Assessing the Houthi Threat to Israel and the West - Lenny Ben-David

 

by Lenny Ben-David

The root of this evil is the ayatollahs of Iran, who fuel, finance, and arm its belligerent proxies.

 

The Houthi army, the Basij militia, and various drone models were on parade in Yemen in September 2023, one month before the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. (AlAhed News)

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Vol. 24, No. 23

• The Houthis of Yemen are well-armed with Iranian drones, missiles, rockets, and anti-aircraft systems. They are trained by Iranians and Hizbullah.

• Iran now directly engages U.S. Navy vessels and still yearns to sink a U.S. aircraft carrier.

• Authoritative U.S. Government agencies have published extensive photographs and proof of Iranian weapons in Houthi hands, but military responses to the Iranian aggression have been sparse and paltry.

• U.S. defense officials focus on the Houthi threat to international shipping and Israel but pay little or no attention to Iran’s immense support role in training, and providing weaponry, intelligence, and funding to the Houthis. And with the world’s attention diverted to the proxies’ wars, Iran’s nuclear enterprise continues.

• Will the relatively passive Western and Israeli responses to Iran (and the Houthis) change when the new U.S. Administration takes office?

The Houthis in Yemen are not a rag-tag, flip-flop-shod, bunch of goat herders chewing Qat, as once imagined and portrayed.

Today, the Houthis are a well-armed and dangerous army of more than 800,000 fighters threatening Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, the U.S. Navy, and international shipping, with drones, ballistic missiles, and rockets. International shipping is under the constant threat of Houthi piracy.

Houthi fighters – once. Now get this image out of your heads. (AP Photo/Hani Mohammed)

A high-ranking Pentagon official recently gave this assessment in October 2024: Houthi rebels are brandishing increasingly sophisticated weapons, including missiles that “can do things that are just amazing,” said Bill LaPlante, the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The Houthis “are getting scary.” La Plante continued, “I’m an engineer and a physicist, and I’ve been around missiles my whole career. What I’ve seen of what the Houthis have done in the last six months is something that — I’m just shocked.”¹

La Plante did not explain the source of the Houthis’ “amazing” missilry.

The Houthi military has earned the analysts’ epithet, the “Southern Hizbullah.” After the Israeli military campaigns against Hamas and Hizbullah, the Houthis remain Iran’s most viable and dangerous “resistance” proxy. Like the “Northern Hizbullah,” the Houthis view their mission as relieving Israeli pressure on Hamas. Houthis are likely to show up on Israel’s borders as Iranian expeditionary forces.²

Iran’s Expeditionary Proxy Force

Incredibly, U.S. defense officials focus on the Houthi threat to international shipping and Israel but pay little or no attention to Iran’s immense support role in training, and providing weaponry, intelligence, and funding to the Houthis.

Just weeks after Iran fired 200 missiles at Israel, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III gave this statement on October 16, 2024, on U.S. airstrikes on Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.³ Note the negligible mention of Iran:

Today (October 16, 2024), U.S. military forces, including U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers, conducted precision strikes against five hardened underground weapons storage locations in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. U.S. forces targeted several of the Houthis’ underground facilities housing various weapons components of types that the Houthis have used to target civilian and military vessels throughout the region. This was a unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified. The employment of U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bombers demonstrates U.S. global strike capabilities to take action against these targets when necessary, anytime, anywhere. 

For over a year, the Iran-backed Houthis, Specially Designated Global Terrorists, have recklessly and unlawfully attacked U.S. and international vessels…

Between 2015 and 2021, a “commercial” Iranian ship, the Saviz, was anchored in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen to provide intelligence and relay electronic signals. It served as a forward command post for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The Saviz was knocked out of commission in April 2021 by Israeli commandos and was replaced by the Behshad. The “civilian” ships were to relay Iranian transmissions to and from unmanned drones, conduct surveillance, and guide attack missions. It is suspected that the vessels also served as weapons cargo ships that broke down the cargo into smaller loads for fishing boats to smuggle ashore. After Houthi attacks on U.S. Navy ships in 2024, the Behshad left its anchorage in the Red Sea in January 2024 and sailed to a Chinese military harbor in Djibouti. The vessel, believed to have been “lining up” targets in the Red Sea for the Houthis, was reportedly hit by a U.S. cyberattack,⁴ and today, it is back in an Iranian port.⁵

The U.S. Defense Department has noted that the Houthis recently downed two of its super-tech MQ-9 unmanned combat aerial vehicles. The advanced $30 million+ killer-hunter drones were shot down in November 2023 and February 2024 by Houthi air defense systems. Supposedly, the systems were Houthi-made Saqr and Barq missiles, but the U.S. military knows the systems by their Iranian designation, “358. SAM.”⁶

An Iranian anti-aircraft missile by any other name is just the same – Saqr or 358. (U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency)

In late 2023- early 2024, the U.S. Navy intercepted dhow boats heading for Yemen loaded with 14 electro-optical trackers for surface-to-air missile systems, three ballistic missile warheads, five liquid-fuel type medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) engines, and one C-802/Ghadar-class Iranian anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM), called Mandab-2 by the Houthis.

International Institute for Strategic Studies chart. Note the origins of Houthi missiles. (by Fabian Hinz)

The Defense Intelligence Agency

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported “The Houthis assemble, repaint, and modify smuggled Iranian weapons and display them with Houthi names.”

A publication of the Defense Intelligence Agency, February 2024, shows with certainty the Iran-Houthi weapons cloning and sharing. The publication “provides a visual comparison of Iranian missiles and weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and those displayed and employed by Houthi forces in Yemen to attack civilian infrastructure across the region. Photos of weapons displayed and fired by Iran and the Houthis… strongly suggest their Iranian origin.”⁷

Already in 2017, U.S. UN Ambassador Nikky Haley provided a “show and tell” briefing to the press at a U.S. army base which “incontrovertibly” showed Iranian components in Houthi rockets.⁸

(DoD photo by EJ Hersom)

An embossment representing Iranian company Shahid Bagheri Industries was found on ballistic missile remnants on display at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Washington, D.C., Dec. 12, 2017. The missile remnants were from two Qiam missiles fired into Saudi Arabia by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in 2017. (EJ Hersom/DoD photo)

Iran Is Hunting for U.S. Navy Ships, Including Aircraft Carriers

The Pentagon confirmed on September 17, 2024, that several U.S. Navy ships fought off “a complex attack” by the Houthis against warships in the Red Sea.⁹

“I can confirm that no U.S. ships were damaged or hit,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters. “There were no injuries to U.S. personnel. We did see a complex attack launch from the Houthis that ranged from cruise missiles and UAVs.”

Subsequently, U.S. destroyers were involved on October 1, 2024, during the massive Iranian attack on Israel. And in November, Houthis attacked two U.S. destroyers sailing from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden through the Bab el Mandeb Strait.¹⁰

Iran’s elite military unit, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reports directly to Ayatollah Khamenei. In 2015, it held military drills in the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The target? A replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier.¹¹

Why would the Islamic Republic seek to engage a U.S. nuclear vessel?

For the prestige of sinking a $5 billion carrier, to kill the 6,000 American sailors and airmen onboard, and to destroy the 90 aircraft and weaponry on deck. As explained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy chief, “American aircraft carriers are very big ammunition depots housing a lot of missiles, rockets, torpedoes and everything else.” The Revolutionary Guards’ Adm. Ali Fadavi added that a direct hit by a missile could set off a large secondary explosion.¹²

Iranian Missiles Just Missed the USS Eisenhower

The Iranian Navy just missed its chance to hit a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower, in the summer of 2024. West Point’s authoritative Combating Terrorism Center at West Point revealed that an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) arrived at a very shallow trajectory, with minimal warning, without a chance for interception, and splashed down around 200 meters from the USS Eisenhower.¹³ In January, the USS Gravely missile destroyer narrowly avoided a missile strike by intercepting it with the close-in-weapons-system, Phalanx multi-barrel gun.¹⁴

The explosions on the Iranian mock aircraft carrier after attacks by Iranian speed boats and missiles.

The carrier model was built on several barges. Below is a photo of the barges’ unintended flipping.¹⁵

The Iranian replica’s hull flipped, fell apart, and sunk while being towed back to port in July 2020. (H I Sutton – Covert Shores)

A satellite image of Iran’s fake “U.S. aircraft carrier” with its phony aircraft before it embarked on its “mission.

Comparison of Iran’s fake carrier superimposed on a Nimitz-Class U.S. Naval carrier diagram.

It may be a coincidence, but in recent months major U.S. aerial engagements in the region have been carried out by land-based U.S. Air Force F-15s. In November 2024, a U.S. Marine Corps F 35C conducted the plane’s first combat strike from the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier against targets in Yemen.

Conclusion – “Limited Liability” Must End

Ultimately, all violence against the West, Israel, and freedom of shipping in the Middle East is traced back to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The “3-H Club” of Hamas, Hizbullah, and Houthis have killed thousands, brought perpetual war to the region. and virtually shut Suez Canal shipping. The assassination squads of the evil terror syndicate have hunted their enemies across the United States and Europe.

The root of this evil is the ayatollahs of Iran, who fuel, finance, and arm its belligerent proxies.

No revenge was carried out after Iran almost destroyed the Saudi oil industry with an attack on the Abqaiq facilities; the United States restrained Israel’s retaliation after direct and massive Iranian bombardments of drones, missiles, and rockets; American reaction to attacks on Red Sea shipping and U.S. Navy ships is mostly limited to defensive action; and the U.S. Administration responded to Israel’s initial and limited response to Hamas and Iranian attacks with a shameful admonition, [just] “take the win.”

Will the relatively passive Western and Israeli responses to Iran (and the Houthis) change when the new U.S. Administration takes office?

* * *

Notes

1. https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/laplante-houthi-antiship-missiles-iran↩︎

2. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240918-houthis-thousands-of-fighters-ready-to-go-to-lebanon-if-war-breaks-out/↩︎

3. https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3937640/statement-by-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iii-on-us-airstrikes-in-houthi/↩︎

4. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/us-conducted-cyberattack-suspected-iranian-spy-ship-rcna138638↩︎

5. https://www.ft.com/content/5fb8849c-b5b2-4f6f-908f-2c125159e3ce↩︎

6. https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Documents/News/Military_Power_Publications/Iran_Houthi_Final2.pdf↩︎

7. https://www.dia.mil/Portals/110/Documents/News/Military_Power_Publications/Iran_Houthi_Final2.pdf↩︎

8. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/258890/dod-shows-iranian-weapons-proof-tehrans-duplicitous-ambitions↩︎

9. https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3919899/deputy-pentagon-press-secretary-sabrina-singh-holds-a-press-briefing/↩︎

10. https://news.usni.org/2024/11/12/houthis-attack-two-u-s-destroyers-leaving-the-red-sea-pentagon-says↩︎

11. Iran Just Blew Up a Fake American Aircraft Carrier https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hayesbrown/iran-just-blew-up-a-fake-american-aircraft-carrier↩︎

12. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/world/middleeast/in-mock-attack-iranian-navy-blasts-away-at-replica-us-aircraft-carrier.html↩︎

13. A Draw Is a Win: The Houthis After One Year of War, by Michael Knights, https://ctc.westpoint.edu/a-draw-is-a-win-the-houthis-after-one-year-of-war/↩︎

14. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/houthi-missile-comes-shockingly-close-aircraft-carrier-uss-dwight-d-eisenhower-213258↩︎

15. http://www.hisutton.com/OSINT-Iranian-IRGC-Fake-Carrier-Breaking-Apart.htm↩︎

 

Lenny Ben-David worked for AIPAC for 25 years in Washington and Jerusalem. In 1997, he left to open an independent consulting firm, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tapped him to serve as Deputy Chief of Staff in Israel’s Washington Embassy. He is the author of the book American Interests in the Holy Land Revealed in Early Photographs, and he is completing his next book, Secrets of World War I in the Holy Land Revealed in Early Photographs. He is the Director of the Institute for U.S.-Israel Relations at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Source: https://jcpa.org/article/assessing-the-houthi-threat-to-israel-and-the-west/

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Bill Clinton speaks candidly about Israel's attempts to make peace with the Palestinians, through Yassir Arafat - Sally Zahav

 

by Sally Zahav

Bill Clinton, who had first-hand knowledge of all the parties involved and their various issues, speaks candidly about Israel's outreach for peace with the Palestinians

Hat tip: Dr. Carolyn Tal

 

Sally Zahav

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MtOovP_oEM

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New Super PACs blossom following Trump's victory, pushing America First ideals - Charlotte Hazard

 

by Charlotte Hazard

As a result of Agenda 47, more political action committees have been formed in support of dismantling the federal government's reach into Americans' lives and supporting Trump's agenda.

 

Following President-elect Donald Trump's recent victory, the "America First" crowd is fired up for another four years of the former president's first term. Some of Trump's goals include uprooting the federal bureaucracy and reducing the size of the federal government, resulting in him creating the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for his second term. 

The purpose of the DOGE is to downsize the federal government and will be led by Tesla owner Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. 

The pair will lead Trump's newly created agency intended for the sole purpose of eliminating unnecessary expenditures and programs. They explained their approach in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. "This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget," they wrote. "The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings."

As a result of this new upcoming agenda, more political action committees have been formed in support of dismantling the federal government and supporting Trump's agenda.

Some of the super PACs include the DOGE PAC, the 'Make America Greater' Super PAC and the 'Integrity Political Action Committee,' according to Politico.

Super PACs have been around for years and have supported both sides of the political aisle and these new ones are really expected to support Agenda 47.

PAC's that have supported Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign include Restoration PAC, Preserve America PAC and Make America Great Again Inc. As Trump ran on an "America First" agenda and used populist messaging, it is likely that these new PACs will have a similarly more populist take.

Congressman Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., said that there are lots of departments that should go in the next Trump administration. 

"I'm glad to hear the reports that are coming out – getting rid of the Department of Education," Rosendale said on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "I think you can get rid of the Department of Energy. I think you can get rid of the EPA."

Rosendale argued that a lot of states can have control over their own energy. "Every single state has their own department of environmental quality and they have standards that are already as high as the EPA sets for them," Rosendale said. 

"We have a legal system that provides for it and everybody has regulations in place to protect [it]," he added. "We should start getting rid of those agencies right now."

Charlotte Hazard

Source: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/hold-new-super-pacs-arise-following-trumps-victory-pushing-america-first-ideals

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Chabad emissary to UAE Zvi Kogan murdered in 'antisemitic terrorist attack' - Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Maya Gur Aryeh

 

by Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Maya Gur Aryeh

Mossad and authorities in the Gulf country had opened an investigation into Kogan's disappearance believing it may be related to “a terrorist incident.”

 

Chabad emissary Rabbi Zvi Kogan.

(photo credit: Chabad/X)

Authorities in the United Arab Emirates have identified the body of previously missing Chabad emissary Rabbi Zvi Kogan, the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Affairs Ministry announced on Sunday morning.

Mossad and authorities in the Gulf country had opened the investigation based on information that Kogan's disappearance may be related to “a terrorist incident.”

"The Israeli mission in Abu Dhabi has been in contact with the family since the beginning of the incident and continues to support them during this difficult time," the PMO and Foreign Affairs Ministry stated. "His family in Israel has also been informed."

"The murder of the late Zvi Kogan is a criminal antisemitic terrorist attack," the statement continued.  "The State of Israel will act by all means and bring the criminals responsible for his death to justice."

Investigating the disappearance 

Kogan, an Israeli-Moldovan dual citizen who lives in the UAE, has been missing since Thursday.

Chabad emissary Rabbi Zvi Kogan, November 23, 2024. (credit: via walla!)

“Israeli intelligence and security agencies are working tirelessly out of concern for Zvi Kogan’s safety and well-being,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office promised on Saturday.

Kogan's vehicle was discovered in a city about an hour and a half from Dubai, Ynet reported. Authorities suspect that he was abducted by three Uzbek nationals who subsequently fled to Turkey.

Information in Israel’s possession indicated that Kogan may have been under Iranian surveillance, reports said.

N12 reported that Kogan had entered the UAE on his Moldovan passport, which left authorities to contact the Moldovan embassy for support instead of Israel.

"There is great shock and anger following the absence of Chabad emissary Zvi Kogan. It happened after several years where there was no unusual security or nationalist incident," a source close to Dubai authorities told N12. "In the government system, they hope that something will lead to the discovery of the mystery and good news. Senior clerics and the government are working to verify and clarify the incident." 

Remembering Rabbi Zvi Kogan

Kogan had only been married for a little over a year before his death. Before moving to the UAE, he served in the IDF.

Former Minister Ayoob Kara said before the discovery of Kogan's body, "I have been accompanying the Chabad people since I arrived here in 2017, and Rabbi Zvi Kogan was one of them. I was with him at an event not long ago. This is a special rabbi with special connections. I know all of his surroundings, and he makes the State of Israel sacred. I hope for good news for the Kogan family as well."

In response to news of the death, Chabad wrote "With great pain, we share that Rabbi Zvi Kogan, Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Abu Dhabi, UAE, was murdered by terrorists after being abducted on Thursday."

They requested that a mitzvah be carried out in memory of Kogan.

🕯️ Baruch Dayan Haemet
With great pain we share that Rabbi Zvi Kogan, Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Abu Dhabi, UAE, was murdered by terrorists after being abducted on Thursday.
His body was recovered early Sunday morning, and his family has been notified.
Please do a mitzvah in… pic.twitter.com/UwKmGqu3YK

— Chabad.org (@Chabad) November 24, 2024

Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan Missing from Dubai.
Requests for prayers and added mitzvot in his merit:https://t.co/o3LgD7c4xy pic.twitter.com/bCnnnHX19y

— Chabad.org (@Chabad) November 24, 2024

Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan Missing from Dubai.
Requests for prayers and added mitzvot in his merit:https://t.co/o3LgD7c4xy pic.twitter.com/bCnnnHX19y

— Chabad.org (@Chabad) November 24, 2024

On Saturday, the Chabad HQ asked people to pray for his safe return.

"We ask everyone to keep Zvi haCohen ben Ettel in your prayers," Chabad posted on X/Twitter.

STATEMENT BY CHABAD-LUBAVITCH WORLD HEADQUARTERS

We are deeply concerned about Rabbi Zvi Kogan, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who went missing in the Emirati city of Dubai on Thursday.

Our emissaries are working closely with authorities as they investigate his disappearance.… pic.twitter.com/bS6komiSVh

— Chabad Lubavitch HQ (@Lubavitch) November 23, 2024

"I received, together with the entire people of Israel, the difficult news of the cold-blooded murder of the emissary in Abu Dhabi, the holy Rabbi Zvi Kogan, by vile murderers," Ynet quoted Religious Affairs Minister Michael Malchiali as saying in response to the news of Kogan's death. "My condolences to his wife, who worked together with him in acts of kindness and God's sanctification in their mission. In this difficult time, I am strengthening the hands of Chabad Chassidim and Chabad emissaries around the world. This criminal act is a wake-up call to take care of the safety of Chabad emissaries and members of Jewish communities around the world."

Israel has long commented on fears for the safety of Jewish and Israeli communities living abroad. Chabad had been a potential target for a recently thwarted attack in Sri Lanka.

Danielle Greyman-Kennard, Maya Gur Aryeh

Source: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-830438

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Honeymoon over: Abraham Accords tested as antisemitism resurges in Gulf - analysis - Seth J. Frantzman

 

by Seth J. Frantzman

Jews have understood over the last few years that when it comes to the West’s enforcement of “hate crimes,” Jews are usually the one group that doesn’t get protection.

 

Rabbi Zvi Kogan

(photo credit: SECTION 27A COPYRIGHT ACT)

The murder of Chabad emissary Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the United Arab Emirates represents the culmination of fears that have often crept up over the years regarding the targeting of Jews abroad by various enemies.

Authorities identified the body of Kogan, according to reports on November 24. "The Israeli mission in Abu Dhabi has been in contact with the family since the beginning of the incident and continues to support them during this difficult time," the announcement declared. "His family in Israel has also been informed."

Abraham Accords

This incident will have several impacts. First, it is already impacting the Gulf. Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords in 2020. It has now been four years since the first momentous flights began.

At the time, there were high hopes, and relations grew quickly. They grew in many ways, from tourism to business and also for the Jewish community in the Gulf. The growth came so rapidly, after many years in which the community kept a low profile, that many wondered if it was too good to be true. Indeed, the very public profile of the Jewish community in 2020-2021 was a honeymoon period.

Conflict in May 2021 in Gaza and then the October 7 attacks and other tensions in the region meant that there was a sense that the happy times of 2020-2021 were being put on ice, at least temporarily.

ANTISEMITISM ON display at the UK’s Free Palestine rally. (credit: CST)

Over the last four years there has been a lot of talk about extending the Accords to include Saudi Arabia. The election of Donald Trump this month is expected to put more wind in the sails of a possible deal. However, Israel’s enemies have shown that they are willing to burn down the region in order to prevent normalization.

Iran, Hamas, and other countries have opposed the Abraham Accords. For instance, Turkey threatened to break relations with the UAE in 2020 if the UAE normalized ties with Israel. Ankara is one of the most hostile countries to Israel in the world today. Hamas was hosted in Doha and may now be hosted in Ankara. Doha is also hostile to Israel and did not join the Accords.

Opposition to the Abraham Accords doesn’t necessarily lead to attacks on Jews, however in the wake of the October 7 attack there have been rising attacks on Jews around the world. These attacks are often fueled by Iran, Hamas and groups that are linked to them.

Some of the groups may pose as progressives in the West, but their overall milieu is one that is linked to Hamas and Iran. For instance, a recent anti-Israel protest in Canada included images of a nazi salute and a woman calling for the “final solution.” In addition, a Jewish man on his way to synagogue was shot in Chicago in a hate crime in October.

Global effort of antisemitism 

What we have come to understand since October 7 is how there is a global effort to fan the flames of anti-semitism. This is linked to numerous sources and influences. There are online social media personalities who have built up followings and used the Gaza war to spread hate against Jews. There are voices linked to Qatar and Moscow. Student activists on college campuses in the West rip down posters of the hostages.

Much of this global attack on Jews was visible in 2021 during the brief 10-day conflict with Hamas. During that war, which was likely a dry-run for the October 7 attack, mobs were unleashed in the West to harass Jews and threaten to rape Jewish women.

The UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) quietly dropped charges against two of the men who participated in a convoy of cars that drove around Blackburn in northern England, shouting antisemitic slogans and threatening to rape women.

Jews have understood over the last few years that when it comes to the West’s enforcement of “hate crimes,” Jews are usually the one group that doesn’t get protections. In many cases, the community has to work harder to get basic justice when Jews are targeted. Jews are more likely to be targeted with violent hate crimes than another minority group in most Western countries.

In the Middle East, Jews have always felt threatened over the last decades. The pervasiveness of anti-semitism in most of the countries in the region is clear. In many countries, whenever there is an “enemy” or a “conspiracy” that is told, it is Jews who are said to be behind it.

For instance, former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak was recorded saying that the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt would mean “Qatar will bring American Jews” to Egypt, and he alluded to a conspiracy that “Jews” are behind Ethiopia’s Nile valley dame.

During the overthrow of Muammar Qadafi, some posters depicted him with a Star of David, insinuating he was either secretly Jewish or a “Zionist.”

Sometimes, the anti-semitism and anti-Israel views, which are entwined, are more subtle. When the Kurdistan region sought a referendum for independence in 2017, both Iran and Turkey spread rumors that Kurdistan would be a second Israel.

Peace between Egypt in the 1980s and Jordan in the 1990s did not bring tolerance for either Israel or Jews in the region. Anyone who has travelled in the region has run into the pervasive anti-Jewish, anti-Israel views that are meshed together.

In some cases, western media has sought to cover this up, for instance, translating curses against “Jews” or “Yahud” as being against Israel. This is the method used to cover up the street-level populist hatred of Jews that has been cultivated in the Middle East for decades and pretend that many people merely dislike “Israelis” or “Zionists.”

The fact is that many people in the region have been raised to hate Jews. For them, Israel is “the Jew,” and killing or hating Jews and killing Israelis is generally synonymous. This is the reason most anti-Israel social media accounts in the region will refer to the killing of Israelis in all areas of Israel as “settlers.”

The goal is to “other” all Israelis. It doesn’t matter if Israelis live in Tel Aviv or Efrat, for many of the anti-Israel voices they are “settlers” and “Jews” and attacking or killing them is justified as “resistance.”

After the Abraham Accords, many of us who believed in peace wanted to hope that this trend might shift. It might be possible that the decision by authorities in the region to educate people to be anti-Israeli and anti-semitic might shift if the countries in the region saw that this was not a profitable trend in their interest.

Many regimes used antisemitism and “anti-Zionism” to stay in power. Therefore if they saw the fruits of peace from the Accords, perhaps they would shift to see coexistence as in their interests.

The struggle for the Accords was that while they got off to a great start in the UAE and Bahrain, and to some extent in Morocco, the enemies of the Accords were powerful lobbies such as Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In early 2021, when the Biden administration was coming into power, far-right media in Turkey published an article detailing all the Jews in the administration, as if to promote a kind of Elders of Zion take on American politics, wrapped in Turkish-Islamist conspiracies.

Target in the UAE 

This brings us back to the apparent targeting and murder of Kogan in the UAE. The initial statement by authorities referred to a “missing Moldovan citizen.” The concern with saying that Kogan was Israeli or a rabbi is clear in these initial reactions.

Now, many questions will be raised about how he was killed, whether the perpetrators escaped, and, if so, how. What is clear is that this killing will likely change many things. It is one of many threats to Jews in the region as well as Iranian-backed plots.

These plots have spanned the region from Azerbaijan to Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. In addition, an Israeli-Russian researcher named Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped in Iraq in 2023. This should have set off alarm bells at the time.

After October 7, her kidnapping has been underreported because of the sheer volume of attacks on October 7 and the kidnapping of 250 people to Gaza, 101 of whom are still held there. 

Seth J. Frantzman

Source: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-830452

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Inside Trump’s Second-Term Mission to Dismantle the Administrative State - Roger Kimball

 

by Roger Kimball

In his second term, Donald Trump, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, plans to dismantle the administrative state by cutting bureaucracy, enforcing accountability, and slashing costs.

 

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

Around the time that Donald Trump took office the first time in January 2017, his chief strategist Steve Bannon said that one of his primary goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” In the event, Trump’s first term managed only to nibble around the edges of the administrative state. Why? For one thing, Trump, the political outsider, was unprepared for the adamantine wall of resistance he would face from the entrenched Washington bureaucracy. It was, by the way, the same bureaucracy that harassed, investigated, impeached, indicted, and attempted to imprison him. It also worked overtime to upset any serious reforms he attempted.

During his first term, Trump made a yeoman’s effort to unwind the regulatory behemoth that our government had become. He did roll back some bits of the regulatory burden that had increasingly stymied the institutions of civil society. He even made some important moves to extract certain pieces of the governing apparatus from the smothering, nearly 100-percent-left-progressive Geist of Washington. For example, David Bernhardt, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, actually managed to move important parts of his agency out of Washington to, well, to the interior, where it belongs. He recounts his efforts in You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State (2023). Predictably, though. Bernhardt’s good work was instantly undone by executive order when Joe Biden came to power in 2021.

The same can be said about much that Donald Trump accomplished in his efforts to tackle the administrative state in his first term.

I am confident that things will be very different in Trump’s second term. For a brief but rousing explanation of why I think things will be different, and better this time, I recommend the brief but scintillating essay in The Wall Street Journal by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy called The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.

As all the world knows, Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by President Trump to lead a new, blessedly temporary initiative called “The Department of Government Efficiency.” Their announced end date is July 4, 2026, by which time they hope to make some important inroads against the federal debt (currently an eye-watering and unsustainable $35 trillion dollars), cut billions in governmental expenditures, and fire many tens of thousands of timeservers on the government, which means the taxpayer, payroll.

Musk and Ramaswamy begin as I did, by noting that “most legal edicts” in America today are not

laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This self-engorging, self-perpetuating monster represents “an existential threat to our republic,” Musk and Ramaswamy argue. They are right. And it is refreshing to see that they come not with white papers and committee recommendations but with real, implementable, enforceable proposals for reform. “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they explain. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

How? First, by identifying and hiring “a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

In the background, helping to enable this work, are two important Supreme Court decisions. The first is West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), which says that agencies may not impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. The second is Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), which overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine under which federal courts were to “defer” to the interpretation of the law promulgated by the regulatory agencies.

Won’t a future president be able to nullify what reforms DOGE actualizes by countermanding executive orders? No, because Congress will once again be put in the driver’s seat, as the Founders intended. “The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront,” Musk and Ramaswamy note, “but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.” (My emphasis.)

This dismantling of the regulatory octopus will enable the real goals of DOGE, beginning with “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” i.e., mass firings. “The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.” Won’t that simply swell the ranks of the unemployed? Not if it is done right. “Employees whose positions are eliminated,” Musk and Ramaswamy write, “deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector.”

Musk and Ramaswamy go into some detail about how they would accomplish this huge but delicate surgery. The end or telos of their labors is “delivering cost savings for taxpayers.” The list of agencies, private as well as public, that are currently supping at the government’s trough is long and expensive. Musk and Ramaswamy list just a few candidates for removal from the federal gravy train. There are currently more than $500 billion in annual federal expenditures that are not authorized by Congress, “from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.” Cut them all.

Musk and Ramaswamy end by taking aim at the government’s broken procurement process. The Pentagon, which just failed its seventh annual audit, presides over a budget of some $800 billion but cannot account for how it spends the money.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory on November 5 gives him a rare mandate for change. The initiatives outlined by Musk and Ramaswamy are an important part of the MAGA agenda. They are right that Trump’s victory presents them with a “historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” Yes, there will be a furious “onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington.” The regime does not like change, especially when it threatens their perquisites. Expect the bureaucrats to fight tooth and claw to oppose DOGE. Musk and Ramaswamy say they understand what they are up against. They say further that they are prepared for the battle and “expect to prevail.” It won’t be easy. But as Spinoza observed, Sed omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

Roger Kimball

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/24/inside-trumps-second-term-mission-to-dismantle-the-administrative-state/

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Sen. Ron Johnson threatens legal action to get COVID-19 vaccine data - Thérèse Boudreaux

 

by Thérèse Boudreaux

Your agencies’ refusal to provide complete and unredacted responses and documents to my numerous oversight letters on the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines has hindered Congressional oversight and has jeopardized the public’s health,” Johnson wrote.

 

(The Center Square) -

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has threatened to issue a subpoena when he becomes chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations if three federal health agencies continue to withhold data on the adverse health effects wrought by the COVID-19 vaccine.

In a letter addressed to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services, Johnson demanded that the agencies preserve all records referring to the development, safety, and side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, and to produce the records without redactions by Dec. 3.

“While your agencies have largely ignored or failed to fully cooperate with my oversight efforts, I can assure you that your obstruction will soon come to an end,” Johnson wrote Tuesday. “Your agencies’ refusal to provide complete and unredacted responses and documents to my numerous oversight letters on the development and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines has hindered Congressional oversight and has jeopardized the public’s health.”

Johnson has requested full versions of three sections within a FOIA from May 2021, which the CDC so heavily redacted that no scientific data was revealed.

One of the sections revealed that then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky received Pfizer data regarding the number of myocarditis cases associated with the vaccine, though the 14-page document is completely redacted except for the cover page.

Other data requested in full by Johnson consists of emails within the CDC, showing that officials initially planned to send out a Health Alert Network message to the public about the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis associated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Johnson reiterated his request that the CDC release all communications and briefings regarding the decision not to issue the HAN, which he originally asked for in January.

He also demanded to see the completely redacted 17 pages of apparent COVID-19 talking points that the Biden White House sent out to the America's top public health officials.

“What is clear from these excessive redactions, however, is a concerted effort to obscure Congress’ and the public’s understanding of your agencies’ detection of and response to COVID-19 vaccine adverse events such as myocarditis and pericarditis,” Johnson concluded. “Ultimately, despite your agencies’ awareness of the risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccines, the main talking point from these and other public health officials was uniform and entirely deceptive: the vaccines are safe and effective.”

Johnson, ranking member of the committee for a short time longer until the majority flips from Democrats to Republicans with seating of the 119th Congress, has sent more than 60 public letters to federal agencies regarding the origins and treatment of the COVID-19 virus.

His demands come as the GOP-led House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report showing the Biden administration spent $900 million promoting faulty health messaging around the COVID-19 virus and vaccines.

 
Thérèse Boudreaux

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/johnson-threatens-legal-action-get-covid-19-vaccine-data

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Almost 1 in 5 young French people think Jews leaving country would be good, CRIF finds - Mathilda Heller

 

by Mathilda Heller

"Young people are more receptive to antisemitic, Islamist and conspiracy theories, which are invading social networks," said Jonathan Arfi.

 

People attend a demonstration against anti-Semitism at the Place de la Bastille, in Paris, France, June 20, 2024.

(photo credit: REUTERS/Johanna Geron)

Almost 1 in 5 young people in France think it would be a good thing if Jews left the country, according to a recently commissioned survey by CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) and carried out by IPSOS.

The survey - named "The French View of antisemitism and the Situation of French Jews in 2024" - was published for the first time in Le Point on Thursday. 

“There has been an upheaval in the types of French people who express anti-Jewish opinions,” Brice Teinturier, deputy CEO of Ipsos, told Le Point.

"It's a historical reversal of the political map," added Brice Teinturier. "LFI [Le France Insoumise] is now competing with the far-right for leadership in antisemitism." 

Views of Jews in France

Among the key revelations are that 12% of the general population in France believe Jews leaving the country is a good thing, compared to 6% in 2020. As mentioned, 17% of under-35s believe this would be a good thing.

‘All the security is not a normal life,’ Rabbi Moshe Sebbag told The Jerusalem Post as French Jews face an uncertain future. (credit: ALAIN AZRIA)

"It is very violent, and contrary to the historical trend," said the president of CRIF, Jonathan Arfi. "Young people are more receptive to antisemitic, Islamist and conspiracy theories, which are invading social networks."

Only 53% of French people between the ages of 18-24 felt that Jews were integrated into French society.

However, 68% of respondents felt they had positive or very positive relations with Jewish people, whereas only 55% felt they had positive relations with Muslims.

One question asked what the reactions would be to seeing certain types of people on the street. Most respondents were indifferent to seeing men in traditional Jewish garb, and Jews wearing a kippah. Only 5% of people said they felt nervous seeing this.

40% felt nervous or annoyed seeing people wearing a keffiyeh, and a 3/4 had adverse reactions to seeing women in a full burqa.

Views on antisemitism

In terms of harbored prejudices against Jews, a majority of respondents felt Jews were more attached to Israel than to France.

The next highest-held anti-Jewish stereotypes were: Jews have very powerful lobbies that operate at high levels; Jews use the Holocaust to achieve their interests; Jews are richer than the average French person; and Jews are too present in the banking sector.

Less commonly held stereotypes included that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, Jews had too much power, and Jews controlled the media.

When asked if they agreed with sixteen different antisemitic opinions on Jews, 27% of respondents agreed with 3-5 of them. 

46% held six or more antisemitic opinions - an increase from 37% in 2020.

Only 3% of French people held none.

Regarding demographics, the age bracket with the highest antisemitic views was 25-34. In general, the people who held such views had a lower level of education. 

Politically, 55% of those holding such views were supported by Le France Insoumise.

In positive terms, 89% of respondents said there was no excuse for antisemitic words or actions, and 85% said that Jews are French just like anyone else.

79% said antisemitism was widespread in France, and only 2% felt it wasn't. 70% felt antisemitism was increasing.

There was a general understanding among respondents that if Jews left to go to Israel or other countries, it was because of rising antisemitism (63%).

Interestingly, 16% felt that Jews were responsible for rising antisemitism. 

30% felt too much importance was given to Holocaust remembrance. This as highest among those voting LFI.

“LFI has given antisemitism a political legitimacy,” Jonathan Arfi told Le Point.

“We observe this toxic porosity between criticism of Israel and the ostracization of French Jews. The Palestinian cause becomes a license to hate.”

Stance on Israel

Another key finding was that, in general, more people had a positive view of Israel than of Palestine, with 21% viewing Israel positively, as opposed to 18% for Palestine.

While the majority of people (75%) viewed Israelis positively, only 26% viewed the Israeli government positively. 51% viewed the state of Israel negatively

88% of those who voted for LFI felt the state of Israel was aggressive.  

Of those who were aware of the BDS movement, 62% felt it was in place as a way of damaging the image of Israel. Only 38% felt it was legitimate.

More people held sympathy for Israel (47%) over Palestine (40%) in the conflict. 2/3 viewed Hamas as a terrorist organization. 

Among LFI voters, 25% expressed sympathy for Hamas.

75% felt the war in Israel-Gaza was responsible for the rise in antisemitism in France.

CRIF is set to hold its 14th convention on Sunday in the presence of Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

Mathilda Heller

Source: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-830421

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Among the media watchdogs, NewsGuard, which often targets conservative outlets, is most feared - Paul Bond

 

by Paul Bond

Unlike the other media watchdogs, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its rating.

 

(This story is the second in a four-part series this month by Just the News on watchdogs who promote censorship.)

Part of President-elect Donald’s Trump plan to rein in censorship, which he disclosed on Nov. 9, involves tweaking section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Section 230 gives social media companies liability immunity for user posts, though Trump wants it to apply only to those with “high standards of neutrality,” not just those who appear to routinely take down posts that lean conservative.

Without calling out by name Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or a legacy media, Trump referred to “a sinister group of deep-state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media.”

Coinciding with Trump’s bold plan, Just the News has launched a four-part series exploring the media watchdogs who censor.

In the first part of this the series, we explored the Trusted News Initiative. In this second installment, we look at NewsGuard.

NewsGuard

Unlike the other media watchdogs in this series, NewsGuard is a for-profit company, making money in a variety of ways that include licensing its ratings, dubbed “Nutrition Labels,” that search engines and Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, use to warn users against news sources NewsGuard deems unreliable.

For $4.95 a month, consumers can attach NewsGuard’s nutrition labels to all of their Internet search results, allegedly so that they’ll know if what they are reading is true or not, based on the opinions of the dozens of researcher/journalists the company employs. 

Tellingly, NewsGuard doesn’t disclose who those journalists are, their credentials or the political parties with whom they are aligned but penalizes media outlets for the same perceived lack of transparency.

In the five years since its founding, NewsGuard has ingrained itself into schools, libraries and hospitals, and it has struck contracts with the Defense Department (though the company told Just the News it does not currently generate revenue from the government). 

Among its products is BrandGuard, used by advertisers and the agencies that represent them, to ensure their ads don’t appear alongside news stories and at media outlets to which NewsGuard assigns a low rating.

Thus, it wields unusual power for such a young company, given that media outlets that get a low grade will most likley suffer a decline in traffic and advertising revenue. 

Its claim of nonpartisanship, though, appears dubious, given its team of human fact-checkers rarely deviate from the legacy media’s approved narrative, and outlets that stray – often conservative ones – are more often than legacy ones given lower marks.

Thus, right-leaning outlets such as Breitbart News and the Daily Wire score Nutrition Labels of just 49.5%, while The Washington Post scores 100%. 

That perfect rating stands in contrast to the august newspaper insisted for months – until after the election – that first son Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake; appeared to frame stories to insinuate that Trump was acting as an agent for Russia during his first term as president; and dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. All these turned out to be false.

Insiders at multiple media outlets told Just the News that many companies arbitrarily choose a 70% NewsGuard rating as a minimum threshold before they’ll consider buying an ad, notably just above the 69.5% rating it gives to Fox News. NewsGuard, though, told Just the News that 60% is a more common threshold. 

The Nutrition Labels are based on several categories including: false or misleading content; how an outlet gathers and presents news responsibly; effective practices for correcting errors; avoiding deceptive headlines; the disclosures of ownership and financing, potential conflicts of interest; whether advertising is clearly labeled; whether the names of an outlet's content creators are disclosed and their biographies are provided; and how an outlet handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly. 

The New York Times lost 12.5 points in that latter category, depriving it of a perfect score.

“It’s nuts. They hold different outlets to different standards,” said one media executive who has dealt with NewsGuard. Indeed, media insiders pointed out that while the Daily Beast was penalized for reporting that Biden’s laptop was likely fake, more traditional outlets like The Post and The New York Times were not.

“It’s not an unbiased tool. It’s arbitrary categories with arbitrary weighting from people who think they know best because they were once journalists,” the media insider also said. “It’s terrible to begin with, and a shame it ever got traction.”

Just the News asked NewsGuard why, if the disclosure of financing is important, does it not take into account revenue from advertisers, given how often media companies are accused of bias in favor of pharmaceutical companies, for example, because they are the nation’s largest buyer of ads.

NewsGuard replied: “Simply receiving some ads from an industry that a site also covers, among many other ads from other industries, would not cause a site to lose points.”

NewsGuard told Just The News that it employs 40 "analysts" to rate news outlets. It wouldn’t say whether more are Democrats or Republicans, though an insider familiar with the situation estimates 65% lean left.

NewsGuard also argues many conservative outlets score higher than liberal ones, using as an example Fox News' 69.5% compared to MSNBC's 49.5%.

Bullying as a business model

NewsGuard also pointed out that co-CEO Gordon Crovitz is a long-time conservative writer for The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation and Regnery Publishing. 

If a media outlet scores poorly, NewsGuard will tell it what to do to raise its rating. 

Sometimes the advice is ambiguous. One media executive told Just the News that his outlet was informed that NewsGuard was “uncomfortable” with some of their opinion pieces. 

“Who are they to say to say what our audience and advertisers should be comfortable with?” said the executive, who chose to remain unnamed. “It’s like they saw a space to launch a company to bully conservative news sites and promote the ones they like. They don’t look at every story, they pull out the ones they disagree with to downgrade your newsroom.”

NewsGuard said its criteria is based on “apolitical criteria of journalistic practice,” and that it was founded as “an alternative to government censorship or the continued dominance of the secret ratings of news publishers by the social media companies and left-wing advocacy groups.”

But conservatives don’t buy it, hence a House Judiciary Committee report criticized the company for flagging stories that correctly reported that a Gaza hospital explosion was due to a misfired Hamas rocket but not penalizing outlets that falsely reported that Biden’s laptop was "Russian disinformation." (NewsGuard penalized the Daily Beast until it corrected its reporting, two months after The New York Times and Washington Post, which were not penalized, corrected theirs). 

One interesting aside is that retired General Michael Hayden, who in 2020 along with 50 other former security operatives signed the now-infamous and debunked statement positing the Biden laptop as fake, serves as an "advisor" to the board of NewsGuard. A congressional report indicated that the statement was drafted and circulated by then Biden campaign staffer Antony Blinken.

Global Alliance for Responsible Media

Republicans also held a hearing on July 10 to explore possibe collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, another watchdog accused of censorship that was by X (formerly Twitter) and Rumble in August and folded a few days later.

At the hearing this summer, the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro testified that NewsGuard “has penalized us openly for being a conservative site. When we mention that we are actually honest about our bias, what they said is, ‘Well, that means you are not objective,’ as opposed to other outlets which claim to be objective but actually are biased toward the left.”

As first reported by Newsmax, on Nov. 13, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote a letter about NewsGuard to the CEOs of Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube); Meta (the parent of Facebook and Instagram); Microsoft; and Apple.

Just as Trump referenced how tech companies risk liability protection under Section 230 if they don’t act in good faith by allowing diverse viewpoints, so does Carr, whom Trump has picked to lead the agency. 

But the major point of his letter, reviewed by Just the News, is to seek intel on how the four major tech companies employ “the Orwellian named NewsGuard,” as Carr put it.

“NewsGuard has consistently rated official propaganda from the Communist Party of China as more credible than American publications,” writes Carr, pointing to a report from the conservative Media Research Center. The report includes that NewsGuard co-founder and co-CEO Steven Brill went on CNBC in 2020 to claim the laptop story was probably a Russian hoax. 

“NewsGuard aggressively fact checked and penalized websites that reported on the COVID-19 lab leak theory,” Carr’s letter also reads. NewsGuard, in fact, acknowledged that it mistakenly downgraded 21 news sites over their reporting of the lab leak theory and said it corrected the error.

Carr demanded from the four tech giants a list of their products that rely on NewsGuard as well as details on how they use NewsGuard in relation to their advertising services and the ad agencies they use, giving them until Dec. 10 to respond.

Even before Carr’s letter, the GOP-led House Committee on Oversight and Accountability launched an investigation into NewsGuard to determine its impact on protected First Amendment speech.

There are myriad examples of what conservatives might see as evidence of bias in how NewsGuard’s service seeks to influence those who search for news on the Internet.

When Trump said Liz Cheney, an ex-GOP Congresswoman and Trump critic, wouldn’t be so pro-war if she were the one doing the fighting, for example, a search for “Trump threatens Liz Cheney” revealed a hyperbolic headline from The Atlantic that read, “Trump Suggests Training Guns on Liz Cheney’s Face,” along with NewsGuard’s perfect rating of 100% for the outlet. 

Even MSN’s misleading, no-context headline, “Trump says Liz Cheney should be ‘shot in the face’ by nine guns in sickening fantasy,” was accompanied by a 64.5% NewsGuard rating.

But a far-more accurate and in-context headline from Breitbart News – “Trump Says Liz Cheney Might Not be Such a ‘War Hawk’ If She Had Guns Pointed At Her” – that appeared much further down in Google’s search results, was accompanied by a NewsGuard rating of just 49.5%.

NewsGuard gives Just the News a 69.5% rating and says the less-than-stellar rating is related to a 2023 article that accurately quoted Dr. Harvey Risch, Yale University’s professor emeritus of epidemiology, saying that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin could effective treatments for COVID-19 if taken properly. The story also included Risch citing a study concluding that the more doses of the mRNA vaccine a person gets, the more risk they have of contracting COVID.“

These boosters are incrementally doing harm to the immune system in general,” Risch said.

NewsGuard, however, seized on the cited study falling short of declaring that multipole vaccine boosters were to blame for the results and that the authors called for further research into the correlation.

Since NewsGuard uses humans rather than algorithms, a representative reached out to John Solomon of Just the News for his response, and he said at the time: “We accurately quoted the study. Any claim to the contrary is arbitrarily false and malicious.”

In a similar case, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended last year that children as young as six months old should get the latest version of the mRNA vaccine, Fox News published a story whereby Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo complained that the recommendation was “anti-human” and a “major safety concern.”

The story was true, given Ladapo was quoted properly and in context. 

But NewsGuard called the story misleading given that Fox News didn’t push back against Ladapo’s conclusions, even though the point of the story was that Ladapo was pushing back against the media’s usual narrative (and that of the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who at the time was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).

Just the News asked NewsGuard: “When an outlet cites a legitimate source, such as a Yale medical professor or a state surgeon general, pushing back against things Dr. Anthony Fauci or the CDC has said, NewsGuard penalizes the outlet under the guise that Fauci and/or the CDC’s position isn’t prominent in the story. Why does that not work in reverse? In other words, when Fauci’s and the CDC’s positions are promoted without alternative, credible detractors, why does NewsGuard not penalize the outlet for not presenting both sides?”

NewsGuard responded: ”When articles quote someone making an unsubstantiated claim for which there is significant countervailing evidence, the site typically includes countervailing evidence or notes that the claim is unsubstantiated." 

Thus, when Fox News opinion show host Sean Hannity said in 2020 that 99% of healthy people quickly recover from COVID-19 (echoing what Dr. Fauci himself told Congress days earlier), NewsGuard still penalized the conservative-leaning news outlet for not citing CDC data and “research published by Chinese authorities,” that political analyst Rudy Takala wrote that year.

Takala, who has worked for Fox News, The Hill, Mediate and others, also noted that CNN spent a year dismissing the lab-leak theory and “botched the story about Biden’s laptop while heavily promoting the discredited Steele Dossier, of Russian collusion hoax infamy,” still earns an 80% from NewsGuard.

PragerU

One company pushing back against NewsGuard is PragerU, the video platform of radio host Dennis Prager that boasts more then 5 billion views. In 2022, NewsGuard rated it 57%, so low that its video hosting service dropped PragerU.

PragerU responded by asking fans to sign a petition “to expose NewsGuard and its cronies for suppressing free speech,” identifying the “cronies” as Big Tech, Big Pharma, the Defense Department, the American Federation of Teachers and the World Economic Forum.

PragerU also sent a string of emails addressed to Brill and Crovitz, as well as an editorial director and a health director.

The emails, reviewed by Just the News, indicated that one of NewsGuard’s specific complaints was that a PragerU video featuring America’s Frontline Doctors, a network of medical doctors who were skeptical of the efficacy and safety of the mRNA vaccine and of COVID-19 lockdowns and other protocols. The doctors also claimed that HCQ and Ivermectin were effective treatments.

NewGuard’s numerous complaints also included a PragerU video where a participant said that children weren’t dying of COVID and another, hosted by Lila Rose, that claimed Planned Parenthood does not want to show ultrasounds to women who seek abortions.

In all, NewsGuard had nine complaints, and PragerU addressed them all, citing studies, and also studies that refuted the ones that NewsGuard relied upon.

Thus far, PragerU’s petition and its emails have failed, as its rating hasn’t budged. The CEO of PragerU finished the correspondence by writing: “This chain of emails we’ve exchanged with you and your team has exposed your organization for what it is – an online media bully run by wealthy left-wing activists pushing their agenda. The public and your clients deserve better.”

In the third installment of this four-part series on Big Censorship, Just the News explores Media Matters for America.

Paul Bond

Source: https://justthenews.com/accountability/cancel-culture/bond-2

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