Saturday, December 26, 2020

Nashville: A bomb blast unlike any other on American soil - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

What we know about the mysterious Nashville bombing leaves us with many more questions than answers.

The facts about the Christmas morning bomb in Nashville are not complicated. What is complicated is understanding who set off the bomb and why. That’s because this bombing does not match any other bombs that have exploded in the Western world.

As I said, the facts about the bomb are not complicated:

Early Christmas morning, someone parked an RV in front of the AT&T building near Second Avenue and Commerce Street in downtown Nashville.


 

 

Shortly before it exploded, the RV began playing a recording telling people to leave the area:



 

Note the precision of that announcement: If you can hear this recording, you are in the blast range. The person who prepared that bomb knew precisely how far the blast would carry – and how far the announcement would carry. Nashville police, upon hearing that announcement, went door to door telling people to evacuate: Doing so was extremely brave because there was no reason to believe that the announcement was honest. That bomb could have gone off at any minute. At least three people ended up in the hospital. The police also announced that they’d found human remains, although they have not stated whether they were from a victim or the bomber.

 

Even if a person other than the bomber ended up dying, this bomb blast was not meant to take human life. The street would have been relatively deserted on Christmas morning and the RV itself warned people to leave the area. I therefore doubt that this was Islamic terrorism because I cannot think of a single act of Muslim terrorism that did not have as its primary goal killing as many people as possible.

Unlike the Oklahoma City bombing, this bomb did not target a government building. Despite the usual Trump haters conflating Trump supporters and Nazis, this fact alone probably means that one of the vanishingly small numbers of actual white supremacist groups in America was not involved because those groups tend to be hostile to the government.

This wasn’t the usual anti-corporate bombing. To begin with, those are usually "message bombings (“don’t ship chemicals,” “don’t cut down trees,” “don’t build weapons to hurt third world countries,” etc.). The destruction was also insufficiently showy for the Antifa crowd, which views violence as theater.

The CNN connection is also unimpressive. While AT&T owns CNN, if this was an anti-media bomb, why not just bomb CNN?

In any event, this bomb had such delicacy. There is no evidence that I know of saying that AT&T suffered massive structural injuries. AT&T did experience wireless and internet disruption (including 911 services, which were quickly reinstated), but the injury was still a pinprick compared to the immensity of the explosion and to a savvy bomb builder’s ability to destroy infrastructure.

In sum, it’s unlikely (although never impossible) that the bomb was Islamic terrorism, or anti-government, anti-corporate, or anti-media terrorism. In some ways, the bomb was so exquisitely done – a huge explosion that wasn’t meant to take any lives – that it seems like showing off. That is, it seems like someone made a point that, if he really wanted to, he could have done much worse.

Alex Little, a former federal prosecutor has written a lengthy Twitter thread speculating about the bomb. He covers the things that had already occurred to me, and that I wrote about, above, as well as some other things, such as a targeted attack by an overseas enemy. Because the thread runs to 67 tweets, I won’t publish it here, but you may want to check it out because Little’s observations because they’re interesting and the questions he asks are important.

Speculation, of course, is always enjoyable. And until the police and FBI investigate more (video cameras, debris, witnesses, etc.) or until the bomber makes a statement, all we’ve got is speculation.

What’s not enjoyable is realizing how seemingly easy it was for someone to do this – and again, I wonder if that wasn’t the message: Americans are vulnerable. This year has shattered their confidence. They are vulnerable to disease; to “fear itself;” to malignant and tyrannical politicians capitalizing on disease and fear; to the disruption of its political systems; and now, with the year almost over, there’s a stunningly competent bomber out there toying with us.

Along with everyone else, I am looking forward to 2020 ending. I am dubious, however, that 2021 will be any better – and today’s bombing in Nashville gave the nervous and paranoid among us one more thing about which to worry.

IMAGE: The RV that blew up in Nashville. Metro Nashville PD.

 

Andrea Widburg  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/nashville_a_bomb_blast_unlike_any_other_on_american_soil.html 

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Democrat Governors Freed the Criminals and Killed the Elderly - Daniel Greenfield

 

​ by Daniel Greenfield

They released criminals to protect them from the virus - and locked nursing home patients in with the virus.

 


In March, Governor Cuomo's administration ordered nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients and prohibited even testing incoming patients for the virus. The same month that Cuomo began the process of infecting countless nursing home residents with the virus, he also began freeing thousands of criminals from prison to protect them from the virus.

Over 3,000 criminals have been freed from New York State prisons to protect them from the virus, and New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio freed 1,500 criminals, and they swiftly began committing a variety of crimes, but despite the media hype claiming that prison was a death sentence and a campaign by woke celebs like John Legend, criminals were not at risk.

Only 19 inmates in New York State actually died of the virus.

Meanwhile an estimated 11,000 nursing home patients have died of the virus statewide.

Unlike the prison numbers, which are easily accessible, the Cuomo administration has stonewalled and refused to provide the actual number of deaths, instead offering only an incomplete listing of only those nursing home residents who died in the actual facilities.

While Governor Cuomo took great care to protect criminals, very few of whom died of the virus, he condemned thousands of nursing home patients to a slow and miserable death. And the media and celebrities who advocated for rapists and killers showed no interest in their fate.

But it wasn’t just Cuomo.

In California, Governor Newsom ordered skilled nursing facilities to accept infected patients. The next month, 3,500 criminals were freed. By the fall, over 9,000 criminals had been freed, with a plan to release as many as 17,600 criminals. After an ACLU lawsuit, Orange County was ordered to free 1,800 violent inmates whom Sheriff Barnes described as "people in for very serious offenses -- murder, attempted murder, domestic violence."

96 California State prison inmates have died in the pandemic alongside an official death toll of 5,940 nursing home residents.

But the lives of nearly 6,000 nursing home patients mattered less than the lives of 96 criminals.

New Jersey released 2,258 criminals in one day to slow the spread of the virus.

“Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, our administration has worked tirelessly to save as many lives as possible,” Governor Phil Murphy falsely claimed. Then he bragged that, "the population in State correctional facilities has decreased by nearly 3,000 people."

This wasn’t good enough for Senator Booker who demanded that Murphy release more criminals, claiming that he could “save the lives of tens of thousands” of criminals.

Just not of their victims.

Only 52 criminals in New Jersey custody have actually died of the virus.

The former Goldman Sachs executive who started his career in politics by buying an ambassadorship from Obama was far less compassionate to the elderly than he was to his own kind. His administration signed a death sentence for thousands of senior citizens by ordering nursing homes to accept infected patients and banned them from using coronavirus tests.

Over 7,400 nursing home residents died of the pandemic in New Jersey. Some of the hardest hit residents were veterans living in nursing homes managed by the New Jersey government.

Governor Pritzker in Illinois released around 4,000 criminals from prison, including 64 murderers, using the same Disaster Proclamation that he used to lock residents in their homes, while failing to notify their victims. Only 50 prison inmates actually died in Illinois.

But recently 605 nursing home residents died in Illinois… in just 7 days.

7,559 nursing home residents have died in the pandemic in Illinois amounting to over 50% of the state’s death toll. Criminals only account for 0.3% of the state’s death toll. But while Pritzker was freeing criminals, he funneled infected coronavirus patients into nursing homes.

Democrat officials repeatedly prioritized criminals over nursing home residents, releasing the former to protect them from getting the virus while locking up the latter with the virus.

Had the Democrats set out to deliberately kill 100,000 senior citizens, they couldn’t have done a better job than the policies enacted by the Cuomo, Newsom, Murphy, Whitmer, Wolf, Pritzker, and other Democrat administrations.

And now that the vaccine is being rolled out, the welfare of criminals remains a top priority.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a member of the socialist squad, vowed to fight, "for incarcerated men and women to be prioritized in the distribution of the vaccine."

A report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine being utilized by the CDC recommended placing criminals and homeless vagrants in phase 1b, the second phase, alongside nursing home residents, as if their risk or moral standing were equivalent.

D.C. and a number of states are indeed putting criminals ahead of much of the population.

But after all the agonizing from Democrats, activists, and the media over outbreaks in prisons, 149 federal inmates out of 124,538, and 551 state prison inmates out of some 1.2 million died.

In 2016, 4,117 criminals had died in federal and state prisons.

The only prison coronavirus crisis was caused by the release of criminals back onto the street.

The plight of criminals facing coronavirus in prison has led to celebrity awareness campaigns, protests with lefty activists chanting, “Free Them All”, massive media coverage that describe every prison death as another “grim milestone”, and special interventions by governors, mayors, and judges on behalf of the worst people in our society outside of politics and the press.

Meanwhile the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients, a true grim milestone, have passed unnoticed with no word from any celebrity, no protest, and hardly a whisper.

Democrat governors not only haven’t intervened on their behalf, but helped kill them.

New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California, the states run by Cuomo, Murphy, Wolf, Pritzker, and Newsom, who pushed infected patients into nursing homes, account for some 40,000 deaths among nursing home patients. These numbers are incomplete because of the deliberate obstruction of some of these administrations, notably those of Cuomo, Murphy, and Pritzker, when providing accurate and comprehensive statistics of these deaths.

While Democrats fought to help criminals, they neglected and killed the elderly.

The media has run more high profile coverage of the deaths of a few hundred criminals in custody, out of millions, than of the deaths of 113,981 nursing home patients. And even now it urgently warns that the criminals are in danger and must be freed before they all die. Certainly, it insists, they should be early in line for the vaccine even though very few criminals have died.

The true story of the pandemic’s grim milestone is that the Democrats freed the criminals to protect them from the virus and locked nursing home patients, who were the most vulnerable, in with those infected with the virus. Now they want to prioritize criminals for the vaccine.

And that stands to reason.

As pro-crime felon voting laws sweep the nation, the Democrats are fighting to keep their voting base of criminals free, while killing the elderly who are more likely to be conservative.

They didn’t mismanage a pandemic. They managed a political genocide.

 

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

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/democrat-governors-freed-criminals-and-killed-daniel-greenfield/ 

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NY Post Editorial Board: China’s deadly COVID cover-up was worse than we thought - NY Post Editorial Board

 

​ by NY Post Editorial Board

China launched an obscene effort to protect its own image at huge and deadly expense for the entire world

COVID-19 did not need to be a global pandemic: China expert

A new report finds China censored and suppressed alarming information on the severity of COVID-19 in the early days of the virus; Gordon Chang, author of 'The Coming Collapse of China,' reacts.

 Fresh evidence published jointly by The New York Times and ProPublica confirms that Beijing has been trying to keep COVID-19 information from the rest of the world since the very start of the pandemic.

On Feb. 7, Li Wenliang, the doctor who blew the whistle on COVID-19, died of the disease he’d warned the world about. While working at Wuhan Central Hospital in China’s Hubei Province, he saw a new version of the severe acute respiratory syndrome known as SARS, which also originated in China in 2002.

As news of the 34-year-old doctor’s untimely death spread and grief went viral on social media such as Weibo and WeChat — Beijing set out to bury the truth.

FAST-SPREADING UK CORONAVIRUS VARIANT: ALL YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED

"They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to [Li’s] death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter," the Times-ProPublica team reports.

In all, the Hangzhou offices of Beijing’s Internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, issued more than 3,200 directives and 1,800 memos in its COVID-censorship drive — all leaked by the hacker group C.C.P. [Chinese Communist Party] Unmasked.

"At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies," the investigative team warns, "China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus."

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

In January, before the coronavirus had even been definitively identified, the CCP began working overtime to mislead the world about the truth to protect the party’s image as infections began soaring — even making the disease look less severe. As a result, the world lost its best chance of preventing the global pandemic.

This is a damning expose from two left-leaning news organizations. Now it’s up to left, right and center to unite in holding the CCP to account for its obscene effort to protect its own image at the huge and deadly expense to the entire world.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS EDITORIAL IN THE NEW YORK POST

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE NEW YORK POST EDITORIAL BOARD

 

NY Post Editorial Board  

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/coronavirus-china-coverup-ny-post-editorial-board 

 

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Biden Meddles with Donald Trump's Middle East Legacy at his Peril - Con Coughlin

 

​ by Con Coughlin

Mr Trump's Middle East legacy... completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict....

  • It is worth remembering that, when President Trump took office, the region was still reeling from the dire consequences of former US President Barack Obama's inept and naive handling of the region.

  • By early January 2017, when Mr Trump took office, Iran was squandering the tens of billions of dollars it received for signing the nuclear deal, which Mr Obama had helped broker in 2015, on expanding its malign influence across the landscape of the Middle East.

  • Mr Trump's Middle East legacy... completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict....

  • [T]he challenge for the incoming Biden administration now will be to see how it can pursue a different foreign policy agenda without jeopardising the very significant achievements that have been accomplished during Mr Trump's tenure.

  • Certainly, if the incoming Biden administration makes any serious attempt to undermine Mr Trump's legacy in the Middle East, it will do so at its peril.

President Trump's Middle East legacy is not only impressive -- it has completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict, as was so often the case during Mr Obama's presidency. Pictured from left to right: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Donald Trump, Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif bin Rashid Al Zayani and UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan at the signing ceremony of the Abraham Accords at the White House on September 15, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The incoming Biden administration has indicated that one of its top priorities will be to adopt a new approach in Washington's dealings with the Middle East. In particular it wants to revive the flawed nuclear deal with Iran as well as re-establish a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership, which imposed a three-year boycott on the Trump administration.

Yet, while the new Biden team, the majority of whom are relics from the Obama administration, are keen to assert a new policy agenda for the region, they also need to take care that, in so doing, they do not squander the impressive legacy US President Donald Trump has built up in the region.

It is worth remembering that, when Mr Trump took office, the region was still reeling from the dire consequences of former US President Barack Obama's inept and naive handling of the region.

By early January 2017, when Mr Trump took office, Iran was squandering the tens of billions of dollars it received for signing the nuclear deal, which Mr Obama had helped broker in 2015, on expanding its malign influence across the landscape of the Middle East.

This malign influence included supporting the Assad regime in Syria, the Hizbollah terrorist organisation in Lebanon, pro-Iranian Shia militias in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, which regularly employed Iranian-made drones and missiles to attack Saudi Arabia, a key US ally.

Attempts to revive the Israeli-Arab peace process, meanwhile, were going nowhere because of the Obama administration's antagonistic attitude towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as maintaining its hopeless quest for a more constructive relationship with the Palestinian leadership.

In addition, Mr Obama's ambivalence about becoming involved in Syria's brutal war meant that US forces were hampered in their attempts to destroy the Islamist fanatics of ISIS, which had succeeded in capturing large swathes of northern Iraq and Syria.

Mr Trump therefore deserves enormous credit for achieving a complete turnaround in America's standing in the region during his tenure at the White House.

Thanks to Mr Trump's robust approach to Iran, where he withdrew from the nuclear deal and re-imposed crippling sanctions against Tehran, the Iranian economy has been seriously diminished, thus limiting the ayatollahs' ability to peddle their pernicious creed throughout the region.

ISIS, and its dream of establishing a self-governing "caliphate", has been completely destroyed, mainly because, soon after taking office, Mr Trump gave US commanders the authority and freedom to intensify the military campaign against the Islamist fanatics.

Arguably, Mr Trump's greatest achievement in the Middle East, though, has been the success he has enjoyed in breaking the impasse in the Israeli-Arab peace process, with a clutch of Arab regimes - the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco -- establishing diplomatic relations with Israel under the so-called Abraham Accords, with many other Arab governments -- including Saudi Arabia -- said to be giving serious consideration to following suit.

Mr Trump's Middle East legacy is not only impressive -- it has completely redefined the landscape of the region from the chaos and conflict that prevailed when Mr Obama left office. Nowadays, the momentum in the region is moving towards peace, not conflict, as was so often the case during Mr Obama's presidency.

So the challenge for the incoming Biden administration now will be to see how it can pursue a different foreign policy agenda without jeopardising the very significant achievements that have been accomplished during Mr Trump's tenure.

Certainly, if the incoming Biden administration makes any serious attempt to undermine Mr Trump's legacy in the Middle East, it will do so at its peril.

 

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

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16866/biden-trump-middle-east 

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Rudy Giuliani is again promising good news is on the way - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

During his Christmas Day podcast, Giuliani says that word is finally going to get out about the vast scope of the pro-Biden election fraud.

When it comes to the election, the facts are clear: Joe Biden, an incompetent, corrupt, possibly senile politician who campaigned from his basement, allegedly received more votes than any president in American history. The engines for that victory were media and tech propaganda and censorship, and paper and computer ballot fraud. Nevertheless, a craven judicial class that refuses to look at the evidence, corrupt political officials, and more media and tech propaganda and censorship seem to have fixed the dial on a Biden presidency. On Christmas Day, though, President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, promised that things are “going to blow up” going forward.

Let me say that I’m a little bit worried that Giuliani is over-promising. I know how lawyers think. They get incredibly excited about a specific fact, legal argument, or procedural point, and optimistically assume that whatever excites them is going to break the whole case wide open. Sadly, lawyers are almost always wrong about that. What ends cases isn’t some Hollywood, Perry Mason moment, with a witness suddenly admitting to a lie or a fingerprint magically appearing. Instead, it’s a long slog of aggregating facts and legal arguments.

The problem with the 2020 election is that we don’t have a long slog. Instead, we have a judicial class (reaching all the way up to the Supreme Court) that has settled for a very peculiar and deeply immoral position: In an election rife with manifest fraud, America’s judiciary would prefer to see Trump’s real votes voided through fraud, than see Biden’s fake votes properly invalidated through having that fraud exposed. Put another way, they’re voting for a dishonest Biden win than an honest Trump victory.

Given this situation, we Trump supporters keep hoping that a black swan explodes onto the scene, or even better, a fiery phoenix that blasts to ashes the arguments propping up the dissolute, demented, doddering Democrat darling, Joe Biden. (I love alliteration.)

Giuliani chose Christmas day to suggest that the fiery phoenix is on its way. In his regular podcast, Common Sense, Giuliani said that Trump’s challenges to the alleged election results are “really going to blow up” in the coming days.

The video begins with Giuliani summing up the now-familiar examples of voter fraud, and the problems that come with media and tech misinformation and censorship. He then notes that, despite media and tech company efforts, Americans are learning about the fraud, with most Republicans, many Independents, and a small but growing number of Democrats realizing that something very wrong happened on November 3 and in the days after.

Next, Giuliani updates the procedural posture of the state legislatures, which will be reviewing whether they made the appropriate decision when certifying their electors. He notes that new evidence in Arizona has the legislators questioning their decision. There’s also legislative movement in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Wisconsin is particularly interesting because of potential fraud around absentee ballots that may affect 226,000 ballots.

And then, at 12:56, Giuliani makes the headline statement:

So, starting after Christmas, this is really going to blow up because the evidence that all these crooked television networks, newspapers, big tech, and the leadership of the Democratic Party will have been giving you is false – and you’re going to find it out all at once. It can be very shocking to the country.

 

Sadly, Giuliani doesn’t explain whether these facts will “blow up” because legislators will be discussing them or if something else will happen that will force the facts on Americans no matter how the media and tech tyrants try to suppress them.

The most important thing Giuliani says is that we shouldn’t lose hope. And that made me think of the 2006 winter Olympics, when Lindsey Jacobellis, a snowboarder, was so certain she had won her race that she celebrated too soon, fell, and ended up with a silver medal. Meanwhile, Tanja Frieden, who had been dismissed early in the race (“Frieden is out”), got the gold.

What I hope Giuliani is telling us here is that the Democrats are Jacobellis, celebrating prematurely and going down to a loss. Meanwhile, we Trump voters are Tanja Frieden, dismissed early on, but never giving up and ultimately winning the gold.

IMAGE: Rudy Giuliani on Christmas Day. YouTube screengrab.

 

Andrea Widburg  

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/rudy_giuliani_is_again_promising_good_news_is_on_the_way.html 

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Why Sidney Powell gets the Galileo treatment - Eric Georgatos

 

​ by Eric Georgatos

A stolen election in 2020 therefore isn’t a shocking aberration; it’s an obvious continuation, a culmination of the ruling class determination to get rid of an outsider who threatened to ‘reset’ America back to its original design

Observers of human history might have to go back all the way to Galileo to find a ruling class as determined to cancel someone as much as today’s is to cancel Sidney Powell in response to her single-minded devotion to bringing the truth of the full scale of the 2020 election fraud to light. 

Galileo broke the news/discovery that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and in fact revolved around the sun, and that just didn’t comport with what the ruling class, including church authorities, were prepared or willing to accept.  Galileo rocked their world -- probably deeply threatening their hold of authority over the masses if they were exposed as so fundamentally wrong -- so their solution wasn’t to deal with the truth but to put Galileo under house arrest and demand that he renounce his discovery.

The American ruling class of 2020 is bizarrely opposed to allocating any oxygen to what Sidney Powell has discovered and is alleging about Dominion Voting Systems (and others), about vote-shifting algorithms and partial decimal vote counts, and about vote manipulation showing up throughout the country.  Even Rudy Giuliani, the President’s attorney, and Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, seem hellbent on publicly keeping their distance from Powell -- and on keeping President Trump from getting too close to or aligned with Powell.

Sidney Powell (YouTube screengrab, cropped)

Other elements of the ruling class -- such as SCOTUS and much of the rest of the federal judiciary -- won’t even look at the evidence Powell has assembled.  They just ‘don’t want to go there’, and so they make up legal excuses -- e.g., lack of standing -- and wave off the substance of the allegations.

What gives?  Why are they behaving this way?

Common sense says election integrity is fundamental to the survival of democracy in any form, so if there are reasonable grounds for suspicion, why wouldn’t serious adults want to turn over every rock to determine the truth?  If the ruling class is so eager to pronounce Sidney Powell a lunatic fringe conspiracy theorist, why wouldn’t they want the Dominion voting machines fully audited so they can prove once and for all that Powell is crazy and deserves to be mocked and ignored?

Many people in the Dallas, Texas area have been struggling with these ‘what gives?’ questions since at least 2018, when the mid-term election results had an immediate smell of having been rigged.  Yet Texas law enforcement authorities -- by reputation so pro-law and order -- refused to investigate.

There seem to be three possible explanations for the behavior of the ruling class, and none of them are good.

The first and probably worst is that many on both sides of the political aisle may be in on the fraud.  Rigged elections are an equal opportunity enticement to many if not most politicians.  There would be no desire on the part of anyone in on the fix to encourage any investigation that might ruin the fix for everyone.

Aligned with this explanation is the internet speculation about the remarkable election wins of RINOs and quasi-Never-Trumpers Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins (and even of moderate, no charisma John Cornyn, whose vote total implausibly exceeded Trump’s in Texas).  

All won big despite enormous opposition campaign spending and beat expectations and polls by a sizable margin -- in the same election President Trump supposedly lost to a senile old man who couldn’t draw 200 people to any campaign event (and still can’t draw flies to his speeches from the “office of the President-elect”). 

These Senate results may not scream fraud to the same degree the Trump/Biden result does, but they have an odor about them.  Yet they reconcile pretty quickly -- though to be clear, still hypothetically -- if in exchange for unified post-election effort to dismiss the seriousness of election fraud and help usher Trump out of the White House, they were promised re-election, and with margins that might scare off for at least one election cycle the most credible future challengers. (Outraged by the hypothetical?   Then let’s audit the machines and put hypotheticals to rest.)

The second explanation for the ‘what gives?’ is fear and intimidation.  Election fraud on a national scale in the United States of America is the ultimate high stakes global power play.  As is repeatedly noted at the Conservative Treehouse, ‘there are trillions at stake’.  The players are beyond nasty; nothing is out of bounds for the sake of acquiring or holding on to global power. 

In this scenario, all it would take is a few threatening calls at the right time to a weak officeholder or judge (or their family members) -- and the quick result will be votes or rulings that there shall be no audits of voting machines, or simply dismissals of lawsuits on procedural grounds that permit the evidence to be ignored.

The third explanation is a variant of Galileo’s experience:  the conclusion that follows from the evidence Sidney Powell has put together is so devastating to Americans’ view of how their country is supposed to be governed that it simply can’t be given voice or visibility.  The truth would shock Americans into a complete loss of faith and trust in their government.  The truth would so rock our world -- that we’re all being lied to and manipulated so constantly and in so many ways -- that we’ll cease to function in any manner resembling law and order.  Under such circumstances, the ruling class would have determined that Americans ‘can’t handle the truth…so they can’t be allowed to know the truth.   

It’s easy to see how this explanation can hold together, even in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence of election fraud:  ‘experts’ just raise the evidentiary bar of ‘proof’ so high that it can never be met -- i.e., unless Sidney Powell can produce Dominion/Smartmatic source code written not in programming code but in bold-font, all-caps English that says “FLIP VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN HERE”, then the same experts can solemnly announce that the circumstantial evidence is just not enough proof to justify remedial action.

The American people already know what happened in the 2020 election, because they watched Trump haters in action over the last 4+ years.  They saw the Russia collusion hoax; they saw the sham impeachment; and they increasingly see pandemic protocols utterly untethered to science but transparently connected to straitjacketing the American people with a globalist Great Reset imposed by an unelected ruling elite, with the same pattern of lies and liars that brought about the hoax and the impeachment. 

A stolen election in 2020 therefore isn’t a shocking aberration; it’s an obvious continuation, a culmination of the ruling class determination to get rid of an outsider who threatened to ‘reset’ America back to its original design -- a nation governed not by a hierarchy of ruling elites, but by ‘we the people’.

_________________

All three explanations for ignoring or dismissing the evidence of election fraud are plausible, and they are not mutually exclusive.  And they all point to the over-arching challenge of these times:  is there sufficient courage among the American people to demand the truth?

Sidney Powell has the requisite courage.  The coming days, weeks, months (years?) will answer whether enough other Americans of this era are up to the challenge.  If there are, we believe they can force their government to live by the truth. 

As President Trump might say, “We’ll see what happens”.

 

Eric Georgatos blogs at America Can We Talk?

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/why_sidney_powell_gets_the_galileo_treatment.html 

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The Genius of Israel's Foreign Policy: Mixing Normalization and Silent War - Jonathan Spyer

 

​ by Jonathan Spyer

Covert action, including the use of assassinations, has formed a controversial part of Israel's way of war since the very birth of the state

Originally published under the title "Understanding Israel's War in the 'Grey Zone'."

Israel seeks to keep its enemies at bay while maintaining societal tranquility and economic prosperity.

The facts of the case remain in dispute. A variety of versions have emerged. But all the various accounts agree that the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a brigadier general of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, considered by Israel to be the commander of the military element of the Iranian nuclear program, died in a hail of bullets on the road to his hometown of Absard, south of Tehran, on November 27.

No one has openly claimed responsibility for the killing of Fakhrizadeh, but it may be taken as a near certainty that Israel was behind it. The event thus appears to be a rare sighting of an ongoing campaign under way for some years now: Israel's ongoing, usually silent "grey zone" war against Iran.

This campaign, and the way it is fought, is a natural partner to the diplomatic moves that have recently produced "normalization" agreements between Israel, Morocco, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Together, these represent the Israeli response to a strategic dilemma—namely, how can Israel maintain the required levels of societal calm, normality and tranquility within which economic activity and innovation can flourish, while at the same time engaging effectively in the long, open-ended struggle against those countries and organizations committed to its destruction?

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's goal is less to defeat Israel militarily than to make normal life within it impossible.

The strategic "long war" doctrine underlying the activities of those organizations and states, nationalist and Islamist, which have engaged in irregular warfare against Israel over the last half-century is intended to accentuate this contradiction. The notion, as articulated by Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in his 2000 speech at Bint Jbeil in which he alleged that Israeli society was weaker than a "spider's web," is that by making the pursuit of normal life impossible in Israel, the Jewish state's enemies would erode its people's will to continue—and cause them, over time, to abandon their commitment to it in the first instance. The model for this desired outcome is the demise of French Algeria, and the departure from that country of French settlers after 1959.

Israel, of course, does not accept the historic comparison, nor the underlying diagnosis of the society. But this is not an argument characterized by respectful debate. The task facing Israeli strategists has been to develop a means of diplomacy and a simultaneous means of war capable of preventing the hypothesis from being tested. What this looks like in practice has been on display in recent weeks.

Israel's ongoing military campaigns involve a relatively small number of its citizens.

The purpose of Israel's current, ongoing military campaign is two-fold. It is intended to disrupt and hinder Iran's ongoing efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capacity. It also seeks to prevent and reverse the Iranian project to create an extensive infrastructure of support across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and then to embed advanced weapons systems directed at Israel within that infrastructure.

This is a very 21st-century campaign. It is considered to involve only a relatively small number of Israeli agencies and citizens. Key among the former are parts of the air force, the Mossad and other intelligence bodies, and personnel who learned their trade in Israel's most selective special forces units.

The killing of Fakhrizadeh would have been the province of intelligence groups. The air force, meanwhile, is engaged on a weekly basis in disrupting Iranian efforts at building and consolidating its human and material infrastructure in Syria. This ongoing campaign has, in the view of Yaakov Amidror, a former national security advisor in Israel and today a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, succeeded—as expressed to me in a recent conversation—in setting back the Iranian effort by "80 to 85 percent."

Covert action has been integral to Israel's way of war since its founding.

Covert action, including the use of assassinations, has formed a controversial part of Israel's way of war since the very birth of the state—and, indeed, even before it. Famously, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir directed Israel's intelligence agencies to eliminate the perpetrators of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. This was a mission achieved, though not without serious errors and mishaps. The last of the individuals directly responsible for the Munich massacre was not killed until 1979.

But the structures established by Israel for carrying out that campaign amounted to the formalization of existing practices, rather than a completely novel turn. In the early 1960s, Israel, in "Operation Damocles," conducted a series of assassinations of rocket scientists, including German veterans of Hitler's rocket program. These men were working with the then-Egyptian regime to develop Cairo's long-range missile capacity.

Even prior to the establishment of Israel, Zionist paramilitary organizations kept assassination as one of their tools. The commander of the Mossad operational unit in Operation Damocles was future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. The latter learned his trade as operations officer of the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Israel Freedom Fighters), better known in the English-speaking world as the Stern Gang. This organization assassinated, among others, a UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem in 1948, and a British minister of state in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo in 1944.

The first significant political assassination carried out by Zionist organizations indeed traces all the way back to Jerusalem in 1924. The victim was Jacob De Haan, a prominent Jewish anti Zionist leader. The perpetrators were the newly formed Haganah, first of the Zionist military groups.

It is a long way from pistol shots by a lone gunman in 1920s-era Jerusalem—the gunman in question, at the time, was Odessa-born Avraham Tehomi, later the founder and first commander of the Irgun—to the complex, high-tech operation that appears to have ended the life of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. But a consistent, if evolving, praxis links the two. Israel does not always wait until a problem has ripened in order to meet it with large-scale conventional military or diplomatic means. Instead, where Israel deems it necessary, it prefers to deploy direct action to prevent the nascent problem from fully emerging.

Former Deputy Prime Minister and Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, speaking to me recently in Jerusalem, located Israel's alleged policy of assassinations within an integrated, three-sided strategy intended to stop Iran from going nuclear. The strategy, according to Meridor, involves "prevention" (a euphemism for active measures to disrupt the Iranian effort), "defense" (including such systems as the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system) and "deterrence" (relating to Israel's own putative nuclear capacity).

This strategy minimizes disruption for the daily lives of the vast majority of Israelis, who are able to continue their own endeavors largely unaware of, or incurious about, national security details.

In this way, it fits with the current advances in peacemaking and the normalization agreements. The defense strategy is intended to keep professed enemies at bay with the minimum of visibility. This then enables civil society and enterprise to flourish. These, in turn, produce the capacities—in desert agriculture, medical tech, artificial intelligence and other fields—that make Israel such a useful partner for regional states in the civilian realm.

The killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh on the road from Tehran to Absard thus forms part of an approach to conflict intended to minimize fallout and accompanying noise, while bolstering the atmosphere of security and normality that makes a flourishing 21st-century society feasible amidst a troubled and strife-torn neighborhood. Innovation, normalization and cooperation for those who seek goodwill; the silent war for those with other intents. As of now, it appears to be working.

 

Jonathan Spyer is a Ginsburg/Milstein Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis.

 Source: https://www.meforum.org/61874/israel-way-of-war 

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The Israeli left is far from dead - Carolyn B. Glick

 

​ by Carolyn B. Glick

The left remains the only power that competes with the Likud for power. And if Likud and its coalition partners do not win 61 seats in the upcoming elections, the left will continue to control the national agenda regardless of what the public thinks.

 

The true defenders of freedom and equality
Outgoing Deputy Attorney General Dina Zilber | Photo: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90

Over the past several weeks, Israel's political commentators have repeatedly declared the demise of the political left. On the face of things, they are right. The polls all show that the right-religious bloc will win a comfortable majority in the Knesset elections scheduled for next March. There is no way that the left-Arab bloc will win a sufficient number of seats to form a government.

The commentators insist that given the polls, today the name of the game is the contest between the right-wing leaders. Will Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party win enough seats to maintain their dominant position? Will his opponents Gideon Sa'ar and Naftali Bennett win sufficient seats to unseat him?

With all due respect to the polls and the commentators that interpret them, the left is far from dead. True, its parties aren't popular enough to form a government. But that has been the case since the mid-1990s. The left long ago accepted that it has lost the public. Rather than reconsider its positions, the left developed a strategy that compensates for its lack of public appeal. That strategy enables the left both to seize and wield power without public support and prevent the right from wielding the power it wins at the ballot box.

The left's post-democratic strategy has two main components. The first is the so-called deep state. The deep state in Israel is an amalgam of senior government officials, the legal fraternity including the state prosecution, the attorney general's office and the Supreme Court, and the media. Members of these groups are overwhelmingly associated with the left. They use their powers to advance the ideological and political goals of their camp while stymying the right's efforts to implement its own policy and ideological agenda.

This week we were witness to two spectacles of the deep state in action.

Tuesday, the justices of the Supreme Court conducted a hearing on a number of petitions asking the justices to abrogate the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People. Despite the law's name, the hearing wasn't geared primarily to undermining Israel's Jewish national identity. Israel was the Jewish state before the law, and doesn't need the law to remain the Jewish state.

Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut, and PM Benjamin Netanyahu at a memorial service for former President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, Sept. 19, 2019 (AP/Ariel Schalit)

The purpose of the hearing had little to do with the law itself. Instead, as far as the justices were concerned its purpose was to stake out the claim that the Court has the right to overturn Basic Laws. To understand how radical this move is, it is important to understand the legal basis of the court's current powers.

Israel has no constitution. At the outset of Israel's so-called "judicial revolution" in the 1990s, the justices invented a distinction between Israel's Basic Laws, which deal with general principles of the state, and its other laws. On their own volition and with no legal foundation, the justices called the Basic Laws a constitution. Having made this determination, the justices proceeded to arrogate to themselves the power to abrogate the non-Basic Laws, claiming the Basic Laws as the source for their extra-legal seizure of power. A significant portion of the Court's more radical political judgments have been anchored in their radical interpretation of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. Among other things, they have used the law as a means to erode the significance of Israel's Jewish character.

The Knesset passed the Nation State law as a Basic Law in a bid to curb the justices' power to exploit their radical interpretations of the Human Dignity and Liberty law. Since the Court said the source of its power is the Basic Laws, it is self-evidently barred from abrogating the source of its authority. But on Tuesday, the justices set out to do just that and so seize the Knesset's power to legislate, as the sovereign repository of the people's will, the quasi-constitutional foundations of the state.

To legitimize her legally groundless action, during the hearing Chief Justice Esther Hayut announced the existence of a heretofore non-existent third type of law – the law that lets Supreme Court Justices abrogate Basic Laws. She referred to her new type of law as "the doctrine of amending laws that are unconstitutional."

Both Netanyahu and Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin stated flat out that the justices have no legal authority to discuss the constitutionality of Basic Laws. But Hayut and her comrades, and their supporters in the media, the Attorney General's office and the left's political parties couldn't have cared less. They are staking a claim and there is nothing the government can do about it.

Avigdor Lieberman, left, with Gideon Sa'ar in the Knesset in 2009 (Lior Mizrahi)

The day after Hayut's democracy-killing Kabuki court theater, her comrades in the Attorney General's office celebrated their own extra-legal seizure of power from Israel's elected leaders at a farewell bash for Deputy Attorney General Dina Zilber.

Over the past decade, Zilber emerged as the symbol of the deep state's seizure of policymaking power from Israel's elected leaders. Whether she worked to undermine Israel's communities in Judea and Samaria, harm religious liberty or economic freedom, Zilber repeatedly used the language of law to present her political views as law. Her actions have compelled successive unwilling governments to advance the political and ideological goals of the left while undercutting those of the right.

In her farewell address, as has long been her habit, Zilber presented her unpopular, controversial ideological positions as uncontroversial and beyond reproach.

"What is unacceptable about the goal of inserting redistributive justice into the allocation of state resources?" she asked rhetorically.

Non-rhetorically, the concept of "redistributive justice" is highly controversial and unacceptable to a large cross-section of the public. Whether redistributive justice is something the government should or should not advance is a question for voters – not unelected government lawyers – to decide.

MKs Yoaz Hendel and Zvi Hauser in the Knesset (Oren Ben Hakoon)

"What is unacceptable about aspiring to be a free nation in our land?" Zilber asked.

On the face of things, nothing about the aspiration immortalized in the national anthem is objectionable. But considering the source of the question, the answer is, it depends.

It depends on who decides what "free" means. It depends on who decides how "nation" is defined. And it depends on who decides what we're talking about when we say "our land."

Moreover, in the Jewish nation's free state in the land of Israel, the answer is that the public decides these things, not members of the state prosecution's appointments committee.

As she concluded her remarks, Zilber rallied her troops to carry on her democracy defying work. "Don't forget that you are the beautiful and the just. Many people in the silent majority are with us," she said.

This sort of nonsense is able to pass without episode because the media supports it. The media is the main tool that enables the likes of Zilber and Hayut to seize the powers of Israel's elected leaders. For years, the media have done their best to delegitimize every effort by right-wing politicians to advance their camp's political and ideological goals as somehow base and corrupt. The term "political" has become a dirty word. On the other hand, "professional" – as in everything "professional" judges and government lawyers do – is objective, and right and true and just and democratic.

Ironically, the right itself – or specific factions of the right – is the second component of the left's strategy for maintaining and expanding its power despite its lack of public support. The presence on Israel's political scene of right-wing political factions motivated primarily not by ideology but by hatred for Netanyahu enables the political left to secure its continued relevance and it enables the institutional left to secure its power. As Israel moves toward elections, there are two right-wing parties that are largely defined not by their ideological convictions but by their hatred of Netanyahu – Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu party and Gideon Sa'ar's newly minted "New Hope Party."

Netanyahu hating rightists empower the left politically in two ways. First, while they are ideologically aligned with the right, they are politically aligned with the left. Both Lieberman and Sa'ar have made clear they will not join a coalition led by Netanyahu. Also running is Naftali Bennett and his Yamina party, which has made clear that it will join both a left-led coalition and a right-led coalition.

Yamina leader Naftali Bennett (Oren Ben Hakoon)

Sa'ar, Lieberman, Bennett and their colleagues understand that the only way for them to form a government without Likud and Netanyahu is to form a government with the left. Consequently, these "anyone-but-Bibi" rightists are the left's ticket to power. This unspoken, but well-understood state of affairs is the reason that the media, which has obsessively attacked Netanyahu for the past 25 years, slobbers over "anyone-but-Bibi" right-wing politicians.

Even when the "anyone-but-Bibi" camp doesn't have the requisite number of Knesset seats to form a government, so entrenched are its right-wing members in their hatred for Netanyahu that they still empower the left. Following the April and September 2019 elections, Lieberman prevented the formation of a government and forced the country into the second and third round of elections by refusing to join a Netanyahu-led coalition.

And following the third round of elections, former Netanyahu aides and current "anyone-but-Bibi" right-wing politicians Zvi Hauser and Yoaz Hendel who broke away from two parties to join the Blue and White list, were willing to block their leftist Blue and White party from forming a post-Zionist government with the Joint Arab List. But they weren't willing to leave Blue and White to join Netanyahu to form a right-wing government. And as a result, Netanyahu was compelled to form a coalition with Blue and White.

Blue and White's position in the outgoing government didn't give its leaders Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi the power to implement their leftist policies. But it did give them the power to block Netanyahu and Likud from advancing their rightist policies which Hauser and Hendel ostensibly support. Gantz and Ashkenazi torpedoed Netanyahu's plan to apply Israel's sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley, in accordance with US President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan. This week, Gantz and Ashkenazi blocked Netanyahu from bringing the young Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria to the government for formal approval. Blue and White's Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn has worked assiduously to expand the powers of his leftist partners in the judiciary and the state prosecution while ruling out the implementation of the Likud's agenda of legal reform.

Given the left's success in seizing and wielding power through its partners in the deep state and its enablers in the "anyone-but-Bibi" right, it is clear that the polls that give a significant majority of Knesset seats to right-wing parties obscure more than they reveal. The left remains the only power that competes with the Likud for power. And if Likud and its coalition partners do not win 61 seats in the upcoming elections, the left will continue to control the national agenda regardless of what the public thinks.

 

Carolyn B. Glick  

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/12/25/the-israeli-left-is-far-from-dead/ 

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