Middle East and Terrorism: 2021-05-23

Saturday, May 29, 2021

The truth about the Hamas terrorist organization - Ben-Dror Yemini

by Ben-Dror Yemini

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal

Despite the rampant criticism of Israel, history and facts prove that the Palestinian group is not interested in prosperity just terrorism and the total destruction of Israel; this is why Israel is not only right to attack Hamas, it is actually bound to do so

One can and should understand the reaction of television viewers around the world who are moved by the images of destruction and devastation coming from both the Gaza Strip and cities in Israel.

Many good people claim that the blame for the current conflict lies with Israel, since it is clearly stronger than Hamas. A quick flick through the various channels also reveal a wave of unfounded allegations against Israel.

Needless to say, this is an unequivocal show of anti-Semitism. But it is also necessary to add that it is simply born of ignorance.

And so, here are the basic facts everyone should know.

In 2007, Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip, eliminating in the process hundreds of members of the rival Fatah movement that is headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Some were even murdered by being thrown off the roofs of tower blocks.

The Hamas - an organization affiliated with the radical Muslim Brotherhood - has a senior spokesman who calls not only for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people as a whole, but also seeks to conquer Rome, and "the two Americas."

Hamas also publicly and officially calls for the “extermination of Jews and Christians to the last." Hamas teaches these destructive worldviews as early as kindergarten.

An IDF tank fires into the Gaza Strip during the latest escalation round

(Photo: AFP)

At the political spectrum of Islamic organizations, Hamas holds an extreme ideology not to that of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Despite this, the international community offered Hamas an outline that would allow it to receive large-scale aid.

In 2006, the Middle East Quartet (Russia, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations) presented to Hamas the three preconditions for continued Western aid: The recognition of Israel, cessation of terrorism and recognition of previous agreements.

These prerequisites were later made public in three separate statements made by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, then U.S. Secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, and former EU foreign policy czar Javier Solana.

The offer for Western aid, which included $600 million in assistance from the European Union and another $400 million from the United States, was quickly and summarily rejected by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who claimed that “Hamas was impervious to bribery, intimidation and blackmail.”

The international community refused to throw in the towel, and in 2007 the offer to provide aid to the Palestinian people came up again.

This time it was Ismail Haniyeh, who was the Palestinian prime minister on behalf of Hamas at the time, who rejected the offer, arguing that “it is the right of the Palestinians to continue their resistance by all means."

Consequently, the headline in the international Arabic news outlet Al-Jazeera read: “Palestinians reject Quartet demands.”

Gaza's Hamas Chief Yehya Al-Sinwar talks to media, in Gaza City

Hamas chose, and continues to choose to this day, terrorisms over prosperity. In 2014, when the Israel-Gaza conflict began, the ministers of the EU offered the Palestinians aid in exchange for "the demilitarization of all terrorist organizations."

France, the United Kingdom and Germany presented a detailed plan. The EU made one more attempt to end the fighting in the Strip, and again made an official offer for rehabilitating Gaza in return for demilitarization.

And while Israel approved of the offer that would see the conflict promptly end, Hamas again refused.

In 2017, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ new leader in Gaza, reiterated once again that "Hamas will never recognize Israel."

In February 2018, when tensions between Israel and Hamas rose once again, the EU once again presented its aid offer to no avail.

In other words: Hamas does not want prosperity, it wants terrorism. Even so, again and again for humanitarian reasons, Israel allows the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars into the Strip along with hundreds of trucks carrying supplies into the Gaza Strip on a daily basis. It did not help.

Hamas used the money to fund the terrorist tunnels that go beneath Gaza into Israeli territory.

One more thing to keep in mind: wherever the branches of political Islam rule, destruction, bloodshed and destruction prevail.

After all, the large majority of Hamas’ victims are Muslims. Even Hamas rockets, which fall within the Gaza Strip itself once every six or seven times, have killed more Palestinians than Israelis.

Does this bother them? Without the blockade, Iran would not be supplying medicine, it would be supplying rockets. Without the blockade, the Hamas regime would expand its industry of death.

Without the blockade, the would not be building schools or industry that led to prosperity, Hamas would be building more tools of destruction meant for mass murder. This is not an opinion. This is what is they are doing today. These are the facts.

According to one claim, even if Israel has the right to strike at Hamas, its response is disproportionate. This is a strange claim. No country has eve

r taken so many measures meant to prevent civilian casualties.

The IDF, more than any other military in the world in similar operations, is making a supreme effort to reduce innocent casualties. This has been affirmed by world-renowned experts in military law.

One such expert is Prof. Wolff Heintschel, who said that, "The IDF takes many more precautions than are required, setting an unreasonable precedent.”

Another is Prof. Michael Schmitt, who argued that “The IDF’s warnings [to avoid civilian casualties] certainly go beyond what the law requires, but they also sometimes go beyond what would be operational good sense elsewhere."

But who are they, these world renowned experts compared to nobodies in the global media who constantly criticize Israel without knowing what they are talking about.

When images of destruction are shown to the world, one can understand the demand for a ceasefire. But no one has the right to demand anything of Israel.

Even Sweden would have bombed any target of the Islamic Jihad organization near its border if it had fired missiles at Stockholm.

Background and facts are important. It is vital to know that Hamas is a radical jihadist organization that Israel has not only a right, but the obligation, to separate from its weaponry.

Ben-Dror Yemini is the author of "Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict"

Source: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryFgHO11Yu

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The World Hates to See Jews Defending Themselves - Don Feder

by Don Feder

If you’re a Jew, those are the choices: Live on your feet or die on your knees.

I’m haunted by a photograph from the nightmare years. A Jewish boy, 9 or 10 years old, dressed in an oversized coat and cap, is being led away from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, his hands in the air. German troops are taking the child to a certain death.

For me, it symbolized the culmination of 2,000 years of Diaspora history – of mass murder, torture and every horror imaginable, leading to the Holocaust and the slaughter of one out of every three Jews on earth. But that was only a way station. The end of the road is nowhere in sight.

I contrast this with images of an Israeli war plane sitting on a tarmac and plumes of smoke rising from buildings in Gaza.

If you’re a Jew, those are the choices: Live on your feet or die on your knees.

When there are creatures screaming for your blood – who fired 4,000 missiles from Gaza, staged mini-Kristallnachts from New York to LA, marched throughout Europe waving Palestinian flags shouting “F___ the Jews, F___ their mothers, Rape their daughters,” posted 17,000 Tweets with variations of “Hitler was right”-- the choice is very simple: Do you want to be a survivor or a statistic?

The oversized leftwing of the Democrat party shifted into high gear. The Muslim Brotherhood thanked quisling Bernie Sanders, AOC, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the Jihad Caucus for opposing U.S. arms sales to Israel.

In gratitude for having their ancestors sold into slavery by Arab traders, Black Lives Matter activists (think of what they could do with missiles) raved about Israel’s “colonial occupation.”

How can you occupy your own land?

Of course, they think America is occupying our land too. That’s why critical race theory and anti-white indoctrination have become so popular from the AMA to the Boy Scouts (with its diversity/inclusiveness merit badge).

Occupation? Israel is the only nation in history with a quit claim deed from God, as recounted in the first three books of the Bible. That covenant is eternal. That’s why Jews are the only people in history who maintained their identity and returned to their land after two millennia of exile, and why they have retained that land ever since against overwhelming odds.

Mark Twain said it eloquently in his 1899 essay, written almost 50 years before the rebirth of Israel.

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

It's no secret. The Jew is the irrefutable proof of God’s existence. If God did not exist, Jews would not exist.

That’s why genocide was Hitler’s primary goal throughout World War II. He blamed Jews for Judeo-Christian morality, which he saw as an affront to the natural order. Thus, he reasoned: No more Jews, no more God -- with His thou-shalts and thou-shalt-nots -- and we can go back to being happy pagans with the strong devouring the weak.

There are as many reasons for anti-Semitism as ways for Democrats to spend money: envy of Jewish success, paranoia over Jewish conspiracy theories, the need for scapegoats.

The existence of Israel is only the latest catalyst. Even barely sentient progressives have to ask themselves: Was Israel (which didn’t exist from the first century until 1948) the reason for thousands years of forced conversions, expulsions, blood libels, massacres and pogroms?

In the final analysis, the Jews are hated for introducing humanity to God, for teaching the world about truth and justice. There are still Jews who are willing to proclaim and even die for that truth, too few, sadly. And part of that truth is the relationship of Israel to the land.

Nothing can withstand this reality – not the terrorists with their brutal desert god, not the left with its utopian vision, not the so-called international community, which is reflexively anti-Israel.

The world hates the Jews for reclaiming their ancestral homeland – where they lived for 1,600 years before Muhammed. And it hates Jews for defending themselves.

Black Lives Matter, AOC, Antifa, Tlaib and other domestic terrorists endorse the lie that Israel was the aggressor in the latest round of violence. The same gang of fanatics who are trying to destroy America want to destroy Israel as a warm-up -- proving again that the destinies of these two great nations (unique in the annals of history) are intertwined.

Today is 1943 and 1948 and 1967 – past, present and future. The world is still trying to annihilate the Jews – to drive us into the sea. How will we respond – with our hands -- or our planes -- in the air?

Don Feder

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/world-hates-see-jews-defending-themselves-don-feder/

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Biden received funds from top Russia lobbyist before Nord Stream 2 giveaway - John Levine

by John Levine

The DNC said they had returned the funds in the midst of declining to enforce sanctions on Russia

President Biden and his allies raked in campaign cash from a top Russia lobbyist in 2020, just months before his administration’s decision to scrap sanctions on a controversial firm building a Russian oil pipeline to Germany.

Richard Burt, a managing partner at McLarty Associates and a former U.S. ambassador to Germany during the Reagan administration, ponied up $4,000 for Joe Biden in October 2020 and dropped another $10,000 in the lefty-aligned political action committee Unite The County in March 2020, FEC records show.

In addition to violating Biden’s own campaign pledge not to take lobbyist cash, the money from Burt is particularly noteworthy as he is currently directly engaged in lobbying activities for Nord Stream 2 AG.

"When Richard Burt donated to Biden Victory Fund, he failed to acknowledge that he was a registered foreign agent and was therefore ineligible to contribute," a Democratic National Committee spokesman told The Post. "Because Burt also listed a different employer than on his [Foreign Agents Registration Act] registration, he was not flagged during our vetting process."

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during their meeting in Moscow March 10, 2011. Biden is on the second day of an official visit meeting top officials in the Russian capital. REUTERS/Alexander Natruskin (RUSSIA - Tags: POLITICS) (Reuters)

KAMALA HARRIS HAS GONE 66 DAYS WITHOUT A NEWS CONFERENCE SINCE BEING TAPPED FOR BORDER CRISIS ROLE

The DNC said it returned the cash on Thursday after The Post’s inquiry.

The Switzerland-based Nord Stream 2 — controlled by an ex-East German stasi officer and close ally of Vladimir Putin — is currently engaging in sanctionable activity, according to the State Department. Team Biden raised eyebrows, however, after declining to enforce sanctions, citing U.S. national interests, Axios reported.

Critics worry the project will allow Russia dangerous influence over European energy supplies and increase their overall political leverage on the continent.

To build the pipeline, Nord Stream 2 has partnered with five European energy companies, ENGIE, OMV, Shell, Uniper and Wintershall Dea. Lobbying disclosure forms show that Burt is currently advocating on behalf of all five.

"To protect and further the company’s interests in the debate over natural gas as an element of European energy security and advise on Russia sanctions issues," reads Burt’s disclosure for OMV under the area for "specific lobbying issues." The other four offer similar language.

"Reading between the lines you can clearly see what that lobbying looks like," Anna Massoglia, an investigative researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics told The Post. "While it’s not evidence of anything illegal, it’s just something that is evidence of how influence works in Washington."

DR. BEN CARSON: SADDEST PART OF BDEN CAUSING MASSIVE INFLATION IS EFFECT ON EVERYTHING

Burt, a longtime GOP donor before switching sides in 2019, has long been a fixture in D.C. foreign policy circles. "He carries an air of great knowledge and wisdom and experience, and he’s impressive when you meet him," a former Trump official who dealt with Burt told The Post.

Burt played an early role in advising the Trump campaign’s foreign policy positions, and even helped the billionaire candidate craft his first foreign policy speech — something critics immediately jumped on as proof of untoward Russia connections.

"The revelation of Burt’s lobbying activity raises new questions about Russian influence in Trump’s campaign," blared Politico, which extensively cited Burt’s work on Nord Stream 2 — a project Trump went on to oppose as president.

"The sum total of Trump’s words and actions has only encouraged Russian meddling in our elections," said California Rep. Adam Schiff in August 2020. "Insecure, unscrupulous and transactional, Trump is Putin’s ideal American president."

In March, 2019, Burt gave a maximum $2,800 donation to Schiff shortly after the congressman took the reins of the powerful House Intelligence Committee.

Schiff has not commented publicly on the Biden Nord Stream 2 decision.

Both Burt and reps for Schiff did not respond to request for comment from The Post.

Click here to read more of the New York Post.

John Levine

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-received-funds-from-top-russia-lobbyist-before-nord-stream-2-giveaway

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A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone - Lawrence Kadish

by Lawrence Kadish

As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.
For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America's best days are in the past.
What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill -- or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company's headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate -- to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.
Few debate the idea that our nation's infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as "infrastructure" has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for "environmental" agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.
This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge.... As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

(Image source: iStock)

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah -- and pathetic.

Enter Joe Biden's "American Jobs Plan," a $2.3 trillion spending scheme that takes some Americans' most fevered fantasies and wraps them inside an "infrastructure" label in an effort to convince Capitol Hill that the spending is all about roads and bridges. An analysis by the Wharton School places plenty of caution flags on this initiative.

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possible sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America's best days are in the past.

Even the White House acknowledges that their spending debt would take 15 years to pay off, providing that Biden's proposed corporate tax hikes generate the projected revenue – itself highly questionable. What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill -- or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company's headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate -- to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation's infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as "infrastructure" has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for "environmental" agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant. Sadly, the bill suggests a clumsy political strategy to prevent open debate and an honest review of the Biden agenda.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge. Biden's spending spree is far beyond Washington's traditional pork. It is creating a level of unsustainable debt in pursuit of a social agenda that could literally sink everyone, drowning all, regardless of which political party they claim.

As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

Lawrence Kadish is a real estate developer, entrepreneur & witness to an era of "Brother can you spare a dime".

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

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Coming Soon: China's Navy Patrolling Off New York - Gordon G. Chang

by Gordon G. Chang

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America's two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent [Africa], they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.
On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.
If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure.... Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.
Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a "ghost base." As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.
China could get a base even closer than [Lajes]. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.
Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China's militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing's hands.
China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.
At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America's two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America's East Coast. China is also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores, where there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart. Pictured: A US Air Force C-130 prepares for takeoff from Lajes Field on March 4, 2003. (Photo by Michelle Michaud/U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

China is scouting for a naval base on the west coast of Africa. In the near future, therefore, Chinese ships could be regularly patrolling off America's East Coast.

In recent testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has been sounding the alarm.

At the moment, China's only offshore military base is in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. The facility is near some of the world's busiest shipping routes, including those going through the Suez Canal.

Townsend believes the People's Liberation Army Navy is surveying locations on Africa's west coast, from Mauritania in the north to Namibia in the south. "Now they're casting their gaze to the Atlantic coast and wanting to get such a base there," the general told the Associated Press.

Africa is important in its own right. "Located at the crossroads of the world, Africa watches over strategic choke points including the Strait of Gibraltar, the Strait of Sicily, the Red Sea, the Bab al Mandeb, and the Mozambique Channel," General Townsend pointed out in a publicly released 2021 Posture Statement for Congress. "The land mass of Africa is larger than the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe combined."

The African continent is home to 11 of the 25 fast-growing economies and is the world's most demographically vital region.

Chinese planners are not only thinking of the continent, they are also eyeing islands in the Atlantic, specifically Terceira, one of the Azores.

On that island, part of Portugal, there is a port and, of even greater interest, Air Base No. 4. Better known as Lajes Field, the facility is jointly operated by the U.S. Air Force and its Portuguese counterpart.

If China controlled the base, the Atlantic would no longer be secure. From the 10,865-foot runway there, Chinese planes could patrol the northern and central portions of the Atlantic and thereby cut air and sea traffic between the U.S. and Europe. Beijing would also be able to deny access to the nearby Mediterranean Sea.

Pentagon budget cutters have been scaling back activities at Lajes, making it a "ghost base." As a result, Lajes is ripe for China to take it over.

Whether China takes over Lajes or not, China's plans for Africa are clear. As Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told the Washington Times this month, "It's just a matter of time before you have regular surface and subsurface Chinese naval vessels in the Atlantic."

An Atlantic base "would let China make mischief for the United States in its own hemisphere," James Holmes of the U.S. Naval War College told Gatestone. "It could siphon some U.S. forces from the Western Pacific to the Atlantic, easing the pressure on China in the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait, and South China Sea. It would distract and stretch us to Beijing's benefit."

Worse, China could then target the American homeland. Lajes, for instance, is less than 2,300 miles from New York, shorter than the distance between Pearl Harbor and Los Angeles.

China could get a base even closer than that. About 90 miles east of Palm Beach, on Grand Bahama Island, a Hong Kong-based business is spending about $3 billion on a deep-water container facility, the Freeport Container Port.

That port is designed to take advantage of traffic from the recently expanded Panama Canal, but the concern is that the port will become another Hambantota. China in December 2017 took control of the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, grabbing 70% of the equity and signing a 99-year lease after that project could not repay high-interest loans extended by China. China's takeover was inevitable because Hambantota was, from an economic point of view, misconceived from the beginning.

Now there are concerns that Hambantota will eventually become a Chinese naval base. China's admirals have long eyed Sri Lanka. In both September and October 2014, the Sri Lankan government allowed a Chinese submarine and its tender to dock at the Chinese-funded Colombo International Container Terminal.

Sri Lanka is perhaps the model for China's militarization of the Bahamas. In addition to the overly large facility in Freeport, there is a Chinese-funded port on Abaco Island, also part of the Bahamas. The port in Abaco is essentially useless from a commercial point of view and could fall into Beijing's hands.

China, therefore, could have two naval bases close to Florida, unless the Biden administration moves fast to block Chinese penetration of the Bahamas.

As Holmes points out, it would be a mistake to believe that countries in Africa or this hemisphere will not assert their own interests. "It's worth speculating about what response a Chinese presence would elicit from South Atlantic countries, not just ourselves," he tells this site. "Like other regional hegemons, Brazil has proprietary feelings toward regional waters, especially considering how much of Brazilians' economic hopes depend on the offshore 'Blue Amazon.' "

Holmes, the first holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, suggests Brazil could act like India. In the Indian Ocean, India, with big ambitions, can determine outcomes close to its coast. "China," Holmes says, "can't automatically bully its way into a dominant position."

At the moment, Beijing, deploying trade, investment, and other tools, bullies and intimidates countries in Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean. America can counter, however, by working closely with capitals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet Washington needs to look beyond countries with ports. South and Central America and the Caribbean are important in their own right, as is Africa.

At the moment, America is, with trade and investment, strengthening a hostile Chinese regime, which has declared the U.S. to be its enemy. Last year, America's two-way trade with China totaled $560.1 billion.

Washington, with incentives and disincentives, should redirect trade toward countries in Africa and the Western hemisphere so that the U.S. can build support for democracy instead of Chinese-style totalitarianism — and permit countries to be less reliant on Chinese cash.

There is a long way to go to build ties. America's two-way trade in goods with Africa last year was a paltry $45.8 billion. The figure for US two-way trade in goods and services with Brazil last year was $103.9 billion.

That brings us back to the Chinese naval bases. Beijing, as evident from statements from its leaders, wants to rule the world. An interim step is controlling the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the waters off the East Coast of the United States.

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Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17414/china-navy-patrol-new-york

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Communist Club? No problem. Liberty Club? Not so fast! - Eric Utter

by Eric Utter

100 million non-Communists slaughtered? No problem! Believe in limited government and the existence of two sexes? Off to the Gulags you sick, Trump-supporting, cis-gendered, patriotic freaks!

A Columbia University student group recently launched the “Columbia Communism Club,” an organization utilizing the school’s well-known crown as a symbol, albeit enhanced with the Communist hammer and sickle. The Ivy League bastion of higher learning’s newly formed club recently held its first meeting. The club even has an Instagram page, a post on which read: “Do you want to be a part of leftist discussion, engage in mutual aid, and better understand leftist theory? Join us today and be apart [sic] of the movement!” (Cut them some slack, they’re teaching leftist theory, not English grammar.) In ironically capitalist fashion, the club already is establishing its “brand,” with a social media tagline stating: “Bringing accessible theory to Columbia students – Workers of the world, unite!”

Communist theory -- and practice -- has been quite “accessible” in the 100-plus years of its existence, too much so for the more than 100 million people who were exterminated by it in the 20th Century alone.

By contrast, Skidmore College’s student government denied official approval to a Young Americans for Liberty chapter and student leader Hannah Davis, calling the views of the group bigoted and hateful. Liberty is apparently deemed hateful by many, judging by their steadfast determination to impose or submit to mask mandates, vaccination decrees, lockdowns, and various other preposterous violations of personal liberty and autonomy.

A recent petition cleverly titled “Stop Skidmore College from Approving the Young Americans for Liberty Club” baselessly smeared YAL, saying it has a “proclivity to spread hatred” that “cannot be tolerated.” The petition also claimed, utterly without evidence, that YAL’s group application is a “reactionary response to students of color voicing their experiences and is an attempt to silence our voices.” No, the only attempt to silence voices is obviously coming from those behind the petition and the Skidmore College student government.

Skidmore officials hilariously claimed that free speech is protected on campus, except for “hate speech.” Speech that everyone loves and agrees with probably doesn’t need protection, does it? The right to free speech is specifically focused on speech that some could find offensive.

YAL’s Davis appealed the private liberal arts college’s student government’s denial in March, but the Student Government Association comrades remained heroically firm and inflexible in their opposition to the First Amendment, liberty, and the concept of dissenting viewpoints.

The stark contrast between the ease with which the Columbia Communist Club came into existence and the trials the Young Americans for Liberty club has had to endure to get a Skidmore chapter approved is perfectly illustrative of the current culture in the U.S. under the Biden administration.

100 million non-Communists slaughtered? No problem! Believe in limited government and the existence of two sexes? Off to the Gulags you sick, Trump-supporting, cis-gendered, patriotic freaks!

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

Eric Utter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/communist_club_no_problem_liberty_club_not_so_fast.html

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Jewish Studies Has an Anti-Semitism Problem - Daniel Greenfield

by Daniel Greenfield

Is the murder of Jews what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”?

When Sultan Doughan signed a hateful letter falsely claiming that Israel and Zionism were based on "Jewish Supremacy", a term popularized by Neo-Nazi leader David Duke, that ugly rhetoric wouldn’t have attracted much attention in an antisemitic time... except for one thing.

Doughan is a Muslim postdoctoral associate at Boston University's Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies.

Her work at a center named after one of the most prominent writers about the Holocaust includes the “case of a German-Palestinian museum guide who lost her job over a controversy that was triggered by her comparing her own family’s traumatic past in the Nakba with Jewish experiences during the Holocaust.”

More accurately, the guide compared the Jews to the Nazis at the Anne Frank House.

In her thesis, Doughan complains that "Muslims have to submit to the Holocaust" and that the "Holocaust remains an exceptional event in German discourse, authorizing immigration policies, citizenship tests and discrimination" against Muslims.

Muslims emerge as the "new Jews" who are being victimized by the Holocaust, not just in Israel, but in Germany, where they are asked not to spew hate at Jews as a condition of citizenship.

Doughan appears to suggest that compensation funds for the Holocaust be used for Muslims.

She smears a Muslim social worker fighting antisemitism over his shock at a woman declaring, “I’d rather send my daughter to Tel Aviv to blow herself up." Doughan accuses him of being a "driver of imported 'Muslim anti-Semitism'” because his worry over "the idea of killing Jews was greater than his worry for this concrete girl possibly dying in the course of such an act."

This would be a moral abomination anywhere, but it’s especially horrifying within the context of a Jewish Studies center named after Elie Wiesel.

But the hateful anti-Israel letter using Neo-Nazi language toward Jews reveals just how deep the rot in Jewish Studies has become. While African-American Studies departments promote positive narratives about black people, Jewish Studies departments do the opposite to Jews.

Often they’re used to attack Jews from the inside while advancing anti-Jewish narratives.

Pratima Gopalakrishnan, another signatory to the "Jewish Supremacy" letter, is a post-doc at the Duke Center for Jewish Studies who rants about Israel on Twitter and ponders "how intro classes on the ancient Near East can make intentional connections to Palestine today".

Pratima claims to be studying "ancient Judaism" using "theoretical approaches drawn from feminist and queer theory". That hostile lens is supplemented with a column on the Torah for Jewish Currents, a former Communist publication that celebrated the Muslim rape and murder of Jews, and firing off social media blood libels about “Israel’s military aggression against the people of Gaza”, and false claims about the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.

Lila Corwin Berman, who holds a chair in American Jewish History at Temple University, is also one of the more prominent figures in Jewish studies as chair of the Academic Council of the American Jewish Historical Society. Her signature on the hateful letter is unsurprising considering her opposition to anti-BDS measures, and support for anti-Israel groups.

Berman has appeared with Peter Beinart, who has called for the destruction of Israel, and supported him, and promoted material from the JVP pro-terrorist hate group.

She also took part in a webinar for the former Communist Jewish Currents anti-Israel site.

Beyond her anti-Israel activism, Berman has labored to rid Jewish Studies of Jews.

In "Jewish History Beyond the Jewish People", Berman argues that "Jewishness may help us interpret a person, a place, an idea, a text, an object, or a relationship without first having to meet any preexisting condition of being Jewish." What then makes Jewish Studies, Jewish?

"Is it possible to think of Jewishness as anything other than real Jewish bodies and spaces?" Berman wheedles. "When we write Jewish history beyond its foundational claims—the Jewish people or a Jewish space—we must announce that these claims are neither inevitable nor eternal." That is a prerequisite to the destruction of the Jewish people.

Mostafa Hussein, another signatory to the "Jewish Supremacy" letter, has a PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis. He's currently teaching at the Department of Judaic Studies at Michigan University where he's working on a book arguing that Zionism was based on Arab and Islamic ideas. Hussein, a graduate of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, claims that Jews constructed "the identity of the new Jew and his sense of belonging to the Land of Palestine/Israel" by having "exploited Arabo-Islamic knowledge".

The problem is not simply that some people involved in Jewish Studies hate Israel in their own free time, or even that they sign letters using the language of David Duke, it’s that they center their own extremist agendas at the expense of the Jewish people, whose heritage and legacy they exploit in a broader campaign to attack Jews using Jewish Studies as their weapon.

At the University of Massachusets, Alon Confino acts as the Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies when he isn't complaining that Germany isn't antisemitic enough.

"The situation in Germany today is absurd. Any harsh critique of Israel’s occupation or its policies is deemed antisemitic. Is this really a lesson Germans want to draw from the Holocaust?" Confino whined in an article equating Israel with Nazi Germany and urging that, as "Holocaust scholars", it was important to listen to the voices of Israel's Muslim “victims”.

Amos Goldberg, the co-author of the article with Confino, and another signatory to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter, is the co-editor of “The Holocaust and Nakba: Memory, National Identity and Jewish-Arab Partnership.” The Nakba is the Arab Muslim name for their failed genocide of the Jews that has become an annual “Lost Cause” commemoration and an orgy of racist violence.

The abuse of the Holocaust to attack Jews and support antisemites is routine in Jewish Studies.

Atina Grossmann, a Cooper Union professor and a fellow the United States Holocaust Museum, is a signatory to the letter that uses the Neo-Nazi trope of “Jewish Supremacy”. But when the Museum protested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s description of illegal migrant detention as “concentration camps”, Grossman rushed to the defense of the antisemitic leftist who is allied with Jeremy Corbyn and whose blood libels have encouraged hatred toward Jews.

The letter signed by Grossman wailed that “the Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical.” But comparing American immigration policies to the Holocaust is entirely historical.

Grossman was also one of the signatories to a letter warning Facebook not to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. As were Amos Goldberg, Lila Corwin Berman, Alon Confino, and multiple other signatories to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter including Hasia Diner.

Diner, an NYU prof of American Jewish History, and another member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Center for Jewish History, is refreshing in that she makes no effort to disguise her raving hatred for the Jewish State behind the obscure academic jargon of other academics.

In a hatefilled rant, Hasia Diner wrote that though she abhorred “bombings and stabbings”, the murder of Jews is what “oppressed individuals resort to out of anger and frustration”.

“I feel a sense of repulsion when I enter a synagogue in front of which the congregation has planted a sign reading, ‘We Stand With Israel’”, Diner wrote. She described Israel as “a place that I abhor visiting, and to which I will contribute no money, whose products I will not buy”.

She also complained that, “it is impossible to have a conversation about Israel or BDS because one is accused of being anti-Semitic.”

Maybe that’s because they are.

Jewish Studies has an antisemitism problem and it’s only been getting worse.

The signatories to the “Jewish Supremacy” letter are many of the same ugly figures in Jewish Studies who sign on to every anti-Israel letter that comes their way. They signed the letter opposing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the letter opposing campaigns against campus antisemitism, opposing the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and opposing, well, Jews.

Jewish Studies, as Lila Corwin Berman implies, ought to have little to do with actual Jews. But it’s not enough for Jewish Studies to displace Jews, burying a people in a mass grave of academic verbiage and social justice buzzwords, it must also set out to eliminate the Jews.

As has happened so often, the theft of Jewish ideas and narratives is sealed with genocide.

Jewish Studies has become an academic war on the Jews. And no matter how good the intentions of the donors subsidizing chairs in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and religious studies were, the academics who seize them adopt an eliminationist ideology, resenting the confines of Jewish identity, and seeking to destroy it by satanizing the Jews.

The same old narrative of Jewish history is playing out on campuses where the physical body of the Jewish people and the bodies of Jews are being ideologically separated from “Jewishness”.

Academic ‘Jewishness’ is constructed to mean anything and everything but actual Jews. Jews are reframed as the enemies of true Jewish values and ideas who must be destroyed to save “Jewishness” from the Jews.

Divorcing the study of Jewish history and ideas from Jewish communal institutions and peoplehood has repeatedly created monsters, whether it’s Holocaust museums that promote Black Lives Matter and accuse Jews of Nazism, or Jewish Studies departments that are friendlier to Hamas than to Israel. Donors have to stop funding academic organizations detached from connection and accountability to the people whose peoplehood they exploit.

Academics have rediscovered the old notion that Jewish ideas are appealing, but actual Jews are not. Jewish ideas are pitted against real Jews, and the idea is used to beat to death the reality proving once again that the students of history are the last to learn from the past.

Antisemitic academics may not be able to learn from the past, but Jews don’t have that luxury.

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/2021/05/jewish-studies-has-antisemitism-problem-daniel-greenfield/

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