Why compromise is unlikely in Israel’s crisis - Melanie Phillips

 

by Melanie Phillips

The protesters won't stop because they think they can bring Netanyahu’s government down

 

(JNS) The night before Monday’s Knesset vote on the first of the government’s proposed judicial reforms, a video filmed on the escalators in Jerusalem’s central train station went viral on social media.

It showed a great tide of people holding Israeli flags going down one escalator on their way back from protesting against the reforms in Jerusalem, and a great tide of people holding Israeli flags going up the other escalator on their way back from demonstrating in support of the reforms in Tel Aviv.

What was so remarkable and moving was that people on each escalator were leaning over to shake hands with those on the other side, in recognition of the importance of putting people before a cause.

This image deeply touched many who are horrified by the chasm that has opened in Israel over the reforms. Accordingly, there’s a desperate desire for compromise. Most Israelis want to check the powers of the court and legal officials. Most of them, however, want to achieve this by consensus.

Unfortunately, there can surely be no compromise with the main organizers of the anti-reform protests, because for them the real issue was never the reform itself. As was stated explicitly from the start by former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and others, the aim was to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

One of the main leaders of the protests is another former prime minister, Ehud Barak. An astounding video clip has now surfaced showing Barak in March 2020 addressing Forum 555, a group of retired Israeli Air Force pilots and navigators.

Three years before judicial reform was even a twinkle in the Israeli government’s eye, Barak detailed for this group a plan for a coup d’état that would overturn the Netanyahu government and install Barak himself as prime minister.

The plan involved inciting the civilian population to revolt by falsely claiming that Israel’s democracy was in danger, using buzzwords like "democracy" and "dictatorship" to mask their real intent, and bankrolling protests that would manipulate popular patriotism by such measures as the mass purchase of Israeli flags.

Such an uprising, said Barak, had to be presented to the public as a defense of democracy rather than an attempt to get rid of Netanyahu. “Democracy is a better dividing line,” he said. “Support for democracy penetrates deep into the right as well.”

He went on, “I have a friend who is a historian and who once told me: ‘Ehud, they will call on you [to lead] when dead bodies float in the Yarkon River.’ But I wish to emphasize that the bodies will not be those of workers who infiltrated from the ‘territories,’ nor those of Israeli Arabs. The bodies that float will be those of Jews killed by Jews.”

You really do have to rub your eyes at this. Here was a man who formerly served as prime minster, head of military intelligence and chief of the IDF general staff urging a mass insurrection and civil war that he believed would result in Jews killing Jews—because this would bring him to power.

When challenged about the video, Barak blustered that he also said he had told his friend, “It will not happen and they will not call on me.” It was also nothing new, Barak claimed, since he had “repeated this on live broadcasts at least three times in the past.”

So, Barak now just happens to be a leader of an uprising that fits every detail of the plan that he set out three years ago to mount a coup by misleading the Israeli public and enlisting them as useful idiots. Are we really supposed to believe this is just an astonishing coincidence?

The Barak video is virtually unknown in America or Britain, where the media hasn’t reported it. For the same reason, most Americans and Britons have never read the arguments of law professors who have spelled out the absurdity and legal illiteracy of the claims made by the protesters.

In Britain and America, Diaspora Jews are lining up against the reforms and parroting the Israeli opposition, usually due to ignorance, political prejudice and the instinct to grovel to the most powerful voices in the public sphere.

In Israel, the crisis has bitterly divided families and friends, reminiscent of the terrible divisions in Britain and America over Brexit and former President Donald Trump.

In each case, the left has been intent on thwarting the democratically expressed wishes of the majority.

In Britain, the left tried to stop Brexit because it overturned the “progressive” dogma that transnational institutions and laws must take precedence over laws passed by national parliaments.

In America, the left was outraged that the “deplorables” who wanted the restoration of American national integrity and pride had elected a man who pledged to deliver on that agenda and therefore, the left believed, had no right to hold office at all.

In Israel, most opponents of the reforms don’t find it outrageous that judges can invalidate government appointments, military decisions and policies of national significance.

All they see are the “wild men” of Israel’s governing coalition. Reform opponents have a point in saying the court is the only check on government actions, which is a problem caused by Israel’s dysfunctional political system.

But at least politicians are subject to elections, while the court’s powers are unchecked. As a result, Israeli democracy has been undermined by the unbridled power of unelected and unaccountable judges.

Contrary to opponents’ claims, the reforms won’t destroy the court’s ability to hold the government to account. They will return Israel to the constitutional balance that existed between Israel’s founding in 1948 and the 1990s, when the Supreme Court began to unilaterally expand its powers.

As a result of Monday’s legislation, the judges will still be able to strike down laws and block government actions. They will simply be unable to continue using the slippery criterion of “reasonableness” that has enabled gross judicial overreach and has no basis in legal principle anywhere in the free world.

The incoherence of the opposition was illustrated by Bret Stephens in this week’s New York Times. He conceded that the reforms have merit because Israel’s “unusually powerful judiciary” has arrogated powers to itself that were never democratically given and are elsewhere considered strictly political.

Nevertheless, he wrote, this week’s reform bill was a “true disaster” for Israel. This wasn’t because it was anti-democratic. If anything, Stephens said, “it is all too democratic, at least in the purely majoritarian sense of the word.” The disaster was that the reform risked depriving the country of the “fierce loyalty of its most productive and civically engaged citizens.”

So, Stephens’s argument appeared to be that because a key section, but not the majority, of the Israeli public has lost its mind on this issue, it is the politicians who are to blame for their reaction—above all Netanyahu, who is “trying to wangle out of his criminal indictment.”

Well, hang on. The judges presiding over Netanyahu’s trial for bribery and breach of trust themselves told prosecutors in June that the case had collapsed for lack of evidence and the trial should be stopped. Yet Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara let it be known that she would continue with the prosecution regardless.

This wasn’t an attorney-general exercising a check and balance on politicians. This was political vindictiveness on the part of Israel’s highest legal official, appointed by the previous government (In Israel, the incoming prime minister inherits the attorney general, while in the USA, a new president apooints a new one if he so desires, ed.)

In any meaningful democracy, Barak would be in jail for sedition. Israeli Transportation Minister Miri Regev has called for a legal investigation into Barak and Forum 555. But she sent her request to the attorney-general.

What do you think the chances are that Baharav-Miara will accede to such a request?

Quite. That’s precisely the problem the judicial reforms set out to address; and it’s precisely such an erasure of the democratic rule of law that opponents of the reforms are inescapably endorsing.

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, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/374818

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

The hypocrisy of Biden’s Left-wing opposition to Israel’s judicial reform - Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

 

by Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

What does Joe Biden have to do with Israel's court? In a sane world, nothing. Israel does not tell America how its court should work

 

Last November, the voters of Israel democratically elected — by a significant majority — a moderately conservative, center-right government that likewise is sympathetic to traditional family values. Just as the Left in America blazes forth with its worst venom against Blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas who are conservative, so they explode with extra hate against Jews who refuse to toe their Leftist line.

The American Left believes it owns Blacks and Jews. Other people are “up for grabs,” but Blacks and Jews will not be permitted to leave the plantation. The ADL is run by an Obama staffer. The American Jewish Committee now is run by a lifelong Democrat politician. And G-d forbid that Israel be overtly conservative and pro-religion, educating American Jewry that “progressive” Leftism is their foe.

In reality, authentic Judaism is not and never has been “progressive” or compatible with leftist ideology. Open a Bible for yourself and peruse the Torah volumes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Of course the Torah and Judaism are compassionate to the poor, the widow, the orphan, the peaceful stranger, and the downtrodden.

Such values are not the provenance of the Left. In fact, the Left distorts those values by teaching, contrary to the Bible, that responsibility for caring for the needy falls on Government, not the individual. In that way, the individual is excused from acting righteously and instead can advocate to pick the pockets of others, taxing others to fund over-staffed, over-salaried, politically appointed mega bureaucracies that create “social justice” (i.e., socialist) programs marked primarily by failure to reach truly deserving recipients and achieve declared purposes. Instead, public money gets frittered. Departments expand and bloat. Professionals game the system. And nothing structurally changes half a century later to alleviate deserving need where it actually exists.

Judaism is conservative and family-oriented. The Biblical values of compassion and caring — not virtue signaling — completely define the conservative worldview. Orthodox Jews, for example, are exceptionally charitable, aiming to provide a safety net for those truly needing it. The government’s proper role is in situations of catastrophic need for which government truly exists: to provide security from invasion and attack from abroad; to assure law enforcement, security, and domestic tranquility; and to assure the health and safety of the public guided by scientifically validated medicine. Conservatives expect government to assist at times of hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, and similar “Acts of God” (a legal term of art for such events). Likewise, to oversee the development and production of safe medicines and diagnostic devices. But not to become our parents. For that last purpose, we have other people: they are called “our parents.”

The same Left strangulation in America defines the Israeli Left. Throughout the country’s first thirty years, it was ruled by a socialist extreme-left order, left-wing media heroes like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, and Yitzchak Rabin. Those days ended in 1977. Israel changed with the election of center-right moderately conservative prime ministers like Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Shamir, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Its economy has exploded into a world-leading center of cutting-edge technology and more. And Jews throughout the world correspondingly have moved to the right. In England, the conservative party has received 69 percent of the Jewish vote. In Russia and Ukraine, Jews are the most anti-Communist of all, and one million who left Mother Russia have crushed the once-invincible Labor Party which hoped to receive their votes.

As Israel has moved to the right, the democratic will of its voters repeatedly has been stymied by a last vestige of the socialist order: a “Supreme Court” that operates as a government unto itself. Although it is called “Supreme Court,” it sees itself not only as “Supreme” when compared to lower trial and appellate courts but also as the “Supreme” ruler in the Land, capable of snuffing out Knesset laws and executive branch personnel at will.

The Israeli Supreme Court is an unrestrained separate government.

-Whereas American courts require a litigant to demonstrate he or she has “standing” to bring a case, Israel lets anyone bring a Supreme Court case, no matter how unrelated he is to the matter.

-In America, the courts are limited by the requirement that a case have “justiciability.” In other words, they may sit only on matters pertaining to law, not to outside things like, say, military strategy. An American Supreme Court can rule on the legal ramifications of the “War Powers Act” but cannot rule on whether a president, amid war, may drop a bomb or conduct a “surge.” By contrast, the Israeli Supreme Court has no reins to stop them on any subject. They even have issued orders as to who may sit for a rabbinical exam.

How have such judges gained such quasi-tyrannical control? By selecting their colleagues. America, for example, prevents self-perpetuation by having the president, elected by the public, name the judges and then the Senate, elected by the public, confirming. It works the same in American states, where governors name state judges and justices.

Not in Israel. There, the left-wing justices sit on the panel and replicate themselves. They hire each others’ kids to be their law clerks. The Chief Justice even has sat in judgment when her husband was employed by one of the litigants. And the panel includes lawyers who can practice before the judges they help select or reject when first nominated and again when up for renewal. How do you imagine judges treat those attorneys’ clients on cases before their Supreme Court?

So the newly elected Israeli government ran on a pledge to reform the Court and transform it from a separate government. As a first tiny “baby step,” they simply struck down one little itsy-bitsy thing: the “reasonableness standard.” Under that rule, the Supreme Court unilaterally grabbed power years ago to strike down anything they regard as “unreasonable.” That means they do not have to find any basis in law, any legal precedent — just their feelings. American attorneys know they must submit legal briefs citing established precedential law. That is why computer programs like “Westlaw” and “Lexis” exist, to help attorneys find case law and statutes they can cite. By contrast, in Israel an attorney can argue: “Your Honors, I know all previous judicial opinions on this subject over the past thirty years have ruled ‘No,’ but — c’mon, Your Honors, that’s just not reasonable.”

So the government of Israel, elected with a clear 64-56 majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats, just passed a law prohibiting the Supreme Court from handing down decisions anymore based solely on whether the justices feel something is “reasonable.” It is weird that something so obvious even had to be enacted.

And how has the Israeli Left reacted, now that left-wing justices have to adhere to actual legal precedent and statutory authority instead of their feelings? They have responded by rioting in the streets, blocking traffic on major highways, disrupting the country’s one significant airport, throwing bottles at police, setting fires, and threatening civil war. The mainstream Left Media are egging them on, reporting times and locations to appear for demonstrations.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak, one of Israel’s two most incompetent-ever leaders and now openly in the extreme-left Meretz Party, is calling for insurrection. He has not had this much fun since he was buddy-buddy with Jeffrey Epstein, meeting with him some thirty times, flying on his infamous plane, a “fixture at his Manhattan apartment.” Epstein-Barak Syndrome. And he is joined by Ehud Olmert, the single most incompetent prime minister in Israel’s history, who later served prison time for proven financial fraud and accepting bribes who now is begging countries to cut off support for Israel. Treason anyone?

What does Joe Biden have to do with all this? In a sane world, nothing. Israel’s leaders do not lecture America on how its courts should work. That is America’s business, and Israel stays out of it, as do all other countries. But Biden, as if he has nothing else to do, has been lecturing Israel’s government not to reform its extreme-left unrestrained Court. He is so involved that his comments on the saga appear daily in Israel’s newspapers. It is crazy.

And he now has begun using Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as his additional mouthpiece to publish op-eds repeating his messaging. He demands Israel “not rush” the Judicial Reform, even though the issue has been of public concern and debated publicly for more than threedecades.

Biden says Israel should not enact laws except by broad consensus even though that doddering hypocrite unilaterally has issued 115 executive orders to bypass Congress, and laws like his “American Rescue Plan” barely passed the House of Representatives by a whisker, 220-211 (51-49 percent), without a single Republican voting for it, and desperately required the Vice President to cast a tie-breaking 51-50 vote in the Senate. Biden has pushed so many one-sided uncompromised laws through the U.S. Senate without a single Republican joining that he has needed the Vice President to cast a record 31 tie-breaking votes. (When there is a tie in the 100-seat Senate, the Vice President casts the tie-breaker. Only John C. Calhoun of the 1830’s ever cast as many as 31 tie breakers, and he did so in the course of 2,856 days in office. Harris tied the record on July 13, now having cast 31 in 918 days.)

Biden the hypocrite likewise lectures Israel’s elected government to respect its Supreme Court even though he regularlyattacks and berates his own country’s High Court. Biden’s regular attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court have been termed “despicable behavior” by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy.

Biden is a bald-faced hypocrite.

But glimmers of light are penetrating. The guideline to follow: When Maariv, Yediot/Ynet, Haaretz, Kan 11, Keshet 12, Reshet 13, JTA, Times of Israel, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all report that Israel is ending democracy, it assuredly means the opposite: voters’ democratic will finally is being carried out. After thirty years of hardline socialism and the following 45 years during which, despite voters choosing center-right moderately conservative candidates, they still have been getting left-wing results, the society finally is chipping at the vestiges of its anti-religious leftist socialist swamp.

Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.

To receive Rav Fischer’s Weekly Extensive Torah Commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the Weekly Torah Portion, the Biblical Prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or Advanced Judaic Texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org

 

Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer

Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/374829

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Congress obligated to launch Biden impeachment inquiry after he 'clearly lied': Jonathan Turley - Fox News Staff

 

by Fox News Staff

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he is considering an impeachment inquiry over Hunter Biden deals

 

Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley argued Friday it is Congress' obligation to launch an impeachment inquiry against President Biden after he "clearly lied" to Americans about his involvement in his son Hunter's business deals. The GWU law professor told "The Faulkner Focus" on Friday that questions surrounding potential bribery "cannot go unanswered." 

CRITICS DOUBT WHITE HOUSE CLAIM THAT PRESIDENT BIDEN WON'T PARDON HUNTER: 'SURE, SURE...'

JONATHAN TURLEY: We often talk about the powers of Congress and not its obligations. What is the House supposed to do? You know, you have a president who has clearly lied, lied for years, lied to the American people, lied through his representatives at the White House during his presidency. He obviously did know about these deals. He had involvement with some of these meetings. There was money that went to China. And then you've got IRS agents saying that the fix was in, that this case was actively managed to avoid serious charges for the president's son. You have millions of dollars moving through a labyrinth of accounts. You have a trusted source saying that there was a bribery allegation. The crime that is the second one mentioned in the impeachment clause. So what are you supposed to do about that? And the answer is you have to investigate. And an impeachment inquiry gives the House that ability. It doesn't mean they're going to impeach. It means they're taking the responsibility seriously no matter what the administration may want out of this. The one thing the House cannot allow is for these questions to go unanswered. 

Video

 

House Republicans have floated launching an impeachment inquiry against President Biden amid newly surfaced allegations that suggest his involvement in the business dealings of his son. But can congressional lawmakers initiate the use of that constitutional tool for alleged treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors that transpired before holding the office of the presidency?

"The answer is clear," Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Fox News Digital. "No one knows."

Article II, Section 4, of the U.S. Constitution states: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

But it doesn’t specify whether those alleged actions need to take place during the time the official holds the office.

"The crucial impeachment language in the Constitution is not limited to ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ committed while ‘in office,’" senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation Hans A. von Spakovsky told Fox News Digital. "That language is not there."

Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy noted that "impeachment is a political process, not a legal one."

Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report. 

 

Fox News Staff

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/media/congress-obligated-launch-biden-impeachment-inquiry-clearly-lied-jonathan-turley

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Present, past and the Tenth of Av - Caroline Glick

 

by Caroline Glick

In the 18 years since the withdrawal, Gaza has been transformed from a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat. Their range covers most of Israel.

 

The Hebrew language—the language of the Jewish people—lacks a concept of history. The closest term to history is zikharon, or “memory.” Although both concepts—history and memory—relate to past events, they relate to those events and to the nature of time itself, in entirely different ways.

The concept of history involves thinking about time in a linear fashion. Time is circular in memory. History is the study of events that happened in the past. Memory is a process of absorbing past events into the present and the future.

Memory for Jews is a collective, national concept. For instance, we remember the Exodus from Egypt not as an historical event that happened to other people 3,400 years ago. We remember it as an event that happened to our people. And the imperative of Jewish memory is not to simply learn of the events of the past. Jews are commanded to relive them, to recall them and experience the memory as if we were there, and teach it to our children so the memory will be transported into the future.

This week we marked two days of national memory. One happened 2,000 years ago. The other happened 18 years ago. The first day—the Ninth of the Jewish month of Av, or Tisha B’Av, which we marked on Thursday—is the national day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

Friday, the Tenth of Av, is the day the government of Ariel Sharon forcibly expelled 10,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. The media, in particular, likes to overlook this day. It is mentioned in passing or with features about particular families that were expelled. Our collective memory of those events and what they teach us as a people are deliberately ignored.

For the past seven months, due to the left’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the right’s electoral victory and its right to carry out its plan to reform the legal system, Israel has been plunged into a deep domestic crisis. While the events of today are unprecedented in many ways, their closest parallel—or rather, antecedent—are the events that preceded the expulsions of the Tenth of Av.

In 2003, Ariel Sharon led the Likud Party to a landslide victory in the Knesset elections. Sharon’s opponent was Labor Party head Amram Mitzna. In the midst of the Palestinian terror war still raging at the time, Mitzna ran on a platform of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Sharon, in contrast, ran on a platform opposing all withdrawals.

Sharon knew well (as most Israelis did) that a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza would be disastrous. During the elections, Sharon coined the phrase Din Netzarim k’Din Tel Aviv. Roughly translated it meant, “As goes Netzarim (the most isolated, vulnerable community in Gaza), so goes Tel Aviv.”

In December 2004, Sharon stunned the country when he announced that he was adopting Mitzna’s electoral platform. “By then end of 2005,” he declared, “there will be no Jews in Gaza.”

A means to improve Israel’s security?

What followed were eight months of domestic strife and rancor unprecedented in Israeli history—until, that is, these past seven months. Between December 2004 and August 2005, the media ran a continuous campaign of incitement and demonization of the Jews of Gaza. Never mind that there was literally no truth whatsoever to its constant claim that the Jews of Gush Katif—the largest bloc of communities in Gaza, along the border with Egypt—were dangerous fanatics. Never mind that when the expulsions took place, fully a third of the cadets in the IDF’s male officers training course were residents of Gush Katif. Never mind that Gush Katif farmers were the most innovative, successful farmers in the country, or that there was virtually no crime there.

For eight months, the media subjected the public to something approaching a brainwashing program. Israelis were made to believe the 8,500 Jews of Gaza were demonic, parasitic thugs who forced Israeli soldiers to die just to protect them.

With the active support of the Supreme Court led by then president Aharon Barak, the Justice Ministry issued draconian orders to quell peaceful protests and delegitimize opposition to the expulsions. Buses carrying protesters to lawful, licensed protests were interdicted by police en route to the protests and forced to turn back. More than 6,000 Israelis were arrested protesting the planned expulsions—an average of 22 per day. As then-chief public defender Inbal Rubenstein explained in a Knesset hearing after the expulsions, the state prosecution, with the active collusion and support of Supreme Court justices, deliberately trampled the basic civil rights of protesters. They were collectively accused with no evidence against any specific suspect provided to the court. They were remanded to custody pending trial—for months in many cases—with no evidence of wrongdoing provided. Minors as young as 13 were held for months in jail without indictment. With Barak’s support, prosecutors justified their actions by saying that denying basic civil rights to protesters was necessary as a “form of deterrence,” to prevent others from joining the protests.

The expulsions and withdrawal were presented to the public as a means to improve Israel’s security. Gaza without Jews would become a new Singapore, Sharon’s top adviser Dov Weisglass insisted. The decision to adopt Mitzna’s plan was made by Sharon and his political consultants without any consultation with the Israel Defense Forces. The obvious fact—that Sharon ran an election campaign on just months before—that surrendering Gaza to Palestinian terrorists would endanger Tel Aviv was castigated as demagoguery.

In the event, Gaza became Afghanistan. Thirty days after the withdrawal, the Palestinians began their now 18-year projectile war against Israel by shooting rockets on one of the cities closest to its border, Sderot.

In the 18 years since the withdrawal, Gaza has been transformed from a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat. The Palestinians from all terror groups operating in Hamas-controlled Gaza field rockets, mortars and missiles. Their range covers most of Israel.

Israel has been compelled to fight a half-dozen mini-wars against Hamas since 2005 and carry out innumerable airstrikes. Iran has become the Palestinian terror groups in Gaza’s largest state sponsor. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps supplies Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror forces with missiles, mortars and money. They, in turn, do Iran’s bidding.

Who sets the national agenda?

So, 18 years after the Tenth of Av 5765, the main question that must be answered is why? Why did Sharon order the operation? Why did the left want it so badly?

These questions speak directly to our situation today. In regards to the left, the answer was given by leading writers both before and immediately after the expulsions. And it had nothing to do with security. It had to do with the same issues at the heart of the left’s protests today.

Six weeks before the expulsions, Haaretz ran an editorial explaining their rationale.

“The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism’s status will be different. The real question is not how many mortar shells will fall, or who will guard the Philadelphi Route [connecting Gaza with Egypt], or whether Palestinians will dance on the roofs of [the village] Ganei Tal. The real question is who sets the national agenda.”

In other words, Haaretz, speaking for the left, declared it was reasonable to undermine Israel’s national security to maintain the left’s power to set national policy. The best means to preserve that power, the Israeli newspaper argued, was by destroying religious Zionism through a program of expulsion and demonization.

Haaretz’s editorial board wasn’t alone. Opinion-makers from Dan Margalit and Ari Shavit to Yair Lapid jumped on the anti-religious bandwagon using their prominent positions in the media to gin up hatred for the 8,500 Jews of Gaza and their supporters.

Margalit called for the imposition of a numerus clausus against religious Zionists serving in the IDF. Strict limits, he wrote, must be placed on the number of religious Israelis permitted to serve as officers.

Lapid insisted that the Jews of Gaza weren’t his brothers and he wouldn’t have a problem going to war against them.

Shavit wrote the Jews of Gaza deserved no protection from the IDF because as far as he was concerned, they weren’t even Israelis.

So, for the left, religious Zionists—and regular Zionists, for that matter—were their enemy, not the Palestinians shooting their mortars at Israel. The goal of the expulsions was to defeat them in order to preserve the left’s power to dictate national policy.

And what of Sharon? The answer to the riddle of what motivated him leads us again to precisely the point we stand at today.

Just ahead of the 2003 elections, a prosecutor named Liora Glatt-Berkowitz leaked to Haaretz that Sharon and his sons were under investigation for bribery. When she was caught, Glatt-Berkowitz said she had hoped to swing the elections to the left by publishing the information.

Most of the people involved in executing the expulsion plan who weren’t part of Sharon’s inner circle agree that the bribery investigation convinced Sharon to take the step he knew would devastate Israel’s security. Sharon understood that the prosecution and the courts were dominated by hard-left ideologues. To convince them to go easy on him and his sons, he adopted their policies and helped them to destroy their enemies: his voters.

Moshe Ya’alon was IDF Chief of General Staff when Sharon announced the withdrawal and expulsion plan. Ya’alon is now one of the leaders of the left’s anti-government insurrection. But he saw things far differently in the past.

In his 2009 memoir, Ya’alon wrote, “I have no doubt Sharon’s decision derived from external considerations. When he found himself in personal distress because of the criminal investigations against him … Sharon decided to turn the tables and take a dramatic step that blatantly contradicted his worldview and didn’t jibe with his grasp of reality.”

Most historians believe that the destruction of the Second Temple wasn’t inevitable initially. The Jews couldn’t beat the Romans in a frontal battle. But they had sufficient stores of food in Jerusalem to withstand years of siege, during which they could perhaps exhaust the Romans through attrition. The destruction became inevitable, however, when a tiny group of fanatics called the Sicarii burned all the stores of food. The Sicarii wrongly believed that the Jews could defeat the Romans, but the only way to get them to do so was to leave them with no choice other than to fight. Hence, they burned the food.

The question in Israel now is who are today’s Sicarri? The left insists that the Netanyahu government is because it insists on implementing the judicial reform agenda it ran on. The right insists that the leftist elite burning the country in a bid to preserve its power and privilege protected by the judicial system are the Sicarri.

By preserving the memory of the events of the Tenth of Av 5765, we find the answer to the question regarding the Ninth of Av. Jews who want to prevent the destruction of the Third Commonwealth— the State of Israel—must remember that time and that day, and live by its lessons.

 

Caroline Glick is the senior contributing editor of Jewish News Syndicate and host of the “Caroline Glick Show” on JNS. She is also the diplomatic commentator for Israel’s Channel 14, as well as a columnist for Newsweek. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington and a lecturer at Israel’s College of Statesmanship.

Source: https://www.jns.org/jewish-and-israeli-holidays/tisha-bav/23/7/28/306213/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Stop the Marxist Makeover of the U.S. Military - Frank Gaffney

 

by Frank Gaffney

Biden's war on American national security.

 

It’s time we face an unpalatable reality. Nothing less than the national security of the United States hangs in the balance.

The truth is we are in the midst of the third Obama-Biden administration. The cumulative damage is incalculable as we are reaping the whirlwind of having elected in 2008 Barack Obama – a man who, in a moment of hubris-driven candor on the eve of his first presidential election, declared the incipient “fundamental transformation” of America.

As president, Obama did as much as he could get away with to morph the nation. Domestic policies eroded our constitutional order and the freedoms it guarantees. Remember his pronouncement that “I have a phone and a pen,” his pretext for taking actions he had previously acknowledged he could not legally do?

Among the worst of his enduring legacies is that, far from being the promised post-racial president, Obama deliberately and repeatedly exacerbated race-relations.

Obama-Biden 1.0 and 2.0 pursued foreign policies characterized by appeasement and emboldening of foreign enemies that dangerously diminished our nation’s standing in the world.  They brought us, for example: “apology tours;” unenforced red-lines; and disastrous initiatives like the Iran nuclear deal, embracing the Muslim Brotherhood which led to the toppling of friendly, if imperfect, Mideast regimes and acceding to the Chinese Communists’ seizure of atolls that would, in short order, be turned into bastions for their controlling the strategic South China Sea.

The first two terms also translated into the population of the government with a cohort of radical leftists. Many started out as political appointees but wound up as senior members of the permanent bureaucracy. From that vantage point, they were able to undermine, betray and otherwise stymie the Trump presidency and set the stage for a restoration of the Obama-Biden regime in 2020.

To those who would assert that Joe Biden is the President now, not his former boss, I would simply say: Really? It is no longer possible to ignore Biden’s obvious physical and mental incapacitation. Someone else is clearly running the U.S. government.

Barack Obama has boasted that the Biden White House staff is comprised of his people. The same is true of myriad individuals now serving in Cabinet and sub-Cabinet positions. And he previously expressed a desire to run things without having actually to be president.

What especially imperils our national security now is the fact that the subversive legacy of the previous Obama-Biden terms is becoming manifest in the U.S. military, as well. It is, arguably, the last national institution to undergo the Marxist makeover Barack Obama set in motion. But, thanks to officers aggressively promoted during his 1.0 and 2.0 presidencies becoming senior commanders, it is perilously devastating morale, retention, recruitment and readiness.

A particularly important and topical example is the current nominee to succeed the disastrous Gen. Mark Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Air Force General Charles “C.Q.” Brown. An accomplished combat aviator, Brown has in recent posts – including his present one as the top Air Force officer – become a champion of the full Obama-Biden transformational agenda, including: substituting racial quotas for the armed forces’ renowned, and necessary, meritocracy; social engineering to accommodate, among others, psychologically disordered transexuals; and the indoctrination of future military leaders with critical race theory.

To date, Gen. Brown’s disqualifying attachment to such radical notions has not been properly vetted by the U.S. Senate. During his confirmation hearing only two of its Armed Services Committee’s twenty-five members asked him questions that touched on his own positions, let alone the damage those so-called “woke” policies are doing to the military. An urgent request by thirty-one national security practitioners and other public policy leaders for Gen. Brown to be closely questioned about both thus went largely unheeded. With the Committee voting out the nomination last week, this seriously defective promotion now awaits final action by full Senate.

I suspect the reason for such kid-gloves treatment is that Gen. Brown is black. And many in the Senate and elsewhere are responding to the prospect of his becoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as we did Barack Obama’s candidacy for the presidency – namely, with the hope that it will banish racism. Sadly, as with Obama, Gen. Brown is certain to inflame it, instead.

As a shooting war with Communist China looms, this is no time to indulge in wishful thinking about bringing the full Obama-Biden “hope and change” bait-and-switch next to our armed forces. We must stop the military’s Marxist transformation now, and the place to start is by rejecting the appointment of C.Q. Brown to be its next top officer.

 
Frank Gaffney formerly acted as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. He is currently the Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy and host of “Securing America.” Opposition to the Brown nomination can be conveyed to your Senators at www.SecureFreedom.org.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/stop-the-marxist-makeover-of-the-u-s-military/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

At UN Security Council meeting, Erdan quashes Palestinian ‘right of return’ - Mike Wagenheim

 

by Mike Wagenheim

“Let me be clear: There is no ‘right of return,’” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said. “You all know this.”

 

Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations in New York City on Jan. 16, 2023. Photo by Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations had a blunt message for the Security Council on Thursday during its quarterly open debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Let me be clear: There is no ‘right of return.’ You all know this,” Gilad Erdan told the council, which he accused of perpetuating the Palestinian refugee issue.

“The demand of returning millions of descendants of refugees is a demand to obliterate the Jewish people’s right to self-determination,” he added. “This will never happen.”

The meeting marked the council’s 14th this year on the Israel-Palestinian file. Ordinarily, it meets monthly under this single agenda item.

Erdan blasted the United Nations and Secretary-General António Guterres, in particular, for criticism of Israeli counterterrorism operations in Jenin earlier this month. All 12 casualties were confirmed terrorists.

“The fact that the secretary-general chose to condemn Israel, a law-abiding democracy, as opposed to the bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists seeking to murder innocent Israelis, is a disgrace,” Erdan said. “Such remarks only embolden the terrorists.”

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, 2023. Credit: Christophe Licoppe, Audiovisual Service, European Commission via Wikimedia Commons.

Part of the international body’s critique of Israel centered on damage in what the United Nations calls a “refugee camp.” Erdan mocked that label.

“How can it be that after so many decades there are still refugee camps inside Palestinian cities?” posed Erdan. “Have you ever stopped to ask yourselves why the descendants of Palestinian refugees are still living in refugee camps? Why have they not been integrated into Palestinian society?”

“We are talking about camps in Palestinian cities,” he added.

Erdan called the scheme, which the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) perpetuates, a “brainwashing” of “generation after generation of Palestinians.” The latter is led to believe that they might annihilate Israel by eventually making their homes in Israeli cities, rather than settling permanently in Palestinian Authority territory.

Descendants of original Palestinian Arab refugees are the only people to which the United Nations grants refugee status. It uses no such identification for second- and third-generation descendants of refugees of any other conflicts around the world.

The United States noted that while the number of Palestinian deaths in conflict this year has already surpassed 2022’s total, “the number of Israelis killed by terrorism this year is quickly approaching that of the whole of 2022.” (Washington did not appear to differentiate between Palestinian terrorist and civilian deaths.)

Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, speaks during a Security Council meeting on July 27, 2023. Credit: Courtesy of the Israeli mission to the United Nations.

‘Counter all forms of violence and incitement’

Also at the meeting, Robert Wood, U.S. alternative representative for special political affairs, said that Washington expects the Palestinian Authority to clearly denounce terrorist attacks against Israelis. 

“We urge all parties to take proactive measures to counter all forms of violence and incitement and to ensure accountability and justice are pursued with equal rigor in all cases of extremist violence,” Wood said.

Washington is concerned by the number of injuries and property damage in Jenin but recognizes “that Israel took steps to avoid civilian harm during its operation,” Wood said.

Wood also applauded the Israeli government’s security cabinet decision this month to consider steps to prop up the faltering P.A. and steps the P.A. has taken to try to bring Jenin—a Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad hotbed—back under control.

“We encourage Israeli and Palestinian security forces to increase their cooperation to improve the security situation,” in Judea and Samaria, “including in Jenin and other areas that have been loci of violence,” he said.

Meanwhile, Egypt requested a conference to generate fresh political and financial support for UNRWA, which is struggling financially under the weight of decreased donations, inflation and the burden of adding to its “refugee” rolls each time a Palestinian is born.

Zhang Jun, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, affirmed the “just cause” of the Palestinians, best served through the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, which prevents funding, weapons and materials for terrorist activity to enter the Strip.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. Source: Twitter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to travel to Beijing later this year to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Separately, a senior U.N. official urged the Israeli government on Thursday to “heed the calls” of citizens protesting proposed judicial reforms and “preserve civil rights and maintain checks on power.”

Volker Türk, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, stated that he has been “following developments closely” in Israel and described the protests as an effort to “preserve the democratic space and constitutional balance so painstakingly built in Israel over many decades. It demonstrates the extent of public disquiet at the extent of fundamental legislative changes.”

Türk, who doesn’t typically express concern for the rights of Israeli citizens, also spoke out against the proposed judicial reforms in February.

At the time, he drew a rebuke from Netanyahu, who called the concern an “absurdity” and the U.N. Human Rights Council “a biased and ineffective body.”

Mike Wagenheim

Source: https://www.jns.org/israel-palestinianconflict/united-nations/23/7/28/306174/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Israeli Supreme Court to Decide Whether It Should Have Absolute Power - Daniel Greenfield

 

by Daniel Greenfield

This is beyond parody.

 

That’s how you know it has too much power.

Despite threats of civil war, a strike by major corporations and a medical association and every lie the leftist media could trot out, the Israeli parliament passed a law stating that the Supreme Court’s leftist judicial activists couldn’t overrule the government because it decided that the government was “unreasonable”.

The Israeli Supreme Court is a worst-case scenario authoritarian institution which self-selects its members and claims the absolute power to intervene in any case and override any decision by the other branches. It claims the power to take cases without any standing and has eradicated any checks and balances.

Leftists and assorted useful idiots have spent much of the year screaming that the Supreme Court, which exists only to suppress democracy, is the bulwark of democracy and that its power must be unlimited.

After the parliament passed the ‘unreasonableness’ law, the Supreme Court decided to rule as to whether it has unlimited power.

Israel’s Supreme Court has decided to hear petitions against the “reasonableness law” that the Knesset enacted this week, with a court date set for September, according to the NGO Movement for Quality Government in Israel.

This is beyond parody.

Democratically elected officials pass a law reducing the total power of an unelected and lawless branch of the government, and it decides that it will be the one to decide if it’s going to give up any of its power.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Israel would enter “uncharted territory” if the High Court of Justice struck down the Knesset’s passage of the first leg of his government’s judicial reform plan.

“We will go into unchartered territory, and I would like to believe that they would not do that,” Netanyahu said in an interview with CNN on Thursday, the latest in a series of at least three interviews he gave to major US news outlets.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Netanyahu if he would abide by a Supreme Court decision to dismiss the Knesset’s passage of that law as illegal.

“I hope we do not get to that,” Netanyahu said, as he refused to confirm if he would respect such a court decision, stating instead that Israeli would enter “uncharted territory and I would like to believe that they [the court] won’t do that.”

How about asking if the court will abide by the laws passed by a democratically elected legislature? But we already know the answer.

That’s why judicial reform is desperately needed.

The Left has used its institutional power, including in the courts, to block democratic change and nullify the power of Israel’s growing Middle Eastern, Russian, and Orthodox Jewish populations. It’s not a legal institution, but a mafia that represents a very specific set of interests, and answers only to itself.

The rioters fighting democracy claim to be doing so in the name of democracy. They’re not defending democracy, they’re waging war against it.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/israeli-supreme-court-to-decide-whether-it-should-have-absolute-power/

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

The West Is Importing China's Cultural Revolution - J. B. Shurk

 

by J. B. Shurk

Given how synchronized the Chinese Communist Party and the World Economic Forum continue to be, it appears that Schwab is more than willing to help China export its totalitarian police State across the globe

 

• The founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, routinely applauds China's surveillance State for its capacity to "nudge" citizens toward compliance. While China apologists turn a blind eye to the one-party communist State's continuing genocides against Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other minorities, they champion the machinery of China's technocratic totalitarianism as a model for the rest of the world. It is deeply unsettling to see a destroyer of civilizations held up as the future for global civilization.

• Schwab's influential organization seeks to recreate a Chinese system where a small group of elites bark orders and ordinary citizens dutifully obey.

• If the WEF were actually interested in projecting Enlightenment ideals, Western liberalism, and democratic norms throughout the globe, that unelected body of aristocrats would be doing everything in its power to convince Chinese leaders of the fundamental importance of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, the rule of law, and respect for privacy. That they do no such thing suggests that the WEF's loyalties are more aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's mandarins than Schwab's ideological followers are willing to advertise.

• Given how synchronized the Chinese Communist Party and the World Economic Forum continue to be, it appears that Schwab is more than willing to help China export its totalitarian police State across the globe.

• Excusing China's totalitarianism and handing the communist nation the keys to enriching itself from lucrative global markets may well prove to have been the most consequential foreign policy error in centuries. Instead of bringing greater prosperity for Americans, as then President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised at the time, normalizing trade relations with China has devastated the United States' once robust industrial and manufacturing self-sufficiency, impoverished blue-collar workers across the country, and left ordinary Americans dependent upon an often hostile geopolitical foe for critical raw materials and finished products.

• Rather than providing a mechanism for "democratizing" a closed communist State, bringing the world's economy to China's doorstep has only hardened its iron-grip authoritarianism, encouraged its regional saber-rattling, expanded its capacity to inflict harm on ordinary Americans, and cemented its geopolitical clout.

• It has been more than 80 years since the death of U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and once again appeasement of brutal totalitarian regimes is back on the table — all in service to that oft-elusive promise of global peace.

• If then President George W. Bush had known in 2001 that America's blue-collar workforce would be languishing today, that China would be killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with fentanyl while stealing American companies' proprietary technology, and that global institutions such as the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum would be actively promoting the Chinese Communist Party's technocratic surveillance State, perhaps he would not have been quite so eager to empower China through unfettered trade... Perhaps he would have acknowledged that China might well succeed in exporting its authoritarian philosophy around the world even more effectively than the United States exports freedom.

• China's "Cultural Revolution" already destroyed one great civilization; perhaps the West should reject importing a cultural revolution of its own before it finally becomes too late.

China's "Cultural Revolution" already destroyed one great civilization; perhaps the West should reject importing a cultural revolution of its own before it finally becomes too late. Pictured: A group of children reading Chairman Mao Zedong's 'Little Red Book', assembled in front of a portrait of Mao during China's Cultural Revolution, circa 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Traditional Chinese culture, thousands of years old, is filled with beautiful Confucian philosophies, kinship rituals, artistic symbolism, mythologies, and regular devotion to family ancestors. To observe any of these ancient customs in person, however, it is Taiwan — not China — where a visitor must go. When mainland Chinese communists bulldozed over China's rich heritage and Mao Zedong's "Cultural Revolution" purged the "Four Olds" — old customs, culture, habits, and ideas — from Chinese society, Taiwan became the de facto last refuge for one of the world's oldest great civilizations.

China's traditional way of life had survived thousands of years of intermittent civil war, foreign aggression, bouts of famine, and Western sabotage. When the virus of communism took root in its lands, however, China's vibrant history was wiped out within a generation. Two and a half decades ago, several academics made a laudable effort at calculating the costs of communism in the twentieth century in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. While that work capably catalogues how communist governments systematically murdered a hundred million citizens and tortured many more, it only begins to describe the immense destructive force communism has had on the Chinese people.

If Western Civilization had endured a similar "Cultural Revolution," it would be as if all of the great ideas from Greek democracy, Roman republicanism, Judeo-Christian theology, Enlightenment reason, the Scientific Revolution, and the preservation of individual liberty had disappeared overnight. Imagine deleting from history Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Locke, Jefferson, and every other thinker, writer, artist, inventor, and statesman in between. That is the depth of the cultural genocide communism has perpetrated against the Chinese people in addition to the tens of millions of victims slaughtered and expunged from collective memory.

It is bizarre, then, to see so many international institutions today looking to China for global guidance. The World Health Organization largely aped China's draconian COVID lockdown policies when promulgating containment procedures that affected every aspect of Western life. The founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, routinely applauds China's surveillance State for its capacity to "nudge" citizens toward compliance. While China apologists turn a blind eye to the one-party communist State's continuing genocides against Christians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and other minorities, they champion the machinery of China's technocratic totalitarianism as a model for the rest of the world. It is deeply unsettling to see a destroyer of civilizations held up as the future for global civilization.

That is, however, exactly what the WEF's "Great Reset" has in mind. For all its emphasis on science and technology, and despite its dazzling visions for the future, the "Great Reset" follows in the footsteps of China's cultural desolation. Schwab's influential organization seeks to recreate a Chinese system where a small group of elites bark orders and ordinary citizens dutifully obey. It chases a bleak existence where freethinking is viewed as "dangerous" and State dogma is embraced on faith. It wishes to construct a civilization devoid of lively culture where forms of artificial intelligence build out the world and human innovation wastes away. The "Great Reset" is a twenty-first century "Cultural Revolution" intended to purge the West of its "old ways."

If the WEF were actually interested in projecting Enlightenment ideals, Western liberalism, and democratic norms throughout the globe, that unelected body of aristocrats would be doing everything in its power to convince Chinese leaders of the fundamental importance of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, private property, the rule of law, and respect for privacy. That they do no such thing suggests that the WEF's loyalties are more aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's mandarins than Schwab's ideological followers are willing to advertise.

"The techno-totalitarian regime that the CCP is perfecting in China will not stay there," U.S. Rep. Michael Gallagher, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, has warned. "It's a model increasingly they want to export around the world." Given how synchronized the Chinese Communist Party and the World Economic Forum continue to be, it appears that Schwab is more than willing to help China export its totalitarian police State across the globe.

There is a sick irony to this turn of events. Around the time that The Black Book of Communism was laying bare the sheer horror of China's crimes against humanity, politicians in the United States were paving a golden path for the one-party police State to join the World Trade Organization and become a manufacturing powerhouse. One of the chief justifications for overlooking China's long record of human rights abuses when then President Bill Clinton and a bipartisan Congress granted the communist nation Permanent Normal Trade Relations status in 2000 was the dubious assertion that doing so would make China more like America. "The American people support this agreement," U.S. Rep. Bill Archer claimed at the time, "because they know it's good for jobs in America and good for human rights and the development of democracy in China." Two and a half decades of American job losses, continued Chinese persecution of ethnic minorities, and growing global power for the Chinese Communist Party have rendered that statement remarkably naïve.

Excusing China's totalitarianism and handing the communist nation the keys to enriching itself from lucrative global markets may well prove to have been the most consequential foreign policy error in centuries. Instead of bringing greater prosperity for Americans, as then President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised at the time, normalizing trade relations with China has devastated the United States' once robust industrial and manufacturing self-sufficiency, impoverished blue-collar workers across the country, and left ordinary Americans dependent upon an often hostile geopolitical foe for critical raw materials and finished products.

While American jobs are steadily off-shored to the other side of the world and American paychecks are spent on Chinese imports, wealth is drained from the United States and deposited as capital under the control of the Chinese Communist Party and its roaring military. China continues to skirt any international rules or norms that might hinder its expanding power or economic bottom-line. It has also utilized its trade routes to smuggle fentanyl and other deadly narcotics into the United States. Just as alarming, the CCP has also been smuggling groups of men of military age "in unprecedented numbers" — seemingly under orders to sabotage American infrastructure should the U.S. attempt to stop China from seizing Taiwan. A huge spike in Chinese illegal immigrants with confirmed ties to the People's Liberation Army has led U.S. Rep. Mark Green to conclude, "This is a concerted effort by the Chinese to destabilize the United States, to harm our society and to facilitate the basic execution of their version of the global world order."

Despite China's well-documented behavior as a currency manipulator and intellectual property thief, the International Monetary Fund has all but confirmed that it will soon accept the Chinese yuan for debt repayments. Rather than providing a mechanism for "democratizing" a closed communist State, bringing the world's economy to China's doorstep has only hardened its iron-grip authoritarianism, encouraged its regional saber-rattling, expanded its capacity to inflict harm on ordinary Americans, and cemented its geopolitical clout. The U.S. is essentially underwriting the Chinese Communist Party's barbarity, concludes Tony Perkins, former chair of the bipartisan United States Commission on International Religious Freedom: "China is actually more repressive today than they were two decades ago, and the reason is they can afford to be as American consumers fund their repression."

Politicians and trade representatives in Washington, D.C., may have believed that they could catch the Chinese dragon by its tail, but there is no question a quarter-century later that the fire-breathing beast has grown only more dangerous. Senator Marsha Blackburn bluntly describes the Biden administration's tendency to ignore China's bad behavior as delusional efforts "to appease a dictatorship that commits pervasive human rights abuses and oppresses its own people." It has been more than 80 years since the death of U.K. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and once again appeasement of brutal totalitarian regimes is back on the table — all in service to that oft-elusive promise of global peace.

Besides the destroyers of their own ancient civilization, what kind of people run communist China today? Well, they are exactly the kind of authoritarians that the Davos elite paradoxically decry when they extol the virtues of "democracy." China sends its spies all over the world to harass and intimidate dissidents who speak and write against the communist regime. It has placed million-dollar bounties on the heads of those who have voiced opposition to Beijing's takeover of Hong Kong. If "you pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party in any way," U.S. Rep. Carlos Gimenez has warned, "you'll be persecuted, you'll be in prison, and sometimes, you may even lose your life."

Many supporters of normalizing trade relations with China assumed only the best results and ignored the possibility of further empowering an untrustworthy actor. A year after Clinton helped to bring China into the "free trade" club, then President George W. Bush also argued, "Open trade is a force for freedom in China, a force for stability in Asia, and a force for prosperity in the United States." Ignoring the repercussions of feeding a dangerous beast, he continued, "When we open trade, we open minds. We trade with China because trade is good policy for our economy, because trade is good policy for democracy, and because trade is good policy for our national security."

Those were all commendable goals, but good intentions frequently bring disastrous results. If Bush had known in 2001 that America's blue-collar workforce would be languishing today, that China would be killing tens of thousands of Americans each year with fentanyl while stealing American companies' proprietary technology, and that global institutions such as the World Health Organization and World Economic Forum would be actively promoting the Chinese Communist Party's technocratic surveillance State, perhaps he would not have been quite so eager to empower China through unfettered trade. Perhaps he would have been more willing to consider whether democracy, stability, prosperity, and national security might ultimately degrade. Perhaps he would have acknowledged that China might well succeed in exporting its authoritarian philosophy around the world even more effectively than the United States exports freedom.

As many scholars on radical movements have attested, "Much of the activism currently tearing Western civilization asunder is driven by ideas that can be traced back to Maoism." China's "Cultural Revolution" already destroyed one great civilization; perhaps the West should reject importing a cultural revolution of its own before it finally becomes too late.

J. B. Shurk writes about politics and society, and is a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19825/importing-china-cultural-revolution

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter

Biden's Legacy: The Axis of Tyrannies - Majid Rafizadeh

 

by Majid Rafizadeh

A New World Order Dominated by China, Russia and the Iranian Regime, with North Korea Heading Up the Rear

 

• [T]he weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm.

• Iran, which has already declared a new world order, is, even beyond its accelerating nuclear weapons program, swiftly trying to reshape the world militarily and geopolitically wherever Western nations appear to be losing power. The Iranian regime also appears to be wasting no time indoctrinating it citizens with anti-Western and anti-American points of view.

• Since the Biden Administration assumed office in 2021, its vacuum of leadership in the Middle East has led to the increasing influence of China and Iran in the region; the decision by the Gulf nations to dodge the US and tilt towards China, and even to the China-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that further sidelines the U.S.

• "The Chinese have a strategy they've been following. We kind of wander around from day to day." – Former National Security Adviser John R. Bolton, WABC 770 radio, March 12, 2023.

• In November 2022, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed, "Death to America will happen. In the new order I am talking about America will no longer have any important role." The Iranian regime, now that it is aligned with Putin's Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, would probably be delighted to conquer the US.

• As the Biden Administration has unfortunately created a leadership vacuum throughout the world, its apparent risk-paralysis and feeble leadership seem quickly to be leading to a new world order led by the Axis of Tyrannies: China, Russia and Iran, with North Korea heading up the rear.

The weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm. Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation leaders' summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 15, 2022. (Photo by Alexandr Demyanchuk/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

"The greatest of all evils is a weak government," said Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the UK (1868, 1874-80)." This comment sadly brings us to the weak and possibly compromised administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which appears to have enabled and empowered the autocrats of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, all of whom seem to be working overtime to create a new authoritarian world order with themselves at the helm.

Iran, which has already declared a new world order, is, even beyond its accelerating nuclear weapons program, swiftly trying to reshape the world militarily and geopolitically wherever Western nations appear to be losing power (here, here and here). The Iranian regime also appears to be wasting no time indoctrinating it citizens with anti-Western and anti-American points of view.

"Biden has been the weakest president in modern history," stated former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, also one of the current Republican presidential candidates.

"Under his administration, we've had a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, an unprecedented border crisis, the worst inflation in 40 years, and an emboldened enemy in China. It's time to retire Joe Biden and make America strong and proud again."

Since the Biden Administration assumed office in 2021, the leadership vacuum it left in the Middle East has led to the increasing influence of China and Iran in the region; the decision by the Gulf nations to dodge the US and tilt towards China, and even to the China-brokered deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that further sidelines the U.S.

"We're sitting still, and the Chinese, the Russians, Iran, North Korea, and several others, are moving to shore up their relations and threaten us in a lot of different places," former US National Security Advisor John Bolton recently said.

"It's an indication that the Saudis and others are trying to hedge their bets with China and Russia, because they don't think the United States has the resolve and the fortitude necessary to do what they need to do to protect the world against Iran and its intentions. The Chinese have a strategy they've been following. We kind of wander around from day to day."

During the Trump administration, thanks to a policy of "maximum pressure," Iran was going through its worst economic crisis in 40 years . Although still reportedly being crushed by its own corruption and mismanagement, under the Biden administration, Iran's ruling mullahs are freely selling oil and violating sanctions with impunity. The US sanctions are no longer hurting Iran's economy or cutting off the flow of funds to Tehran.

Iran is currently producing more oil and selling it at levels close to the pre-sanctions era to countries such as China, which desperately needs more oil. Meanwhile the Biden Administration, in its first week in office, suspended new oil and gas leases on US public land, thereby enabling countries hostile to the U.S. such as China, Russia and Venezuela to enjoy an economic bonanza that may well have included enabling Russia to invade Ukraine.

With total disregard to the Biden Administration, the ruling mullahs of Iran have continued rapidly to advance their nuclear program to the place where they now reportedly have enough enriched uranium to manufacture five nuclear bombs. "Make no mistake, Iran will not be satisfied by a single nuclear bomb," Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said recently.

"So far, Iran has gained material enriched to 20% and 60% for five nuclear bombs... Iranian progress, and enrichment to 90%, would be a grave mistake on Iran's part, and could ignite the region."

In November 2022, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed:

"Death to America will happen. In the new order I am talking about America will no longer have any important role."

The Iranian regime, now that it is aligned with Putin's Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, would probably be delighted to conquer the US.

China, North Korea and Russia have also been building up their nuclear weapons. China may have even surpassed the United States in the number of nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). On February 21, 2023, the U.S. Strategic Command informed Congress that China now has more ICBM launchers than the U.S.

In January 2023, North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un ordered his country to carry out an "exponential" expansion of its nuclear arsenal as well as the manufacture of a more powerful ICBM. Russia has also been upgrading and expanding its nuclear arsenal.

As the Biden Administration has unfortunately created a leadership vacuum throughout the world, its apparent risk-paralysis and feeble leadership seem quickly to be leading to a new world order led by the Axis of Tyrannies: China, Russia and Iran, with North Korea heading up the rear.

• 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/19836/biden-axis-of-tyrannies

Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter