America’s Great Purge (and Israel) - Caroline Glick

 

​ by Caroline Glick

Democrats demonstrate that they have very short memory

President Joe Biden and the small crowd assembled on the Washington Mall for his inauguration Wednesday celebrated the event as “democracy’s day.” But in truth, the state of democracy in America today is nothing to celebrate.

The talking heads on TV, Democrats and a smattering of anti-Trump Republicans insist that the fault for all of America’s political woes lies with former president Donald Trump and the senators and congressmen who joined him in questioning the results of the election in several swing states. For refusing to set aside evidence of widespread election fraud, they stand accused of inciting an insurrection and so endangering the foundations of American democracy. Trump was impeached for his statements at the January 6 rally. And Democrat lawmakers are calling for Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to be expelled from the Senate for questioning the electoral college votes from states with widespread allegations of election fraud.

The accusers forget conveniently that Democrat leaders from Nancy Pelosi to Hillary Clinton have insisted since November 2016 that Trump’s electoral victory was “illegitimate” and the job of good Americans was to “resist” his “regime.”

They forget as well that Democrat lawmakers objected to the certification of the electoral college ballots in 2016. And when their objections failed to overturn the election results, a protest broke out in the visitors’ gallery of the Capitol. Several protesters were arrested.  

No one in the media or in the coastal elite ever accused Pelosi and Clinton of inciting an insurrection even as hundreds of thousands of protesters filled the streets demanding that Trump be overthrown.

Republicans still unafraid of being called domestic terrorists and insurrectionists insist that if the violent protesters in the Capitol on January 6 were insurrectionists, their “insurrection” was but a pale glimmer of the insurrection mounted in the streets of America’s cities throughout the spring and summer, with the enthusiastic support and financial backing of Democrat leaders and their corporate sponsors. 700 police officers were injured, dozens of citizens were killed, tens of thousands of businesses were destroyed and vandalized during the Antifa and BlackLivesMatter riots. Property damage and losses were assessed at $2 billion. Government buildings were besieged, burned to the ground and vandalized.

The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. Politicians from all sides and at all levels of government have long questioned election results. And no matter how strident their rejection of the results may have been, their actions never undermined America’s democratic foundations.

Likewise, America has been the site of mass protests since before the Revolution. The right to protest is considered so sacred that it is protected in the First Amendment of the Constitution. There are laws governing where the line between protests and lawbreaking lies. And policing protests is as American as the protests themselves. Protests do not threaten American democracy.

The great danger to American democracy is not to be found in the streets. It is certainly not to be found in politicians debating how votes were counted and collected.

The grave danger to American democracy emanates from the unprecedented fusion between the Democrat Party and corporate America. Political philosopher Angelo Codevilla referred to this unity of forces as a ruling “oligarchy” that is replacing the American Republic.

The emerging “oligarchy” is currently enacting something that can rightly be dubbed, “The Great Purge.”

The Great Purge, an event without precedent in American history, isn’t about one side seizing the levers of power for itself. It is about one side denying the other side the right to even vie for power.

The purpose of The Great Purge is not to replace Trump loyalists with Biden loyalists in positions of power in government. Such replacement happens as a matter of course every time a new administration comes into office. The purpose of the Great Purge is to “cancel” the Republican Party and its voters as a legitimate political force and so transform the United States into something approaching a one-party system. To achieve this goal, the Democrats in government and their partners in the corporate and big tech media are using their power to repress, silence, ruin and criminalize tens of millions of private citizens for the “crime” of supporting Trump and the Republican Party.

The Big Tech giants’ coordinated cancellation of all of Trump’s social media accounts almost simultaneously was the opening gambit. It was rapidly followed by Congress’s light speed impeachment of Trump for his alleged role in fomenting the violent protest at the Capitol. Like the social media ban, the impeachment flew through with no debate, no due process, no evidence through the good offices of Democrat lawmakers and their Republican allies who wish to make an example out of Trump. There is every reason to believe that in the coming months and years, the members of the ruling class will continue to abuse their power to destroy Trump whether by bankrupting him or prosecuting him. They must continue to pursue him. For if he perseveres, then they will have failed.  

At some point in the near future, Trump will face a Senate trial. As he left the White House on Wednesday morning, Trump had yet to secure legal counsel for the trial. The reason he has no lawyers doesn’t owe to sudden shortage of good defense attorneys in Washington. It owes to fear of the purge. Qualified lawyers are afraid to represent him.

And they should be.

Cleta Mitchell has long been a fixture in Washington legal circles. A senior partner at Foley and Lardner law firm, Mitchell was a member of Trump’s legal team in his electoral challenges in Georgia. When word got out that she was representing him, Democrat operatives from the Lincoln Project began threatening her firm with a client walkout.

The day after the Lincoln Project began threatening the firm’s business, Mitchell announced her resignation. Within an hour of her announcement, all mention of Mitchell was scrubbed from the firm’s website. One of Washington’s top attorneys had been “cancelled.”

Weeks before, the Lincoln Project did the same thing to two other law firms whose partners were representing Trump’s legal challenges to the Pennsylvania election results. The attorneys saved themselves from immediate cancellation by immediately cancelling their representation of the President of the United States.

Since January 6, petitions of lawyers and law students demanding that Senators Cruz and Hawley be disbarred for lawfully challenging the electoral college votes of disputed states have garnered thousands of signatures. Harvard students are demanding the university withdraw the degrees of Trump advisors and political allies.

Regular Americans who participated in the protests – outside and inside the Capitol – are also being purged. Doctors, lawyers, state lawmakers, policemen and others whose only “crime” was being present have lost their jobs after being “outed.”

Therese Duke, a nurse’s assistant from Massachusetts was one of those “purged.” Duke participated in a protest on January 5 – the night before the Capitol siege — at Freedom Plaza in Washington. She was videoed as she wept, with blood flowing down her face after being punched by a policewoman. Duke’s daughter, a member of the “woke” revolution outed her mother in a leering post on Twitter. The next day, Duke was fired from her job at University of Massachusetts Memorial Health Care. She told a local newspaper that she doesn’t believe she will be able to get another job.

As bad as things are becoming in the private sector, the smoke signals being sent out from Washington are even more alarming. Since January 6, Democrat lawmakers have been preparing legislation that would apply counter-terror laws passed to fight foreign terror groups abroad to investigating and fighting Americans suspected of membership in “domestic terror groups.” Former military, law enforcement and intelligence leaders are pushing for such a move. General Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan spent the past year campaigning against Trump.

Last week McChrystal told Yahoo News, “I see a similar dynamic in the evolution of al Qaeda in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America.”

Former CIA director John Brennan then detailed who the enemy is. Aside from Trump and “lawmakers,” Brennan said the new enemy is comprised of “an unholy alliance of religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists and even libertarians.”

Former FBI director James Comey made the goal of the purge explicit. “The Republican Party needs to be burned down or changed,” he told the Guardian.

He figures people would be happy to go along with that.

“Who would want to be part of an organization that at its core is built on lies and racism and know-nothingism? It’s just not a healthy political organization.”

Unfortunately for Israelis, this isn’t just America’s problem. Thanks to New Hope Party Chairman Gideon Sa’ar, Israel is now importing some of the instigators of the purge. Sa’ar has reportedly hired four founders of the Lincoln Project to run his campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud ahead of the March elections.

The Lincoln Project is run by former Republicans who have devoted the last four years of their lives to helping Democrats by demonizing Trump, Republicans and Republican voters. Their efforts met with negligible success in the 2020 elections. Trump increased his vote total by 11 million over 2016.

Trump didn’t lose because Republicans stopped supporting him. He lost because the Democrats massively increased their voter base. The Lincoln Project’s performance was so dismal that Cong. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez demanded that it give its outstanding funds – raised from Democrat donors – to Democrat organs that had actually won the election.

But since its election failure, the Lincoln Project as come into its own. When Ocasio Cortez said Democrats should make a database of Trump administration officials to prepare a blacklist, she was pilloried as a totalitarian. But when the “former Republicans,” from the Lincoln Project said they were compiling such a list, it went over without protest. And ever since, the Lincoln Project has led the way in blacklisting and cancelling everyone from Trump’s attorneys to hotels and vacation websites that served Trump supporters who came to Washington on January 6. It is now calling for the firing of everyone from a county election board chairwoman in Georgia to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

For four years, Israelis have gasped at the similarities between the Israeli left’s unrelenting efforts to destroy Prime Minister Netanyahu, in partnership with the media and the legal fraternity, and the efforts of their American counterparts to destroy Donald Trump.

Sa’ar decision to integrate the instigators of America’s great purge – a purge that is already endangering the democratic order of the most powerful democracy on earth – into Israel’s political bloodstream bodes ill for Israel’s future. And it most certainly tells us something alarming about the direction Sa’ar is interested in taking the country, if his campaign to become the next prime minister succeeds.  

Originally published in Israel Hayom.

 

Caroline Glick  

Source: http://carolineglick.com/americas-great-purge-and-israel/ 

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Biden Promises Pain - Matthew Vadum

 

​ by Matthew Vadum

America’s new placeholder president speaks.

 

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 78, was installed North Korea-style as the placeholder president of the United States of America on January 20, surrounded by 25,000 U.S. troops, along with hundreds of socially-distancing well-wishers in front of an empty National Mall populated with a vast forest of planted American flags to distract from the fact that no one was there.

How long he will last before Nancy Pelosi invokes the 25th Amendment to replace him with the predatory Obama wannabe Kamala Harris is anyone’s guess.

The speech came as the Washington Post admitted hours after militia members were charged in connection with the January riot that former President Donald Trump had nothing to do with the civil disturbance that delayed our Potemkin parliament’s certification of electors a few hours. This was, of course, the riot after which Biden, statist simpleton that he is, scolded lawmakers who thought they were running for their very lives for not stopping to put face masks on.

In the process Biden misgendered his own home state House member, saying he was “so proud of my congressman right here in the state of Delaware, Lisa Blunt Rochester,” for trying to distribute masks to other lawmakers during the riot. Reportedly, some Republicans declined the offer, prompting Biden to growl, “What the hell’s the matter with them? It’s time to grow up.”

No one needed to worry about riots in the nation’s capital, not only because of the armed soldiers and out-of-state police that occupied the city, but because the nonentity who blundered his way into becoming the leader of the free world does not inspire passion, except perhaps in the most radical precincts of the Left. While he enjoyed his first half-day in the Oval Office busily trying to erase the legacy of Orange Man Bad by executive fiat, mostly peaceful Antifa rioters marked the occasion in Seattle, Denver, and Portland, Oregon.

The man who administered the oath of office to Biden, Chief Justice John Roberts, is arguably largely responsible for Biden’s so-called victory because he signed on to a series of decisions that ignored election law and put Trump, whom he hates with a passion, at a disadvantage.

In one case, on October 19, 2020, Roberts inexplicably betrayed his own oath of office by voting with the three liberal justices to refuse a stay in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar. With only eight justices on the Supreme Court at the time, this resulted in a tie 4-4 vote denying a Republican request to stay the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s blatantly unconstitutional ruling that usurped the power of the state legislature and forced state election officials to accept mail-in ballots received up to three days after Election Day. The GOP presciently argued the extra time was an invitation to fraud, especially because the Pennsylvania court ruled election officials had to accept ballots late even if they lacked a postmark.

Roberts ignored the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which vests the power to determine state election procedures in state legislatures alone. Article II of the Constitution provides that “Each State shall appoint [electors for president and vice president] in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” The courts have long held that the legislative power here is “plenary,” meaning unqualified and absolute, so when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acted it did so unconstitutionally.

The Supreme Court ruled in McPherson v. Blacker (1892) that “the appointment and mode of appointment of Electors belong exclusively to the states under the constitution of the United States.”

“The legislative power is the supreme authority except as limited by the constitution of the State, and the sovereignty of the people is exercised through their representatives in the legislature unless by the fundamental law power is elsewhere reposed.”

The Supreme Court affirmed this legislative power as recently as 2000 in Bush v. Gore.

When Florida lawmakers saw that Democrat Al Gore was trying to steal the election by gaming the courts, they threatened to ignore the statewide popular vote and appoint electors pledged to Republican George W. Bush. The Supreme Court reminded the litigants that state legislatures have the final say. “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for Electors for the President of the United States…”

But instead of following the law, Roberts decided to stick it to the Trump campaign and snuff out any momentum his campaign might have had a chance of developing in courts across the nation.

Eager to get started destroying the American republic, the cadaverous former vice president was sworn in at 11:48 a.m., 12 minutes before Noon when the 20th Amendment specifies an incoming president’s term actually begins.

Squinting, and at times barking out the words on the teleprompter like someone with a wildly malfunctioning hearing aid, the newly inserted chief executive stumbled over a text that was weighted down with clichés, sentence fragments, and what passes for patriotism in Democratic Party circles. It was a bargain-basement inaugural address.

A co-conspirator in the ultimately successful four-year-plus-long rolling coup that used, among other things, Hillary Clinton’s fake Russian dossier and taxpayer-funded U.S. intelligence agencies to undermine the duly elected 45th president of the United States, the corrupt, lying serial plagiarist, groper of females of all ages, and hair sniffer, outlined his planned assaults on economic freedom, the First and Second Amendments, as well as the coming wave of repression directed against his enemies.

“Few people in our nation’s history have been more challenged, and found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we’re in now,” Biden said.

“A once-in-a-century virus that silently stalks the country. It’s taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer. A cry for survival comes from planet itself. A cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear now. A rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat. To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future America – requires so much more than words.”

He’s right.

Words are not enough.

Doing what Biden and his far-left base want to do requires brute force because sane Americans won’t allow it. Normal Americans oppose slavery reparations paid by people who never owned slaves to people who were never slaves. They don’t want to kill the economy by banning gasoline-fueled cars to save an environment that doesn’t need saving. They don’t want to turn America into a giant prison to control a virus that spares almost all its victims. They don’t want what Biden is selling.

The Chinese Communist Party-promoted virus that causes the disease COVID-19 has ravaged the land, if the questionable official body count for the disease is to be believed. Biden, who refuses to blame the People’s Republic for its murderous biological attack, wants to expand on the failed containment policies including universal mandatory mask-wearing and continuing the economy-killing lockdowns that have thrown millions out of work. He wants to use more force to compel compliance with pandemic mitigation efforts.

Biden’s allies, left-wing Democratic governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, California’s Gavin Newsom, and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, condemned thousands of elderly Americans to COVID-19 deaths in elder care facilities.

Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary Rachel Levine, the Butcher of Harrisburg, sent infected old people to such facilities. Levine is Biden’s token transgender nominee to be Assistant U.S. Secretary of Health.

America is systemically racist, argued Biden, who for most of last year’s nationwide Antifa-Black Lives Matter riots following the drug-caused death of George Floyd remained silent about the lawlessness and destruction as his bloodthirsty running-mate Kamala Harris cheered them on, saying they “should not let up.”

In the hours after taking the oath, Biden rescinded President Trump’s executive order banning Marxist-invented Critical Race Theory in federal training, and killed his 1776 Commission that sought to move American education away from a Howard Zinn-style curriculum that unduly emphasized race-related injustices of the past.

Biden previously endorsed the communist Green New Deal which would return the United States to the 1800s in a few years, so unsurprisingly he falsely claimed that the environment was in grave danger in his speech. The Green New Deal “is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face,” his campaign website states.

Joe “You Ain’t Black” Biden’s ominous statement that “political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism” are on the rise and must be confronted should be particularly worrisome to anyone concerned about civil liberties. This is because we know he wasn’t referring to his friends on the Left. He was smearing 75 million Trump voters as potential enemies of the state.

The leftists who run the Democratic Party believe that anyone outside of their ranks is a potential enemy. And they have funny ideas about what constitutes racism. Remember that when principled conservatives opposed Barack Obama’s socialist juggernaut they were reflexively denounced as racist. The only reason to oppose Obama was “racism – straight up,” washed up actress Janeane Garofolo whined at the time.

The activists of the Tea Party movement who filled townhall meetings as Obama and Biden were forcing Obamacare down the throats of the American people, were similarly denounced at the time by leftists as domestic terrorists. Biden obviously plans to apply the label to Trump supporters to discredit and marginalize them, along maybe with throwing some of them into prison for their political beliefs if he can get away with it . And since some of the January 6 rioters had military backgrounds, he is already setting in motion a disturbing Stalinist-style purge of the armed forces.

Then there was the Orwellian part of Biden’s address in which he seemed to be outlining plans for a new Thought Police or maybe a citizen-dominated Thought Militia.

Biden said, “we must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured.”

“Recent weeks and months have taught us a painful lesson. There is truth and there are lies. Lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and a responsibility, as citizens, as Americans, and especially as leaders – leaders who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation — to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”

This sounds much like Barack Obama urging his supporters to “get in the face” of his opponents.

The ”lies” to which Biden refers concern the justified worries of Americans about election fraud. Anyone who says Biden or the Democrats stole the election from Trump may be targeted in some way. As I wrote earlier this week, Republican lawmakers and lawyers are the first to be attacked but more harassment and persecution are coming.

And this supposed duty to defend truth and defeat lies isn’t something the Founding Fathers would have recognized. They believed, in the words of the Declaration of Independence that exalted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Americans are supposed to be free to believe what they want.

People have to be left alone to figure out the world for themselves, without compulsion from the government or politically correct censorship at the hands of Mark Zuckerberg’s 12-year-old content moderators jam-packed into electronic sweatshops.

Joe Biden will never get that.

And his inability to comprehend this quintessential aspect of what it is to be American is going to get people killed.

 

Matthew Vadum  

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/biden-promises-pain-matthew-vadum/ 

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Democrats Expose Dynamics of the Oligarchy - Lloyd Billingsley

 

​ by Lloyd Billingsley

A legal, democratic recall election is now a “coup” attempt by extremists.

 

“This recall effort, which really ought to be called ‘the California coup,’ is being led by right-wing conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers and groups who encourage violence on our democratic institutions.”

That was California Democratic Party chair Rusty Hicks, in a January 12 press conference, joined by Fresno city councilman Nelson Esparza who called the recall “treasonous.”  That language prompted Ben Christopher of CalMatters to clarify the matter.

“Unlike a coup, which is an illegal seizure of power,” Christopher wrote, “a recall campaign is a democratic mechanism written into the California constitution that allows voters to remove an elected official by popular vote.” This legal, democratic mechanism is what the California Democrats call “treasonous,” and it models what national Democrats have been deploying since 2016.

The “composite character” David Garrow charted in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, whose Dreams from My Father was a novel, transformed a democratic nation into an authoritarian arrangement where the outgoing president picks his successor and deploys the DOJ and FBI to support her and attack her opponent. The overconfident Hillary Clinton failed to campaign in key states and vilified Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” Trump campaigned tirelessly and the people elected him president.

“The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump,” Roger Kimball explains, “is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that governs us.” As in California, Democrats regarded a democratic mechanism for choosing the president as illegitimate. By the time of Trump’s inauguration, the coup attempt was already in progress and for the next three years on full display in the Russia and Ukraine hoaxes. The 2020 election is best seen as the continuation of the Democrat coup attempt.

“Every honest person knows the 2020 election was rigged,” writes Kimball, who cites  William Briggs on how the “woke oligarchy” works. The party that cheats is also in charge of investigating the accusations of cheating. The media calls cheating a conspiracy theory, and rulers move to expel or cancel those who even question the cheating. According to Briggs, “That party will win by virtue of its power. This is the way power works.” For his part, Kimball shows what our particular form of oligarchy means in practice.

The people do have a voice, “but it is a voice that is everywhere pressured, cajoled, shaped and bullied.” The people have a choice, says Kimball, but “only among a roster of approved candidates.”

In 2016 the Democrat candidate should have been Bernie Sanders, but “the way power works” brought in Hillary Clinton. In 2020, the party was responsible for counting the votes is in charge of investigating the accusations of cheating, so the nation gets addled retread Joe Biden, choice of the oligarchy. In similar style, the DOJ and FBI, which spearheaded the coup attempt against President Trump, are responsible for investigating the coup, so there will be no criminal charges against Comey, Strzok, McCabe, Ohr et al.

For Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, there was no treason and no crime, only “a massive system failure by senior leadership,” in the DOJ and FBI. For the oligarchy and its collaborators, the real problem is the power of the people to remove politicians from office by legal means.

In 2003, Californians of all parties recalled Democrat Gov. Gray Davis, who couldn’t even keep the lights on. Current Gov. Gavin Newsom is basically Davis plus an emergency order that empowered him to govern as a full-on autocrat. Among other actions, Newsom locked down the state, brought back the blackouts, spent $1 billion on masks from a Chinese company, and looked the other way as convicts scammed the unemployment system for $2 billion.

The lawful process to recall the disastrous Newsom is a “California coup,” according to Rusty Hicks, who has an election back story of his own. Hicks became state Democrat Party boss after charges of sexual harassment forced former state party chair Eric Bauman to resign. Democrat staffer William Floyd charged that Bauman forcibly performed oral sex on him several times and sued Bauman over sexual harassment, assault, battery, negligence and civil rights violations.

Hicks won the state party post with support from 57 percent of delegates, which nixed prospects of a runoff with African American Kimberly Ellis. The Emerge California activist ran for Democrat Party chair in 2017, narrowly losing to Eric Bauman and contesting the results, “keeping the party friction alive for months and turning off some members of the party establishment,” as the Associated Press reported.

According to Politico, the Democrat Party “paid millions of dollars to settle sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against Bauman.” The party conducted an investigation into Bauman’s conduct but last year approved candidate Rusty Hicks declined to release the results. Hicks’ effort to “deny the truth and hide the evidence,” party members charged in a letter, “sends the message that serial harassers and assailants are still welcome in the party.”

In 2008, Rusty Hicks served as California political director for the composite character formerly known as Barry Soetoro. In eight years, he transformed the nation into the oligarchy it has now become.

The FBI and DOJ are political players operating above the law. Voter fraud is standard practice. The truth counts for nothing and the voice of the people is bullied.  The people must choose from a roster of approved candidates. And the people’s attempt to recall a politician by constitutional, democratic means becomes an attempted coup.

* * *

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

 

Lloyd Billingsley  

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/democrats-expose-dynamics-oligarchy-lloyd-billingsley-0/ 

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Biden tells Mexican president he will end Trump's 'draconian' immigration policies - Adam Shaw

 

​ by Adam Shaw

Biden has enacted a flurry of immigration orders in his first week in office.

Biden 'refusing to listen to the experts' on illegal immigration and border security: Don Rosenberg

Don Rosenberg, president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, accuses President Biden of playing politics with his immigration policy.

President Biden on Friday told Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador that he will reverse the Trump administration’s "draconian" immigration policies -- in a week in which the new U.S. president has signed a flurry of immigration orders.

A readout from the White House said that Biden spoke with Lopez Obrador to "review bilateral cooperation on a range of bilateral and regional issues, particularly regional migration."

TEXAS AG SUES BIDEN ADMINISTRATION OVER 'UNLAWFUL AND PERILOUS' DEPORTATION PAUSE

"The President outlined his plan to reduce migration by addressing its root causes, increasing resettlement capacity and lawful alternative immigration pathways, improving processing at the border to adjudicate requests for asylum, and reversing the previous administration’s draconian immigration policies," the statement said.

"The two leaders agreed to work closely to stem the flow of irregular migration to Mexico and the United States, as well as to promote development in the Northern Triangle of Central America," it said. "They also recognized the importance of coordination to combat the COVID-19 pandemic."

Biden campaigned on ending the Trump administration’s stricter immigration policies and has made it a priority since being inaugurated.

On Wednesday, Biden signed an order halting construction of the wall at the southern border while the administration studies whether it can redivert money that has been assigned to the project. 

TOP DEM ADMITS PASSING BIDEN IMMIGRATION BILL A 'HERCULEAN' TASK AMID GOP OPPOSITION

He also signed a memorandum to protect the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shields immigrants who came to the country illegally as children from deportation. 

Video

Other orders included an end to Trump-era travel bans, another revoking the Trump administration’s plan to exclude non-citizens from the census and the apportionment of congressional seats, and another to extend the Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) designation for Liberians in the country until June 2022.

On Friday, a 100-day deportation freeze went into effect and was immediately subjected to a lawsuit from Texas -- claiming it was dangerous, unconstitutional and in violation of an agreement with DHS.

Biden is also forging forward with a sweeping immigration plan that includes an eight-year path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants, as well as immediate green cards for farmworkers and DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients.

Lopez Obrador has been supportive of such a move, and urged there to be dual nationality for Mexicans who work in the U.S.

Biden has also promised to end the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) -- known as the "Remain in Mexico" policy. That Trump-era policy keeps migrants in Mexico as they await their hearings. Biden promised to end the program, but officials during the transition said that it may take longer to achieve.

 

Adam Shaw is a reporter covering U.S. and European politics for Fox News. He can be reached at adam.shaw@foxnews.com.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-mexican-trumps-draconian-immigration-policies 

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Iranian Foreign Agent Used by Obama’s Media Echo Chamber Arrested - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

From Howard Zinn’s teaching assistant to an agent of a Shiite terrorist state.

 

When the New York Times and the Washington Post wanted Iran explained to them, they turned to Kaveh Afrasiabi. So did at least one member of Congress who is only listed as “Congressman-1” in the FBI’s application for Afrasiabi’s arrest as a foreign agent of Iran.

Afrasiabi had started out as Howard Zinn’s teaching assistant. The notorious Communist revisionist historian was the Iranian immigrant’s dissertation adviser. “My first exposure to Zinn was in his graduate class on Marxism and anarchism,” Afrasiabi wrote in a tribute at The Nation.

Zinn had gushed, "I admire Afrasiabi for his courage."

Afrasiabi, who was on familiar terms with Zinn and Noam Chomsky, was practicing a different kind of revisionist history than Zinn’s affinity for Communist revisionism or Chomsky’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers. For decades, he peppered newspapers and journals with letters and later articles laying out a revisionist history of the brutal theocracy terrorizing Iran and the region.

In a 1990 New York Times letter, Afrasiabi insisted that Iran was a tolerant place, where there is "very little book censorship", and there's more freedom than there was before the Islamic takeover. The letters soon turned into op-eds. He wrote articles, studies, reviews, and books that laid out a case for appeasing the Islamic terror state and dismissing its nuclear program.

And the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Harvard International Review, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, were all happy to run Afrasiabi’s political revisionism.

After Iranians took to the street to protest a rigged election, CNN’s Don Lemon interviewed Afrasiabi who defended Ahmadinejad. CNN also featured a piece by Afrasiabi assuring its readers that there was no evidence of election fraud and suggesting that they would soon see "a more moderate Ahmadinejad gearing up for dialogue with the West".

Before long, Afrasiabi had become an official expert on Iran.

The Council on Foreign Relations repeatedly quoted Afrasiabi on everything having to do with Iran. When anti-government riots broke out in Iran, the Washington Post turned to Afrasiabi. By 2009, an unknown member of Congress, described only as “Congressman-1”, was regularly turning to Afrasiabi and cited him in a letter to Obama about cutting a deal with Iran.

Kaveh Afrasiabi had his own thoughts on the subject. In an email to Iran’s Foreign Minister and UN ambassador after President Trump took out terror boss Qassam Soleimani, he urged the terror regime to retaliate in order to "strike fear in the heart of enemy" and "weaken Trump and strengthen his opponents". President Trump’s opponents were the ones listening to Afrasiabi.

And Afrasiabi was getting his talking points directly from Iran which was paying his salary.

Not only has Afrasiabi been charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Islamic terror state, but his role was so blatant that he was actually getting checks directly from and having his health insurance covered through Iran’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations. 

Afrasiabi did everything but formally register as a foreign agent, and yet no one cared.

Meanwhile Afrasiabi’s emails showed how he was using his access to the media on behalf of an enemy regime.

"I will continue to fully support our foreign minister as I have in the past," he wrote during the Iran Deal debate. "For your information, last month I wrote article in Boston Globe, letter in Washington Post."

Just as the Washington Post had provided space for the Qatari regime by printing Jamal Khashoggi’s columns, and then treating him as a martyr, it offered space to Iran’s regime. And Iran was shaping Afrasiabi’s material similarly to the way Qatar had shaped Khashoggi’s.

When Iran took American sailors hostage, a press secretary from Iran's UN mission gave him talking points about how well they had been treated. And Afrasiabi pleaded for “a more robust role for me given my credential and name recognition in iran as a stubborn defender of iran who has experienced years of oppression in us.”

His “oppression in us” involved extensive litigation with Harvard when he was accused of extortion, with Zinn, Chomsky, and Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes coming to his defense.

He also claimed to have been the victim of police brutality from “racist, brutal, unprofessional and malicious” Cambridge Police officers. The Iranian immigrant claimed that the cops targeted him because he looked foreign, but news reports mention that he was arrested because he left the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub in Central Square without paying for his meal.

None of this bizarre history dissuaded academia and the media from taking him seriously.

His latest book, Trump and Iran: Containment to Confrontation, was featured in Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs. Meanwhile he was serving on the advisory board of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII).

The New York Times, the Washington Post, Congressman-1, the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, the United Nations, and everyone who gave Afrasiabi a forum may try to argue that they had no idea he was working for Iran. No matter how hard he shilled for Iran, its nuclear program, and its domestic brutality, Afrasiabi’s enablers chose not to see.

After the murder of Neda Agha Soltan, who was killed by the Iranian regime while protesting against Ahmadinejad,  Afrasiabi claimed that the violence was the fault of "some rogue officials" and suggested that she may have been killed by "dissident groups" or foreign spies.

Afrasiabi may not have registered as a foreign agent, but he made little secret of his sympathies. After Soleimani’s assassination, he ranted during a television interview that President Trump’s “hands are stained with the blood of ten martyrs" and warned that the President “has provoked . . . blowback . . . that will be coming before too long.”

The blowback never came. Instead, Afrasiabi was arrested for acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Iran. The only blowback is to the media’s echo chamber which loses one of its own.

“We created an echo chamber,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s close adviser, had told the New York Times. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

The Iran Deal became possible because the Obama administration had collaborated with pro-Iran groups to push a false narrative about the deal and its nuclear program.

Among the places that Afrasiabi was published was LobeLog. While LobeLog has since become part of George Soros’ Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, it was formerly partly funded  by the Ploughshares Fund. And the Ploughshares Fund was a key part of the echo chamber.

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else,” Rhodes had boasted. The Iran Project, like LobeLog, repeatedly ran material quoting Afrasiabi.

While the Obama administration claimed to be worried about foreign interference, its propaganda campaign for the Iran Deal was utilizing the work of an Iranian foreign agent.

The foreign interference in America’s political system had been aided and abetted by the Obama administration which spied on members of Congress speaking to Prime Minister Netanyahu and relied on an echo chamber that included an alleged agent of Iran.

Afrasiabi once wrote an article titled, “Reading Marx in Cairo.” If a Democrat DOJ doesn’t undermine the investigation, then Afrasiabi may end up reading Marx in prison.

 

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/2021/01/iranian-foreign-agent-used-obamas-media-echo-daniel-greenfield/ 

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Who ordered the National Guard troops stuffed into the icy underground parking garage? - Monica Showalter

 

​ by Monica Showalter

Democrats are falling all over themselves to deny they ordered the National Guard (who protected them) shunted away into an icy underground garage.

Following the strange inauguration of Joe Biden, some 25,000 to 65,000 National Guard troops brought in to guard the Capitol were in for a string of insults.  First, their loyalty was questioned.  Then their professionalism was questioned.  And with no clear purpose for so many of them to protect the Capitol, it was clear they were being used for photo op props, not the service they were sworn to.  They found themselves there not to chase off rioters, but to bolster Democrats in their political purpose of smearing Republicans as insurgents. 

The final insult came when someone ordered them to get lost from the Capitol.  Like discarded props, or no longer welcome valets, more than a thousand were ordered into an icy underground parking garage to stay out of sight, out of mind.  They had no heat, just one bathroom for 5,000 personnel, and only one outlet.  They had no internet and no beds, forcing them to sleep on hard ground in 38-degree cold.  COVID was present, making the harsh conditions a potential superspreader event.

Upstairs the beautiful people in monochrome colors, heat, fancy bathrooms, and tons of snacks carried on as usual.  It's good to be the elite.

According to Politico, who asked a Guardsman what was going on:

"Yesterday dozens of senators and congressmen walked down our lines taking photos, shaking our hands and thanking us for our service. Within 24 hours, they had no further use for us and banished us to the corner of a parking garage. We feel incredibly betrayed," the Guardsman said.

Four governors called their National Guardsmen back, with Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis summing it up with this: "They are soldiers.  They're not Nancy Pelosi's servants."

Finally, someone on Team Biden told doddering old Joe there was a public relations problem, and Biden reportedly called the National Guard commander to apologize.  We don't have a quote, so we don't know if he really apologized, but the press barreled ahead to claim it was that.  Around the same time, wife Jill, whoops, that's Dr. Jill Biden, was dispatched to meet a few of the Guard on the outside grounds, to distribute a basket of cookies.  Based on the size of her basket, it didn't look like enough to feed 65,000; it was just enough for the cameras.  And no, she didn't take that basket into the garage; she just served the cookies to the Guards guarding, out on the Capitol lawn.

What's vivid here is how many Democrats fell over themselves to claim they didn't like it and didn't do it.

Besides a lot of Republicans, House leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted "yeah this is not okay" and offered the Guard the use of her office couch, along with a lot of snacks.

President Trump, however, apparently got there first, offering the Guard the luxurious accommodations of the nearby Trump hotel for free.  Nice try, Sandy.

Meanwhile, another leftist, Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) went out of his way to deny that he was the one who did it, as Breitbart News reported, having gone "Karen" by loudly confronting a National Guardsman in a Dunkin Donuts not wearing a mask, and at least appealing to the management — he said Joe Biden signed a mask mandate, so it was very important to him to intervene.  In any case, he said the Guards were just resting and never were sleeping on the floor, so nothing bad went on. 

According to the Boston Herald:

Keating said he was in a coffee shop in the House with a large number of people on Thursday when he saw some not wearing masks. President Biden on Wednesday had signed an executive order mandating mask wearing on federal property.

"I commented — to no one in particular — that this has the ingredients of a super-spreader event and we should all keep our masks on. A member of the National Guard chose to loudly refuse," said Keating, who makes at least $174,000 a year as a congressman and earns a state pension of nearly $114,000 as a former district attorney, according to the comptroller's office.

"That is the totality of what took place," Keating said. "Over 400,000 people have already died in this country, roughly 4,000 a day, due to COVID, and if I were in the same situation today, I would say the exact same thing."

Whoever it was who ordered the National Guard into the garage is not owning up to it.  The media are incurious — not a single reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki about it — but after so many indignities connected to the Biden inaugural, the Guard would surely have a right to know.

What's known so far is that members of the Guard said the Capitol Police ordered it, but the Capitol Police chief explicitly denied it.  Chief Yogananda Pittmann said she "temporarily" ordered them to a garage where there were heat and bathroom facilities, so nothing bad happened, but the Guard said there was neither.  This, like Keating's qualifiers, doesn't quite sound like a denial.

Whether Pittmann was acting on her own or at the behest of House speaker Nancy Pelosi is an interesting question, given Pelosi's role in controlling the Capitol Police.  Pelosi hasn't said anything on her Twitter feed, or apparently anywhere else.  She praised the Guard a few days ago, but she blasted them last summer when President Trump called them in to protect federal property.

According to the Washington Examiner, a low-level Capitol police officer acting outside the chain of command is the goat who did it, and in any case, he was sending them to a nice place with heat, not what was really a freezing parking garage.  This sounds like more spin, given that nobody knows who the little fellow is.

Whatever happened, it sounds like the doings of the Democrats, who used the Guard and then tried to bury them underground, out of sight, out of mind.  That sets a mighty interesting tone for the incoming Biden administration.  It might just be the first thing it's remembered for.

 

Monica Showalter  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/so_who_ordered_the_national_guard_troops_stuffed_into_the_icy_underground_parking_garage.html 

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The Religious Transformation of French Schools - Giulio Meotti

 

​ by Giulio Meotti

If extremists have managed to intimidate France's schools and universities, why should they not be able to subdue all of society?

• In France, a low-intensity war is bubbling, aimed at radicalizing education.

• At the Pierre Mendès France School in Saumur, a student told his teacher, "My father will behead you". It has become impossible even to make a precise list of these incidents. They occur every day in France.

• "Faced with Islamist intimidation, what should the free world do?" — Title of Robert Redeker's column in Le Figaro in 2006. A few days later, he began receiving death threats.

• If extremists have managed to intimidate France's schools and universities, why should they not be able to subdue all of society?

In France, a low-intensity war is bubbling, aimed at radicalizing education. Minister of Education Jean Michel Blanquer revealed that after the beheading of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty in October, 800 Islamist "incidents" had taken place in French schools. Pictured: Bois-d'Aulne College in Conflans-Saint-Honorine, where Paty was murdered on October 16, 2020. (Photo by Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)

"Unlike you, Colonel, and so many others, Mila will never submit", wrote the French teenager's father to her school's principal in a letter published by Le Point. On January 18, 2020 Mila O., then 16 years old, made insulting comments about Islam during her Instagram livestream.

"During her livestream, a Muslim boy asked her out in the comments, but she turned him down because she is gay. He responded by accusing her of racism and calling her a 'dirty lesbian'. In an angry follow-up video, streamed immediately after she was insulted, Mila responded by saying that she 'hates religion'".

Mila continued: "The Koran is a religion of hatred; there is only hatred in it... Islam is sh*t..." Since then, she has received approximately 50,000 messages and letters that contain threats to rape her, slit her throat, torture and behead her. She has had to keep moving from one school to another.

Once again, Mila has found herself without a high school. On a social network, she accidentally gave the name of her new military school. Its management promptly excluded her for being a potential threat to the students' security. "Devastated by so much cowardice", Mila's father wrote. "Even the army cannot protect her and allow her to continue her education, what can we do, us, her parents? This observation is for us a horror film".

Even the French army cannot protect her? "She is 17 years old and now lives like the staff of Charlie Hebdo, in a bunker; it is unbearable!" Mila's lawyer, Richard Malka, said.

A few days later, "Caroline L.", a professor at the Faculty of Law of Aix-Marseille University, received countless death threats, accusing her of being "Islamophobic". The Aix-en-Provence prosecutor opened an investigation for "public insults for belonging to religion". Her "crime"? The professor had explained to her students there:

"There is no freedom of conscience in Islam. If you were born to a Muslim father, you are a Muslim for life. A kind of sexually transmitted religion. One of the biggest problems we have with Islam, and unfortunately it is not the only one, is that Islam does not recognize freedom of conscience. It is absolutely terrifying".

The Pierre Joël Bonté High School in Riom (Puy-de-Dôme) was closed on January 11 due to "insults and death threats" targeting teachers. "We have decided to close the school following insults and death threats to protect students and staff", a spokesperson of the school explained. A few hours later, a teacher in Toulouse, Fatiha Boudjahlat, asked for police protection after receiving significant threats.

In 2015, Islamic State announced that French schools must be attacked and invited its followers to "kill the teachers". According to Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islamism, "The school, for the supporters of political Islam, has become a citadel to tear down."

An article in L'Express tragically points out that schools are the object of violent campaigns by Islamists throughout the world. In 2014, a military school in Peshawar, Pakistan was targeted by a deadly Islamist attack that claimed the lives of 132 students. The Pakistani Taliban movement, between 2009 and 2012, attacked 900 schools according to a report by the NGO International Crisis Group. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai, known for her fight for girls' education, was shot in the head by the Taliban in Swat. Boko Haram, responsible for numerous attacks in Nigeria, claimed it had kidnapped 276 high school girls in Chibok. In an attack by Islamists affiliated with al-Qaeda on Kenya's Garissa University, 142 students were killed. In Burkina Faso, more than 2,000 schools have closed their doors.

In France, a low-intensity war is bubbling, aimed at radicalizing education. While many Muslims might not support such a transformation, the current effort seems to have begun in 1989, during the bicentenary of the French Revolution and the French publication of Salman Rushdie's fictional novel, The Satanic Verses. A college in Creil refused admission to three students wearing the Islamic veil. French authorities tried by dialogue and appeasement to calm the situation. In an appeal, however, published by Le Nouvel Observateur and signed by authors Alain Finkielkraut and Elisabeth Badinter, several intellectuals denounced the "Munich of the republican school".

The Islamization of French education is now proceeding at a rapid pace. In 1989, the cry was, "Teachers, let us not capitulate!". Since then, some French teachers who have refused to capitulate have paid with their lives.

In October 2020, a French history teacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded by a Chechen terrorist for having carried out his work: educating his students to respect the founding values ​​of Western societies and the words mounted over the doors of their school (Liberté, égalité, fraternité), for discussing freedom of speech and showing them Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of Mohammed.

"Living together is a fable," Alain Finkielkraut wrote after Paty's beheading; "the lost territories of the Republic are the territories conquered by hatred of France. Eyes have opened, the evidence can no longer be hidden".

French Minister of Education Jean Michel Blanquer revealed that after the beheading of Paty, 800 Islamist "incidents" had taken place in French schools.

Another teacher was physically threatened at the Battières School in Lyon, where Samuel Paty had started his career. This teacher of history and geography had given a lesson on freedom of expression, in accordance with the school curricula, to a fifth-grade class. He stated, among other things, that Emmanuel Macron was not "Islamophobic". The father of a student came to see the teacher, challenging him verbally in front of witnesses. "He was vocal and very intrusive about what he said was and was not allowed to say in his classes", a witness said. Shocked, the teacher was put on sick leave and asked to change schools.

At a high school in Caluire-et-Cuire, near Lyon, a student threatened a teacher to "cut off his head". In Gisors, a girl distributed a photo of Paty's beheading to her companions. In Albertville, Savoy, the police had to summon four ten-year-old children and their parents because in the classroom they said "that teacher deserved to die". In Grenoble, an extremist Muslim was arrested for threatening to behead a teacher of history and geography named Laurent who appears on a reality TV show. "I will behead you" he said . Laurent was evidently preparing a video tribute to Paty. At the Pierre Mendès France School in Saumur, a student told his teacher, "My father will behead you".

It has become impossible even to make a precise list of these incidents. They occur every day in France.

A new survey reveals the level of self-censorship among French teachers. To avoid possible incidents, one out of every two teachers is admitting to self-censoring in class. By means of fear, terror and intimidation, Islamism is reaping what it has sown.

How We Let Islamism Enter the School is the title of Jean-Pierre Obin's new book about the rise of Islamism in French schools. Obin, a former inspector-general of national education, in 2004 coordinated a report on manifestations of religious affiliation at schools. It was not the first report from a French education insider. Bernard Ravet was, for 15 years, the principal of three of the most problematic schools in Marseille. In his book, College Principal or Imam of the Republic?, Ravet wrote:

"For more than ten years, fanaticism has been knocking on the door of dozens of establishments.... It has sought to encroach on the physical territory of the Republic, centimeter by centimeter, by imposing its signs and standards",

French philosopher Robert Redeker wrote in 2006:

"Islam tries to impose its rules on Europe, opening swimming pools at certain times exclusively for women, a ban on caricaturing this religion, the demand for special dietary treatment of Muslim children, the fight for the wearing the veil at school, the accusation of Islamophobia against free spirits."

His column in Le Figaro was titled, "Faced with Islamist intimidation, what should the free world do?" A few days later, Redeker began receiving death threats. "I can't work and I am obliged to hide", Redeker said. "So in some way, Islamists have succeeded in punishing me on the territory of the republic as if I were guilty of a crime of opinion".

We should have paid more attention to that first case. It was the first in a long series of attacks on French teachers and schools. Fourteen years later, Samuel Paty has paid with his life, a university professor just received security protection and another had to leave his school after threats. If extremists have managed to intimidate France's schools and universities, why should they not be able to subdue all of society?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

 

Giulio Meotti  

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16972/france-schools-religion 

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The Palestinian Plan to Dupe the Biden Administration - Bassam Tawil

 

​ by Bassam Tawil

There is one reason, and one reason only, why Abbas is now talking about holding general elections: to continue milking the cash cow he has in the form of American and European governments.

• The proposed Palestinian elections are part of a scheme designed to deceive the international community, specifically the US and EU, into believing that the Palestinians are serious about implementing major reforms, ending financial and administrative corruption, and engaging in another peace process with Israel.

• Not only does Abbas have no plans to depart from the political scene anytime in the near future, he is even said to be considering running in the presidential election.

• There is one reason, and one reason only, why Abbas is now talking about holding general elections: to continue milking the cash cow he has in the form of American and European governments. Abbas wants the money to ensure his continued dictatorial rule over the Palestinians.

• Abbas is hoping that such an international conference, under the auspices of the United Nations, European Union, Russia and China, would impose a solution on Israel. Abbas has only one solution in mind: one that would see Israel fully withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state that would undoubtedly be used in the future as a launching pad to wage war on Israel.

• The Palestinians live under two dictatorships: one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. Elections, even if they are held, will not produce new leaders. They will produce Fatah flunkies and Hamas henchmen who bow obediently to their corrupt bosses.

Palestinian elections proposed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are part of a scheme designed to deceive the international community, specifically the US and EU, into believing that the Palestinians are serious about implementing major reforms, ending financial and administrative corruption, and engaging in another peace process with Israel. Pictured: Abbas speaks in Ramallah on September 3, 2020. (Photo by Alaa Badarneh/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

One week after he entered the 17^th year of his four-year term in office, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas finally announced new parliamentary and presidential elections, scheduled to take place in May and July 2021.

His announcement was carefully timed to coincide with the inauguration week of President Joe Biden and in response to immense pressure from the European Union.

Abbas's announcement, which many Palestinians take as seriously as they would take the alleged sighting of a UFO, is part of an attempt to curry favor with the Biden administration and the EU.

There is only one word to describe Abbas's announcement: deception.

The proposed Palestinian elections are part of a scheme designed to deceive the international community, specifically the US and EU, into believing that the Palestinians are serious about implementing major reforms, ending financial and administrative corruption, and engaging in another peace process with Israel.

Abbas, who boycotted President Donald Trump's administration since December 2017, is hoping that the Biden administration will, among other things, resume financial aid to the Palestinians and the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA); reopen the PLO diplomatic mission in Washington, DC., and cancel the US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Abbas did not call for elections because he suddenly believes in democracy and pluralism or because he wants to pave the way for new and young leaders to rise to power. Abbas did not call for elections because he wants to give the Palestinians the opportunity to elect new leaders through a free and fair electoral process.

Perhaps the 85-year-old Abbas called for elections because he wants to retire and spend his time playing with his grandchildren. Better not count on that.

Not only does Abbas have no plans to depart from the political scene anytime in the near future, he is even said to be considering running in the presidential election, if and when it takes place on July 31.

There is one reason, and one reason only, why Abbas is now talking about holding general elections: to continue milking the cash cow he has in the form of American and European governments. Abbas wants the money to ensure his continued dictatorial rule over the Palestinians.

He knows that without money from the US and EU, his regime would not survive for one day. Abbas also knows that without Israel's security presence in the West Bank, Hamas and his political enemies would easily remove him from power.

Abbas is trying to show the Biden administration and the Europeans that he is not an autocrat or an illegitimate leader whose tenure ended in January 2009.

In addition to money, Abbas is apparently hoping that his election farce would persuade the Americans and Europeans to support his plan to hold an international conference for "peace" in the Middle East.

Abbas does not want to return to direct negotiations with Israel: he knows that Israel cannot comply with 100% of his demands (a full withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the "right of return" for "millions" of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel).

Abbas is hoping that such an international conference, under the auspices of the United Nations, European Union, Russia and China, would impose a solution on Israel. Abbas has only one solution in mind: one that would see Israel fully withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state that would undoubtedly be used in the future as a launching pad to wage war on Israel.

If Abbas's rivals in Hamas win the parliamentary and presidential elections, the future Palestinian state that Abbas is aspiring to establish will be an Iran-backed Islamist terror entity, similar to the mini-state that already exists in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

In 2006, Hamas defeated Abbas's Fatah faction in the parliamentary election, triggering a bitter and bloody power struggle between the two rival parties. At the peak of the conflict in the summer of 2007, Hamas militiamen threw Fatah activists from the rooftops of tall buildings and killed hundreds of others.

Since then, the Palestinians have had two independent and sovereign mini-states: one to the east of Israel, on the "West Bank" of the Jordan River; and one to the west of Israel, on the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian terrorist groups, is being used as a launching pad for carrying out various forms of terrorist attacks against Israel, including firing thousands of rockets into Israel over the past 15 years.

Hamas leaders have welcomed Abbas's announcement They say they intend to participate in the general elections. Hamas is now hoping to repeat the victory it scored in the 2006 parliamentary election.

Public opinion polls have shown that more than 60% of the Palestinians would like to see Abbas quit. This means that a vast majority of Palestinians do not believe in Abbas and his Fatah lieutenants.

In 2006, many Palestinians voted for Hamas because they were fed up with Fatah's corruption and incompetence.

The polls now show that the views of many Palestinians toward Abbas and Fatah have not changed, which means Hamas has a good chance of winning another victory in the upcoming elections. Another Hamas victory means that the West Bank would become another terrorist entity ruled by Iran's Palestinian allies and proxies. Thanks to the presence of Israel in the West Bank, there is less terrorism there. If Israel pulls out, the West Bank will fall into the hands of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who will start firing rockets at Israeli in the same way they have been doing from the Gaza Strip for years.

A reminder of Hamas's dangerous ambitions was provided on January 18, 2021, by none other than its leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

Addressing a conference in Tehran, Haniyeh said that the "resistance" against Israel remains an "ideal choice" and the "strategic option" of his group.

"Resistance" is a euphemism for continuing the war of terrorism against Israel by using rockets, suicide bombings, car-rammings, stabbings and shootings, as well as throwing rocks and firebombs at Israeli soldiers and civilians.

In early February, leaders of Fatah and Hamas are expected to meet in Egypt's capital, Cairo, to discuss preparations for the elections. The two sides are saying they want to reach agreement not only on the issue of elections, but "real partnership." Fatah and Hamas are ready temporarily to lay aside their differences to form a unified front against Israel.

Abbas wants money, while Hamas wants legitimacy and recognition from the international community. Hamas, of course, also wants to extend its control to the West Bank, overthrow Abbas and proceed with its plan to destroy Israel.

For Abbas and Fatah, the talk about elections is important because they want to dupe the US and EU into giving them more money. Hamas, for its part, is hoping that the elections will legitimize it in the international community it and turn it into an acceptable player in the Palestinian arena.

If Fatah and Hamas really cared about elections and the interests of their people, they would have held elections a long time ago. The two parties, however, have spent the past 15 years torturing and arresting each other, denying their people both free elections and basic public freedoms.

The Palestinians live under two dictatorships: one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. Elections, even if they are held, will not produce new leaders. They will produce Fatah flunkies and Hamas henchmen who bow obediently to their corrupt bosses.

 

Bassam Tawil, a Muslim Arab, is based in the Middle East. 

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16976/palestinian-plan-dupe-biden 

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