The EU and the Biden Administration Give in to Iran's Mullahs - Majid Rafizadeh

 

by Majid Rafizadeh

It seems clear that the nuclear deal was never about stopping the predatory regime of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

• The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran's ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially -- as they should have learned from Russia by now -- because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.

• By revealing its desperation to buy oil, the EU is empowering Iran's ruling clerics to gain the upper hand in the nuclear talks and obtain even more concessions to revive the nuclear deal. Desperation, to the Iranian regime, means weakness.

• To appease Iran's mullahs, the EU and the Biden administration are also turning a blind eye to China's violating the sanctions on Iran... Reportedly, the Iranian regime is exporting more than 1.5 million bpd. The ruling mullahs of Iran are exporting approximately 80% of the oil they used to export before the sanctions. Iran's revenues heavily rely on oil exports; the sale of oil accounts for more than 50% of the regime's export revenues.

• The EU, moreover, has yet to join the US in imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime. In fact, European countries are still trading with Tehran in spite of the US sanctions. Tehran Times reported: "The value of trade between Iran and the European Union reached €4.863 billion in 2021, registering a nine-percent growth compared to the previous year...."

• It seems clear that the nuclear deal was never about stopping the predatory regime of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. For the EU, the nuclear deal is about trade, making money and buying oil from the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism; for the Biden administration, it is about a "diplomatic win". In return, the ruling mullahs will have a legal path to blackmail the world, using nuclear weapons and missiles, into sending Iran's regime billions for their terror and militia groups to torment everyone.

The European Union is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran's ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. By revealing its desperation to buy oil, the EU is empowering Iran's ruling clerics to gain the upper hand in the nuclear talks and obtain even more concessions. Desperation, to the Iranian regime, means weakness. Pictured: EU foreign affairs representative Josep Borrell (left) is hosted by Iran's then foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, in Tehran on February 3, 2020. (Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

The Biden administration and the European Union are trying hard to appease the Iranian regime in order to revive a nuclear deal that will provide the ruling mullahs of Iran with additional billions of dollars of revenue, enhance the regime's legitimacy on the global stage, and actually open the path for Iran to have a nuclear arsenal.

The EU recently dropped its own bomb when it unabashedly said that it wanted new nuclear deal so that EU countries could buy oil from Iran -- one of only four countries on the US State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism (the other three are Cuba, Syria and North Korea). Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign affairs representative, recently said:

"We Europeans will be very much beneficiaries from this [nuclear] deal, the situation has changed now. For us it was something . . . 'well we don't need it', [but] now it would be very much interesting for us to have another [crude] supplier."

The EU is basically admitting that it views the nuclear deal with Iran's ruling clerics from the perspective of economic opportunity. That should not be the objective of the nuclear talks. Instead, European leaders ought to be seeking a strong deal that will prevent the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially -- as they should have learned from Russia by now -- because those nukes may soon be aimed at their countries.

In addition, by revealing its desperation to buy oil, the EU is empowering Iran's ruling clerics to gain the upper hand in the nuclear talks and obtain even more concessions to revive the nuclear deal. Desperation, to the Iranian regime, means weakness.

The recent statement by Borrell has also made the Iranian regime more determined to cling to its top demand: removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force from the lists of terrorist organizations. The designation of the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization has nothing to do with Iran's nuclear program, but is linked to the IRGC and Quds Force terror activities across the world.

Now, however, the EU appears to have given in to the Iranian leaders' demand. The EU suggested recently that it is offering a compromise to delist the IRGC from the terror list as a last attempt to revive the nuclear deal. "At a certain moment," Borrell pointed out this week, "I will have to say, as coordinator [of the Vienna talks] I make this proposal on the table, formally... the only equilibrium point possible would be this one."

When it comes to the US position, the Biden administration, on the other hand, seems to be looking for a foreign policy achievement or a diplomatic win amidst the crisis The nuclear talks have been dragging on for a long time and the Biden administration has been facing criticism over its handling of the Ukraine crisis, China, Russia, Afghanistan and Iran. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, a majority of the American people disapprove of the Biden administration's handling of foreign policy.

To appease Iran's mullahs, the EU and the Biden administration are also turning a blind eye to China's violating the sanctions on Iran. China has been steadily ramping up its oil imports from Iran, to currently nearly 1 million bpd, and global oil prices have increased. Reportedly, the Iranian regime is exporting more than 1.5 million bpd. The ruling mullahs of Iran are exporting approximately 80% of the oil they used to export before the sanctions. Iran's revenues heavily rely on oil exports; the sale of oil accounts for more than 50% of the regime's export revenues.

The EU, moreover, has yet to join the US in imposing sanctions on the Iranian regime. In fact, European countries are still trading with Tehran in spite of the US sanctions. Tehran Times reported:

"The value of trade between Iran and the European Union reached €4.863 billion in 2021, registering a nine-percent growth compared to the previous year.... According to the data released by the Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture (TCCIMA), Iran exported €554 million worth of commodities to the union during the said nine months, while importing goods valued at €2.7 billion".

It seems clear that the nuclear deal was never about stopping the predatory regime of Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. For the EU, the nuclear deal is about trade, making money and buying oil from the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism; for the Biden administration, it is about a "diplomatic win". In return, the ruling mullahs will have a legal path to blackmail the world, using nuclear weapons and missiles, into sending Iran's regime billions for their terror and militia groups to torment everyone.

• Follow Majid Rafizadeh on Twitter

 

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

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18531/eu-biden-iran-mullahs

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Hillary Clinton-hired oppo research firm must turn emails over to Durham probe, judge rules - Bradford Betz

 

by Bradford Betz

Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann is one of three people charged so far

GPS Fusion, the research firm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign hired to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s supposed ties to Russia, must turn over nearly two dozen emails to special counsel John Durham, a federal judge ruled Thursday. 

Those emails – which are largely exchanges between Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman and Fusion GPS – are part of a batch that prosecutors subpoenaed last year. 

Photo of John Durham and Michael Sussmann. Sussman pic: Perkins Coie (Perkins Coie)

U.S. District Judge Christopher "Casey" Cooper blocked prosecutors from getting 16 of those emails but allowed Durham to obtain 22. Cooper ruled that the 16 emails in question were protected by attorney-client privilege and attorney-work-product while the remaining 22 were not. 

Still, the judge ruled that those emails will not be admissible in the impending trial of Sussman – who is charged with lying to the FBI during a September 2016 meeting – because of the untimeliness of Durham’s request.

CLINTON CAMPAIGN SEEKS TO BLOCK DURHAM ACCESS TO PERKINS COIE DOCUMENTS

Sussman is accused of relaying to the FBI concerns from cybersecurity researchers about a potential secret back channel of communications between servers of the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. The FBI investigated the matter but ultimately found no such suspicious links.

Prosecutors allege that Sussmann misled the FBI's then-general counsel by saying that he was not attending the meeting on behalf of a particular client when he was actually presenting the information on behalf of the Clinton campaign and a technology executive with whom he had worked. Sussman’s trial is set to begin on Monday in Washington's federal court. He has pleaded not guilty. 

Christopher Steele, a former British spy who wrote a 2016 dossier about alleged links between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, leaves the High Court in London following a hearing in the libel case brought against him by Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev.  (Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images)

Durham, a former U.S. attorney in Connecticut, was appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William Barr to look for government misconduct during the investigation into Russian election interference in 2016 and possible ties to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Sussmann is one of three people charged so far. The other two are Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email and received probation, and Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst and source of information for Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who assembled a dossier of anti-Trump research. Danchenko was charged in November with lying to the FBI during a 2017 interview.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

Bradford Betz is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to bradford.betz@fox.com  and on Twitter: @Bradford_Betz. 

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hillary-clinton-oppo-research-firm-must-turn-emails-durham-probe#

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How Dare Israel Rebuild a Synagogue the Jordanians Blew Up? - Hugh Fitzgerald

 

by Hugh Fitzgerald

Good can come of this -- or evil.

 

Visitors to the Old City of Jerusalem are often struck by how new all the synagogues in the Jewish Quarter look. That is because they are new, built after 1967, when Israel won back the Old City from Jordan, that had seized the area in 1948 and held onto it for 19 years. Those synagogues that have so far been built were meant to replace the 58 synagogues, some of them many centuries old (the Hurva synagogue dated from the 16^th century), that Jordan systematically blew up when it held the Old City. Now Israel is rebuilding the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue on the spot where it once stood, and Jordan is furious: how dare the Jews rebuild that synagogue in the Jewish Quarter that we blew up? Apparently those dozen-odd synagogues that had previously been rebuilt by Israel did not merit the same outrage, but now, with the recent focus on the Old City, and the Temple Mount, and Arab charges that Israel has designs on dividing or appropriating Al-Aqsa being hysterically bruited about, any rebuilding of another synagogue in the Old City, especially one so famous as Tijferes Yisrael, is cause for Arab alarm.Empty stone alley street among jewish and arab quaretrs of Jerusalem old city next to Western Wall (or Wailing Wall aka Kotel)

A report on this latest Jordanian outrage – in both senses – is here: “Jordanian Royal Committee says rebuilding a synagogue (destroyed by Jordan) is a racist Jewish crime,” Elder of Ziyon, May 3, 2022:

The Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs of Jordan was created by the late King Hussein in 1971 and reconstituted in 1994. Its mission:

The Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs is working to raise awareness of the importance of the issue of Jerusalem and not to separate it from its Arab and Islamic dimension, expose the Judaization and daily Israeli violations it is subjected to, and increase efforts working to stabilize Jerusalemites, support their steadfastness and publicize their suffering.

Its website is filled with antisemitic invective, calling every Jew in Jerusalem a “colonialist.”

Here is a typical article that exposes how thoroughly antisemitic the Committee is – as well as the government that funds it. It rails against the Israeli plans to rebuild the Tireres Yisrael synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, which was destroyed along with every single other synagogue in the Old City in 1948 by Jordanian forces.

[Israel’s] plans to start building a synagogue allegedly called Tiferes Israel, on an endowment land in which there is an Islamic historical building, about 200 meters from the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque from its western side, at a cost of $13 million, and with a construction area of 387 square meters, consisting of six floors, four of them underground and two above the ground, 23 meters high. It includes a synagogue, facilities for holding Talmudic prayers, a false Talmudic museum and public services, to be one of the largest synagogues in the world.This comes after the building of the Hurva synagogue, which was also erected on confiscated Jerusalem land and property, in implementation of an Israeli rabbi’s proposal claiming that it speeds up salvation and the coming of the Messiah and building the temple, according to their claim.

Israel is rebuilding one more synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, Tiferes Yisrael, had had been blown up by the Jordanians in 1948. That’s all. Israel has no designs on Al-Aqsa. After destroying the original synagogue, the Jordanians built their own structure on the land upon which the original synagogue was built. That land had been bought by Jews, for an exorbitant sum, in the 1840s. After the 1948 war, the Jordanians promptly destroyed the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue, as they did all 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter. On the site where that synagogue had stood, Jordan built what it now describes as an “Islamic historical building.” According to them, that building in the middle of the Jewish Quarter must forever remain Islamic. That “historic” Islamic building is not exactly “historic” – it was built after 1948 –more than a full century after the land for the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue had been bought. And this “Islamic historic building” has no religious or other claim to remain in the Jewish Quarter, but is in effect “squatting” on the land that was bought by Jews in the 1840s and belongs by right to the congregation of a rebuilt Tiferes Yisrael.

Apparently it is outrageous for the Israelis to build the synagogue on land that belonged to Tiferes Yisrael, which the Jordanians say is “allegedly” called the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue. Why “allegedly”? That was the name of the original synagogue and will be the name of its replacement. There is nothing “allegedly” about it. And why should the size of the synagogue matter to Muslims? The synagogue is not being built in the Muslim Quarter, or on the Temple Mount, and will be more than 600 feet distant from Al-Aqsa as the crow flies, and more than 2000 feet below Al-Aqsa’s base. It’s none of Jordan’s business what size the synagogue is, or how many stories are being built, both below and above ground.

The Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs stresses the danger of this alleged synagogue, as well as other Jewish centers, which are trying to obliterate the Arab identity of Jerusalem and its authentic Arab (Islamic and Christian) identity, and aims to change the space of the Arab city of Jerusalem in preparation for the expulsion of its Arab residents and the settlement of settlers, and an attempt to create an alleged Jewish climate by creating Talmudic paths and stations and building synagogues and biblical gardens in the vicinity of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque and the city of Jerusalem, which destroys peace and security in the region and ends the chance of the two-state solution to establish a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the 1967 borders, which was adopted by international resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.

Why is it called an “alleged” synagogue? Such a word means the Jordanians are suggesting it may have some other purpose. Could those diabolical Israelis be building what they are assuring the world is a synagogue, but that may also have some other use, as a weapons warehouse, or an Iron Dome anti-missile site, or an IDF barracks? After all, the Arabs use their mosques — even the Al-Aqsa Mosque — to store weapons and hide fighters. Why wouldn’t the Jews do the same, these Jordanians must be thinking, with synagogues? Of course, there is no evidence to suggest that this building will be anything other than a synagogue. And there are no examples of synagogues being used as weapons storehouses or hideouts for fighters, as mosques have often been used, especially in Gaza, by Hamas, and in southern Lebanon, by Hezbollah. 

What is the terrible “danger” posed by the rebuilt Tiferes Yisrael synagogue to the Arabs? Note the use of the word “Talmudic”: the synagogue’s rebuilding is “an attempt to create an alleged Jewish climate by creating Talmudic paths and stations and building synagogues and biblical gardens in the vicinity of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.” “Talmudic” is undefined, but the word is meant to suggest something dark and dangerous. And how will all these sinister plans for building synagogues harm the Arabs? Just how many of the 58 synagogues destroyed by the Jordanians does Israel have a right to rebuild in the Jewish Quarter? Many of us would respond “all of them.” In the past 55 years, after Jordan had systematically destroyed all 58 of those synagogues in the Old City, did Israel follow the Jordanian example and blow up mosques in the territory under its control? Not a single one. Not in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, not in the rest of Jerusalem, and not anywhere else in Israel. That should be kept firmly in mind. 

And how would Al-Aqsa Mosque be harmed by this building project, as the Jordanians claim? Al-Aqsa, after all, is built on top of the Temple Mount, that looms 2,428 feet above the rest of Jerusalem, far above the site where the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue is scheduled to be built. And the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue will not only be built on land that is 2,428 feet below Al-Aqsa, but also on land that is 628 feet distant, as the crow flies, from Al-Aqsa. Vertically and horizontally, that’s very far away.  

Israel is not trying to “obliterate” the Islamic component of Jerusalem’s heritage; there is no truth to the Jordanian claim that Israel is plotting to “judaize” east Jerusalem. There were 66,000 Arabs in east Jerusalem in 1967 when Israel took control of the area; there are 340,000 today. The Israelis are simply asserting their rights to rebuild a historic synagogue that the Jordanians destroyed. It is not preparing for the “expulsion of its [Jerusalem’s] Arab residents.” Israel has had 55 years, after all, to “expel” Arabs from Jerusalem; it has not expelled a single one.

The Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs affirms that the firm position of Jordan under its historical Hashemite leadership, which has historical guardianship over the Islamic and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem, will remain the defender of Palestine and Jerusalem, regardless of the cost and sacrifices as a national and national cause. The unanimous agreement that includes deterring Israel (the occupying power) to stop its crimes and violations, including hundreds of international resolutions issued by the United Nations and its affiliated organizations, including UNESCO, which affirmed the exclusive Arab identity of Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian holy sites, and international organizations must protect human rights and humanitarian organizations ….[and expose] Israel’s racist crimes.

“Historical Hashemite leadership…historical guardianship” – this use of the word “historical” is meant to suggest that Jordan’s role in the Waqf that manages Al-Aqsa Mosque is of long duration. In fact, it began only in 1949; 73 years is not what most of us would describe as “historical.”

What are Israel’s “crimes and violations” in the Old City? What UN Resolutions have found fault with Israel’s stewardship of the Old City? Lie follows lie in this hysterical screed from the Jordanian government. Where did UNESCO “affirm the exclusive Arab identity of Jerusalem”? It has never done so.

Let’s get this story straight. It’s very simple. Israel has been scrupulous in its care of the Old City, in respecting the rights of all religions. On the Temple Mount, it has put limits on Jewish worshippers in order to accommodate Muslims, even going so far as to prohibit Jews from praying, aloud or silently, at the holiest site of Judaism. An extraordinary concession, for which Israel gets no gratitude. Furthermore, Israel allows Jewish visitors to visit the Mount for only four hours a day, and only on five days of the week, to minimize the “offense” to Muslims. Furthermore, they are instructed to remain on the perimeter of the Al-Aqsa Compound, and not to get too close to Al-Aqsa itself. 

Israel has been allowing Jews to rebuild the synagogues that the Jordanians destroyed between 1948 and 1967, right on the same spots where they had once stood. So far roughly a dozen have been rebuilt. They are being constructed with sensitivity to the surrounding buildings. The Tiferes Israel synagogue, for example, will have six stories in all, but only two of those stories will be above ground, so that the synagogue does not loom over any buildings nearby, and will be the same height above ground as was the original synagogue.

Israel has not expelled any Arabs from Jerusalem. It has not destroyed any mosques in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel. In rebuilding this famous synagogue that Jordan destroyed, the government of Israel has no sinister aim. The Tiferes Israel synagogue will not be a place where weapons are stored or fighters hidden – unlike what has been the case, as we all know, with many mosques in Gaza and southern Lebanon. The Jordanians can rage, impotently, over the rebuilding of this mosque, but the more they do so, the. more supporters of Israel will have an opening to remind the world of what happened to all 58 of the synagogues in the Old City during the years of Jordanian rule. It’s a story too few know, just as even fewer people know that the Jordanians pulled up tens of thousands of ancient tombstones from the venerable Jewish cemetery at the Mount of Olives, and used them to line the floors of Jordanian army latrines or to be ground into gravel. 

Good can come of this, and evil. The evil is if people fail to grasp just how absurd are every one of the Jordanian charges leveled at Israel The good can come of it if, in answering those charges, we can make sure that Jordan’s record of destroying those 58 synagogues in the Jewish Quarter, and its wanton destruction of tens of thousands of headstones at the oldest Jewish cemetery in the world, become much more widely known. Let Jordan rue the day it raised the alarm about the Tiferes Yisrael synagogue.

 

Hugh Fitzgerald

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/how-dare-israel-rebuild-synagogue-jordanians-blew-hugh-fitzgerald/

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Americans oppose transgender surgeries, anti-puberty blockers for minors: poll - Bradford Betz

 

by Bradford Betz

Medical professionals have told Fox News they have seen rates of gender dysphoria skyrocket among young people in recent years

The majority of Americans do not support transgender surgeries or anti-puberty blockers for minors, according to a poll from a conservative nonprofit organization.

The survey asked respondents whether they would support a ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and physical sex-change surgeries for children under 18. 

Protestors in support of transgender rights rally outside the Alabama State House in Montgomery, March 30, 2021. (Jake Crandall/The Montgomery Advertiser via AP)

56% of respondents said they would support a ban, while 34% said they would not. A little over a third of those respondents identified as Democrats, while 37% identified as Republicans, and just under a quarter identified themselves as Independents, according to the survey by the American Principles Project Foundation. 

A survey from American Principles Project Foundation.  (APP)

In another question, respondents were asked whether they supported or were against children being pushed into a sex change. Around 63% of respondents agreed that children were too young for the decision. Around 22% of respondents believed that opposition to gender transitioning was transphobic. 

RACHEL LEVINE'S CLAIM ALL AGREE ON ‘GENDER-AFFIRMING CARE’ IS SLAMMED BY DOCTORS ‘IN HIDING’

The poll was conducted by OnMessage Inc. for American Principles Project (APP) in six Senate battleground states – Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Hampshire – targeted likely general election voters via telephone. The margin of error for the survey was +/- 2.82%. 

Rachel Levine, nominee for assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services, testifies at her confirmation hearing, Feb. 25, 2021, on Capitol Hill.  (Caroline Brehman-Pool/Getty Images)

Medical professionals have told Fox News they have seen rates of gender dysphoria skyrocket among young people in recent years, but that many of their colleagues are reluctant to speak publicly against transgender ideology for fear of both professional and personal retaliation. 

Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, who is the highest-ranking transgender person in the U.S. government, made headlines last month for claiming during an interview with NPR that "there is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care."

While many medical associations have embraced various procedures for kids who identify as transgender and are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, some doctors have warned against the use of hormone treatments that have not been approved for gender dysphoria by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Most hormone treatments "are only FDA approved as puberty blockers in children for the purpose of treating central precocious puberty and not for gender dysphoria," Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an independent private practice endocrinologist in Rocklin, Calif., told Fox News in Dec. 2021.

"Central precocious puberty is a medical condition in which a child starts puberty at an abnormally young age, say age 4," Laidlaw explained. "Medications like Supprelin LA are used to stop this abnormal puberty. Then once the child reaches a typical age for puberty (say age 11 or 12), the medication is stopped, and then normal puberty will resume."

"The off-label use of these medications for gender dysphoria is completely different," the endocrinologist added. "In this case the healthy child has already begun normal puberty. But then the medication is given to block normal puberty. Blocking normal puberty has numerous unhealthy side effects including loss of normal bone development, interference with normal brain and social development, and importantly causes infertility and sexual dysfunction. Many of these effects will be irreversible."

 Fox News’ Jon Brown and Tyler O'Neil contributed to this report. 

Bradford Betz is a reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to bradford.betz@fox.com  and on Twitter: @Bradford_Betz. 

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/americans-oppose-transgender-surgeries-anti-puberty-blockers-for-minors-poll

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Pseudo-Scholars Promoting the Demonization of Israel and Jews - Richard L. Cravatts

 

by Richard L. Cravatts

Academia’s contemporary blood libel.

 

Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.

That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of the Arab world’s vilification of Jews — now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations.

But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has shown itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, in order to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship.

Masked as research and scholarship, the fruits of this academic malpractice are used to further the ongoing campaign of the demonization of Israel, and the intellectual capital oozing out of campuses in the thrall of a Marxist worldview of oppression and victimology has as its goal to substantiate Israel’s moral and existential inferiority in an attempt to make it a pariah in the world community. Part of achieving that malicious objective is scholarship designed to reveal every real or imagined sinister aspect of Israel’s culture, society, politics, and military, and to confirm that the Jewish state’s behavior is singularly perverse, malicious, sinister, and murderous—especially in its cruel, inhuman treatment of non-Jewish children.

One notorious example of this type of mendacious academic output can be found in a 2017 book by Rutgers professor Jasbir K. Puar published by Duke University Press, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. The thesis of Puar’s book is formed by her examination of “Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule,” which, she asserted, is “that of creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them.”

In other words, Puar’s core notion is that Israeli military tactics — as an extension of its political policies — involve the deliberate “stunting,” “maiming,” physical disabling, and scientific experimenting with Palestinian lives, an outrageous and grotesque resurrection of the classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews purposely, and sadistically, harm and kill non-Jews.

Puar, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, boasts that she regularly writes on a hodgepodge of currently fashionable academic fields of study, including “gay and lesbian tourism, queer theory, theories of intersectionality, affect, homonationalism, and pinkwashing,” the latter being the perverse theory that Israel trumpets its broad support of LGBT rights in its society to furtively obscure its long-standing mistreatment of the Palestinians.

Morally coherent people would normally look at Israel’s progressive policies towards gays and commend the Jewish state for treating members of the LGBT community humanely and in a manner they are not treated in most of the Muslim world, but not Puar and her fellow pinkwashing theorists. Nothing Israel does, in their minds, is done with good intentions, only motivated by dark impulses meant to deceive, including, according to Puar, the inclination to maim, not kill, Palestinians and, by disabling them, controlling them.

“The Israeli Defense Forces (idf) have [sic] shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill. This is ostensibly a humanitarian practice,” she admitted, although it results in “leaving many civilians ‘permanently disabled’ in an occupied territory of destroyed hospitals, rationed medical supplies, and scarce resources.”

So, while Puar reluctantly admits that Israel purposely limits the lethality of its self-defense by maiming rather than murdering, she still accuses it of using violence and injury as a tactical tool of a settler state to maintain control of a vulnerable indigenous population. It is both sadistic and exploitative, she contended, because it maintains a purportedly unjust and illegal occupation and the oppression of a victimized people.

“I am arguing that debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves,” she explained, “ . . . what I call ‘the right to maim’: a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, ‘the right to kill.’”

“Maiming,” she contends, “. . . is a sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule,” without ever bothering to offer an explanation of why it is strategically more productive for Israel to permanently injure, as opposed to eliminating, a population which is perpetually an existential threat and whose culture is an unrelenting breeding ground for genocidal hate and terror against Jewish civilians.

In a 2016 speech Puar delivered at Vassar College, which presaged the content of her book, she presented this same noxious theme, that Israel is intent on “Targeting youth, not for death but for stunting” as a “tactic that seeks to render impotent any future resistance.” “Maiming masquerades as let live when in fact it acts as will not let die,” she said, and this technique, as part of a sadistic, imperialistic militancy on the part of Israel, “is used to achieve . . . tactical aims of settler colonialism.”

Of course, no acknowledgment from Puar is ever forthcoming as to the reasons “why the most intensive practice of the biopolitics of debilitation,” the use of force against the civilian Palestinian population, exists in the first place; that is, that Israel’s so-called brutal occupation and its military incursions are necessitated by Arab aggression and terrorism, and the use of force, the maiming of the Palestinians (to the extent that it even exists), are not random occurrences based on the whims of a sadistic Israeli military, but a reaction to and the result of unrelenting terroristic attacks in which psychopathic jihadists have attempted to murder Jews with knives, trucks, bombs, rockets, firebombs, and rifles since Israel’s founding.

Puar also accused Israel of randomly, and recklessly, targeting medical facilities and other infrastructure as a deadly way “to provide the bare minimum for survival, but minimal enough to attempt to defeat or strip resistance” where “. . . the target here is not just life itself but resistance itself.”  But Puar’s view that Israel’s military operations are characterized by disproportionality and a disregard for human life—even of its mortal foes—was, in fact, totally contradicted by a report prepared by The High-Level International Military Group on the Gaza Conflict in 2014, which found that “during Operation Protective Edge . . . Israel not only met a reasonable international standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard.”

A second malicious academic whose body of work targets Israel as the singular source of child murder in the world is Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a professor and the Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology at Israel’s Hebrew University. Shalhoub-Kevorkian “studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gendered based violence, violence against children in conflict ridden areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization and social control,” but given the fact that she proudly announces that she is “a prominent local activist . . . [who] engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives . . . [and] spaces of death . . ,” the subject and tone of her spurious research clearly has as its sole purpose to slander and demonize the IDF.

In two visits to Columbia University, in 2016 and 2019, for example, Shalhoub-Kevorkian promoted her grisly though unfounded belief that Israel uses Palestinian children to test military weapons, that “Palestinian spaces are laboratories.” In fact, she claimed, “The invention of products and services of state-sponsored security corporations are fueled by long-term curfews and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli army,” and the “Israeli security industry [is] using them as showcases” for promoting this technology for global adoption and use.

At a June 2021 event hosted by The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), Shalhoub-Kevorkian carelessly threw out the accusation that Israel randomly and capriciously murders Palestinians, and specifically their children, in its system of oppression and occupation. “We see that our children became a political capital in the hands of the state,” she said, “to further unchild [sic] them, arrest them and kill (them), and govern their hopes.”

What is Israel’s, and Zionism’s, strategy of oppression, according to Shalhoub-Kevorkian? Zionism “invades our everydayness,” she claimed, “on the way to school for kids, during birth for women, during funerals, through home evictions and demolitions, to ethnically cleanse.” 

Sound academic research is one thing, but Shalhoub-Kevorkian formulates her theories about Israel’s predations based on notoriously unreliable, and likely non-existent, accounts she gathers, not from other scholars or actual research data, but from the accounts given to her by Palestinian children—“narratives,” as she refers to them. Of course, narratives are not facts, so this data and research have little value as reliable academic output, especially when the testimony she records comes from children inculcated since birth to loathe Israel and Jews. In a 2018 article published by the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, “Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her co-author made this same mendacious claim about how “Israel’s policy of targeting Palestinian children and childhood through the criminal justice system is fundamental to the state’s mechanism of colonial dispossession.”

In a 2021 co-authored article, “Colonial Necrocapitalism, State Secrecy and the Palestinian Freedom Tunnel,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduced another accusation incorporating a classic anti-Semitic trope that Jews are not only motivated by money and profit but will murder innocent civilians in pursuit of it, something she calls “necrocapitalism.” Necrocapitalism, according to her, is the “means of accumulating capital and profit from the death” of Palestinians. In necrocapitalism, “profit flows from visible and invisible violence, as well as the killing of the colonized, as a state of fear generates continuous insecurity, which in turn generates a demand for security goods.” 

In other words, the occupation, the oppression of an innocent indigenous people, and all of Israel’s purported efforts to thwart terrorism and keep its citizenry from being murdered are all merely pretexts; the actual motivation for this malign behavior is Jewish profit, a grotesque accusation that Israel is only interested in “accumulating capital and profit from death,” even the death of children. “The very existence of the Palestinian endangers the colonial state” of Israel, she concluded, and “their death is necessary for the survival” of Israel. “Necrocapitalism” is “operationalized through violent policing of Palestinians.”

When she spoke as one of the participants in a grossly-biased, anti-Israel June 2021 webinar entitled “Said's Palestine,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian regurgitated her wild claims, suggesting that “When Palestinians refuse and resist, Israel always kills Palestinian civilians,”  and Israel’s “viciousness now includes a startling amount of arrests in the last month in historic Palestine . . . and attacks on Palestinian livability because Palestinians resist, watching the attacks on children alone as my work on unchilding [sic] clearly reveals, we see that our children became a political capital in the hands of the state, to further unchild [sic] them, arrest them and kill them and govern their hopes . . . .”

Supporters of the Palestinian cause have come to accept the fact that Israel will not be defeated through the use of traditional tools of warfare. Instead, the Jewish state’s enemies, abetted by the academic and political elites in the West, have begun to use different, but equally dangerous, tactics to delegitimize and eventually destroy Israel in a cognitive war. By dressing up old hatreds against Jews, as Puar and Shalhoub-Kevorkian do, combined with a purported goal of seeking social justice for the oppressed, and repackaging ugly biases as seemingly pure scholarship, they and Israel’s other ideological foes have found an effective, but odious, way to ensure that the Jew of nations, Israel, is still libeled for bringing harm and death to non-Jews.

It is a vicious and ugly trope in the centuries-old history of the world’s oldest hatred: that Jews still harbor murderous, sadistic, and inhuman impulses against non-Jews and wish to injure or murder them — in the current day with the Palestinian Arabs as long-suffering victims of the Jew of nations, Israel.

 

Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., a Freedom Center Journalism Fellow in Academic Free Speech and President Emeritus of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, is the author of Jew-Hatred Rising: The Perversities of the Campus War Against Israel and Jews.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/pseudo-scholars-promoting-malevolence-israel-and-richard-l-cravatts/

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Imagine the Unimaginable - Victor Davis Hanson

 

by Victor Davis Hanson

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we’ll see over the next few months.

Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory. They may witness things over the next five months that once would have seemed unimaginable.

Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.

In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader Vladimir Putin now talks trash about the likelihood of nuclear war. 

A 79-year-old Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who should be removed from power. 

After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-induced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to exploit this rare window of global military opportunity. 

The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system—are dissolving.

Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the disease of hyperinflation.

There is no southern border.

Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into the United States without audit, COVID testing, or vaccination. None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigration law.

Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District attorneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges. (Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and the Los Angeles County D.A. refused to press felony charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.  

Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and politics determine whether the law is even applied.

Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from many shelves.

Politics resembles the violent last days of the Roman Republic. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own abortion laws has created a national hysteria. 

Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them into altering their votes.

There is no free speech anymore on campuses.

Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention, grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or ethnic category. 

When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and professional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and irreversible declining standards of living.

What happened? 

Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are choices, not fate. The United States has the largest combined gas, coal, and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development on the planet.

Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. He kept printing trillions of dollars for short-term political advantage, incentivizing labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politicized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate policymaking in the Biden Administration. 

The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism.  Ruling elites would rather be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically incorrect, successful, and popular. 

Is not that the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from 18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022. Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Joe Biden still push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and deliberate cabinet nonperformance. 

Why? The Left has no confidence either in constitutional government or common sense. 

So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more doxxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation, swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer. 

Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the fall issue more COVID lockdowns. They will still dream of packing the Court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.  

When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.

 

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the newly released The Dying Citizen.

Source:https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/11/imagine-the-unimaginable/

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Hong Kong Without a Net - Mark Tapson

 

by Mark Tapson

Insights into the territory’s history of struggle for freedom.

 

Before the news media focused everyone’s attention on Ukraine as the world’s flashpoint of democracy in peril, that flashpoint was rightfully centered on Hong Kong, where a courageous pro-democracy movement rebelled against the oppressive, communist Chinese regime. That rebellion is still ongoing, and still being suppressed. Just this week, Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, retired Cardinal Bishop of Hong Kong and one of the world’s leading human rights activists, was arrested in Hong Kong with three others as trustees of an organization that helps local democracy activists pay their legal fees. The trustees’ crime was “collusion with foreign forces,” part of a new security law implemented last year by Beijing to crush the protests in the former British colony, which has been under Chinese control since 1997. 

Few Western conservatives can write as intimately and knowledgeably about Hong Kong and its people as the late writer Bruce Herschensohn, whose final book has just been published by Beaufort Books*. A Profile of Hong Kong, subtitled “During Times Past, Times Current, and its Quest of a Future Maintaining Hong Kong’s Liberty,” is composed of Bruce’s personal reflections upon, and historical analysis of, one of the most highly-developed, densely-populated cities in the world, one in which the people yearn for freedom from the communist yoke and look to America as their inspiration (you will recall that the protesters in 2019-2020 waved the Stars and Stripes and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” together). His insights stem from 37 trips to Hong Kong made annually from 1960 through the British handover of the city in 1997, and they include his thoughts on what he calls “the frightening days and nights” when thousands of protesters were arrested and many brutalized by excessive police force.

The extraordinarily accomplished Herschensohn had a long and distinguished career in political analysis as a senior fellow at Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, former Distinguished Fellow at the Claremont Institute, Fellow at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, and former Fellow at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics. He received the Distinguished Service Medal, served as Deputy Special Assistant to President Nixon, was selected as one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in the Federal Government, traveled to over ninety countries, and even worked with Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He authored such books as An American Amnesia: How the US Congress Forced the Surrenders of South Vietnam and Cambodia; Above Empyrean: A Novel of the Final Days of the War on Islamic Terrorism; and the 2012 book Obama’s Globe: A President’s Abandonment of US Allies Around the World, a concise and hard-hitting indictment of former President Barack Obama’s disastrous foreign policy (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here).

Herschensohn passed away in December 2020 and was eulogized at FrontPage Mag by Horowitz Freedom Center President Michael Finch, who wrote this of the conservative stalwart:

What many don’t remember or know about Bruce is that he was also an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, wrote classical music scores, was a longtime teacher of politics, most recently at Pepperdine University, and served under four Presidents: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon as a Deputy Special Assistant, and as part of Ronald Reagan’s transition team in 1980. He also was the author of numerous books and countless articles during several decades as a columnist.

Most of all, Bruce was simply one of the kindest, humblest, and nicest people that one could meet. He was the epitome of class, always with a positive outlook on life and a kind word.

Those characteristics, as well as Bruce’s compassion for the Hong Kong freedom-lovers whom he calls “the angels of our times,” are in evidence on virtually every page of A Profile of Hong Kong. “The inhabitants of Hong Kong prove on a daily basis that no one knows better what to do with liberty than those who have lived under an absence of liberty,” he writes.

Herschensohn’s short but densely informative book begins, as the chapter heading indicates, “Looking Centuries Back in Hong Kong” and progresses through the city’s uniquely interesting history up to the aforementioned pro-democracy protests in 2019-2020. In short chapters along the way he covers such topics as “The Cultural Revolutions of 1966-1976,” “Margaret Thatcher vs. Deng Xiaoping,” “How Hong Kong Became a Beacon of Liberty,” “The Tiananmen Square Massacre,” “The Midnight of Broken Promises” detailing the sorrowful British handover of the colony to the Chinese regime, and the period thereafter when the territory lacked the underpinning of Western support, in “Hong Kong Without a Net.”

Amid his recounting of Hong Kong history are such gems as details of the Tiananmen Square massacre and what he calls “one of the most incredible end-of-a-war stories ever to take place”: the tale of a flag of Great Britain hidden by a British citizen when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese on Christmas Day 1941. The citizen was sent to a prisoner of war camp but in August 1945 escaped, retrieved the flag, and raised it in defiance of the Japanese occupation. As it turns out, and as Herschensohn explains, that act saved Hong Kong for the British, and had it not, Hong Kong’s “triumph of freedom and free enterprise, including the most magnificent skyline in the world, would never have existed.”

Regarding present-day Hong Kong, Bruce laments that “those who are currently [in 2020] being taken through the streets of Beijing are being sent to be ‘tried’ for ‘crimes’ against [President] Xi Jinping’s demands.” They are “the angels of our times” who “cherish future liberties for all Hong Kong people and for all those who want to join them in being free without… liberty ever being taken away again.”

In the epilogue Bruce closes the book with an expression of gratitude to its readers, and an endearing apology: “If I editorialized at times within this book, I am sorry.” Then, in an amusing afterthought a few pages later: “But not very sorry.”

As Beaufort Books publisher Eric Kampmann notes at the beginning of the book, he “had complete trust that [Herschensohn] would bring respect, discernment, and expertise when telling Hong Kong’s turbulent story.” And he certainly did. To understand where the territory stands today and where it may be headed, anyone who cares about the fate of those pro-American, pro-capitalist Hong Kong protesters risking their lives for freedom, must begin with Bruce Herschensohn’s slim but enlightening book, A Profile of Hong Kong.

* Beaufort Books will generously donate 50% of the book’s net proceeds to a scholarship fund in Bruce Herschensohn’s name.

 

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/hong-kong-without-net-mark-tapson/

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Finland's president tells Putin his country will apply to join NATO - Julia Musto

 

by Julia Musto

Niinisto said he repeated 'deep concern' over Russia's attack on Ukraine

Finland's President Sauli Niinisto told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call on Saturday that the country plans to apply for NATO membership in the next few days. 

In a release, Niinisto’s office said that he had stressed how Russian demands late last year aiming at preventing countries from joining NATO had "altered the security environment of Finland."

MOSCOW THREATENS TO RESPOND IF NATO MOVES NUKES ANY CLOSER TO ITS BORDER

"The conversation was direct and straight-forward and it was conducted without aggravations," Niinisto said in a statement. "Avoiding tensions was considered important." 

The Kremlin's press service said in a statement that Putin responded that Finland's abandonment "of its traditional policy of military neutrality would be an error since there are no threats to Finland’s security."

"Such a change in the country’s foreign policy could negatively affect Russian-Finnish relations, which had been built in the spirit of good neighborliness and partnership for many years, and were mutually beneficial," the statement added.

FILE - Finland's President Sauli Niinisto makes a point during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool, File)

Niinisto’s office pointed out he had previously told Putin in 2012 that every independent nation maximizes its security.

"This is what is happening now, too," it said. "By joining NATO, Finland strengthens its own security and assumes responsibility. It is not away from anyone else." 

MCCONNELL MAKES SURPRISE TRIP TO MEET ZELENSKYY IN UKRAINE

Niinisto noted that he repeated "deep concern" over Russia's attack on Ukraine and "stressed the imperative of peace." 

"He also conveyed the messages on securing the evacuation of civilians delivered earlier in the same week by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy," the office said. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Talent and Success Educational Foundation via videoconference at the Sirius Educational Center for Gifted Children in Sochi, Russia, Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In addition, the leader of the militarily non-aligned Nordic country said that Finland "wants to take care of the practical questions arising from being a neighbor of Russia in a correct and professional manner." 

Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia.

On Thursday, the Kremlin called Finland's push to join NATO a "threat to Russia." 

A formal announcement from Niinisto and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin is expected on Sunday.

The phone call was initiated by Finland.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

 

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News Digital. You can find her on Twitter at @JuliaElenaMusto.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/finland-president-tells-putin-nato-application

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Woke Hypocrisy: A User’s Guide - Steve Rose

 

by Steve Rose

Too many Americans are still blind to the true nature of Wokeism.

Wokeism is not what it pretends to be.

It fools a lot of people by pretending to be about high ideals. It pretends to struggle against injustice, overcome oppression, and so on.

But in reality, it’s something very different. For many more of us, the scam is clear: the Woke simply want power. They just want to rule over the rest of us. They’ve already made astounding progress toward this goal.

How are they pulling this off? They’re working to invent a flood of rules that we must live by, but they don’t. They want two sets of rules -- some for us, others for them.

For example: Offending them is a terrible thing. It’s so terrible, in fact, that they’ve been trying to make it illegal to hurt their feelings. Yet they can offend us all the time.

They insist that subjective feelings are profoundly important -- important enough to write laws and even base entire societies on. Yet our feelings are routinely ignored, minimized, dismissed, mischaracterized, or forcefully suppressed.

They justify everything they do based on their imaginary fantasies and utopian ideals, yet they dismiss everything we do because of the sinister aims they imagine we have.

They insist that we “shouldn’t judge” other people, and any expression of disapproval of their behavior, however mild, is completely unacceptable. Yet they “judge” us -- quite harshly -- all the time.

They insist on being allowed to be who they are, yet they refuse to let us be who we are.

They insist that we’re such terrible people that they refuse to even engage in a dialogue or conversation with us. Yet they claim that we’re the ones who are intolerant.

They claim the ability to know exactly what’s in our hearts (via their mind-reading skills, presumably), yet they insist that what’s happening in their hearts is something mysterious and profound that we can never understand.

They claim that we can never understand them because we’ve never lived their experience, yet they claim to fully understand us even though they’ve never lived our experience.

They insist on being judged solely by their good intentions, yet they insist on judging us solely by the imaginary motives they project onto us.

To call them unflattering names, accidentally or otherwise, is a horrific crime, they say (despite their ever-shifting, incoherent, exhausting jargon regarding what they want to be called), Yet they call us truly horrific names all the time (“fascist,” “racist,” “hater,” “White supremacist,” etc.)

They talk about race and gender relentlessly, as if those are the only important matters in life, yet they constantly accuse us of being racist and sexist.

They constantly accuse us of racism and sexism, while they continually judge people, divide them into groups, and try to reorganize the entire world according to individuals’ gender or skin color.

On the topic of males and females, they lecture us about the horror and intolerance of being “binary,” and insist (despite biological realities) that there are infinite shades of gray -- yet they also declare that everyone is either a “Racist” or an “Anti-Racist,” and that’s it, those are the only two options.

They psychologize all of our motives (“You’re really doing that because of X, Y, and Z”), yet they insist that their own motives are completely pure and noble. (This applies even when their motives are glaringly and transparently corrupt.)

They insist on being allowed to define themselves, yet also insist that we can’t be allowed to define ourselves. They define themselves as heroic crusaders who fight Nazis, fascists, racists, etc. (which we’re also against, by the way) -- but they refuse to acknowledge that we’re fighting evils as well, such as communists, tyrants, and totalitarians.

They insist that everything they’re doing is based on hard facts, science, and “truth,” yet they’re constantly trying to create an entire legal framework based entirely on hurt feelings or subjective emotions.

They pretend to be tragically wounded when they’re offended and claim that being offended is a horrific thing, yet they deliberately and unnecessarily choose to interpret harmless phrases and mundane acts in ways that are maximally offensive.

They misrepresent our positions constantly, yet they continually complain about being misunderstood or misrepresented.

They constantly silence us, yet they pretend to finally be championing the voiceless.

They enjoy the full support of Big Tech, Big Business, Big Hollywood, Big Education, nearly the entire media establishment, the entire Democratic party in Washington, and a significant part of the Republican party, and yet they claim to be “oppressed.”

They claim to be tolerant and compassionate, yet they openly mock, ridicule, and insult anyone they disagree with.

They see themselves as creative and free-thinking individuals, yet they all think and act alike, and punish anyone who says anything outside of the approved narrative.

They claim the ability to interpret anything and everything however they want, however absurd, and hide behind “lived experience” or subjective feelings as a defense of their interpretations (“I have a right to my opinion!”) -- yet they declare that our interpretations and “lived experiences” are invalid.

They work to deliberately bankrupt us, abolish most amendments, deliberately flood the country with non-citizens, corrupt and nationalize elections, abolish the electoral college, abandon the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add additional states to the union, ban political speech, they fly non-American flags at government departments, kneel to other causes in the Capitol building, and pledge allegiance to other (non-American) flags.  

They’ve already ruined or corrupted much of Hollywood, Big Media, Big Business, Big Tech, nearly our entire education system, the music industry, entertainment, etc. -- yet they accuse us of being bad for the country.

The above are just a few examples of Woke hypocrisy. There are plenty more. Yet an awareness of this hypocrisy would have little effect on someone who was truly Woke. Why? Because the Woke are hypocritical about hypocrisy itself.

Most of us see phoniness and hypocrisy as bad things, and honesty and integrity as good. But a true Wokester could read all of the above, and say, “So what? Sure, I say one thing and do another. Yes, I want one set of rules for you and another for me. Sure, I seem like a hypocrite. But I’m doing it all for ‘a good cause’ -- my imaginary Utopian fantasy -- and therefore, I’m morally justified to inflict in any horror I choose.”

Meanwhile, they aren’t afraid to use the “hypocrisy” charge against us. They constantly accuse us of falling short of our impossibly high ideals and use that imperfection to justify our total destruction.

Too many Americans are still blind to the true nature of Wokeism. It’s societal poison. It’s a fundamentalist cult, riddled with zealotry and intolerance, fueled by hysteria and moral narcissism. It’s an intellectual virus that has been deliberately engineered to destroy Western culture and replace it with a hellish Marxist dystopia.

We need more real Americans to understand what’s actually happening, and to inoculate ourselves against it before it’s too late.

Image: US Congress

 

Steve Rose

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/woke_hypocrisy_a_users_guide.html

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Gov. DeSantis Mandates Teaching About Crimes of Communism - Daniel Greenfield

 

by Daniel Greenfield

It's not enough to just try to push critical race theory and gender grooming out of schools. The bigger question is what replaces it. It's not enough to drive out the bad, you have to replace it with the good.

 

There are a lot of talkers, but Gov. Ron DeSantis is providing a master class in how to actually fight the Left, not just talk about it.

It's not enough to just try to push critical race theory and gender grooming out of schools. The bigger question is what replaces it. It's not enough to drive out the bad, you have to replace it with the good. And you have to push back against the Left, instead of getting bogged down on the defensive about trying to keep their pet topics and agendas out of classrooms.

Gov. DeSantis clearly understands that.

Public school teachers in Florida will soon be required to dedicate at least 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day” to teach students about communist leaders around the world and how people suffered under those regimes.

Speaking at Miami’s Freedom Tower before a crowd of local lawmakers and supporters, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 395, which designates Nov. 7 as the state’s official “Victims of Communism Day,” making Florida one of a handful of states to adopt the designation.

Lefties are predictably falling into the trap of denouncing the move which just makes DeSantis' point for him about their Communist and socialist sympathies.

The bill, which DeSantis signed along with two street designations in honor of Cuban exiles, would require the instruction to begin in the 2023-2024 school year. It would require teaching of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro, as well as “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech” endured under those regimes.

“That body count of Mao is something that everybody needs to understand because it is a direct result of this communist ideology,” DeSantis said, noting that tens of millions of people died in China under his rule. “I know we don’t need legislation here to do this but I think it’s our responsibility to make sure people know about the atrocities committed by people like Fidel Castro and even more recently people like Nicolas Maduro.”

That comes as the DSA is holding a lovefest with Maduro.

Vice is already fuming that, "Florida teachers can’t say gay, but they are required to teach about the “victims of communism.”

"Acknowledging that queer people exist and have human relationships? Bad. Nuanced conversations about America and race in school and the workplace? Also bad. Nearly hour-long nakedly political lessons on the “victims of communism”? Good—and mandatory, if you’re a public school in Florida."

This is what actually going on the offensive looks like.

 

Daniel Greenfield

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/05/gov-desantis-mandates-teaching-about-crimes-daniel-greenfield/

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