ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: Herzog’s framework is capitulation, not compromise

Posted By on March 17th, 2023

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-734578

President Isaac Herzog began his much-anticipated address to the nation on Wednesday evening – to present his plan for judicial-reform compromise – by mentioning the revelation earlier in the day about a terrorist infiltration from Lebanon.

“The serious security incident that became public a few hours ago is clear proof that our enemies well recognize the severing of Israeli unity, and are acting accordingly,” he said.

“Nor is this the only threat,” he added, as a segue to discussing the dangers of internecine strife.

“The [events of] last few weeks are tearing us apart,” he continued. “They are harming Israel’s economy, security, political ties and especially Israeli cohesion. Shabbat meals have become a battlefield; friends and neighbors have become rivals. The conflicts are getting worse. Worry, fear and anxiety are more tangible than ever.”

Fair enough. Yet he didn’t go on to reprimand the “resistance” for its protests and appeals to foreign governments to delegitimize the state’s democratically elected officials.

No, he simply bemoaned the societal schism and warned against the possibility of an actual civil war that includes casualties.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Judicial reform protests threaten to undermine IDF, former commanders say: David Isaac

Posted By on March 17th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/judicial-reform-protests-threaten-to-undermine-idf-former-commanders-say/

“You cannot have an army where people say that if the government doesn’t do what I want, I won’t serve. Today, it will be judicial reform. Tomorrow, it will be removal of settlements,” said Maj. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

None of the anti-judicial reform protests that have roiled Israel in recent weeks have been so worrisome as Israeli soldiers’ refusal to serve. The most dramatic example was a squadron of over 30 F-15 reserve pilots who declared last week that they wouldn’t show up for exercises. They eventually backed down and agreed to show up to base (not to drill, to talk).

Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, CEO and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), a group comprising thousands of former security officers, told JNS that the refusal to serve “poses an existential danger. If there is one thing that unites us all, it’s the army.”

“The IDF is not a professional army but an army of the people, where everyone sends their sons and daughters to serve. People need to set politics aside when they don their uniforms. When people bring politics into their units, which is what’s happening now, it breaks apart the very foundation that enables our army to function, because we will always have governments pushing policies that some people won’t agree with,” he said.

“There were times when the government did things that I, and everyone who was a part of our group, IDSF, felt was against our values. But it never crossed our minds even for one second to involve the army,” he continued. “Two years ago, there was a government that basically handed the keys to the Muslim Brotherhood. For many, that went 100% against the most basic principles of Zionism. Yet, they didn’t pull the army into it. You cannot have an army where people say that if the government doesn’t do what I want, I won’t serve. Today, it will be judicial reform. Tomorrow, it will be removal of settlements.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s two-faced allies America and Britain undermine Israel’s security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state. By Melanie Phillips

Posted By on March 17th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-two-faced-allies/

America and Britain claim to be allies of Israel. There is no gainsaying the deep links between them of military assistance, intelligence and trade. Israel is the invaluable strategic asset for America and Britain in the Middle East, a crucial bulwark in the defense of the West.

And yet, both America and Britain undermine Israel’s security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state.

A recent event illustrated this particularly sharply when British diplomatic officials in Jerusalem effectively endorsed the Palestinian Authority’s agenda to eradicate Israel.

Palestinian Media Watch has revealed that at last Friday’s annual “Palestine Marathon” held by the P.A., seven British officials taking part as “#TeamUK” wore marathon T-shirts displaying the P.A.’s map that erases Israel and represents the whole country as Palestine.

The Jewish Chronicle reports that the team consisted of the UK’s Deputy Consul General Alison McEwen and Foreign Office colleagues. A picture of the team was tweeted from the official account of the British Consulate in Jerusalem, hailing “the incredible Palestine Marathon to support #FREEDOMOFMOVEMENT for all Palestinians.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How to stop law students from blocking free speech Let employers and state licensing boards know what they did Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 17th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/stop-law-students-blocking-free-speech-stanford/

When a federal appellate judge speaks at a major law school, he should expect tough questions from a learned audience. He should not expect to be shouted down. When he tries to speak but is heckled, jeered and disrupted, he should expect a university administrator to step in, read the students the riot act and restore order. He shouldn’t expect that administrator to sympathize with the disruptive students and let the trouble continue, as the feckless bureaucrat at Stanford Law School did.  

Her shameful behavior is hardly unique. It’s characteristic of mid-level bureaucrats hired to push “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” at universities across the country. They show very little concern for free speech, alternative views or robust debate. That’s a very big problem since those are the very essence of higher education in a democracy. 

These metastasizing DEI bureaucracies endow political ideologues with unchecked power over students’ lives and campus activities. The episode at Stanford shows how they use it. That needs to be fixed. One path to doing that (and lowering the cost of higher education, now encumbered by top-heavy administrative structures) is to abolish the entire DEI apparatus. 

The victim at Stanford was federal appellate judge Kyle Duncan and all the students who came to hear him. True, the university later apologized, but that’s just cheap talk unless it is followed by serious actions against the disruptive students and the administrator who failed in her basic responsibility. Of that, we have heard nothing. Only the naive expect much better from Stanford (or Yale, Harvard, Columbia and dozens more). Stanford students are so committed to their illiberal views, so cloaked in moral righteousness, that they actually protested the dean even issuing an apology. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Are We the Byzantines? The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become. Will Americans? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/15/are-we-the-byzantines/

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.

Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell. 

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Elections Have Consequences; Stolen Elections Have Catastrophes By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/elections_have_consequences_stolen_elections_have_catastrophes.html

“Put the adults back in charge,” they whined.  “Donald Trump will break the world,” they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty’s underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup’s celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty’s installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.  Elections have consequences, but stolen elections have catastrophes.

For over two years, the State-controlled press and the permanent political class have accused anyone who challenges the ruling regime’s legitimacy of being an “election denier” pushing the “big lie” that the 2020 race was rigged.  That resort to low-minded name-calling always seems like the “big tell” that they know that the people know that they’re full of it.  Never mind that Time ran an exposé shortly after the election diagramming in great detail how “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”  Never mind that the American people later learned that Facebook CEO “Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020” by “strategically bankroll[ing] and staff[ing] local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting.”  Never mind that leftist agitators had spent months in the run-up to the election threatening to unleash mayhem if Biden “won” the so-called “national popular vote” but lost the Electoral College.  Never mind that those same leftist agitators also spent months seeding a public narrative that a “red mirage” would show Trump winning before days of ballot-hunting eventually overturned those ephemeral victories.  Nope — put all those public admissions and “color revolution” propaganda campaigns aside, you dumb deplorables, and blithely accept the authorities’ assurances that Biden’s election was on the up-and-up.  People with power crossed their hearts and promised they were telling the truth; what more could Americans without power possibly require?  

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Mike Pence – Deep State Patsy A reflection on his character – and his chances in 2024. by John Nantz

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mike-pence-deep-state-patsy/

Former President Donald Trump was a wrecking ball — that’s what people like me voted for in 2016. We recognized the existence of an unelected deep state, composed mostly of Democrats and their shills. And, we understood instinctively that we needed an outsider to demolish the accretions of tyranny.

Trump delivered in spades. He was the first real threat to the bureaucratic state since Nixon.

But, wrecking balls aren’t precision instruments. They’re crass, blunt force trauma, kinetic energy mechanisms of destruction that lay waste. The destructive energy released is the precursor to creation, renewal, and resurrection. But, if you need something deconstructed in quick order, there’s nothing else suited to the job. Trump tore down and built over the rubble, just as he’d done countless times through the decades while building a real estate empire.

President Donald Trump’s accomplishments will leave you gobsmacked when they’re stacked one on top of the other — a magic beanstalk of wins whose terminus is lost in a nimbus of high-flying cirrus clouds. Here’s a list. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in, it’ll take you a while to get through all fourteen pages.

Trump wasn’t perfect. He broke some china. For the snowflakes, feelings got hurt. Trump tweeted harshly. He emoted often — a bunch of highly entertaining, but impolite thoughts. He insulted people, generally, the ones who richly deserved it. In a manlier age, no one would have cared. I certainly didn’t, and don’t.

However, his appointments left a great deal to be desired. At the top of my “wish he’d picked someone else list” are current FBI Director Chris Wray and former Vice President Mike Pence.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Future Lawyers Who Are Afraid of Debate Why the heckler’s veto is wrong – and why universities must prevent its use.Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/future-lawyers-who-are-afraid-of-debate/

Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree.

Not content merely with expressing their opposing point of view, these campus brownshirts are so sure of their beliefs, so positive that their perception is the valid one, the only true one, that they are comfortable with suppressing the alternate opinions and ideology of those whose speech they seek to silence.

And they exert their unearned moral and intellectual superiority to silence ideological opponents because feckless administrators have tolerated this outrageous behavior—the use of what is known as the “heckler’s veto”— for too long now and are reaping the inevitable backlash.

The heckler’s veto is an unethical tactic used the advance one’s own beliefs by defeating an ideological opponent’s argument by silencing him, instead of having to offer a compelling argument of one’s own; someone with alternate views has his speech canceled or, if it is held, shouted down, disrupted, and jeered at.

This is precisely what took place at the Stanford Law School on March 9th when Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was scheduled to deliver a lecture on the topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Instead of being greeted by a polite group of students eager to learn from a federal judge’s wide experience, Judge Duncan, who had been invited by Stanford’s Federalist Society (FedSoc), instead stood at the front of a full classroom with some 100 jeering, insulting activists who only purpose of attending was to silence Duncan and prevent him from speaking at all.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

U.S. Military Recruiting Numbers Dip to Record Lows If Biden wanted to sabotage our military, what would he be doing differently? by Robert Spencer

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-s-military-recruiting-numbers-dip-to-record-lows/

It will come as no surprise to patriots, but it may surprise the Leftists who are sure that they can keep using Americans who love this country as their drones and cannon fodder on an indefinite basis: hardly anyone wants to join Old Joe Biden’s woke military. That’s perfectly understandable. Why go through all the trouble of going through training and risk getting sent to some unnecessary war when you can learn about Critical Race Theory and get vaccinated right at home? Recruitment levels are lower than they’ve been in decades, and instead of doing something about it, Biden’s handlers are working to drive the morale of military personnel even lower.

According to a Sunday report from WTOV in Steubenville, Ohio, “in 2022, the U.S. Army fell 15,000 recruits short of its goal.” Francis Nwiah, captain and commander, U.S. Army Bridgeport Recruiting, said, “It’s a national security concern. We are struggling to get folks into the Army right now.” Nwiah blamed the Shanghai Sniffles: “We got hit by COVID, that affected our modus operandi and how we operate as recruiters.” He didn’t say anything about relentless Leftist indoctrination and the politicization of the military, however, and that’s more likely to be the problem.

To try to get the recruitment numbers back up, the Army is spending $117 million to dust off its 1980s slogan, “Be All You Can Be,” and that’s terrific, because the slogan has so much more resonance now than it did in the Reagan era. Now a male recruit may decide that he wants to be all that he can be by becoming a female recruit, and the Army (using your money, of course) will pay for surgery to reinforce his delusion.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Gen. Milley Won’t Stop Russia From Retrieving U.S. Drone Wreckage The profiles in courage just keep coming. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gen-milley-wont-stop-russia-from-retrieving-u-s-drone-wreckage/

The profiles in courage just keep coming.

Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday.

The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.

It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.

Russia then followed that up by announcing it was going to retrieve the wreckage to count coup and gain whatever intel they liked.

Russia will attempt to retrieve and study the wreckage of the American MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea after being harassed by Russian fighter jets.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, told Rossiya-1 TV on Wednesday that he was not certain the drone could be extricated from the water.

Gen. Milley is on the case though.