What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed - Mollie Hemingway

 

​ by Mollie Hemingway

The last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988

Mollie Hemingway calls for 'accountability' after the Afghanistan exit

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Fox Editor's note: The following op-ed is excerpted from the author's new book, "Rigged." 

If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, then much of the Democratic Party and media establishment should have been indicted for their behavior following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.

After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as "selected, not elected." When Bush won re-election against then senator John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush.

HBO even produced and aired the Emmy-nominated "Hacking Democracy," a documentary claiming to show that "votes can be stolen without a trace," adding fuel to the conspiracy theory fire that the results of the 2004 election were illegitimate. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. 

Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost fair and square, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. They settled on a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.

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The Russia collusion hoax had all the elements of an election conspiracy theory, including baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and treasonous collaboration with a foreign power. Pundits and officials speculated openly that President Trump was a foreign asset and that members of his circle were under the thumb of the Kremlin.

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But despite the patent absurdity of these claims, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country. To question the legitimacy of the 2016 election wasn’t to undermine our

democracy; it was considered by some of our most elevated public figures a patriotic duty.

"You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you," Clinton told her followers in 2019.

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"I know he’s an illegitimate president," Clinton claimed of Trump a few months later. She even said during an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning" that "voter suppression and voter purging and hacking" were the reasons for her defeat.

Former president Jimmy Carter agreed. "[Trump] lost the election and was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf," he told NPR in 2019. "Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016." 

Their view was shared by most prominent Democrats in Congress. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, for example, said he was skipping Trump’s inauguration in 2016 because he believed Trump was illegitimate: "[T]he Russians participated in helping this man get elected.... That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not an open democratic process." Lewis had also skipped the inauguration of President George W. Bush, claiming Bush, too, was an illegitimate president.

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A few members of Congress joined him in 2001. By 2017, one out of three Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Many said they refused to take part in the installation of an "illegitimate" president.

The corporate media didn’t condemn leading Democrats’ refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election. In fact, the media amplified the most speculative claims of how Trump and Russia had colluded to steal the election from Clinton. They dutifully regurgitated inaccurate leaks from corrupt intelligence officials suggesting Trump and his staff had committed treason. They ran stories arguing that Republicans who didn’t support their conspiracy theory were insufficiently loyal to the country or somehow compromised themselves.

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It was all nonsense. Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who ran a multi-year and multi-million-dollar government investigation into claims that Trump personally colluded with 

 

Russian president Vladimir Putin to steal the election from Clinton, found no evidence to support the fevered accusations.

The reporters who pushed this conspiracy theory were never held accountable by their peers for peddling leaks and lies. They received raises and promotions, honors and awards, and the applause of their colleagues. Some were given Pulitzer Prizes for "reporting" that was closer to fan fiction than an accurate description of events.

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From 2016 through 2020, the easiest way to achieve stardom on the political left was to loudly proclaim one’s belief that the 2016 election was illegitimate—stolen by the Russians on behalf of a corrupt traitor. Conspiracy-mongering, up to and including the assertion that the president of the United States was a secret Russian spy, was the highest form of patriotism.

And then 2020 happened. 

At the drop of a hat, America’s electoral system went from irredeemably corrupt and broken in 2016 to unquestionably safe in 2020. Voting methods that were allegedly used to steal elections in 2004 and 2016 suddenly became sacrosanct and unquestionable in 2020. Whereas so-called election experts repeatedly warned pre-2020 about the pitfalls of electronic voting and widespread mail-in balloting, by November 2020 any discussion about the vulnerabilities of those methods was written off as the stuff of right-wing cranks and conspiracy-mongers. 

Such dismissals required ignoring quite real problems with election integrity affecting hundreds of U.S. elections at the state and local levels, and even the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy won just 118,574 more votes than Richard Nixon. That Electoral College win hinged on victories in Illinois, where Chicago vote totals were suspiciously high for Kennedy, and Texas, a state where Kennedy’s running mate Lyndon B. Johnson had been known to exert control over election results. Official biographers and historians have claimed one or both states would have been won by Nixon in a fair election.

If concerns about election integrity were valid from at least 1960 through 2016, then surely those concerns were even more valid in 2020, an election year unlike any other in American history.

In the lead-up to the election, thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic that gripped the world, wide-ranging electoral reforms were implemented. Across the country at the state, local, and federal levels, political actors rammed through hundreds of structural changes to the manner and oversight of elections, resulting in what Time magazine would later call "a revolution in how people vote." Some of these changes were enacted by state legislatures, some by courts, and others by state and county election officials. Many changes, allegedly justified by the global pandemic, were broad reforms that Democrats had long desired. The crisis was their chance to sneak in contentious policies through the back door. 

The bedrock of the American republic is that elections must be free, fair, accurate, and trusted. Election lawyers will tell you that fraud is almost impossible to conclusively find after the fact, and that to fight it, strong rules and regulations are needed on the front end. That’s why Democrats and Republicans fight so bitterly about the rules and regulations that govern the process.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. 

They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. 

They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. 

They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

 

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a Fox News contributor and a senior editor at The Federalist. Her new book is "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections" (Regnery, October 12, 2021).  A longtime journalist, her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellowship.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2020-election-investigated-discussed-mollie-hemingway

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The real reason for Western support of the Palestinian Arabs - Melanie Phillips

 

​ by Melanie Phillips

What actually binds these groups together is an ultimately incomprehensible animus against Judaism and the Jewish people

 

A brand new genre                                                                                                        Netflix   

(JNS) Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States who is now a candidate to head the Jewish Agency, has rightly said that the decline in support for Israel among American Jews has reached a crisis point. The Jewish Agency, he said, “needs to bring young American Jews back from the brink.”

However, the Jewish Agency won’t address this problem by simply tackling American Jews. The roots of this crisis are broader and deeper.

At a conference at the Al Quds University in Ramallah in June, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a recorded speech with the title, “The Zionist Narrative: Between Reversal and Cancellation.”

In a piece for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser has written that Abbas “proudly noted” in this speech that international public opinion had recently undergone a gradual shift towards accepting the Palestinian Arab narrative.

As Kuperwasser wrote, this “narrative” is a tissue of demonstrable and idiotic lies designed to promulgate the fiction that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inheritors of the land of Israel rather than the Jews.

But as Kuperwasser also observes, the Palestinian position is that the Jews of Israel must return to the places from where they allegedly came—not the land of Israel, their actual original homeland, but Europe, where they were scattered in exile, persecuted and murdered in great number.

“The narrative,” he writes, “also emphasizes that the Palestinian struggle is national and Islamic at the same time and ultimately states that in light of all this, all of Palestine is included, and Israel should not be recognized in any way as the nation-state of the Jewish people, which, at any rate, does not exist. At most, it is possible to temporarily accept the existence of an ‘Israeli people’ which is a new concept referring to Israel as the state of all its citizens.”

And this narrative also holds that no one has the right to object to the Palestinian Arabs’ use of terrorism to achieve their aim of annihilating Israel and driving the Jews out.

So the claim made by the Palestinians’ supporters that they are backing a state of Palestine side by side with Israel is totally contradicted by the Palestinians’ own exterminatory narrative.

Kuperwasser rehearses all this because he is appalled at the behavior of Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, who has promised a “loan” to the P.A. Kuperwasser says this is a “circuitous deal that makes Israel’s protests about the P.A. paying terrorists’ salaries ridiculous in the eyes of the world and Israeli law.”

The broader question, though, is how Western liberals in general can support such an obviously odious, bigoted and murderous Palestinian agenda.

The latest such useful idiot is the bestselling novelist, Sally Rooney. She has refused to have her new novel published by Modan, the Hebrew-language Israeli publisher of her first two books, because she supports a cultural boycott of Israel.

Rooney happens to be Irish; and the Irish Republic—one of the most anti-Israel countries in Europe—is a boiling cesspool of Jew-bashing.

The dogged British anti-Semitism researcher David Collier has just published a 202-page report in which he chronicles horrific anti-Jewish attitudes in Ireland driven from the top down by Irish politicians and echoed by journalists, academics and other cultural leaders.

There are many plausible explanations for this Israel animus in Ireland and the West. Ireland sees itself as the victim of English colonialism and so identifies with the Palestinians’ false narrative of Jewish colonialism.

Rooney is a self-confessed Marxist. Israel is being demonized through a perfect intellectual storm: a combination of Marxist identification of capitalism with oppression; liberal internationalist hostility to the Western concept of the nation-state; and the Palestinian propaganda program cooked up in the 1960s with the former Soviet Union to turn the Arab war of annihilation against Israel into Israel’s oppression of the newly-minted “Palestinians.”

This propaganda narrative is now the signature cause of “progressive” folk who astoundingly therefore make common cause with deeply regressive Islamists, who endorse throwing gay people off rooftops and stoning women to death.

What actually binds these groups together, however, is a deadly animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

The Palestinians’ hatred of Israel is based on hatred of the Jews founded upon Islamic theological sources. Medieval and Nazi-style anti-Semitism pour out of the P.A. in an unstoppable torrent.

Even those Palestinian Arab supporters who harbor no ill-will towards Jews as people therefore promote a Palestinian narrative that is based on Jew-hatred. So it’s no surprise that threaded through pro-Palestinian western discourse are unambiguous anti-Semitic tropes.

The deeper question, though, is why it’s always the Jews who get it in the neck from so many different groups. No other people has ever had this experience.

Many decent folk in the West who know nothing about Judaism or Jewish history simply cannot understand why anti-Semitism, which they don’t understand at all, takes up so much global energy.

Many Jews ask themselves the same question. In an anguished piece for Tablet, the Reform Rabbi Amiel Hirsch writes: “Of all the savageries in the sordid history of human affairs, what explains the singling out of the Jews for unique odium? … No other supremacist ideology is as singularly fixated on one group of people. It is not only the hatred of a Jew. Many antisemites have never met a Jew in their lives. It is the obsession with Jewry, the Jewish people” as “… the source of evil in the world.”

Again, there are many obvious explanations. These include jealousy of the “chosen people,” a term that is widely misunderstood; cultural suspicions fueled by observant Jews keeping themselves apart; the Jew-hatred embedded in dominant interpretations of Christianity and Islam over the centuries.

But the Jews were singled out long before Christianity and Islam. They have always been used as society’s scapegoats. The question is why?

The point is that anti-Semitism isn’t just a form of prejudice or racism. Plenty of other people are victims of that. Anti-Semitism is qualitatively different—and ultimately mysterious.

For there is no other people which is obsessively demonized and delegitimized by double standards, systematic falsehoods and being airbrushed out of its own history. No other people has been subjected to the repeated aim of eradicating it from the face of the earth, to the general indifference of everyone else. No other group has been the victim of a mindset that ascribes to people who form some 0.2 percent of the global population the malign power of a conspiracy to manipulate the world.

And it’s this uniquely deranged, paranoid and incomprehensible mindset that’s been given rocket fuel by the Palestinian Arab narrative.

For people don’t care about the Palestinians. What does animate a terrifying number of their supporters is a deep desire for the Jews to vanish from their world. Palestinianism is not just about the eradication of Israel. It has weaponized Israel against the Jewish people.

Many Jews are frightened of acknowledging the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Partly, this comes from a principled concern not to denigrate the suffering of others. Partly, lining up Jewish suffering alongside that of others is a panicky attempt to prevent the world from abandoning the Jews once again. Mainly, though, it comes from a deep reluctance to acknowledge the uniqueness of the Jewish people out of fear that this will increase anti-Semitism.

The result is now all around us. For without acknowledging the uniqueness of the Jews and the uniquely unhinged animus against them, there is scant chance of increasing public understanding of Judaism, anti-Semitism and the State of Israel.

This is the nettle, however difficult and painful, that the Jewish Agency should now grasp.

 

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “BI,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/315126

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Lapid and Bennett’s Old New Diplomacy - Caroline Glick

 

​ by Caroline Glick

By placing the keys to peace in the hands of anti-Semites sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state, Merkel and colleagues effectively say the Arab war against Israel is justified and should be maintained indefinitely. In other words, they said Israel has no right to exist.

 

This week’s diplomatic calendar highlighted the difference between this year’s foreign policies and last year’s.

Sunday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid hosted outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Jerusalem for a farewell visit. Although Israel’s media and foreign policy elites have long presented Merkel as a friend of Israel, for much of her 16-year tenure in office, she has advanced anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish policies. Under her leadership, Germany given more money to anti-Israel political groups, including groups involved in boycotting Israel than any other EU-member government.

With Merkel’s support and diplomatic protection, an illegal settlement was established in Judea. Khan al-Ahmar, an illegal Beduin encampment was built on state land at a strategic chokepoint which directly threatens both Israel’s Highway 1 and the community of Kfar Adumim. But even Israel’s all-powerful Supreme Court justices, who ordered Khan el-Ahmar’s dismantlement more than two years ago are no match for Merkel.

Then too, with Merkel at the helm, Germany has voted lockstep with the Palestinians on virtually every anti-Israel measure at the United Nations.

Then there is Iran. Since she entered office in 2005, Merkel has assiduously maintained Germany’s position as Iran’s largest trading partner in Europe. She has opposed sanctions and backed her colleagues as they made light of Iran’s human rights violations, its nuclear proliferation and sponsorship of terrorism. She has been an indomitable supporter of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that it provides Iran with an open road to a nuclear arsenal. She was unmoved by voluminous evidence of Iran’s bad faith negotiations and systematic, material breaches of the limitations the 2015 deal placed on its nuclear activities.

Merkel led the EU’s opposition to then President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the nuclear deal in 2018. She spent years undermining the U.S.’s strategy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. Arguably in breach of the law of nations, Merkel blocked the U.S. effort to compel the implementation of the so-called “snapback sanctions.” Under the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 that anchors the 2015 deal, the sanctions the Security Council placed on Iran in response to its breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were suspended. Resolution 2231 stipulated that a party to the resolution could order the automatic reinstatement of the sanctions (“snapback”) if it found that Iran was violating the deal. Merkel led the EU-3 in arguing absurdly that the U.S. withdrawal from the deal meant it lacked the authority to reinstate the sanctions. Even if this claim were true – which it was not – it begged the question, why didn’t Germany reimpose the sanctions? The answer was obvious: Merkel didn’t mind Iran’s violations.

Despite Merkel’s commitment to policies that caused it strategic harm, Israel went out of its way to pretend that she was a “friend.” The rationale was clear. A crisis in German-Israeli relations would harm Israel far more than it would harm Germany. Germany is Israel’s largest trading partner in Europe and the most powerful member of the EU. An angered Berlin could devastate Israel’s economy and precipitate a brutal political and economic offensive from Brussels. So Israeli leaders cooed over our “friend Angela” each time she said something mournful about the Holocaust.

But whereas putting a happy face on Merkel’s hostility made sense while she was in power, doing so now, when she is a lame duck is hard to justify. Bennett advanced no discernable Israeli interest when he referred to Merkel’s Germany as “Europe’s moral compass.” Indeed, he harmed the country. By praising a woman who undermined and subverted Israel at every turn, Bennett’s signaled to her successors that they have only to gain from maltreating Israel.

Merkel made a quick departure on Sunday night. And that made sense. She wouldn’t have wanted to be in Jerusalem on Monday, because on Monday Israel marked the first anniversary of the Abraham Accords. Merkel was one of the historic peace accords between Israel and the Arab states of Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan’s greatest opponents. She and her EU colleagues could barely constrain their rage when Trump announced them. Berlin and Brussels both boycotted the Abraham Accords signing ceremony at the White House.

In his remarks at the Knesset event marking the anniversary of the Abraham Accords, Opposition Leader and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “So long as they said you can’t make peace with the Arab world without peace with the Palestinians, we couldn’t make peace. We broke the Palestinian veto and brought four historic peace agreements, the Abraham Accords.”

Who were “they” who insisted on giving the Palestinians veto power over Arab-Israeli peace? Among others, “they” were Merkel and her colleagues in the EU and the Democrats who also boycotted the White House signing ceremony. Their desire to maintain “the Palestinian veto” over Arab-Israeli peace was never a simple matter of priorities. It was a fundamental conviction grounded in anti-Semitism.

In granting the Palestinians a veto over Israeli-Arab peace, Merkel and her colleagues effectively rejected Israel’s right to exist. All Palestinian leadership factions from the PLO to Hamas reject Israel’s right to exist. All are committed to Israel’s physical destruction. The Palestinians justify their genocidal position by denying that the Jews are a nation and their historic ties to the land of Israel.

By placing the keys to peace in the hands of anti-Semites sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state, Merkel and colleagues effectively say the Arab war against Israel is justified and should be maintained indefinitely. In other words, they said Israel has no right to exist.  

This brings us to Lapid and Bennett who slobbered over Merkel on Sunday. The Lapid-Bennett government has an uneasy relationship with the Abraham Accords for two reasons. First, they don’t like the deals because their nemesis Netanyahu made them. And second, most members of the government, which is controlled by leftists and the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Islamist party want to give the Palestinians their veto back.

But for all their opposition to the Abraham Accords, Lapid, Bennett and their colleagues are stuck. As Israelis, they can’t oppose real peace with four Arab states.

Since they came to power in June, Lapid, Bennett and their colleagues have dealt with their Abraham Accords quandary by denying the strategic significance of the peace with the Arab states of Africa and the Persian Gulf while effectively restoring Israel’s pre-Abraham Accords appeasement-based foreign policy.

In Bennett’s case, this has meant reaching out to Jordan. Israel’s relations with Jordan have been wretched for years. The crisis in relations is a function King Abdullah’s animosity and Netanyahu’s refusal to kowtow to him. In stark contrast to his father, the late King Hussein, Abdullah has embraced the PLO.

Abdullah supports Palestinian terrorism and shelters Palestinian terrorists. He is PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s full partner in waging political war against Israel on the international stage. And like Abbas, Abdullah has filled Jordan’s media, which he controls, with anti-Semitic incitement. Abdullah did everything he could to scuttle and subvert the Abraham Accords. He even denied Netanyahu’s request to fly through Amman for an official visit to the UAE earlier this year.

Then there is Iran. In recent years, Abdullah has been coyly cozying up to Iran while enjoying U.S. military protection. This week, Abdullah’s regime media played up his foreign minister’s phone call with his Iranian counterpart.

Bennett’s outreach to Abdullah is entirely devoid of pressure on the Hashemite monarch to reverse his anti-Israel course. Bennett hasn’t urged Israel’s ostensible peace partner to follow in the footsteps of the Abraham Accords member nations and normalize Jordan’s relations with Israel. He hasn’t demanded that Abdullah honor the U.S. extradition request for Sbarro pizzeria bomber Alham Tamimi. Tamimi, who has made a career out of gloating over her murder of 15 people, including eight children at the suicide bombing she orchestrated twenty years ago, is living the good life in Amman under King Abdullah’s protection. Bennett hasn’t demanded that Abdullah stop wooing Iran.

Ignoring all of Abdullah’s hostile actions, Bennett has blamed the crisis in Jordan-Israel relations on Netanyahu. By blaming Netanyahu, Bennett has made “fixing” Israel’s ties with Jordan a simple matter of bowing to every Jordanian demand. Tuesday, Bennett’s government praised a “historic” breakthrough in ties: Israel agreed to double the quantity of water it gives Jordan at cost from the Sea of Galilee.

This brings us to Lapid and his weird visit to Washington.  

While Iran was ostensibly the focus of Lapid’s visit, the Biden administration made clear that it has no intention of reconsidering its commitment to maintaining its nuclear appeasement policy towards Tehran. Then there are the Palestinians. Ahead of Lapid’s arrival, the administration used the anniversary of the Abraham Accords, (which it refuses to call by their name), to underline that they are with Merkel in their hatred of the peace deals and their determination to reinstate the Palestinian veto over Arab-Israeli peace.

“The Biden administration has started out with a clear commitment to the two-state solution…. We continue to welcome the economic cooperation between Israel and all countries in the region. We hope that normalization can be leverage to advance progress on the Israel-Palestinian tracks,” and anonymous State Department spokesman said.

Lapid papered over Israel’s concern over the administration’s pro-Iranian stance and its diminution of the historic peace. And this makes sense. Just as Bennett ignores Abdullah’s hostility and blames Netanyahu for bad relations with Jordan, so Lapid scapegoats Netanyahu as the cause of Democrat antagonism towards Israel.

In the interest of castigating Netanyahu, Lapid has long ignored both the radicalization of the Democrat Party and the rapid spread of anti-Semitism through the American left over the past decade.  

Tuesday Lapid met with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. Lapid heaped praise on Harris just two weeks after she praised a student who accused Israel of committing genocide. Harris, he said, is “one of Israel’s best friends in Washington. A leader who always stands with us in all the important struggles and who we can always count on in difficult moments.”

In Lapid’s follow-on he didn’t simply ignore what Harris just did. He indirectly justified her behavior. In his write-up of the meeting on his Twitter feed, Lapid said that in addition to discussing Iran’s nuclear program, he and Harris spoke about how to “strengthen the bipartisan connection with the next generation of Americans.”

Lapid didn’t express concern over galloping anti-Semitism on campuses. He heaped praise on younger Americans. “They aren’t just busy with wars and confrontations but also with the climate crisis, the global immigration crisis and with questions of identity,” he cooed.

Last year Israel had a reality-based foreign policy. It was predicated on the basic truth that the justice of Israel’s existence and power is immutable. That foreign policy ended the Palestinian veto and brought four robust peace agreements with Arab states. Now Israel has a reality- denying foreign policy which is reinstating the Palestinian veto and glorifying Israel’s enemies.

 

Caroline Glick

Source: https://carolineglick.com/lapid-and-bennetts-old-new-diplomacy/

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Al-Qaeda Threatens U.S. With Attacks 'More Painful Than 9/11' - Robert Spencer

 

​ by Robert Spencer

Yet old Joe continues to aid the jihad.

 

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” Osama bin Laden once famously quipped, “by nature they will like the strong horse.” America during the period in which Old Joe Biden continues to pretend to be president of the United States is decidedly a weak horse, and bin Laden’s old outfit has noticed. Last Wednesday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released a video crowing over the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and promising to inflict damage on the scale of 9/11 in America once again.

The video, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), featured yet another jihadi who was once held at Guantanamo, Ibrahim Al-Qousi, and was entitled “A Message to the American People: You Have Yet to Understand the Lesson.” Al-Qousi showed that he himself has carefully absorbed the lessons of the recent past. He said that “the greatest loss America suffered, besides its material and human losses, is its reputation and prestige as a superpower and the most powerful country in the world.” Thanks, Joe!

The Taliban, Al-Qousi declared, had won a “magnificent” victory, for they “have understood the essence of this religion and the nature of the conflict … they are men whose hands — by the grace of Allah alone — buried a third empire in the soil of Afghanistan and restored the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to rule by the shari’a of Allah, even if America and its allies hate it.”

If there is anything that the State and Defense Departments did not or would not understand, it was the role that religion played in the conflict. Foreign policy experts for years dismissed statements akin to Al-Qousi’s declaration that victory was won in Afghanistan “by the grace of Allah alone” as mere boilerplate, not realizing that for the Taliban, it was the essence of the entire war. That’s why they’re in power today in Kabul, thumping their chests over having defeated the United States.

Al-Qousi sneered at Old Joe’s claim that the U.S. “succeeded and achieved the goals for which the war was launched,” that is, the killing of bin Laden and the assurance that Afghanistan “will not be a base from which jihadi groups threaten the security of America and its allies.” The jihadi asked: “Was it really worth America paying these heavy costs to achieve these two goals? Could America not have achieved these by any other way to avoid such significant losses?”

Of course. A bit less wokeness and a bit more strategic planning by the military might have prevented the entire catastrophe of the withdrawal. And if the ideology of the enemy had been recognized from the beginning, the entire conflict might have been framed in a vastly different way. Al-Qousi slammed Biden for saying that “we have learned the lesson the hard way after 20 years.” The al-Qaeda operative responded: “Certainly, it was a precious lesson by all standards….However, if the lesson to which the U.S. president refers is simply that their entry into Afghanistan…was a strategic mistake that led to their defeat…then this means that they did not learn nor understand the lesson in all its aspects.”

To fully absorb the lesson of Afghanistan, Al-Qousi recommends that Americans “refer to the repeated speeches and messages of Sheikh Osama bin Laden.” He quotes bin Laden ascribing the attacks to “your support for your Israeli allies occupying our land in Palestine. Your position on this, along with some other grievances, is what prompted us to implement the event of September 11.” Yet those who think America can end the jihad by abandoning its Middle East ally are naïve. Al-Qousi doesn’t mention it, but in his 2002 letter to America, bin Laden declared, “The first thing we are calling you to is Islam.” As long as America doesn’t heed that call, the jihad will continue.

Al-Qousi tells Americans today: “Your security is still at risk as long as you do not comprehend the lesson and as long as you do not act to remove the reasons for which the September 11events took place, as explained by bin Laden in his messages….O Americans, your security is still at risk as long as you fight Islam and Muslims under different names, including counterterrorism.”

Old Joe has aided the jihad by removing the impediment that U.S. borders previously posed: “O Americans, let it be known to you that the mujahideen today are not limited to borders and that they can move from any part of the world to execute what they wish to deter your oppression. Every Muslim on the face of earth is in fact an enterprising mujahid.”

Al-Qousi said that upcoming jihad massacres in the U.S. “will not be a carbon copy of the 9/11 attacks,” but they could be even “more painful.” “The days and nights will not pass until we take revenge like we did on 11th of September, Allah permitting.”

Good thing Biden’s security and intelligence apparatus is busy hunting down “white supremacists.”

 

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/al-qaeda-threatens-us-attacks-more-painful-911-robert-spencer/

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Iran's Mullahs and China Empowered Under Biden Administration - Majid Rafizadeh

 

​ by Majid Rafizadeh

In another blow to the US, after many years of Iran trying to be a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), SCO members finally agreed in September to elevate Iran's status from "observer" to "full member," even though the global financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, had placed the Islamic Republic on its terrorism financing blacklist.

• The SCO is a political, military, economic and security alliance that currently includes China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. This alliance will likely... assist the mullahs of Iran to defy the West.

• In the face of these critical developments, the Biden administration has remained silent

• The Chinese regime is profiting as well. This [25-year deal with Iran], which appears similar to a colonial agreement, grants Communist China significant rights over the nation's resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran's oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%. Another secret element of the agreement has a military dimension: China will deploy 5,000 members of its security forces on the ground in Iran.

• Such a strategic and economic deal is a clear win for the Chinese Communist Party.... China will have full authority over Iran's islands, gain access to Iran's oil at a highly deeply rate and increase its influence and presence in almost every sector of Iranian industry, including telecommunications, banking, energy, railways and ports.

• For the ruling clerics of Iran, appeasement means only more weakness.

China's strategic 25-year agreement on economic and security cooperation with Iran, which appears similar to a colonial agreement, grants Communist China significant rights over Iran's resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran's oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. Pictured: Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (right) and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the signing of the 25-year agreement in Tehran, Iran on March 27, 2021. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)

The Chinese Communist Party has openly been helping the Iranian regime evade US sanctions -- most likely due to what reports have been referring to as the weak leadership and "top national security threat" of the US Biden administration.

This Communist Chinese salvage operation could partially explain why the ruling mullahs of Iran see no incentive to halt their nuclear program or come to the negotiating table.

When the Biden administration reached out to Chinese Communist Party to cut its oil imports from Iran, a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Reuters news agency:

"We have used our sanctions authorities to respond to Iranian sanctions evasion, including those doing business with China, and will continue to do so if necessary. However, we have been approaching this diplomatically with the Chinese as part of our dialogue on Iran policy and think that, in general, this is a more effective path forward to address our concerns."

China, however, immediately and defiantly refused to stop importing oil from Iran, and to comply with the US sanctions.

In another blow to the US, after many years of Iran trying to be a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), SCO members finally agreed in September to elevate Iran's status from "observer" to "full member," even though the global financial watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, had placed the Islamic Republic on its terrorism financing blacklist.

The SCO is a political, military, economic and security alliance that currently includes China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. This alliance will likely further deepen the economic, political and military partnership between Iran and China and Russia, and assist the mullahs of Iran to defy the West.

In the face of these critical developments, the Biden administration has remained silent.

China has also defiantly been using the same line of argument that the mullahs of Iran resorted to regarding the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Even though the Islamic Republic is violating its agreements with the JCPOA and stonewalling the nuclear talks while inching closer to becoming a nuclear state, instead of pressuring the Iranian regime to halt its nuclear program's advancement, Beijing is blaming the US for not lifting the remaining economic sanctions against the ruling mullahs and for not appeasing them. As a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson stated in a September 24 briefing:

"The U.S. should redress its wrong policy of maximum pressure on Iran, lift all illegal sanctions on Iran and measures of long-arm jurisdiction on third parties, and work to resume negotiations and achieve outcomes at an early date."

For the Chinese Communist Party, siding with the Iranian regime has several advantages. First, Beijing can likely use Iran as a bargaining chip during its trade war with the US. China, for instance, might agree to pressure the Iranian regime in exchange for the US lifting its tariffs on Chinese products.

Not only is the Iranian regime benefiting from Biden administration's reportedly weak leadership, the Chinese regime is profiting as well. A 25-year deal, for instance, was recently signed between Iran and China. This deal, which appears similar to a colonial agreement, grants Communist China significant rights over the nation's resources. Leaked information reveals that one of its terms is that China will be investing nearly $400 billion in Iran's oil, gas and petrochemicals industries. In return, China will get priority to bid on any new project in Iran that is linked to these sectors. China will also receive a 12% discount and it can delay payments by up to two years. China will also be able to pay in any currency it chooses. It is also estimated that, in total, China will receive discounts of nearly 32%. Another secret element of the agreement has a military dimension: China will deploy 5,000 members of its security forces on the ground in Iran.

Such a strategic and economic deal is a clear win for the Chinese Communist Party. The $400 billion, a small amount for the world's second-largest economy, will be invested over 25 years; all the while, China will have full authority over Iran's islands, gain access to Iran's oil at a deeply discounted rate and increase its influence and presence in almost every sector of Iranian industry, including telecommunications, banking, energy, railways and ports.

Instead of appeasing the ruling mullahs, the Biden administration would do well to adopt a policy of maximum pressure on Iran and, through sanctions, cut the flow of funds to this predatory regime. For the ruling clerics of Iran, appeasement means only more weakness.

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

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17860/biden-iran-china-empowered

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Biden's Credibility Plummets over Purchase of Chinese-Made Drones - Con Coughlin

 

​ by Con Coughlin

The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban.

• Critics of DJI's systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security.

• The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban. The following year, Congress passed legislation banning the use of drones and components manufactured in China, and the Trump administration blacklisted DJI for national security reasons

• "DJI drones are safe and secure for government and enterprise operations." -- spokesman for DJI rejecting claims that its drones posed a security risk, Reuters, July 23, 2021

• Given the Chinese Communist Party's abysmal record for trustworthiness, however – as in promising not to militarise the fake islands they built in the South China Sea just before they militarised them, or claiming that their Chinese virus, COVID-19, was not transmissible human-to-human – this assessment is less than reassuring.

Nothing better illustrates the Biden administration's utter incompetence in safeguarding America's interests than the revelation that a number of federal agencies are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China, including those made by DJI, which are used by the U.S. Secret Service and FBI. Critics of DJI's systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security. Pictured: A DJI drone. (Photo by Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

Nothing better illustrates the Biden administration's utter incompetence in safeguarding America's interests than the revelation that a number of federal agencies are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China.

The Pentagon has previously advised against US agencies purchasing Chinese-made drones on the grounds that they could be used to transfer sensitive data to Beijing's communist rulers.

But now a new report by the Axios website claims that a number of federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration have purchased drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon.

According to Axios, both the U.S. Secret Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have recently acquired surveillance drones from the Shenzhen-based company Da Jiang Innovations (DJI).

The Secret Service bought eight DJI drones in July 2021, according to procurement records, while the FBI is said to have bought 19 of the company's products.

DJI is one of the most popular drone manufacturers in the industry, and the company requires those who purchase their products to download proprietary software and provide to users their own mapping databases.

Critics of DJI's systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security.

The revelation that key federal agencies are buying Chinese-made drones contrary to guidance issued by the Pentagon will further erode trust in US President Joe Biden's competence to protect American interests, which has already hit record lows following his inept handling of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan in August.

A recent poll by Quinnipiac revealed that Mr Biden's approval rating was continuing to slide, putting him at his lowest ever score of 38%, his lowest in any poll since taking office.

His responsibility for the Afghan debacle, as well his incompetent handling of other key issues such as immigration and the economy, were said to be important factors in his low approval ratings.

"Battered on trust, doubted on leadership, and challenged on overall competency, President Biden is being hammered on all sides as his approval rating continues its downward slide to a number not seen since the tough scrutiny of the Trump administration," Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Tim Malloy said in a statement.

The President's approval is set to fall further in the wake of fresh allegations that his administration ignored an explicit warning from the Pentagon about "cybersecurity concerns" linked to Chinese-made drones and parts made by DJI.

Concerns about the company's products being used to advance China's interests have been longstanding and include a 2017 statement from the Department of Homeland Security that claimed with "moderate confidence" that DJI was "providing U.S. critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government."

The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban. The following year, Congress passed legislation banning the use of drones and components manufactured in China, and the Trump administration blacklisted DJI for national security reasons.

The Interior Department, which owns DJI products, grounded its entire non-emergency drone fleet in 2019 due to concerns about Chinese government intrusion.

The Biden administration's willingness to allow key federal agencies to continue buying DJI drones has prompted fierce criticism from Republicans, who argue it raises questions about Mr Biden's claim that he wants to take a tough line with Beijing.

Responding to the revelations made by Axios, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said in a statement, "Given everything we know about the Chinese Communist Party and its companies, there is absolutely no excuse for any government agency to use DJI drones, or any other drones manufactured in countries identified as national security threats."

A spokesman for DJI rejected claims that its drones posed a security risk. "DJI drones are safe and secure for government and enterprise operations," the company said in a statement. "DJI believes defining specific standards and requirements, regardless of a drone's country of origin, is the best way to ensure the security of drone data," it said.

Given the Chinese Communist Party's abysmal record for trustworthiness, however – as in promising not to militarise the fake islands they built in the South China Sea just before they militarised them, or claiming that their Chinese virus, COVID-19, was not transmissible human-to-human – this assessment is less than reassuring.

The Biden administration's involvement in allowing Chinese-made technology into sensitive areas of the American government will only deepen the view that Mr Biden cannot be trusted to uphold his constitutional duties as the country's Commander-in-Chief.

Con Coughlin is the Telegraph's Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

 

Con Coughlin

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17861/biden-china-drones

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Fire Marine Corps Commandant David Berger - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

America needs a Marine Corps that wins battles instead of building woke safe spaces.

 

11 Marines came home in boxes after the bombing at Kabul airport carried out by an Islamic terrorist freed from a prison near Bagram Air Base that had been abandoned by Biden. Other Marines were seriously wounded and hospitalized for months after the attack.

All across America there are recruiting billboards for the Marine Corps with the message, “For Marines There Are Only Battles Won”. But in the runup to the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the only things the Marine Corps really cared about were wokeness and race.

In April, Biden announced that he would be pulling all American forces out of Afghanistan. That same month the Taliban launched their offensive that would end with a takeover of the country.

When General David H. Berger, Commandant of the Marine Corps, testified before the House Subcommittee on Defense at the end of April, he did not refer to Afghanistan. Even while a skeleton force of hundreds of Marines remained in Kabul, Berger made no mention of them.

Instead, Berger spoke about racism.

Bizarrely enough, Berger began his presentation, not with the threats to the United States that the Marine Corps existed to fight, but by declaring that, “our nation has engaged in a long overdue conversation on race and social justice sparked by several visible incidents of institutional racism”. By that, Berger meant that Black Lives Matter mobs had torched a number of cities and their leftist allies had purged everyone who disagreed from every institution.

Berger assured House Democrats that he was happy to lead the purge of dissenting Marines.

“We have and will continue to actively work to identify recruits and Marines who hold extremist views and we look forward to participating in the Secretary of Defense's new Countering Extremism Working Group to develop additional methods of keeping extremists from within our ranks,” Berger vowed, declaring war on fellow Marines instead of on America’s enemies.

“In this era of profound ideological division within our nation, some individual Marines regrettably bring with them, or fall victim to while in service, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic/ transphobic ideologies driven by hate, fear, and ignorance,” he promised. “I have instituted even more rigorous policies than previously existed to ensure we identify such individuals during enlistment and accession screening, I remain committed to identifying and holding accountable any Marine unable to uphold our core values.” 

These new cancel culture values borrowed from college campus safe spaces were all about punishing political dissent and had nothing to do with the task of actually winning battles.

Berger’s presentation mentioned social justice as often as China. He did not mention Afghanistan, Iran, or Al Qaeda. 

Nearly 400 Marines had been killed and nearly 5,000 wounded in Afghanistan. 853 Marines had died and over 8,000 had been wounded in Iraq. And yet the Commandant of the Marine Corps felt no need to even mention the wars of the cause they had sacrificed their lives for.

What enemy was the Marine Corps tasked with fighting? Instead of fighting Al Qaeda, the Marines were "confronting issues of inequality". And if that wasn’t impressive enough, Islamic terrorists could tremble at the thought of the new “gender-integrated training” in Parris Island.

“Structural racism and sexism exists within our current system,” Berger falsely claimed and promised new diversity initiatives to promote more black personnel to higher ranks.

Even though that actually is structural racism.

In July, Berger appeared to leap to the defense of the Navy’s decision to promote Ibram X. Kendi’s racist tract, How To Be An Anti-Racist. 

“There's some places on Earth, maybe more than a handful, where you're not allowed to read books. … You're only allowed to read this, and you're only allowed to espouse that,” Berger dishonestly argued. “We want our service members to read widely. We want them to actually think, not be programmed.” Except that programming them was the entire point.

That same month, Bagram Air Base was abandoned, cutting off the only secure escape route for Americans from Afghanistan, while liberating thousands of Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS-K terrorists, including the Jihadi who would go on to kill 13 Americans at Kabul airport.

While Berger was defending critical race theory in the military, the bloody road to the murder of 11 Marines was being paved. After the horror, he claimed that he wanted an “honest, open critique” of what happened in Afghanistan. But the honest and open critique had already been launched by Lt. Colonel Stuart Scheller who declared "I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, I demand accountability.”

In response to Lt. Col. Scheller’s call for accountability, he was relieved of duty.

The day before Berger’s call for an “honest and open critique”, he showed what would happen to any officer who dared to offer honest and open critiques. Then to further incentivize honest and open critiques, Scheller was placed under a gag order and then confined to a brig when he continued to speak out.

Scheller’s treatment made it clear that Berger's call for "diversity of thought" was as hollow as his solicitation of honest and open critiques. Promoting Ibram X. Kendi was a pathway to promotion, but demanding accountability for the deaths of 11 Marines was unacceptable.

“Freedom comes at a cost,” Berger's statement read after the deaths of those Marines at Kabul airport. The cost of freedom isn’t a hollow cliche, it’s accountability and integrity from officials. 

Last year, General Stephen Neary, a two-star general in command of Marine Forces Europe and Africa, was removed from duty by Berger due to a "loss of trust and confidence in his ability to serve in command" because he had allegedly used the "N" word. Neary hadn't been trying to insult anyone. Instead he had repeated the slur only to complain about the inappropriateness of playing music containing the slur at a Marine Corps training event. But in a woke military leadership where campus cancel culture trumps honor and tradition that didn’t save him. 

While a top general was fired for a slur, no one has been fired for the deaths of 11 Marines. What does it say about Berger that a slur is worse than the deaths of 11 American heroes?

The only man to go on trial has been a persistent critic of the Marine Corps leadership. 

During the George Floyd riots, Berger had warned that "there is no place in our Corps for racists – whether their intolerance and prejudice be direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional."

Much like on campus, being accused of unintentional offense was a hanging crime.

Like the rest of the military brass, Berger initiated divisive “conversations” about race in which officers were expected to listen and accept any accusations from minority personnel. 

“We all have unconscious biases, admitted or not,” Berger told ABC’s Martha Raddatz, parroting the corrosive racial psychoanalysis of critical race theory that says all white people are guilty.

While Berger was ordering officers to “listen” to false accusations of racism, he refused to listen to the much more substantive criticisms of Marine Corps dysfunction, gender and racial ideology, and the disastrous policies that led to the deaths of 11 Marines in Kabul.

General Berger has failed the Marine Corps and the United States of America.

Instead of focusing on the fight ahead, Berger decided that what the Marine Corps needed was to get woke, to dismantle its warfighting readiness by purging political incorrectness, lowering standards for the sake of diversity, and imposing cancel culture for the slightest offenses.

Firing Berger would be the first step to rebuilding a Marine Corps that wins battles instead of building woke safe spaces. That’s what America and the fallen heroes in Kabul deserve.

 

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/2021/10/fire-marine-corps-commandant-david-berger-daniel-greenfield/

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America’s leftist judges are out of control - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

Whether it’s their response to January 6 or to COVID, activist judges have abandoned the law and are engaging in tyrannical acts.

Thirty years of litigation work in the San Francisco Bay Area, which some might consider Ground Zero for activist judges, left me with a deep and abiding disrespect for leftist judges who are more concerned with their prejudices and feelings, than with facts and law. Two recent stories perfectly exemplify this.

The first story involves an Obama appointee who is reaming people arrested because they dared to do what leftists always do: Enter government property, including the Capitol, to protest. The second involves a father who is being barred access to his son until he gets a totally unnecessary vaccine.

Tanya S. Chutkan sits on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia and has been there since Barack Obama appointed her in 2014. She is a stone-cold leftist. In 2017, she ordered the Office of Refugee Resettlement (“ORR”) to ensure that a girl in its care got an abortion. Eventually, she ordered the government to make sure that all girls in ORR custody got to have abortions.

Chutkan also ruled against Betsy DeVos because Chutkan felt DeVos wasn’t doing enough to identify racial disparities in children identified for special ed, restrictive classrooms, and discipline. One of the things we know is that ending discipline based on race has been a disaster for schools.

Another Chutkan initiative was to try to block the federal death penalty by claiming that the federal government, by changing its lethal injection protocol, was violating the Federal Death Penalty Act. That decision is now pending before the United States Supreme Court.

But it’s Chutkan’s latest acts of leftism from the bench that are truly disgusting because they punish political opponents: She is imposing harsher sentences on people swept up in the January 6 dragnet than even Merrick Garland’s prosecutors are seeking. Leftists storming the Senate chamber during Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings were exercising their First Amendment rights and avoided serious consequences. Walking through the Capitol if you’re a conservative is a dire crime that must be punished severely.

Chutkan’s take on things is hard left, as happened with Matthew Mazzocco, who was charged with “parading”:

Although federal prosecutors recommended home confinement for Capitol rioter Matthew Mazzocco, a judge went with a harsher sentence and is sending him to prison instead.

Chutkan’s fanaticism is especially vile given that the FBI’s own reports show that there was no insurrection. (There’s also evidence indicating that January 6 was an FBI set-up.) Chutkan, though, is going to make sure that conservatives give up their bad thoughts and become too terrified to exercise their First Amendment rights. When Republicans control Congress again, I strongly suggest they investigate impeaching her for grossly abusing her power.

Meanwhile, Matthew Cooper, a New York judge has said that a father cannot visit with his three-year-old daughter unless he gets the vaccination or takes weekly (and expensive) COVID tests. The father has already had COVID, which means he is filled with natural antibodies that are more powerful than any protection a vaccination can provide.

Additionally, a healthy three-year-old child is at almost zero risk of getting a dangerous case of COVID. It’s true that children have died from COVID, which is always a tragedy, but the number stands at a low 605, and almost all the children have had serious comorbidities. With roughly 72,000,000 children under 18 in America, 605 deaths is vanishingly small. And of course, there’s the fact that people with the vaccination still get sick and are still COVID spreaders.

Nevertheless, Cooper, abandoning both law and science, and guided only by his blind leftist ideology, inserted himself in the parent-child relationship:

“Here, in-person parental access by defendant is not in the child’s best interests, and there are exceptional circumstances that support its suspension,” wrote Justice Matthew Cooper, who is presiding over the pair’s divorce and custody dispute.

“The dangers of voluntarily remaining unvaccinated during access with a child while the COVID-19 virus remains a threat to children’s health and safety cannot be understated,” the jurist said in the Oct. 7 decision, which withheld the parties’ names.

[snip]

“Unfortunately, and to my mind, incomprehensibly, a sizable minority, seizing upon misinformation, conspiracy theories, and muddled notions of ‘individual liberty,’ have refused all entreaties to be vaccinated,” argued the high-profile judge, who presided over divorce and child custody cases involving actor Robert De Niro, actress Uma Thurman and former NBA star Lamar Odom.

I doubt even this short, powerful video about the vaccine’s failed efficacy would change Cooper’s mind:

Chutkan and Cooper are typical leftist judges for they are both arrogant and ignorant. They and their ilk are a plague on the nation, for they have abandoned the rule of law in favor of using the bench to advance their political ideology.

Image: Judges Chutkan and Cooper. Public domain images edited in befunky.

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

 

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/americas_leftist_judges_are_out_of_control.html

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