Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Attacks on Jews in NYC and Media Double Standards - Danusha V. Goska


by Danusha V. Goska

Why we need to change the way we talk about black anti-Semitism.





December 26, 2019, the day after Christmas, those Americans who emerged from their holiday celebrations to check world headlines were in for a shock. Police reported several attacks on Jews in New York. Americans don't think of their largest city, a world center of finance and the arts, a cosmopolitan capital where one can enjoy cuisine from any continent at any hour of the day or night, as a place where Jews are unsafe on the streets. New York is the city of Seinfeld, of Woody Allen and three-time mayor Michael Bloomberg. Former Mayor David Dinkins famously called New York a "gorgeous mosaic" of diverse peoples. But in fact, these Christmas-and-Hanukkah-week attacks were part of a trend. As bad as they were, worse was yet to come. On Saturday, December 28, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg and his guests celebrated the closing nights of Hanukkah in Monsey, a suburb north of Manhattan. An intruder burst into the home and stabbed five people.

Recent attacks on Jews in New York City typically involve unprovoked punching, cursing, and hurling of objects ranging from soft drinks to large and potentially deadly stones. Victims range from children to the elderly, and include mothers accompanied by their babies. Attackers sometimes yell anti-Semitic comments.

Videos reveal that attackers are frequently black. In one startling video from November 4, 2018, a group of young African Americans congregate outside a Brooklyn synagogue, talk among themselves, hurl a pole through the synagogue window, and then run away. In another attack, a Jewish man is walking down the sidewalk when what appears to be a black youth runs up behind him and punches him hard in the head, nearly knocking him over. In a March, 2019 assault, an apparently healthy, young man kicks a toddler's stroller being pushed by the child's mother. Attacks are not always violent. In one videotaped confrontation, a black woman screamed verbal abuse at a Jewish man on the New York City subway.

On December 10, 2019, David Anderson and Francine Graham killed four people in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Deceased victims include Police Detective Joseph Seals, Leah Ferencz, owner of a kosher grocery store, Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student and a shopper at that store, and Douglas Rodriguez, a store employee and immigrant from Ecuador. Shooter David Anderson was an anti-Semite who had been influenced by the Black Hebrew Israelites, who claim that Jews are not really Jewish, and that the characters in the Bible were all really black. In this ideology, contemporary Jews are labeled "imposter Jews" and "so-called Jews." This idea is not limited to violent extremists. On December 14, Saturday Night Live comic Kenan Thompson referred to "historically correct black Jesus." Jersey City killer David Anderson used the word "imposter" to refer to modern-day Jews. Anderson and Graham's killings were classified as a terrorist incident and a hate crime. The New Jersey attorney general said that the killers "had a tremendous amount of firepower. They had a pipe bomb in their van."

In the wake of this attack, Jersey City school board member Joan Terrell-Paige appeared to attempt to justify it. Terrell-Paige called "jews," as she spelled the word, in lower-case, "brutes," and said that people should seek a "message" in the killers' actions.

Clearly, black anti-Semitism is a problem. It is found among juvenile delinquents, TV stars, terrorists, and those entrusted with educating the young. Black anti-Semitism has an articulated ideology. Not all black people who don't like Jews adhere to this ideology, but it's available to them. Today's Jews are merely "so-called" Jews, "imposter Jews," "usurper Jews," "interloper Jews," and "Johnny-come-lately Jews." In this ideology, the real descendants of the Jews of the Bible are African Americans.

Mainstream media often declines to identify the race of those who attack Jews. On December 27, 2019, media reported that an attacker hit a Jewish mother in the head as she walked with her son in Brooklyn. The attacker, an account reported, was 42 years old and female. But the account did not identify her race, and no mugshot was provided.   

Mainstream media's hand-wringing around the racial identities of attackers is evident in an October 31, 2018 New York Times article with the disconcerting title, "Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?" The "first inkling" of danger for Jews appeared in 2016, the Times reported, when the words "Go Trump" appeared in a playground alongside swastikas. Really? Trump's election was really the "first inkling" of trouble for Jews in New York City?

In fact, New York City hosted a deadly anti-Semitic pogrom in Crown Heights in 1991. According to one account,

"It was the most terrifying four days and nights in American Jewish history … with shouts of 'Kill the Jews' and 'Heil Hitler'; roving mobs in Crown Heights throwing stones at Jews; police standing passively; gangs breaking into homes with mezuzahs while Jews hid in closets. One Jew was murdered; others beaten to a pulp; an Israeli flag was burned."

In 1995, Al Sharpton fomented deadly hatred during his Freddy's Fashion Mart protests. One of the protesters killed eight people, including himself.

In 2002, Amiri Baraka, aka Everett LeRoi Jones, New Jersey's Poet Laureate, published a poem blaming Jews for the 2001 terror attacks.

No, the election of Donald Trump was not the "first inkling" of trouble for Jews in New York City.

The Times must confess that "During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group." The Times gingerly acknowledges "it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder."

The reader comments section is not so careful to use the phrase "varied backgrounds." The most popular reader comment next to the above-linked Times article blames the "Many members of minority communities" who have participated in attacks. The second most popular comment is even more direct. "for left-leaning New Yorkers, anti-Semitism is an issue worth addressing only when the perpetrators of anti-Semitism fit their narrative. If a Nazi or white supremacist does it -- take note and take action.  If the perpetrator is less convenient to the Narrative (evil can only emanate from straight white males), like if the perpetrator is black or Muslim, then they play it down and ignore it."

National Public Radio surprisingly allowed Bari Weiss to speak bluntly in a September 21, 2019 broadcast. "To judge from the footage of many of these attacks, at least some of the perpetrators seem to be young black men or teenagers. And perhaps that's one of the reasons that so many people want to avert their eyes from what's happening in places like Crown Heights," she said.

What we are seeing here is the economy of truth. If it benefits the speaker to condemn white anti-Semites, the speaker will do so. If it damages the speaker to condemn black anti-Semites, the speaker will avoid doing so. This rhetorical game has nothing to do with respecting or helping black people. It has everything to do with covering one's own posterior, and hoarding one's own political correctness points.

***
My book Bieganski devotes a chapter to black anti-Semitism. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate a media double standard. I compare press coverage of two clusters of events that involved accusations of anti-Semitism. One cluster of events involved Polish Catholics; the other involved African Americans.

In November, 1993, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, made a speech at Kean College in New Jersey. Muhammad said, inter alia, that Jews were not related to the main characters in the Bible, who were black (although, somehow, black Jesus' killers were Jews), that Jews hold economic, cultural, and political control of American and African blacks, which they use to torment and oppress blacks, that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust because of their obnoxious behavior in Germany, that Jews control the press worldwide, and that Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was a ploy to get blacks killed.

These charges were leveled in non-standard, frequently obscene and contemptuous language. For example, when Muhammad accused Jews of controlling the world gem trade, he said, "That's why you call yourself Mr. Rubenstein, Mr. Goldstein, Mr. Silverstein. Because you been stealing rubies and gold and silver ... we say it real quick and call it jewelry, but it's not jewelry, it's Jew-elry, 'cause you're the rogue that's stealing all over the face of the planet earth." When ridiculing Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights movement, Muhammad imitated a Yiddish accent. Muhammad, in future speeches, called for death to all Jews: "Never will I say I am not an anti-Semite. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth."

In response to such research-grade anti-Semitism, mainstream press accounts did not begin with full-throated condemnation. In fact, mainstream press articles about Muhammad's speech and attendant controversies are so formulaic that they appear more like the scripture of some obsessive religious doctrine than the result of a free and vigorous press.

One of the refrains of this formula was reference to black suffering. The following quotes, though all similar, are taken from different articles, authors, and sources. Some listed: "drugs, violence, high rates of teen-age pregnancy, poor schooling and poor discipline," "unemployment, alienation, drugs, violence, health care, education, and lack of economic opportunity," "poverty, hopelessness, and despair," "drugs, poverty, hopelessness and crime," "crime, poverty, and inequality," "drugs, poverty, and bitterness," "misery, drugs, crime, poverty, and dying hope," "bitterness, alienation, and mistrust," "the bank that refuses to lend a dime to the inner city to the boy who lives next door and carries a pistol, a crack vial and a heart turned to stone by disappointment and hopelessness" as being responsible for misbehavior.

Other articles recounted black suffering in more intimate detail, often using vivid anecdotes: "The teen-ager pulled up his shirt to show the bandage on his lean belly and the round hole on his back that had been sealed shut. He had been shot the other week, walking down the street to buy a hamburger." "The year was 1948 and the laws of segregation were in full force. For Muqaddin, who is black, it was a shattering experience that left him seething with rage against white America." A Black Muslim woman was asked to remove her veil while shopping in a mall. The woman reported: "she was 'humiliated' by the encounter with the St. Paul police, who forced her to uncover her face. 'I don't want men lusting after the way I look or sound. It's like someone else being made to pull down their undershorts in public.'"

Many references to black suffering went without amplifying commentary. The reader was invited to use his own devices to weigh black suffering in some ethical scale against anti-Semitism. Other writers offered more guidance, and advanced complex rationalizations as to why black suffering ought either to dilute or erase focus on anti-Semitism.

Notre Dame American Studies chairman Robert Schmuhl spun references to black suffering into support for Ishmael Reed's argument that the real story was the threat to blacks and Jews posed by white Christians. The Times argued that since blacks were suffering so much, they needed to embrace and support each other, regardless of ideology. The Times pointed out that blacks, consumed by their suffering, might be "too politically unsophisticated" to differentiate between ideologies. Writer Thulani Davis repeated this view in Time. One African American woman was quoted as saying that since African Americans faced so many threats from white society, it was necessary to choose a force that could protect them, and that that force was the Nation of Islam, regardless of its anti-Semitism. This need for protection was also stated in The Christian Century.

USA Today argued that black suffering made blacks hate all whites, not just Jews. The Humanist argued that the traumas of slavery created a mythic vacuum that NOI was filling. Benjamin Chavis, in the Times, argued that the suffering of blacks "has created an ... alarming chasm of attitudes and perceptions"; thus, whites could not judge people so different from themselves. He also explicitly stated that black suffering, not the racism of NOI, was the real story, the story the press should be covering. This was repeated in several articles, by several authors, including in Time and Maclean's, and by Rabbi Michael Lerner.

Great care was taken to avoid condemnatory headlines and to provide headlines that strove to represent "both sides," without, somehow, stressing that one side was eliminationist anti-Semitism. With the use of such headlines and such "balance," America's mainstream press changed the story. Muhammad's anti-Semitism was not the issue on which focus needed to be trained; focus needed to be trained, rather, on an effort to hear the "other side." An article in which Farrakhan alluded to blood libel and a Jewish conspiracy to destroy him was headlined, "Farrakhan Softens Tone."

Readers were invited to focus on white haters, not black ones. The Progressive compared Muhammad to David Duke. Shelby Steele, in the Times, compared him to Meir Kahane and the KKK. Bob Herbert in the Times compared him to "[Theodore G.] Bilbo and [George] Wallace in blackface." Henry Louis Gates, also in the Times, summoned memories of those who watched Kitty Genovese die and repeated a vivid quote by a rabbi at Baruch Goldstein's funeral: "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." New York magazine ran one issue with two covers; one featured an anti-Semitic NOI preacher; the other, conservative radio personality Bob Grant. The magazine's editor-in-chief, Kurt Anderson, said, "This idea of parallel covers began to make sense and seemed like a way to demonstrate that they go full circle to illustrate the different strident ends of the spectrum."

These comparisons were not buried towards the end of articles, but appeared up front, to confront the reader head-on. The important event to focus on was not the anti-Semitism of a black man, but racism in general. The New York Times entitled one Muhammad-inspired editorial with a generalized headline: "The Stew of Hate." The lead sentence never mentioned Muhammad: "Religious and racial bigotry never recede entirely, witness the ebb and flow of Klan membership." Yes, condemnation of the Klan is laudable, but the Times was changing the subject to one easier to discuss.

Publications simultaneously engaged in a contrary tactic: anti-Semitism among African Americans was dismissed as unworthy of note. "Less news than soap opera" comparable to the competition between figure skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, reported a political science professor. "Just a pimple" said Franklyn Jenifer, president of Howard College, in US News and World Report. "I don't get so upset by Farrakhan," yawned Michael Lerner in Time. Jews are never mentioned in the annual Ebony poll of urgent issues, sociology professor Raymond Mack reminded his readers. "Forget Farrakhan" ran a headline in the Times, under which Bob Herbert advised: "It's time to turn to other matters."

The mainstream press used cautious and trivializing vocabulary to report anti-Semitism among African Americans. Maclean's trivialized: "the Jews took a special shellacking, not much of a surprise." Professor Doris Wilkinson asked whether or not it was even possible that there be such a thing as "black anti-Semitism." In the lead sentence of one article, the Times reported that "Black racism" is, for some blacks, "a laughable oxymoron." Some articles began with "balanced" rhetorical questions, as in this profile of the leader who invited Farrakhan to an NAACP summit: "Who is Benjamin Chavis Jr., and what in the world is he trying to do to the venerable NAACP? Is he a brash and brilliant innovator, pumping life into a sclerotic organization whose glory days are past and whose current relevance is questioned? Or is he an unrepentant radical and a peripatetic neophyte?" When Farrakhan made classically anti-Semitic statements, echoing blood libel: "The same people opposed to [Jesus] are opposed to me. It's the Passover season. It's the right time;" the Times said merely that these statements "may register on many ears as patently anti-Semitic." Time said that Farrakhan "appeared" to be putting down other people; that he was "misunderstood."

Statistics and anecdotes were cited to indicate that black anti-Semites were not representational of the black population. This in spite of other statistics that showed that African Americans are more anti-Semitic than the general population, and unlike the general population, become more anti-Semitic as they become more educated

Reports of anti-Semitism among African Americans were, it was posited, part of a hidden, nefarious, anti-black agenda. Charles Rangel suggested that the ADL might have been milking Muhammad's speech for money and publicity. The Amsterdam News accused the ADL of "willful and cynical exploitation of a people for the purpose of raising money from Jews by frightening them." Michael Lerner also suggested that Jews were using accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans, in this case as "an excuse to deny our own racism toward blacks" and as "justification for some Americans to declare themselves 'disillusioned with the oppressed'" and to cut social programs for the poor. The Times repeated this; charges of African American anti-Semitism were allegedly "an excuse for doing little to reduce inequalities."

Writer Thulani Davis, in Time, wrote that accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans were "attempts to set the terms of the discussion of racial conflict solely on African American xenophobia. Like all litmus tests, this one is reductive and promotes self-defense rather than thought and disclosure."

Davis also pointed out that in the litmus test atmosphere, "African Americans do not even feel comfortable to debate in public ... in such a delicate public discussion it is dangerous to risk having words taken out of context, ideas abbreviated into unrecognizable and harmful sound bites ... If the issue is used simply to identify enemies, few will step forward." Davis further stated that media reports of anti-Semitism among African-Americans were part of a wider effort to create negative images of black people that fed off of whites' fears of "black hate." "Black hate, though, is only a new wrinkle in the increasingly negative portrayal of blacks as a whole," she wrote. This fear of black hate is taught to "each group of new immigrants settling in the big cities of America."

A letter to the Times denounced as "racist" and "paternalistic" A.M. Rosenthal's request that blacks denounce Muhammad. Rosenthal, implied the writer, was not just to blame for his whiteness, he was also a parvenu who told African-Americans, "in their own country" "what to do and say ... even by those that just arrive on these shores."

Accounts veered into victim blaming. Blaming Jews for the anti-Semitism of blacks goes back at least to Michael Lerner's 1969 manifesto in Judaism, where he wrote: "black anti-Semitism ... is ... a tremendous disgrace to Jews, for this is ... rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks in the ghetto. In short, this anti-Semitism is in part an earned anti-Semitism." Lerner was ready with similar accusations to explain anti-Semitism among African Americans in 1994: "Jewish neoconservatives at Commentary and neoliberals at the New Republic have led the assault on affirmative action" and Jews have "delighted in the prospect of throwing black women and children off welfare as soon as possible." Others also blamed Jewish opposition to affirmative action for alienating blacks.

***
This is but a brief summary of my comparisons of press accounts of accusations of anti-Semitism among African Americans, versus press accounts of accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against members of other demographics, especially persons or groups most associated with Catholicism. In this brief summary, one can discern a pattern.

For months now, the media has presented alarming reports of random, innocent Jews aggressively attacked on New York City streets. The attackers, video suggests, are often African American. This is a problem, a problem that needs to be addressed with courage, frankness, and dedication. If members of less-protected demographics, Catholic high school boys from the American South, for example, were attacking Jews on the streets, there would be an international outcry, a flood of tweets from average citizens as well as celebrities, television broadcasts, academic conferences and articles, and demands for an immediately available curriculum to educate bigoted persons. A review of the above paragraphs outlining my research on how media reacted to an overtly genocidal African American anti-Semitic speaker suggests a reason why so few have been willing to state the obvious. No, not all African Americans are anti-Semites, but some are, and those that are include some who commit violent crimes, including murder, in the name of anti-Semitism. This hatred, and these assaults, are not random, but are supported by a detailed and deeply rooted ideology that declares that Jews are "imposters," "interlopers," "Johnny-come-lately Jews" and "usurpers" who have co-opted black people's real identity.

Further, apologias for these assaults rely on a competition for victim status created by leftist ideology. The left awards its certified victims with virtue, innocence, authority, and tangible benefits through programs like Affirmative Action. As long as being the biggest victim is valuable, some African Americans will resent Jews, perversely, for the Jews' own victimization.

"The black holocaust is one hundred times worse than the so-called Jew holocaust," said Khalid Abdul Muhammad on the campus of Howard University. This articulated hatred must be described, denounced, and deconstructed. There should be forthright academic articles, conferences, and curricula, now, condemning this murderous anti-Semitism. Those who take on this task face daunting odds. Those odds make this work no less vital and urgent.

Yes, African Americans have suffered grievous harm. Yes, statistics indicate that African Americans today are, as a group, poorer, less educated, less healthy, and more likely to be incarcerated than white Americans as a group. Yes, all Americans must do everything they can to close the gaps between whites and blacks.

But separate systems of ethics for blacks and whites are no more moral than separate water fountains for blacks and whites. Human decency should not be emblazoned with a "whites only" sign. It is not imperialist or racist for people who aren't African American to speak out against black anti-Semitism. It is paternalistic for mainstream media to resort to transparent weasel words when reporting on vile street attacks on Jewish elderly persons, women, children, and toddlers in strollers. If hitting an old man in the head with a ten-pound paving stone is behavior that is beneath contempt for a white person, it is also beneath contempt for a black person. Those who refuse to say so clearly are guilty themselves. Let us not rewrite Martin Niemoller's famous warning to read, "Then they came for the Jews / And I did not speak out / Because I did not want to risk being accused of being politically incorrect."


Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/attacks-jews-nyc-and-media-double-standards-danusha-v-goska/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter



Fighting the Demonization of Israel at the International Criminal Court - Prof. Eytan Gilboa


by Prof. Eytan Gilboa

Israel should discredit and delegitimize the ICC in turn via aggressive political measures and collaboration with concerned liberal democracies


Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court,
photo by Stephan Röhl via Flickr CC

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,386, December 30, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, has decided to indict senior Israeli policymakers and military officers for committing war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza. Her decision is baseless, preposterous, and discriminatory, and it violates the ICC’s own mission and rules. Bensouda’s action should be placed within the wider context of the Palestinian disinformation, delegitimization, and demonization campaign against Israel at international organizations. Israel should discredit and delegitimize the ICC in turn via aggressive political measures and collaboration with concerned liberal democracies, primarily the US. 

On December 20, 2019, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, announced: “I am satisfied that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.” She referred to 2014’s Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, the 2018-19 Hamas’s violent “protests” along the Israeli border with Gaza, and the Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She mentioned war crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian “armed groups,” but that mention was no more than a fig leaf to create an impression of neutrality. The object of her case—to target Israel for demonization—is reflected in the enthusiastic praise she received for her decision from the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

Bensouda’s opinion is baseless, preposterous, and discriminatory, and most importantly it violates the ICC’s own mission and rules. The Court was established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and serious war crimes. The US and Israel did not ratify the Rome Treaty that established the Court out of concern that it would be used to deliver politicized and biased judgments. That concern has been proven valid.

Bensouda’s action is a major threat to Israel. The ICC prosecutes individuals, not states. Therefore, if its pre-trial chamber of three judges accepts Bensouda’s request and rules that the ICC has jurisdiction over the case, she will be able to subpoena senior Israeli politicians and military officers for interrogation. If they refuse to submit to interrogation, as they are likely to do, she could issue warrants for their arrest.

The ICC is not a genuine court in that it does not follow basic rules of judicial evidence and procedure. It is yet another highly politicized UN body driven by a prejudiced political agenda.

No jurisdiction

The main arguments against Bensouda’s decision are straightforward.
  • Only sovereign states can file complaints. In 2015, the Palestinian Authority joined the Rome Treaty and several countries recognized Palestinian independence. Palestine is not, however, a sovereign state.
  • Israel, like the US and about one-third of the countries in the world, did not join the ICC. The Court therefore has no jurisdiction over it.
  • The ICC was established to deal with war crimes that leaders and countries ignore. Israel is a democracy and has one of the most respected legal systems in the world. Israel investigates cases of war crimes and prosecutes those responsible. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas never investigate their own war crimes and never prosecute those responsible.
  • The ICC was established to investigate and prosecute serious war crimes such as genocide. Crimes of this nature have occurred recently in the Middle East, such as those committed by the Syrian government, Russia, and Iran during the Syrian civil war. They murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, turned half the population of Syria into refugees, and destroyed cities, towns, and villages. The ICC (and for that matter no other UN body) did nothing to stop these war crimes and does not appear to have any interest in prosecuting anyone for them.
  • Contrary to Bensouda’s claims, the ICC is not an independent body, and her preliminary investigation was neither objective or neutral. The ICC depends entirely on the UN General Assembly for its funding and operations. In keeping with the strong anti-Israeli attitude of the UN and its agencies, the Court uses and follows the highly distorted, biased, and one-sided resolutions and reports produced on Israel by UN agencies.
Several liberal democracies have severely criticized Bensouda’s decision. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated:
We firmly oppose this (decision) and any other action that seeks to target Israel unfairly. We do not believe the Palestinians qualify as a sovereign state, and they therefore are not qualified to obtain full membership, or participate as a state in international organizations, entities, or conferences, including the ICC. The US also reiterates its longstanding objection to any assertion of ICC’s jurisdiction over nationals of States that are not parties to the Rome Statute, including the US and Israel, absent a referral from the UN Security Council or the consent of such a State.
Australian PM Scott Morrison said his country does not recognize the “State of Palestine” or its status as a member state of ICC and therefore believes the ICC has no authority on the matter.

Germany, a strong supporter of the ICC, issued a more delicate warning. Its foreign  ministry stated that it is “confident that the court will resolve the issues raised. This will also address issues of admissibility that may be doubtful.” The subtext is clear: Germany does not believe the ICC has jurisdiction over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Context

Bensouda’s action should be placed within the wider context of the Palestinian disinformation, delegitimization, and demonization campaign against Israel. They employ three major instruments: the UN and its agencies; NGOs, particularly those claiming to advocate for human rights; and the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement. These instruments are interrelated and they reinforce each other.

At the UN, the Palestinians enjoy automatic support from Muslim countries, Russia, China, the EU, and developing countries. As they have failed to defeat Israel through violence and terrorism, they have opted to delegitimize and demonize Israel at the UN and its agencies, portraying it as an evil, racist, and apartheid state, the worst violator of human rights in the world—so vile that it is devoid of the right to defend itself and even to exist.

Unfortunately, several international human rights NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, are staffed by anti-Israeli directors and investigators, and they demonize Israel via highly biased, distorted, and misleading reports. Israeli and Palestinian human rights NGOs, too, disseminate distorted and sometime fabricated reports, especially on the confrontations in Gaza. Those organizations include B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Al Haq, Al-Dameer, and Al Mezan. They are heavily funded by Western European countries on condition that they frequently challenge the Israeli legal system and provide the ICC and the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) with incriminating information against Israel.

Refuting the Israeli war crimes thesis 

While all Bensouda’s accusations against Israel should be rejected on the basis of the legal and political arguments discussed above, there is additional overwhelming evidence to dismiss her allegations about Israel’s purported “war crimes” during military confrontations with Hamas in Gaza. Bensouda claims her decision relies on reports on these confrontations submitted to the UN, particularly those initiated and approved by the UNHRC. That dysfunctional and corrupt organization is dominated by authoritarian countries, some of which are among the greatest abusers of human rights on earth. The UNHRC is notorious for its bias against Israel. It has one agenda item just for Israel and another for the entire rest of the world.

The UNHRC appointed several “independent” commissions to investigate Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza. One investigated 2014’s Operation Protective Edge and another the 2018-19 Gaza “protests.” Both relied on questionable and fabricated information provided by local and international “human rights” organizations. The first chair of the 2014 commission, William Shabas, resigned after Israel found that he had previously worked for the PLO and was biased against Israel. Among other things, he said before his appointment that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu should be indicted for “war crimes” committed during the 2006 Second Lebanese War. (Besides his bias, Shabas revealed just how much he really knows about Israel and the Middle East with this charge. The prime minister of Israel during the 2006 war was Ehud Olmert, not Netanyahu.)

The ICC’s investigators did not include anyone with any military background or experience. However, several high-level officers and officials with substantial military experience from several countries investigated the cases cited in Bensouda’s opinion and reached definitive conclusions that are completely at odds with her claims.

In November 2014, following a fact-finding mission to Israel, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, said that “in the 2014 Gaza conflict, Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties.” In June 2015, the independent High-Level Military Group led by General Klaus Naumann, former Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and 10 other former chiefs of staff, generals, senior officers, and officials from seven countries investigated the 2014 Gaza operation. They unanimously stated:
Each of our own armies is of course committed to protecting civilian life during combat. But none of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the IDF last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population in such circumstances… During Operation Protective Edge, in the air, on the ground and at sea, Israel not only met a reasonable international standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard.
Similarly, Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, blasted and systematically refuted the war crimes allegations and reports submitted to the UNHRC on the 2014 Gaza operation and the 2018-19 violent Gaza “protests.” He submitted detailed reports based on research and observations on the ground. He blamed Hamas for the violence and for war crimes and argued that Israel exercised great restraint—and unlike Hamas, took exceptional measures to adhere to the laws of armed conflict and to minimize civilian casualties. He accused the UNHRC of endemic bias against Israel and rejected the reports it had approved as totally wrong and baseless.

Both the UNHCR and Bensouda ignored all this diverse military expert evidence as it did not fit their agenda.

The US approach

In November 2017, Bensouda asked the ICC’s pre-trial judges for an authorization to open an investigation into war crimes allegedly committed by the US in Afghanistan. In September 2018, NSA John Bolton called the ICC “unaccountable” and “outright dangerous” to the US, Israel, and other allies. He threatened the ICC with sanctions: “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the US. We will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system.”

In March 2019, Pompeo warned that the US would revoke the visas of ICC officials who pursued allegations against US forces in Afghanistan or against Israel. On April 5, 2019, the US revoked Bensouda’s visa.

A few days later, the ICC’s pre-trial judges rejected Bensouda’s request to open an investigation against the US by arguing that it is likely to fail due to lack of cooperation from the parties involved and budgetary constraints.

The judges were more concerned about losing their entry visas to the US and about other American sanctions than about the case itself. President Trump called the judges’ decision “a major international victory” and denounced the ICC for its “broad, unaccountable, prosecutorial powers,” as well as for what he considered its threat to American sovereignty. He said, “Any attempt to target American, Israeli or allied personnel for prosecution will be met with a swift and vigorous response.”

What should Israel do?

Israel must fight the ICC through aggressive political means. Bensouda joined those who delegitimize and demonize Israel. The best response would be to delegitimize and penalize her and the ICC via an alliance of countries under US leadership along the lines adopted by the Trump administration. If the pre-trial judges approve Bensouda’s request, Israel should ask the US to fulfill its commitment, cancel the visas of Bensouda, the ICC judges, and its investigators, and apply other severe sanctions against them.

Like the US and other countries, Israel should ban entry by ICC investigators into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; pass laws that protect Israeli officials and officers from ICC directives and potential indictments; and sign bilateral agreements with states refusing to comply with ICC orders and arrest warrants. Israel should also consider sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, which, with Bensouda’s help, started the ICC preliminary investigation. These steps can help to expose the ICC’s complete lack of credibility or legitimacy.



Prof. Eytan Gilboa teaches public diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in Los Angeles and a senior research associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. eytan.gilboa@biu.ac.il

Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-international-criminal-court/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter



Soros’ War Against the Jews - Daniel Greenfield


by Daniel Greenfield


The shame, hatred and megalomania driving the world’s wealthiest anti-Semite.




When George Soros hit middle age, he began seeing a shrink.

The ruthless financier's problem was that he was burdened with an "oversized" sense of shame over a "guilty secret". That guilty shameful secret which sent Soros to a psychoanalyst was "Jewishness".

Soros’ Jewish problem was generational. He grew up in, in his own words, a "Jewish, anti-Semitic home"

He had adopted his father Tivadar’s worldview, that God was a human invention. It was Tivadar who forged and sold documents to Jews trying to escape the Holocaust, charging "wealthy clients", as he put it, "whatever the market would bear". And it was Tidavar who found his teenage son a place with a Hungarian fascist official who was confiscating Jewish property.

In his biography, Tivadar later described the trip to confiscate Jewish property as a move by the "kind-hearted" Nazi collaborator to "cheer the unhappy lad up" where after a dose of watching the persecution of Jews, "he quickly regained his spirits". Soros would later describe this, a period that most Jews remember as a time of utter horror, as “the most exciting time of my life” or an “adventure”.

Tivadar’s amorality thoroughly infected his son. In an infamous 60 Minutes interview, which the Soros network and his media allies have worked hard to spin, Soros coolly agreed that he had "helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. "It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would," he observed.

It echoed his response to allegations of hurting the British economy. “When you speculate in the financial markets, you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.”

The father had profited from selling forged documents to wealthy Jews and the son had enjoyed being part of confiscating the property of a wealthy Jewish family. Neither father nor son, to whom the God of the bible was a human invention and Jewish kinship was mere “tribalism”, felt any guilt over it.

They had no moral or ethnic allegiances. They were not Jews, either ethnically or religiously.

Indeed, the name Soros was taken to cover up the Jewish origins of the family. Even before the war, Erzebet, Soros’ mother, had wanted to change their name so that her sons would not be stigmatized as Jews. If Tivadar was merely amoral, Erzebet actively despised Jews. "My mother was quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish," he told an interviewer. Erzebet had opposed circumcising Paul, George’s brother. Like other members of the Soros clan, Erzebet eventually converted to Christianity. But her son could not believe in either Judaism or Christianity. He had only one faith. In his own godhood.

"George did not convert," Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire notes, "What sense would conversion make for someone who was an atheist?"

The grandson of a schizophrenic, the son of a glib financial manipulator and a neurotic mystic, George Soros would fuse the conflicted legacy of his parents by becoming his own moneyed god.

In a New Yorker interview, he discussed his sense of being a superhuman philanthropist. "God in the Old Testament has a number of attributes, you know. Like invisible-- I was pretty invisible. Benevolent-- I was pretty benevolent. All-seeing--I tried to be all-seeing. So I was playing it out."

If God was merely a human invention, as George and his father believed, why couldn’t he be a god? The more wealth and power Soros amassed, the more he could play god in his godless world.

Or, as Soros put it on another occasion, “I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me into trouble. But when I had made my way in the world, I wanted to indulge my fantasies to the extent that I could afford.”

As one of the wealthiest men around, George Soros could afford to indulge them a whole lot. And by becoming his own god, Soros could escape his shame and suppress his sense of inferiority. Gods have no shame, no guilt and no morality. But George wasn’t a god. He was a man hiding from god by playing god. His shameful secret lay in the God and His people whom he had sinned against.

The family’s Jewish origins were Soros’ secret shame. Schwartz, a Jewish family, were dead. They had been replaced by the Soros clan. George, who had once had a Bar Mitzvah, had been reborn a Nazi collaborator. And then, after the excitement of the war, he washed up as just another refugee in the UK.

It wasn’t the Holocaust that had traumatized Soros. But the aftermath of being a nobody.

The Holocaust had been the most exciting time in his life. After the war, he became a refugee in England, dependent on the charity of British Jewish organizations funded by the sorts of people he and his father had, not that long ago, been taking to the cleaners. He callously defrauded a Jewish charity meant to help the unfortunate and would go on fuming and bragging about that act decades later.

Over the decades, George Soros became very wealthy and very hollow. “I have lived with a double personality all my life,” he later wrote. He was neither a Jew nor a Nazi. He belonged to no nation and no religion. He had made a fortune, but his existence had no purpose except his delusions of grandeur.

Once upon a time, Soros had been convinced that he would be “some kind of god or an economic reformer like Keynes, or, even better, like Einstein.” But outside the financial world, he was a mediocrity.

George Soros dashed off 15 books and endless scribbled thoughts. He has tried to develop a philosophical system. And all of it is so trite that not even his political allies bother to care. His inferiority is real. He’s never had a single thought outside finance that anyone would care about without being paid for it. His only skill is cold-blooded financial manipulation bolstered by a vast informational network.

His only way to overcome his inferiority complex and validate his convictions of godhood was by using his money to tear apart the countries and the people, including the Jews, he had never felt part of.

“I went to England in 1947 and then to the United States in 1956. But I never quite became an American. I had left Hungary behind, and my Jewishness did not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty that would have led me to support Israel,” he would later write. He married a second time, but his mother, the “typical Jewish anti-Semite” turned Catholic, hated his second wife for being “too Jewish.”

This marriage would also eventually fall apart.

"Being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma," Soros recounted. "There was always the desire to transcend it, to escape it."

"The assimilationist Jews of Hungary had a deep sense of inferiority and it took me a long time to work through that," he has said. "This whole interest in universal ideas is a typical means to escape from the particular."

And he was "escaping the particular" by "espousing this universal concept of open society."

The universalism of his Open Society Foundation was, like its Marxist forebears, a means of transcending the secret Jewish shame.

"I don't think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe," he declared. "The only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness."

Soros hates the Schwartzes for his secret shame, the existence of anti-Semitism. If there were no more Jews, there would be no more anti-Semitism. And his secret shame would finally be expunged.

Like his father and mother, Soros tried to overcame the “tribalness” of being Jewish, the shame and inferiority, by loathing those Jews who, unlike him and his parents, remained Jewish, the ‘Schwartzes’ who didn’t become ‘Soroses’, the Jews who stood there and watched their property being confiscated by his “kind-hearted” Nazi collaborators, and worst of all, those who became ‘Samsons’ and fought back.

George Soros hates the Jews of Israel who became neither collaborators nor victims, but fought and won, above all else. The existence of Israel is a shameful reminder of his treachery and cowardice.

“Attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel’s policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views,” he has claimed.

He blamed the "resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe" on Israel and insisted that, "If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish."

In Soros’ twisted mind, Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism.

Soros does not want to be Jewish. He is deeply ashamed of his Jewish roots. He blames Jews for anti-Semitism. And while he avoids Jewish events and organizations, occasionally he makes an exception.

A Hungarian Jewish cultural event with Hungarian dancers, musicians, and traditional foods, lured Soros out to present an award to a writer.  Instead, Soros was booed for a rant in which he compared Israelis to the Nazis in front of an audience of Holocaust survivors.

“I heard what happened. If I had been there,” Elie Wiesel later said. “I would have walked out.”

While Soros compared Israel to the Nazis, he has defended Islamic terrorists who murder Jews.

"America and Israel must open the door to Hamas," Soros urged in a Financial Times editorial. “Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah can be treated merely as targets in the war on terror because both have deep roots in their societies,” he argued in another editorial. “AIPAC must bear its share of responsibility for aiding and abetting policies such as Israel’s heavy-handed response to Hezbollah last summer and its insistence on treating Hamas only as a terrorist organization,” he ranted in a rambling essay.

The media has falsely claimed that criticism of George Soros is an anti-Semitic trope. And yet Soros has defended the use of anti-Semitic tropes. “The fact that constructive critics of Israel say things that, when taken out of context or paraphrased in provocative ways, can be made to sound similar to the comments of anti-Semites does not make them anti-Semitic,” he had insisted.

After defending anti-Semitic tropes aimed against Israel, Soros is playing the victim.

George Soros is a sponsor of numerous groups who say things in “provocative ways”. He’s the godfather of the anti-Israel lobby in America, spreading his money across the spectrum from NIAC to J Street, funding conventional anti-Israel BDS groups and providing stealth money to trojan horse organizations like J Street that are meant to co-opt American Jews into undermining the Jewish State.

The beneficiaries of Soros cash have included Al-Haq, an anti-Israel group whose executive director has been described as a senior leader in the PFLP terrorist organization.

To transcend the secret shame of his Jewish origins, the world’s wealthiest anti-Semite has funded a widespread war against the Jews. Only in a world with no Jews, can Soros finally believe he is god.

“It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out,” the billionaire once quipped.

Instead of curing Soros, therapy made him a megalomaniac, escaping his shame by becoming a god.

But, as the Austrian painter who also decided he was god realized, that requires getting rid of the Jews.

The Soros final solution to anti-Semitism is the familiar Marxist formula of getting rid of anti-Semitism by getting rid of the Jews. When there are no more Jews, then Soros will be cured of his secret shame.

All it will take is another Holocaust.


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/soros-war-against-jews-daniel-greenfield/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter



African-American, Latino, and Muslim Communities Must Root Out Jew-Hatred - Rabbi Aryeh Spero


by Rabbi Aryeh Spero

The time for feel-good ‘dialogue’ is over.


Virtually every recent stabbing and attack on Jews in New York City and the metropolitan area has been perpetrated by a black, Hispanic or sympathizers with jihad. It is time for leaders of those communities to admit to anti-Semitism within their midst and STOP it. Time for truth telling. Perpetrators must be punished.

New York's extremely liberal politicians speak about anti-Semitism, but are not using anywhere near the force of law to bring these perpetrators to justice. In fact, we’re hearing that last week's attackers against Jews, who were black or Hispanic, have already been released and are back on the streets.

Much of the hatred against Jewish people is being fueled by jihadist talk, and yet, because of political correctness, authorities are not doing the pre-reconnaissance that common sense dictates.

We have heard the evasive platitudes about ‘extremism’, ‘intolerance’, ‘hate’, but what we are witnessing in these attacks is raw anti-Semitism, specifically against Jews. Call it what it is!  New York's liberal politicians want us to believe that this is coming from a climate of ‘extremism’ and ‘white supremacists’, whereas in the metro area it is a Jew-hatred being fomented within the minority communities.

The major Jewish organizations have failed the Jewish community by not calling out or pressuring the minority communities responsible for these attacks. They are wedded to liberalism's clichés and goals and, even now, routinely choose their partnerships with minority communities over the safety of Jewish individuals.

Unfortunately, the Democrat Party knows that the Jewish community will remain an enthusiastic constituency even though the Party is silent while anti-Semitism grows within its midst, as seen with Omar, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez and other outspoken members of their caucuses.  The Jewish Community is relinquishing its leverage in service to its undying infatuation with liberalism and the Democrat Party. 

Many of the policies of the mainstream liberal Jewish organizations are militating against solving this crisis:
*  they have been backers of open borders;
*  they have been against necessary vetting of those coming from Muslim countries;
*  they are against what they call ‘profiling’;
*  they are for ‘bail reform’ leading to immediate release of suspects;  and
*  they are the first to call ‘racist’ anyone who asks the minority communities to begin fighting the anti-Semitism in their midst.
Friends: the time for feel-good ‘dialogue’ is over.  Jewish organizations must get past worrying more about the sensitivities of other minorities and their leaders over the lives and safety of the Jewish people. 

People ask: why is there not an outcry over the daily violence against Jews as there would be if the targets were black, Muslim, or LGTB? The answer is that the high-profile mainstream liberal Jewish organizations that often spearhead public outcries when minorities are attacked are far less angered when similar attacks happen against Jews if the perpetrators are from minority groups.  If these attackers in the NYC metro area had been white or Christian, the establishment liberal Jewish organizations and political leaders definitely would be howling and using the opportunity to condemn America and its way of life.


Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/time-african-american-latino-and-muslim-rabbi-aryeh-spero/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter



A Close Look at Adam Schiff - Discover the Networks


by Discover the Networks

What political goals does this powerful Democrat congressman really have?





Fifty-nine-year-old Democrat congressman Adam Schiff became famous in recent months for presiding over the Trump impeachment hearings in the House Intelligence Committee. Let us take a close look at exactly who Schiff is, and what his political agendas are.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Schiff launched his political career in 1996 when he was elected to the California State Senate, where he served as chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

In 1997 Schiff received a Henry Toll Fellowship for “leadership development.” Sponsored by the Council of State Governments, this award has long been heavily financed by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

In 2000, Schiff was elected to represent a U.S. House district centered in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. His campaign recieved more than $100,000 in donations from the Soros-funded MoveOn.org. Schiff has been re-elected to the U.S. House every two years since then.

In early 2013, Schiff was one of dozens of prominent leftists who urged President Barack Obama to award, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the late Fred Ross Sr., a Saul Alinsky-trained radical who had mentored both Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, former honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.


On a number of occasions, Schiff has shown an affinity for radical Islamist organizations. In September 2013, for example, he stated that the the good work done “across the nation” by the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was “much appreciated.” In a similar spirit, Schiff said in October 2017 that “CAIR’s vision and mission is more important now than ever before – to be a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding, and [to] enhance understanding of Islam.” And on August 5, 2019, Schiff was a featured presenter at an interfaith community forum moderated by Hamas sympathizer Salam Al-Marayati and co-sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an organization that views Hezbollah as “a liberation movement” whose members are akin to American “freedom fighters hundreds of years ago whom the British regarded as terrorists.”
In 2015 Schiff co-sponsored House Resolution 569, titled “Condemning Violence, Bigotry, and Hateful Rhetoric Towards Muslims in the United States.” Founded upon unsourced and unsupportable claims that America was experiencing a “rise of hateful and anti-Muslim speech, violence, and cultural ignorance,” this Resolution denounced the “disproportionate targeting” of “Muslim women who wear hijabs, headscarves, or other religious articles of clothing.”

In a March 22, 2017 interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Schiff claimed there was “more than circumstantial evidence” that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had colluded with Russian government operatives to tilt the election in his favor. When Todd asked Schiff if he had “seen direct evidence of collusion,” the congressman replied: “I don’t want to go into specifics, but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of investigation, so that is what we ought to do.”

From that point forward, Schiff established himself as one of the Democrat Party’s leading voices demanding Trump’s impeachment, repeatedly proclaiming to the media that the evidence against the president was overwhelming. In December 2017, for example, Schiff told CNN: “The Russians offered help, the [Trump] campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help and the president made full use of that help. That is pretty damning, whether it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt of conspiracy or not.” And in May 2018, Schiff told ABC that the Russian trolling of Democratic National Committee emails was “like Watergate in the sense that you had a break in at the Democratic headquarters, in this case a virtual one, not a physical break in, and you had a president as part of a cover up.” The congressman subsequently said that Trump’s crime was of “a size and scope probably beyond Watergate.”

But when Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally released his exhaustive 448-page report on the Trump-Russia matter in April 2019, Schiff’s many claims about Trump’s undeniable guilt were all proven to be baseless and false. Yet Schiff never once acknowledged, or apologized for, his many lies about Trump-Russia.

In May 2017, Schiff was one of a number of prominent and influential Democrats who spoke at a Washington, D.C. “ideas conference” organized by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a far-left think tank headed by John Podesta, who served as President Bill Clinton's chief of staff in the 1990s and as Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign manager in 2016. This CAP event emphasized the need for Democrats to unite in uncompromising “resistance” against Trump while also developing “new, fresh, bold, provocative ideas that can move us forward.”

On November 16, 2018, Schiff – who was slated to become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on January 3, 2019 – gave an exclusive, closed-door briefing to members of the Democracy Alliance, a major group of wealthy Democrat funders passionately dedicated to goal of crippling the Trump presidency.

On a variety of key political issues, Schiff believes that:

  • all women should have an unrestricted right to abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy – subsidized by taxpayers, in cases of economic hardship;
  • public and private employers alike should be legally required to implement affirmative-action hiring and promotion policies that give preference to African Americans and women, as compensation for historical injustices;
  • the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is an excellent statute that can serve a strategic stepping stone toward the eventual implementation of a government-run, single-payer healthcare system;
  • the principle of church-state separation is inviolable and should preclude permitting prayer in the public schools, or the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places;
  • voucher programs designed to enable low-income parents to send their children to private schools rather than to failing public schools, constitute bad policy because they rob the public schools of vital resources;
  • the death penalty is applied in a racially discriminatory manner, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and should be abolished;
  • more guns in the hands of private citizens inevitably result in higher levels of crime, thus the availability of firearms should be restricted by whatever means are effective;
  • wealthy people should be required to pay much higher tax rates than those who earn less;
  • restrictions on immigration are basically racist because they tend to prevent Hispanics and other non-whites from entering the United States;
  • social services should be available to all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status;
  • illegal aliens should be offered amnesty if they have been productive members of society;
  • voter ID laws are, by and large, racially motivated attempts to suppress minority voting and should be eliminated;
  • an ever-increasing reliance on “green energy” sources such as wind and solar should be put in place, along with the phasing out of fossil fuels, the imposition of carbon taxes, and the raising of vehicle CAFE standards;
  • federal spending on infrastructure projects and job programs is crucial to the success of any economic recovery program; and
  • the nationalization of failing banks and corporations is preferable to federal bailouts of such entities.
In no way can Adam Schiff be described as a “liberal.” He is a hard-core leftist who seeks to fundamentally transform America, much like President Obama so candidly sought to do.


Discover the Networks

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/close-look-adam-schiff-discover-networks/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter