Twitter Operates as Biden’s Censorship Arm - Joseph Klein

 

​ by Joseph Klein

A sordid tale of tech giants’ election interference.

 

Twitter is censoring the dissemination of links to a bombshell news story and user commentary that is negative to the Democrats’ presidential candidate Joe Biden as voters are already casting their ballots less than three weeks before Election Day. On Wednesday, Twitter as well as Facebook blocked access through their platforms to a New York Post story casting serious doubts on Biden’s denials that he had ever discussed his son Hunter’s business dealings with the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma while he was serving as vice president. Hunter was raking in lots of money from Burisma while his father Joe was traveling to Ukraine as the Obama administration’s point man there.

The New York Post article published the text of an e-mail reportedly showing a top Burisma executive thanking Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father.” In May 2014, the year that Hunter Biden secured his lucrative position with Burisma for which he had no qualifications other than the Biden name, Vadym Pozharskyi, a top Burisma adviser, e-mailed Hunter asking Joe Biden’s prodigal son “how you could use your influence” on Burisma’s behalf. Less than a year later, on April 17, 2015, Pozharskyi reportedly sent Hunter Biden an e-mail thanking Hunter “for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent (sic) some time together.” Less than eight months after the date of this e-mail, during a December 2015 trip to Ukraine, Joe Biden by his own admission pressured Ukraine’s leaders to get rid of the Ukrainian prosecutor or face the loss of a $1 billion dollar loan guarantee. That prosecutor claimed he was preparing to investigate Burisma, which would have meant interrogations of members of Burisma’s executive board including Hunter Biden.

Users who attempted to communicate with other users about the New York Post story on the Twitter platform were confronted on Wednesday with a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” Harmful to whom? Obviously, to Joe Biden for whom Twitter is carrying water. The New York Post’s own primary Twitter account was locked Wednesday afternoon.

On Wednesday, when the New York Post first published its revelation, Joe Biden hid from the press. The Biden camp’s response was that there was no record of an “official” meeting between Joe Biden and the Burisma executive. Meetings to advance a corrupt scheme are not as a matter of course listed on a participant’s official calendar for obvious reasons. The Biden campaign declined to say whether there was ever any unofficial encounter between Joe Biden and Vadym Pozharskyi. Nor did it present any evidence to refute the authenticity of the e-mails published in the New York Post story.

Twitter claimed without any substantiation that materials included in the New York Post article must have been obtained by hacking. According to the New York Post, however, the source of the e-mails discussed in its story was a laptop computer dropped off at a repair shop in Biden’s home state of Delaware in April 2019 that was never picked up. The owner of the repair shop said that the laptop bore a sticker from a foundation named after Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s late son and Hunter’s brother.

Twitter also justified its outrageous censorship decision by claiming that images in the New York Post article contained personal and private information. There is nothing private about Biden’s son providing his corrupt Ukrainian employer’s senior executive with access to his father Joe Biden, the most senior elected official besides President Obama himself at the time who was serving as the Obama administration’s point man in Ukraine while Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s payroll.

Twitter was just getting started with its censorship drive on behalf of Joe Biden. It locked the personal account of White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in retaliation for her sharing access to the New York Post story. Twitter also branded links to the website of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee as “potentially spammy of unsafe,” because the Republican members posted material from the New York Post’s story on their website.

On Thursday, Twitter temporarily suspended the official account of the Trump campaign. Twitter claimed that Team Trump’s tweet calling Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden a “liar” and posting a video about Hunter Biden’s business dealings was a violation of their policy. Again, Twitter asserted that it took its drastic action because the tweet in question violated “our rules against posting private information.” But Twitter’s real agenda when it comes to this year’s presidential election is to cover up the truth about the Biden family’s web of corruption in order to help Biden get elected.

“This is chilling censorship of a sitting President’s re-election campaign 19 days from an election, plain and simple,” Andrew Clark, Trump campaign Rapid Response Director told Fox News. “Twitter is interfering in the election and trying to stop the public from learning damning information about the Biden family’s corruption at all cost, but our campaign and our supporters will not be silenced.”

Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh accused Twitter of engaging in “election interference, plain and simple,” comparing what Twitter is doing to “something from communist China or Cuba, not the United States of America.”

The Trump campaign’s Twitter account has since been unlocked but it never should have been shut down in the first place. Nor should users sharing a legitimate news story highly relevant to the candidacy of Joe Biden and voters’ assessment of his character be blocked from doing so.

Did Twitter raise caution flags when users linked to a New York Times article published recently regarding President Trump’s private business dealings and taxes going back years before he was elected president? Of course not, even though the sources for the Times story were anonymous and may have violated the law in leaking Trump’s personal information to the New York Times. This is just one of many examples of Twitter’s gross double standard.

Silicon Valley’s bias towards the Democrats is overwhelming. Twitter employees are no exception. According to OpenSecrets’ 2020 election cycle report, 98.99% of Twitter employee donations have gone to Democratic federal candidates to date. Only 1.01% has gone to Republican federal candidates. Where Twitter employees want to donate their money is their business. But their company stepped way over the line to tip the scales in favor of the Biden campaign. Twitter shut down the Trump campaign’s Twitter account 19 days before the election, while leaving the Biden campaign’s account up and running without interruption to disseminate its political messages freely. Even though the shutdown of the Trump campaign's Twitter account was only temporary, the shutdown reinforced Twitter’s other actions to suppress dissemination of the New York Post article. In sum, Twitter has provided the Biden campaign with a tremendous gift by censoring critical information about Joe Biden’s possible corrupt acts while serving as vice president that may foreshadow what he and his family would do if Biden is elected president. Voters have a right to have unfiltered access to this information, as they do to Joe Biden’s position on court packing, before they cast their votes.

Twitter may well have violated federal campaign finance laws with its one-sided censorship to benefit Biden’s campaign. As Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley wrote in a letter to the Federal Election Commission, “There can be no serious doubt that the Biden campaign derives extraordinary value from depriving voters access to information that, if true, would link the former Vice President to corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs.”

Twitter’s censorship does not technically violate the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and press under current First Amendment jurisprudence because Twitter is regarded as a private company, not a governmental entity. The First Amendment prohibitions only apply to government actions restricting freedom of speech and press. However, social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook may have assumed quasi-public roles by setting themselves up as supposedly neutral public forums for the exchange of ideas and information among their users.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes such social media platforms from liability for content generated by their users. Either the social media giants should lose this protection if they continue to embark in outright political censorship, or they should be considered for First Amendment purposes the electronic equivalent of public squares for use by the public in general where people can regularly congregate virtually and communicate with each other. If, as is the case with Twitter, the social media platforms engage in a pervasive pattern of content discrimination and bias, especially in the political sphere, they should be fined or, in extreme cases, enjoined from operating until they reform their ways.

Senator Ted Cruz and other Senate Republicans are furious. Senator Cruz announced that they will be subpoenaing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (pictured above) to testify October 23rd. Action must be taken immediately to rein in Twitter and other social media giants who arrogantly censor public discourse on their vast platforms in order to disfavor one political candidate over another.

 

Joseph Klein  

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/twitter-operates-bidens-censorship-arm-joseph-klein/ 

 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Beyond Hunter’s MacBook: Email account of his ex-busines partner reveals high level Chinese group bought hidden access to Biden at the White House - Thomas Lifson

 

​ by Thomas Lifson 

 

President Trump is already speaking about the “Biden Crime Family” in his campaign rallies and will share a stage with Biden. Now we have the proof.

 

The evidence establishing a shocking pattern is now clear: Hunter Biden and his busines partners sold access to Joe Biden when he was the Obama administration’s point man on China. This took place during the period when US jobs were being exported to China by the millions. Hunter earned many millions of dollars and funneled a share of that money to his father, in return for selling out American workers.

An entirely new source – a business partner of Hunter Biden who has “flipped” and granted full access (i.e., his username password) to years of his Gmail email account – reveals that access to then-VP Biden in the White House was granted in 2011 to a high level group of member of the Chinese Communist Party with a keen interest in US trade policy, as that policy was being formulated.

Breitbart has an exclusive story, co-authored by Peter Schweizer, who received access to the email trove of Bevan Cooney, formerly Hunter Biden’s partner in crime, and now serving time in federal prison for a fraud that he claims he was the fall guy for, taking the heat for Hunter.

Moreover, the MacBook hard drive emails have been authenticated by at least two people whose emails were found on it and who verify that the hard drive contains their true communications.  

The long and detailed Breitbart article should be read in full to understand the magnitude of the email records. The 23,000 emails on it are still being reviewed, and more will be released in the days ahead. Here are few words of context from it:

From prison, Cooney provided Schweizer with written authorization, his email account name, and password to his Gmail account to retrieve these emails. He authorized, in writing, the publication of these emails— notable because it is the first time a close associate has publicly confirmed Hunter’s trading on his father’s influence.

The emails offer a unique window into just how the Biden universe conducted business during the Obama-Biden Administration. These associates sought to trade on Hunter Biden’s relationship with, and access to, his father and the Obama-Biden White House in order to generate business.

For instance, on November 5, 2011, one of Archer’s business contacts forwarded him an email teasing an opportunity to gain “potentially outstanding new clients” by helping to arrange White House meetings for a group of Chinese executives and government officials. The group was the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the delegation included Chinese billionaires, Chinese Communist Party loyalists, and at least one “respected diplomat” from Beijing. Despite its benign name, CEC has been called “a second foreign ministry” for the People’s Republic of China—a communist government that closely controls most businesses in its country. CEC was established in 2006 by a group of businessmen and Chinese government diplomats.

CEC’s leadership boasts numerous senior members of the Chinese Communist Party, including Wang Zhongyu (“vice chairman of the 10th CPPCC National Committee and deputy secretary of the Party group”), Ma Weihua (director of multiple Chinese Communist Party offices), and Jiang Xipei (member of the Chinese Communist Party and representative of the 16^th National Congress), among others.

 

The visit was logged in at the White House, but thegroup's meeting with VP Biden was concealed. However, proof that it took place was found on the internet because a member of the group boasted about it:

 

Curiously, the Obama-Biden visitor logs do not mention any meeting with Vice President Joe Biden. But the Vice President’s off-the-books meeting was revealed by one of the core founders of the CEC. In an obscure document listing the CEC members’ biographies, CEC Secretary General Maggie Cheng alleges that she facilitated the CEC delegation meetings in Washington in 2011 and boasts of the Washington establishment figures that CEC met with. The first name she dropped was that of Vice President Joe Biden.

YouTube screengrab

The relationships established during that visit may have benefited Hunter Biden and Devon Archer down the road. Two years later, they famously helped to form the Chinese government funded Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) investment fund. One of BHR’s first major portfolio investments was a ride-sharing company like Uber called Didi Dache—now called Didi Chuxing Technology Co. That company is closely connected to Liu Chuanzhi, the chairman of the China Entrepreneur Club (CEC) and the founder of Legend Holdings—the parent company of Lenovo, one of the world’s largest computer companies. Liu is a former Chinese Communist Party delegate and was a leader of the 2011 CEC delegation to the White House. His daughter was the President of Didi.

On his Fox News program last night – the highest rated program on cable news – Tucker Carlson provided an excellent summary of the meaning of all this.

   

And in the hour that followed, on Hannity, Peter Schweizer himself explained how the pay-to-play system worked. Key excerpt:

A wide net of using the Biden name, using access to the White House, Hunter serving a pipeline to the administration as a means to help their clients and gain clients. The names that come up in this are the Chinese, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Kazakhs – it’s a veritable United Nations of corruption, and what it demonstrates is that Joe Biden as Vice President of the United States of America was a center point --  it was almost the planet around which these business activities moved.

President Trump is already speaking about the “Biden Crime Family” in his campaign rallies, and will share a stage with Biden in the scheduled debate moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker. More and more evidence will be coming out each day, and quite notably, Biden and his lawyers are not contesting the veracity of the emails from Hunter’s MacBook and they have not yet been asked about the Cooney email account, which is readily verifiable.  

The social media cofferdam around distribution of the stories of Biden corruption will not hold. Not only does the Streisand effect serve as an impetus, but the week and half left before the election are focusing the nation’s attention on Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

 

Thomas Lifson  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/beyond_hunters_macbook_email_account_of_his_exbusines_partner_reveals_high_level_chinese_group_bought_hidden_access_to_biden_at_the_white_house.html

  Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

American Jewry's Most Fateful Election - Caroline Glick

 

​ by Caroline Glick

 

Will the "Shy Trump voter" effect kick in again on Nov. 3?

 

Almost all the polls say that President Donald Trump is heading towards defeat at the hands of his Democrat challenger, former vice president Joe Biden next month. But Robert Cahaly who heads the Trafalgar Group polling firm disagrees. Cahaly was the only major pollster that accurately called the 2016 presidential race. In an interview with “The Political Trade” podcast last week, Cahaly said his data show Trump headed for another upset victory November 3.

Cahaly said that today, as in 2016, the disparity between his numbers and the marquis polling firms’ numbers owes to the latter’s systematic neglect of what he calls the “Shy Trump Voter Effect.”

From the time Hillary Clinton referred to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables,” through today as Democrats demonize them as racists and fascists, Cahaly explains that a significant and growing segment of Trump voters will not admit their support for him. Fearing social and professional repercussions, the Shy Trump Voter lies to pollsters and anyone else who asks him what he thinks of Trump.

Cahaly said that he goes to great lengths to correct for the Shy Trump Voter Effect in his polls and the other polling firms ignore the phenomenon.

The Shy Trump Voter Effect makes intuitive sense for anyone watching the cancel culture in America grow more menacing by the day. One of the communities where it likely plays a role is the American Jewish community.

The Jewish community has been one of the most intolerant communities towards Trump supporters. After the Tree of Life massacre two years ago, leading Jewish intellectuals called for synagogues to ban Trump voters from entering their prayer halls. The day that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed peace agreements with Israel at the White House, the Jewish Democratic Council of America ran an ad comparing Trump to Hitler. For the past year, the goal of the Jewish arm of the Democrat Party has been to portray Trump as the gravest threat to the American Jewish community.

And it isn’t just Jewish notables propagating hatred and fear of Trump and his supporters. The old quip that Reform Judaism is simply the Democratic Party with Jewish holidays, rings truer today than ever. In many Reform and Conservative synagogues, Judaism is portrayed as a synonym for progressive politics. Jewish Trump supporters who belong to these congregations are unlikely to share their views with their fellow congregants.

So it’s safe to assume that the Shy Trump Voter Effect is alive and kicking in the American Jewish community today.

And this brings us to Florida.

According the Real Clear Politics average of polls, Biden is leading Trump in the critical swing state by 2.7 percent. Cahaly’s polls place Trump at a 2-point advantage. In 2016, Trump won Florida by a 1.5 percent margin over Clinton.

Jews make up around 3.5 percent of Florida’s population, and an even larger percentage of Florida voters. Consequently, the Jewish vote is critical for winning the state. Cahalay said his polls show “support for Trump in the Jewish community is skyrocketing.”  

If Trump wins an historic level of support among American Jews, it will be a testament to the wisdom of an unprecedented percentage of American Jews. For American Jewry this year’s presidential election is without question the most critical one ever.

Over the past four years, anti-Semitism has become an undeniable, and central characteristic of the Democrat Party to which the vast majority of American Jews have pledged their loyalty for the better part of the past hundred years while anti-Semitism in the Republican Party has dropped to historic lows.

Democrat anti-Semitism has seemingly appeared out of the blue but in truth, the party has been on a largely one-lane road to radicalization for the past fifty years. It’s just that the path turned into a highway over the past four years with the rise of open anti-Semites like Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, Andre Carson, Keith Ellison and Ilhan Omert to commanding positions in the party.

Anti-Semitism runs through Democrat politics, policies and behavior across a spectrum of issues. In foreign policy, hating Israel has become the most passionate position of the progressive grassroots.

Biden announced early on that if elected, he will restore the U.S.’s commitment to the Iran nuclear deal he forged with Barack Obama. That means that a Biden administration will cancel the economic sanctions on Iran, ensuring the survival of the regime. It means a Biden administration will enable the cessation of the UN arms embargo enabling Iran to purchase whatever advanced weapons systems it wants. It also means a regime pledged to annihilate the largest Jewish community in the world – Israel – will have an open path to a nuclear arsenal.

Biden has agreed to restore the Palestinians to center stage. This isn’t a pro-peace position. After all, the Abraham accords are the result of Trump marginalizing the Palestinians. The purpose of a Palestinian-centric policy is it is to delegitimize Israel, justify a U.S. foreign policy that is hostile to Israel and domestic policy that is hostile to Israel’s supporters in America.

Then there is anti-Semitism itself. The good news is that like Trump, Biden can be expected to take on white supremacists. The bad news is that in stark contrast to Trump, Biden can be expected to turn a blind eye to the growing anti-Semitism in his own political camp.

The JDCA announced its campaign demonizing Trump as the gravest threat to the American Jewish community the day Trump signed an executive order extending Title IX protection under the U.S. Civil Rights Act to Jews on campuses. The executive order specified that when considering anti-Semitic discrimination, the definition of anti-Semitism reached by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) should be used as a guidepost. The IHRA definition stipulates that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and that rejecting Israel’s right to exist, comparing it to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa are forms of anti-Semitic actions.

On October 1, New York University reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Division over a complaint filed by a former student alleging anti-Semitic discrimination by university authorities. The complaint was filed following Trump’s executive order. In the settlement, NYU agreed to apply the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism to its actions to protect Jewish students from discrimination.

The NYU case shows how critical Trump’s executive order is to the protection of the civil rights of American Jews. On campuses the most common form of anti-Semitic harassment flows from anti-Zionism. Hostility to Jewish students and faculty has grown as campus authorities have refused to acknowledge that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. NYU’s leadership allowed their campus to become a hostile environment for Jews where the slightest expression of support for Israel found Jewish students attacked and ostracized. So long as Trump’s executive order remains in effect and enforced, Jews can turn to the Department of Education for protection.

The future of the executive order, not to mention its enforcement will be very much in doubt in a Biden administration. For eight years, the Obama-Biden administration abjectly refused to protect Jewish students from discrimination rooted in anti-Zionism. And as a result, the discrimination increased steeply from semester to semester.

Anti-Semitism of course isn’t limited to anti-Zionism. There is also traditional anti-Semitism that involves scapegoating and assaulting Jews simply for being Jews. There’s a lot of that going on in Democrat circles these days.

On October 5, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo held a press conference where he directly threatened the state’s Orthodox Jewish community. In the middle of the Succot festival, Cuomo said, “I have to say to the Orthodox community…’If you’re not willing to live with these rules [of limiting participation in prayers due to the pandemic], then I’m going to close the synagogues.”

It would be one thing to single out Orthodox Jews if they were the only ones rejecting the limitations on religious gatherings. But they aren’t. Not even close.

As Daniel Greenfield reported at Frontpage online magazine, the day before Cuomo threatened the Orthodox community, thousands of Shiite Muslim men gathered without masks and with no social distancing in Queens to mark the Ashoura festival. Cuomo didn’t mention them. He also didn’t mention them in August when they had another Ashoura festival with no masks and no social distancing in Manhattan even though the next day, Cuomo threatened to ban Jewish weddings.

To justify his singling out of Orthodox Jews, Cuomo held up a photograph of a massive Hassidic funeral. Cuomo failed to note the photo was of a funeral that took place in 2006.

Early this week, Cuomo sent state workers to weld shut the entrance to a Jewish cemetery in Rockland County ahead of the memorial of a Hassidic leader that thousands of followers regularly attend. Across the street from the Jewish cemetery is a non-Jewish cemetery and as the Jews were barred from entering their grounds, hundreds of non-Jews gathered at their cemetery without social distancing and in at least some cases, without masks, and with no law enforcement officers around to disperse them. 

According to media reports, Cuomo is the frontrunner to serve as Attorney General in a Biden administration.

The outpouring of wrath against Orthodox Jews by the likes of Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic follows in the wake of a year and a half of ever escalating assaults against Orthodox Jews in the New York metropolitan area. Those attacks culminated with the massacre of Jews in Jersey City, New Jersey and the attempted massacre of Jews in Monsey, New York last November and December.

Rather than take aggressive steps to protect the Jewish communities in neighborhoods like Crown Heights and Williamsburg from the perpetrators who overwhelmingly hail from the African American and Muslim communities, Cuomo and De Blasio ignored them. Infamously, while making light of the assaults and harassment, De Blasio blamed the attacks on white nationalists.

With a record like the one Cuomo has racked up in New York, and with the Democrat House majority incapable of condemning anti-Semitism when it emanates from its own members, it strains credulity to believe a Biden administration will protect the civil rights of Jews. This is especially true in the growing number of cases where the anti-Semites are either progressives or members of privileged communities within the progressive camp, and the victims are either Zionist Jews or Orthodox Jews.

A Jerusalem Post poll this week claimed that 70 percent of American Jews intend to vote for Biden. 25 percent intend to vote for Trump. If the numbers are true, Trump is already enjoying a larger percentage of the Jewish vote than any Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan. If Cahaly’s models are as accurate in 2020 as they were in 2016, it is likely that Shy Trump Voters in the Jewish community will give Trump more Jewish votes than any Republican has received in history.

Originally published in Israel Hayom.

 

Caroline Glick  

Source: http://carolineglick.com/american-jewrys-fateful-hour/ 

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Statues of Lincoln are Being Torn Down Because He Hanged Rapists and Child Killers - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

Leftists want to tear down Lincoln, and put up rapists and child killers.

 

The names of small children don't often appear on monuments, but Edward Baumler's name is there among those of many other children who were murdered in the massacre at Milford.

Edward was only 3 years old when he was shot to death by Dakota raiders. His brother, Heinrich, who died alongside him, killed with a tomahawk, was 7 years old.

Their baby sister was murdered with an arrow.

The Baumler children were among a dozen other children, and twice as many women, killed by the tribal child murderers and rapists who assaulted the immigrant German township of Milford.

Now a statue of President Lincoln was toppled in Portland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison student government voted to remove his statue because he punished the killers of Milford’s children and the killers of the other seventy children under 10 years old.

The massacre at Milford was not unique. Entire communities were wiped out by bands of Indians pretending they had come asking for water. Women and girls as young as twelve years old were raped, mutilated, and murdered. Little boys were beaten to death. Survivors hid in piles of corpses, awaiting death while surrounded by the dead bodies of their loved ones.

Minnesota settlements in the 1860s were a haven for German, Norwegian, and other immigrants who had fled political oppression and limited opportunities to come to America. They had little to do with the causes of the conflict between the Dakota and the United States.

The Dakota massacres were so easily accomplished because the German and Norwegian settlers, unlike the English settlers of another era, were unarmed and weren’t ready to fight. That’s why the “warriors” initially avoided attacking the local fort and instead went after them.

When Little Crow’s War ended, trials were held and 303 fighters were sentenced to be hanged.

President Lincoln was uncomfortable with the speedy trials and the large number of tribal fighters who would have been executed. Despite heavy political pressure from survivors and Minesottans, he personally decided to review the trial records for every single case.

Lincoln had been a talented lawyer, but he was in the middle of the Civil War, and there were 303 cases. The Union depended on the support of Minnesota, and of the German immigrant community, who played a major role in the fighting, to pursue and win the war with the South.

Nevertheless, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial records for each case, and commuted the sentences of 88% of the convicted tribal fighters, agreeing to hang only 39 of them.

The men whose hanging Lincoln approved were both the worst of the lot and those whose guilt he believed absolutely proven. He discarded those who had participated in the general fighting and selected those who had attacked small farms and committed atrocities against individuals, especially women and children. In this, he relied on the testimony of survivors and other fighters because the perpetrators had boasted of the crimes committed against women and children.

As he told the Senate, he had first ordered “the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females” and then those “proven to have participated in massacres”.

Even though Lincoln had been as liberal as he could possibly be and more, the hangings still weighed on him. He offered a last minute pardon to another of the condemned men, issued a special warning not to hang yet another man, and warned that the other prisoners should not be subjected to “unlawful violence”. And in the end, only 38 of the convicted were hanged.

Lincoln’s liberal approach met with outrage in Minnesota. 1862 was an election year and Republicans paid the price. Told that the election would have gone better without his pardons and commutations, he retorted, “I would not hang men for votes.”

Now in Portland, leftist rioters declared an “Indigenous Day of Rage" for Columbus Day and tore down a statue of President Lincoln, along with one of President Theodore Roosevelt, and smashed up the Oregon Historical Society.

They spray painted "Dakota 38" on the Lincoln statue in support of the child-killers and rapists.

A member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's student government has claimed that President Lincoln's statue should be removed because "he ordered the largest execution on American soil: 38 Dakota peoples."

In truth, Lincoln limited the scope of the executions as much as possible. He resisted political pressure from survivors, the military, abolitionists, his own party, and the entire state. In the middle of the most decisive war the country had ever known, he personally spent time poring over transcripts of court records and commuted and pardoned every one he could.

But no amount of liberalism is ever enough for the radicals and racists who hate America.

The campaign against Lincoln isn’t new.

Even before the Emancipation Monument had been taken down in Boston, the 38 rapists and child killers had been used by leftists to attack Lincoln’s legacy. Black Lives Matter racists had vandalized statues of Lincoln in Buffalo, New York, Sioux City, Iowa, and other Democrat cities.

This isn’t about litigating a conflict that took place over a century and a half ago.

Little Crow’s War was typical of many such conflicts, the familiar factors, greed, rage, and radically different worldviews, were all there and led to deadly results. Lincoln, in equally familiar fashion, deplored the violence, but had trouble grappling with the reality of the military conflicts he was repeatedly thrust into, and unable to make the reforms that had caused him to run for public office, substituting for them with speeches and gestures that were both grand and hollow.

That was the tragedy of his career and of the entire awful era that claimed so many lives.

Lincoln was morally serious in the granular, but incapable of bringing that moral seriousness to bear on the tactics and resolution of the Civil War. The Dakota trials was typical of Lincoln at his most morally granular, weighing the lives of the accused men heavily while so many died elsewhere. But, looking at those court records, Lincoln felt a sense of control. In a massive conflict that was raging beyond any control, he could do justice to these particular lives.

The Lincoln statue vandals claim that they want “justice”. But that would include justice for Edward Baumler, his brother and his baby sister. And the many other children killed then.

It would include justice for a young mother who carried the decomposing corpse of her child for over two months, for children who watched their brothers and sisters beaten to death before their eyes, and for every horror and atrocity committed in Little Crow’s War.

Nearly entire families, many of them immigrant, were wiped out through treachery. Others left behind descendants that are keeping their stories and their fight for justice alive today.

History is complex. There was a great deal of unfairness in the collision between the settlers from the east and the west who had both crossed an ocean and found a bountiful new land.

The simplistic narrative pitting “indigenous people” against “settlers” is wrong and was always so. The German settlers massacred in Minnesota were the same sort of immigrants that leftists claim to advocate for today, and their killers were sometimes not even Indian, but like so many “Indians” today, descendants of settlers, slaves, and immigrants who could pass for Indian.

Unarmed immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution, came to the door for Indians asking for water. And then the butchery began. Men who called themselves warriors beat little boys to death, the bodies of little girls were found stripped naked, and that is what the Left celebrates.

That is what the toppling of Abraham Lincoln’s statues is about.

The topplers claim that President Lincoln represents injustice. They would rather not discuss the sort of justice they have in mind. The fallen children can speak to that as well as the fallen statues. They want to tear down Lincoln, and put up 38 rapists and child killers in his place.

 

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/2020/10/statues-lincoln-are-being-torn-down-because-he-daniel-greenfield/ 

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

U.S. Only Country to Hold Iran's Mullahs Accountable - Majid Rafizadeh

 

​ by Majid Rafizadeh

 

The EU needs to stop its appeasement policies with Iran's mullahs. It needs to join the US in holding the Iranian leaders accountable.

• Elliott Abrams, the U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela, pointed out during a hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "The U.S. is committed to holding accountable those who deny freedom and justice to people of Iran and later today the United States will announce sanctions on several Iranian officials and entities including the judge who sentenced Navid Afkari to death."

• Holding the Iranian leaders accountable only for human rights violation is not enough. Pressure must be imposed on the regime to stop its military adventurism.

• Iran has also, since the beginning of the JCPOA, brought terror and assassination plots to the EU. If the mullahs acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, they will not even need to use them; just the threat to European cities should be enough to produce instantaneous acquiescence. German intelligence has acknowledged that more than 1,000 members of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, use the country to recruit, raise money and buy arms.

• The EU needs to stop its appeasement policies with Iran's mullahs. It needs to join the US in holding the Iranian leaders accountable.

The EU needs to stop its appeasement policies with Iran's mullahs. It needs to join the US in holding the Iranian leaders accountable. Pictured: Iranian "Supreme Guide" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left) and President Hassan Rouhani on August 21, 2019. (Image source: khamenei.ir)

The only Western government taking concrete steps to hold the Iranian regime accountable for its human rights violations, destabilizing behavior and aggressive policies in the Middle East is the Trump administration. On September 24, the United States blacklisted and slapped sanctions on several Iranian officials and entities over gross violations of human rights. Sanctions were also imposed on the judge who was involved in issuing the death sentence for the Iranian wrestling champion, Navid Afkari.

The EU, the UN and human rights organization have not taken any tangible action, even after Amnesty International released its report on Iran's shocking human rights violations. Amnesty International warned that the Iranian regime has committed unacceptable atrocities, including victims being frequently "hooded or blindfolded; punched, kicked and flogged; beaten with sticks, rubber hosepipes, knives, batons and cables; suspended or forced into holding painful stress positions for prolonged periods; deprived of sufficient food and potable water; placed in prolonged solitary confinement, sometimes for weeks or even months; and denied medical care for injuries sustained during the protests or as a result of torture."

The United States also imposed sanctions on Judge Seyyed Mahmoud Sadati, Judge Mohammad Soltani, Branch 1 of the Revolutionary Court of Shiraz, and Adel Abad, Orumiyeh for being responsible for gross human rights violations, including torture, arbitrary detentions and unjustified executions. Elliott Abrams, the U.S. Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela, pointed out during a hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

"The U.S. is committed to holding accountable those who deny freedom and justice to people of Iran and later today the United States will announce sanctions on several Iranian officials and entities including the judge who sentenced Navid Afkari to death."

Afkari, like many other people who participated in protests against the regime, was brutally tortured. He explained in a letter:

"For around 50 days I had to endure the most horrendous physical and psychological tortures. They would beat me with sticks and batons, hitting my arms, legs, abdomen, and back. They would place a plastic bag on my head and torture me until I suffocated to the very brink of death. They also poured alcohol into my nose."

Holding the Iranian leaders accountable only for human rights violation is not enough. Pressure must be imposed on the regime's military adventurism. Unlike the EU, the US is taking concrete steps in countering this rogue regime in other arenas as well. On September 21, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a new executive order targeting Iran-related conventional arms transfers, aimed at targeting those who seek to make arms deals with the Iranian regime and skirt the UN arms embargo. Although the US recently drafted a resolution at the UN to extend the arms embargo on Iran, Russia and China exercised their security council vetoes. The other 11 members abstained.

Russia's leaders appear more than willing to help Iran. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of Russia's Liberal Democratic Party, said in January 2020 that Russia needs to "offer Iran an agreement on military cooperation and urgently sell the most modern weapons so that no one dares throw anything in the direction of Iran." In the end, the UN Security Council voted on August 14 to permit the 13-year arms embargo on the Iranian regime to expire. This means that the Iranian regime will be permitted freely to buy, sell, import and export weapons.

To prevent Iran from making arms deals, sanctions have been effectively imposed on several significant organizations and individuals including Iran's Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics; Iran's Defense Industries Organization and its director, Mohammad Ghannadi Maragheh; the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran's (AEOI) Deputy Head of Nuclear Planning and Strategic Supervision, Mohammad Qannadi as well as Javad Karimi Sabet, AEOI's Deputy Head and the head of its Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute; and Mammut Industrial Group and its subsidiary, Mammut Diesel, for being "key producers and suppliers of military-grade, dual-use goods for Iran's missile programs".

The sanctions are evidently intended to make companies and governments think twice about dealing with the mullahs and thereby risk doing business with the US. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, apparently feeling the pressure of the sanctions, lashed out at the US; in televised remarks, he angrily accused the US of "savagery".

Aside from risking doing business with the US, the European countries need to stop doing business with Iran because they are empowering a regime that is setting up terror cells on the European soil. Iran has also, since the beginning of the JCPOA, brought terror and assassination plots to the EU. If the mullahs acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, they will not even need to use them; just the threat to European cities should be enough to produce instantaneous acquiescence. German intelligence has acknowledged that more than 1,000 members of Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, use the country to recruit, raise money and buy arms.

In October last year, the Albanian General Police Director Ardi Veliu revealed that an active cell of the foreign operations unit linked to the Iranian Quds Force had been detected by Albania's security services. In recent years, a series of assassination and terrorist plots took place across Europe -- some successful, others not, but all were committed in the EU by Iran's agents, and traced back to Tehran. In July 2018, a foiled a terrorist attack in Paris targeted a large convention which included not only this author, but also many high-level speakers such as former Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, former US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

A few months later, in October, an Iranian diplomat and several other individuals of Iranian origin were arrested in France, Belgium and Germany for what French intelligence officials concluded was a foiled bomb plot, behind which was the Iranian regime. Iran's regime has also been murdering dissidents on European soil. Ahmad Mola Nissi, a Dutch citizen of Iranian origin and a critic of the Iranian regime, was gunned down at his front door in November 2017. The Dutch authorities publicly acknowledged that it had "strong indications" that the Iranian government had commissioned the murder.

The EU needs to stop its appeasement policies with Iran's mullahs. It needs to join the US in holding the Iranian leaders accountable.

• Follow Majid Rafizadeh on Twitter

 

Dr. Majid Rafizadeh  is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16619/hold-iran-mullahs-accountable 

 Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Biden responds viciously when asked about the Hunter Biden revelations - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

 

When all you get is the kid-glove treatment, it must come as something of a shock when a reporter asks a substantive question.

 

It was disgraceful that, during ABC’s “faux” townhall, George Stephanopoulos did not ask Joe Biden about the contents of the computer that Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop. When CBS News’s Bo Erickson dared to ask Biden that question, Biden didn’t even attempt an answer. He lashed out angrily at Erickson for daring to ask the question.

Erickson posed the question while Biden was preparing to board a gas-guzzling private jet. Speaking respectfully, he said, “Mr. Biden, what is your response to the New York Post story about your son, sir?”

Biden instantly went on the attack:

I know you’d ask it. I have no response. It’s another smear campaign. Right up your alley. Those are the questions you always ask.

 

I asked Joe Biden: What is your response to the NYPost story about your son, sir?

He called it a “smear campaign” and then went after me. “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” pic.twitter.com/Eo6VD4TqxD

— Bo Erickson CBS (@BoKnowsNews) October 17, 2020

The only things Biden forgot to do were to call Erickson “fat” and either challenge him to a push-up contest or offer to take him behind the airplane and beat the crap out of him.

Biden’s problem, of course, is that there are no answers to that question because the facts are damning. There’s no longer any question about the documents’ veracity. The computer belonged to Hunter, and the documents on it tell a sordid tale.

Regarding Ukraine, in early 2014, not long after Hunter joined Burisma’s board, despite lacking any qualifications, he received an email from Vadym Pozharskyi, a top Burisma executive, asking Hunter for “advice on how you could use your influence” for Burisma. A year later, Porzharskyi wrote Hunter a note in which, among other things, he thanked Hunter for “giving [him] an opportunity to meet with your father and spend some time together.”

The relationship between Burisma and the Obama-Biden administration flourished. In December 2015, the Obama administration let a Democrat public relations firm working with Burisma participate in a conference call regarding Biden’s upcoming visit to Ukraine as the administration’s point man. After the meeting, the p.r. firm sent an email with the conference minutes to Porzharskyi, Hunter, and Hunter’s partner, Devon Archer (the nephew of Whitey Bulger, the crime boss).

A short time later, Biden went to Ukraine. While there, he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid unless the Ukrainian administration fired Victor Shokin, a prosecutor investigating Burisma. We know about Shokin’s firing at Biden’s behest because Biden proudly boasted about it.

The hard drive also revealed that Hunter was negotiating with Chinese energy companies closely affiliated with the Communist Chinese Party. These deals were eventually worth over $1 billion. Some of the documents showed Biden allocating assets between interested parties, including “10 held by H for the big guy?” Fox News says that sources have confirmed that the “big guy” is Biden himself. Certainly, while Biden was taking the lead on China, the Obama administration gave it a free hand to militarize man-made islands in the South China Sea, while doing nothing to stop its economic depredations against America or the endless flow of fentanyl into American cities.

Of the information that's been released, there's another sign that Biden was on the take. In a text message to his daughter, Hunter says that she’s lucky that he, unlike her grandfather (that is, Biden, whom Hunter calls “Pop”), won’t demand 50% of everything she earns:

The photo below is a screenshot of a text message from Hunter Biden to his daughter, Naomi Biden, on January 3, 2019.

This describes the amount kicked back to the Boss, Joe Biden, as happens in every organized crime group.

My observations here: https://t.co/1SAwTyEwk9 pic.twitter.com/BK6DTIhT0B

— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) October 15, 2020

 

Ultimately, after reviewing the documents, Hunter Biden emerges not only as a sleazy and corrupt character but also as a pathetic one. Although he was active in all these grifts, it was his father who set up the contacts, apparently in exchange for 50% of the take. Hunter ends up looking like a damaged child pimped out by an avaricious parent who manipulates his son through love, guilt, and greed.

No wonder Biden’s only recourse in the face of an actual question is attack and denial. With the computer verified and the documents pouring out, Biden is a trapped rat, finally facing a very big, angry cat.

Image: Biden snaps at reporter re Hunter documents. Twitter screengrab.

 

Andrea Widburg  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/biden_responds_viciously_when_asked_about_the_hunter_biden_revelations.html 

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Iran Threatens Gulf Countries Making Peace with Israel - Hany Ghoraba

 

​ by Hany Ghoraba

 

[T]he Iranian regime escalated its threats towards both countries in an unprecedented manner.

Iran is escalating threats toward the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain after the United States helped broker peace deals between Israel and the two Gulf states.

Following the peace agreements between both Israel with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and the normalization of the relationships between the latter countries to Israel, sponsored by the United States, the Iranian regime escalated its threats towards both countries in an unprecedented manner.

"Any apparent or clandestine activity by the Israeli intelligence services or their agents in the Islamic Republic or the region, the response will not be directed at the Zionist entity only, and the UAE will be part of the response," said Iranian deputy House Speaker Hassan Abdel Lahian.

"Alliance with the Zionist regime will put the security of Bahrain and the Emirates at a greater risk than in the past," a Sept. 13 statement from the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission warned.

"The executioner ruler of Bahrain should await the harsh revenge of the Mujahideen (jihadist fighters) aiming to liberate Quds (Jerusalem) and the proud Muslim nation of this country," Iran's terrorist Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said in a statement.

Iran has tried to carry out attacks in Bahrain before. It foiled a terrorist plot in March 2018, arresting a militant cell comprised of 116 IRGC members. "The network was planning to target Bahraini officials, members of the security services... vital oil facilities and industries, with an aim to disturb security and public order and undermine the national economy," Bahrain's Interior Ministry alleged. Iran rejected the Bahraini accusations as "baseless, repetitive accusations."

Bahrain claimed that IRGC affiliates, including Iraqi militia groups such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Lebanese Hizballah were involved in the foiled attack.

In August, the IRGC threatened the UAE with a "dangerous future" after the country signed its peace deal with Israel.

"They (the UAE) better be mindful," said Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. "They have committed a huge mistake, a treacherous act. We hope they will realize this and abandon this wrong path."

Rouhani reiterated his threat last month and questioned the faith of the Arab Gulf leaders who signed the deal with Israel. "Some of the region's countries, their people are pious Muslims but their rulers neither understand religion nor [their] debt ... to the nation of Palestine, to their brothers speaking their language," he said.

Iran still sponsors some of the Middle East's most notorious terrorist groups including Hamas, Hizballah and Yemen's Houthi rebels. The Houthis threatened to target UAE cities last month. The UAE and Bahrain are members of the Saudi-led Arab coalition fighting the Houthis in Yemen.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh echoed Iranian threats when he told Hizballah's Al Manar television station that the "UAE will suffer a lot as a result of the deal with the 'Zionist Entity' and history shall not forgive anyone."

Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah described the Emirati deal as a "betrayal to Islam and Arabs."

Tensions between Iran and the UAE predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iran has occupied the Emirati islands of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb and Abo Mosa since 1968. "Iran's sovereignty over the Iranian islands of Abu Musa, the Greater Tunb, and the Lesser Tunb is definite and irrefutable," an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said Sept. 30.

Iran may fear that the peace agreements could pose a threat to the Islamic Republic if Israel can turn them into "a foothold in the Emirates, and in broad terms, in the Gulf" that ultimately includes a military presence, the Lebanese-based Iranian affairs news outlet Jada Iran reported.

Bahrain believes that the peace treaty with Israel will strengthen the gulf kingdom in face of the growing Iranian threats to its safety and sovereignty. "Iran has chosen to behave in a dominating way in several forms and has become a constant danger that harms our internal security," said Bahraini Interior Minister Rachid Bin Khalifa. "We are a state that is determined to develop our national capabilities, and our old and modern strategy is based on strong allies to confront potential threats."

Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the largest waterway for the global energy supply, with an estimate that between 40 to 60 percent of global oil exports pass through it. Iran wants to project naval control in the Arabian Gulf. It seized a British oil vessel passing through the Straits of Hormuz in August 2019 and detained its 23 crew members, claiming it collided with a fishing boat. The United Kingdom called it "state piracy." That same month, Iran seized an Iraqi vessel and a third tanker in the same month claiming it was smuggling 185,000 gallons of diesel. The British oil tanker was released two months later by Iran.

The United Arab Emirates is considering extending a pipeline from its oil fields to Israel to avoid having oil tankers pass through the Straits of Hormuz.

The Iranian fear could be exacerbated by the possible signing of similar treaties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman and others. Iran's isolation was accentuated when the Arab League refused a Palestinian request to condemn the UAE for signing the peace treaty with Israel.

"We have Arab lands occupied by Turkish and Iranian military and militias," said Arab League Chief Ahmed Aboul Gheit.

"Iranian militias are present in Syrian lands and similar militias are jeopardizing the stability of a number of Arab countries and that is an unprecedented situation," he added.

Accordingly, Iran is trying to instill fear in these countries and others which might follow suit.

Copyright © 2020. Investigative Project on Terrorism. All rights reserved.

 

Hany Ghoraba is an Egyptian writer, political and counter-terrorism analyst at Al Ahram Weekly, author of Egypt's Arab Spring: The Long and Winding Road to Democracy and a regular contributor to the BBC.

Source: https://www.investigativeproject.org/8586/iran-threatens-gulf-countries-making-peace-with 

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter