30/rhetoric-lies-and-the-media-a-quintilian-perspective-on-modern-journalism/

Where’s Quintilian when you need him? The author of the twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria (c. AD 95) knew all there was to know about rhetoric, “the art,” as Aristotle said, “of persuasion.” Quintilian’s chief concern was with turning out able and virtuous orators. But in the course of his inquiries, he also analyzed the workings of deceitful or fraudulent oratory. What a rich hunting ground our dishonest media today would have given the old Roman!

It is amusing to speculate on what Quintilian might have made of The New York Times, for example, a recent story in our former paper of record titled “Elon Musk Is South African. We Shouldn’t Forget It.” Musk left his native South Africa in the late 1980s. He never looked back. But according to the Times, Musk was irredeemably tainted by the racial policies of South Africa. He is, the Times  informed its readers, “a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa.” Really?

What follows is an extraordinary web of half-truths, innuendo, and outright lies. Quintilian would have delighted in explaining how it all works.

He would also have found much to work with in “Trump’s Assault on Elites Encompasses Almost Every Aspect of American Life,” Stephen Collinson’s recent essay for CNN. Considered simply as an exercise in mendacious rhetoric, it deserves some sort of prize. I think of it as Mary McCarthy thought of Lillian Hellmann. When asked by Dick Cavett what she found to be dishonest about Hellmann, McCarthy said, “Everything. I once said in an interview that everything she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

So it is with Collinson’s flaccid but scuttling effort to attack Donald Trump.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The AOC Train Wreck is Coming, and it’s Going to Be Spectacular Nationwide rallies are spurring “Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez 2028” whispers, and it’s already clear: the CIA couldn’t do a better job of discrediting the American left Matt Taibbi

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.racket.news/p/the-aoc-train-wreck-is-coming-and

From the New York Times Sunday article, “As the Left Looks to 2028, It Waits on Ocasio-Cortez’s Big Decision.”

As Democrats find… their party’s popularity at a generational low, progressives are also staring down the prospect of a post-Bernie future… The 83-year-old Mr. Sanders has signaled that he does not intend to run for president again. The question now is who will lead the network he built from scratch into the next presidential election…

Virtually everyone interviewed said there was one clear leader for the job: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Hoo, boy. Making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. Vogue’s “Consummate Power Dresser”) the face of a left populist movement is the latest episode of the longest-running television show in history, How Will the American Left Screw Up This Time? It’s an instant entrant in the Hall of Fame of Bad Ideas, on par with a Hitler bobblehead day promotion or training orangutans to pack flatware. This will not end well:

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Garnett Trump Was Right to Kill the EV Mandate Scrapping the EPA’s draconian tailpipe-emissions rule will boost competition, benefit consumers, and strengthen national security.

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-epa-electric-vehicle-mandate-tailpipe-emissions-rule

In his March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump celebrated terminating Joe Biden’s “insane electric vehicle mandate.” A year ago, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency had finalized a rule, nominally about tailpipe emissions, that would have required 30 percent to 56 percent of all new light-duty consumer cars sold in the United States to be electric vehicles (EVs). Trump announced his intention to undo Biden’s EV overreach in his first week in office, as part of his executive order entitled “Unleashing American Energy.”

Biden’s rule would have brought chaos to the automotive industry, caused significant economic harm to millions of Americans, and put U.S. national security at risk. Repealing it will level the playing field in the EV market in ways that will benefit American consumers. According to Kelley Blue Book, the cheapest gasoline car available in America in 2025, the Nissan Versa, costs $18,300. The cheapest EV, the Nissan Leaf, costs $29,280—a staggering 60 percent more expensive.

The logistics of owning an EV are also complicated and time-consuming. EV chargers need to be installed at homes and apartment complexes, and charging a car can take more than 12 hours, compared with the less than five minutes it takes to fill up a tank of gas. The Leaf EV can travel 149 miles on a full charge; the Versa can go more than 375 miles on a full tank of gas, over 150 percent farther.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Columbia’s President Resigns, But the DEI Battle Is Just Beginning The campus diversity regime, at the Ivy League school and elsewhere, won’t go down without a fight.

Posted By on March 30th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbias-president-resigns-but-the-dei-battle-is-just-beginning

With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?

The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.

The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests,. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.

Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.

Th irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.