China: Britain's Biggest Long-Term Threat - Judith Bergman

 

​ by Judith Bergman

China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming: "If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price".

• The UK's new MI5 director, Ken McCallum, said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain's economy, infrastructure, and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

• China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, later denied threatening the UK by making still another threat: "We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend."

• Meanwhile, Huawei's plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead.

• "[China's] implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China's dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile". — Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World.

• In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to "groom" British power elites to support Chinese interests, especially through the networking group the "48 Group Club".... The group features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

• Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission.

Following Britain's recent announcement of a ban on the use of Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G telecommunications network, China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming (pictured), threatened: "The way you are treating Huawei is being followed very closely by other Chinese businesses, and it will be very difficult for other businesses to have the confidence to have more investment". (Photo by Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images)

"If the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade providing big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China," Britain's new MI5 Director Ken McCallum recently told journalists. He added that Russia is currently "providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate". McCallum said that countries such as China and Russia were no longer focused just on traditional espionage activities, such as stealing government secrets, but also on targeting Britain's economy, infrastructure and academic research, while seeking to undermine its democracy.

"The UK wants to co-operate with China on the big global issues like climate change, while at the same time being robust in confronting covert hostile activity when we come across it," he said. "[MI5 is] looking to do more against Chinese activity, carefully prioritised."

That China targets the economy, infrastructure and even the democracy of other states is far from a new occurrence, but it is something that Western countries have only recently begun to acknowledge. For decades, the US -- and with it most Western countries -- believed that "constructive engagement" with the Chinese Communist regime, which included heavily aiding its economic, technological and even military rise, would lead to a prosperous China that would somehow evolve into a liberal democracy sharing Western views on global and regional issues. That belief turned out to be wishful thinking to a hallucinatory degree.

China's goal, according to China expert Michael Pillsbury in his 2015 book, The Hundred Year Marathon, is to "replace the United States as the economic, military and political leader of the world by the year 2049". The "marathon" was launched by Mao Zedong to "avenge a century of humiliation" at the hands of the West. The preferred strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to reach that goal is deception, according to Pillsbury, whether this be in the economic, business, political, technological, diplomatic or academic sphere. While deception forms a basic strategic principle for the CCP, it also, in the words of The Spectator's Andrew Foxall, avails itself of methods such as, "economic coercion, military sabre-rattling, a mammoth state-sponsored media empire, and cohorts of witting and unwitting accomplices" to achieve its goals.

A recent book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World, by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, chronicles the extent of the CCP's deception and subversion of Western elites and institutions for the purpose of achieving international dominance.

"Whereas analysts on both sides of the Atlantic continue to agonise over whether to label China an opponent or even an enemy, the CCP decided this matter thirty years ago", Hamilton and Ohlberg write.

"For the CCP the Cold War never ended. The reshaping of alliances and remoulding of the way the world thinks about it are essential to the Party securing continued rule at home, as well as to its reach and eventually making China the number one global power. The Party's plans have been explained at length in speeches and documents. Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China's dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile".

In the UK, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, the CCP has managed to "groom" British power elites to support China's interests, especially through the networking group the "48 Group Club".

"No group in Britain enjoys more intimacy and trust with the CCP leadership than the 48 Group Club... [It] has built itself into the most powerful instrument of Beijing's influence and intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom. Reaching into the highest ranks of Britain's political, business, media and university elites, the club plays a decisive role in shaping British attitudes to China... enthusiastically fostering the interests of the CCP in the United Kingdom...".

The club features members such as former ministers, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, five former British ambassadors to China, leading business people, directors of large cultural institutions and professors, as well as a number of highly ranked CCP officials, including several former Chinese ambassadors to the UK.

"In our judgement, so entrenched are the CCP's influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing's orbit would probably fail," write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

Britain, recently, did appear to seek to "extricate itself from Beijing's orbit" regarding Huawei's influence and potential security risk in the country, especially after US pressure. In July, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson banned the use of Huawei equipment in the UK's 5G telecommunications network by the end of 2027. The move prompted China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, to threaten the UK:

"The way you are treating Huawei is being followed very closely by other Chinese businesses, and it will be very difficult for other businesses to have the confidence to have more investment".

Liu later denied threatening the UK by making another threat:

"We make no threats, we threaten nobody. We just let you know the consequences. If you do not want to be our partners and our friends, you want to treat China as a hostile country, you will pay the price. That means you will lose the benefits of treating China as a friend."

Meanwhile, Huawei's plans to build a research center in Cambridgeshire are going ahead. Huawei has pledged to spend £1 billion on a massive campus, which will host R&D and manufacturing teams focusing on the creation of optical devices and modules. The US wanted the local planning committee to withhold permission, with Keith Krach, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, reportedly calling the research center an "expansion of the surveillance state".

When China imposed a new security law in response to repeated pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the law as a "serious breach" of the UK-China agreement on the territory. He also said he would open a path to citizenship for almost three million residents of Hong Kong, while Britain's extradition treaty with Hong Kong would be suspended "immediately and indefinitely". China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, on the other hand, accused the US and other critics of being "cold war warriors":

"China and the UK should have enough wisdom and capability to manage and deal with these differences, rather than allowing anti-China forces and cold war warriors to kidnap China-UK relations."

Boris Johnson, however, appeared to send a signal of having stood up to the CCP in a rather half-hearted way. "There is a balance here", Johnson said back in July. "I'm not going to be pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe on every issue, somebody who is automatically anti-China. But we do have serious concerns." Johnson said he would not "completely abandon our policy of engagement" with China, adding: "You have got to have a calibrated response and we are going to be tough on some things, but we are also going to continue to engage."

More than anything, Johnson's comment underscored just how much the UK lacks a consistent China policy.

Chinese influence in the UK extends to British universities. In November 2019, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, published a report, "A Cautious Embrace: Defending Democracy in an Age of Autocracies," which found that British universities were not adequately responding to the growing risk of China and other autocratic states influencing academic freedom in the UK. The report stated:

"There is clear evidence that autocracies are seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities, as well as limit the activities of researchers on university campuses. Not enough is being done to protect academic freedom from financial, political and diplomatic pressure...

"During our inquiry into China and the rules-based international system, we heard alarming evidence about the extent of Chinese influence on the campuses of UK universities. Despite the fact that there are now over 100,000 Chinese students in the UK, the issue of Chinese influence has been the subject of remarkably little debate compared to that in Australia, New Zealand and the US".

Much of Chinese influence on British campuses is done through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, of which there are at least 29 in the UK, according to a February 2019 report on the topic by the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission:

"In Britain, there are at least 29 Confucius Institutes, the second largest number in the world after the United States, attached to major universities such as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Cardiff and University College London. There are also 148 Confucius 'classrooms' in schools around the United Kingdom... Confucius Institutes...are directly controlled, funded and staffed by an agency of the Chinese government's Ministry of Education, the Office of Chinese Language Council International, known as the 'Hanban'".

According to Hamilton and Ohlberg, Confucius Institutes were "initiated in 2004 as an innocuous way to spread the Party narrative... ostensibly devoted to teaching Chinese language and promoting Chinese culture they are, as former propaganda chief Li Changchun put it, 'an important part of China's overseas propaganda set-up'".

Confucius Institutes are not all, however. The China Media Centre at Westminster University, for example, has hosted training courses for CCP officials, partly paid for by the British taxpayer through the Foreign Office, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg, who quote the head of spokesperson development for the Central Office of External Propaganda:

"Chinese Officials' understanding of the functions of the media in Western countries and their ability to respond to and interact with the media has been much enhanced by the excellent intensive 3-week briefings by The China Media Centre and provided to ministries, provinces and cities over the past 7 years". The China Media Centre, according to Hamilton and Ohlberg "has brought many party officials to mingle with the media and political elite, including five seminars at 11 Downing Street, at the invitation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer".

"Those arguing in favor of these kind of courses maintain that they will help bring about a more open media in China", write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

"In fact the opposite is the case: they help the CCP fine-tune its propaganda and use it more effectively across the globe. The courses teach techniques used by Western journalists to extract answers, and also how government officials can handle adversarial questions in press conferences. At a time when official Chinese spokespeople are regularly under fire for the Party's concentration camps in Xinjiang, and other human rights violations, teaching them how to 'handle' questions seems to be more in the CCP's interest than the British public's".

The large extent of Chinese influence in British society will make the MI5's task of tackling hostile covert activity complicated -- but Britain is at risk.

 

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute. 

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16794/china-britain-threat 

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The Roots of the COVID-19 Pandemic - Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham

 

​ by Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham

 

While the possibility of a natural contagion has not been ruled out, the alternative of an unnatural if primarily accidental contagion has gathered momentum, and with good reason.

 

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,847, December 14, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: There has been a notable shift in thinking on the genomic origin and direct source of the virus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. While the possibility of a natural contagion has not been ruled out, the alternative of an unnatural if primarily accidental contagion has gathered momentum, and with good reason.

The question of the genomic origin and direct source of the virus that set off the COVID-19 pandemic is being addressed in parallel by both science and intelligence agencies, with each using its own tools to compile hypotheses and draw conclusions. The genomic origin of the index virus (the strain that infected Patient Zero) has been determined to be a Chinese bat virus that underwent extensive pre-adaptation to humans, including continual transmissibility, prior to infecting Patient Zero. The open question is how, where, and when such exceptional genomic pre-adaptation took place.

On the surface, it appears that in this instance the probability of human intervention (of whatever kind) is higher than naturally occurring, spontaneous evolutionary adaptation, though it is difficult to comparatively quantify those two probabilities.

Another critical issue concerns significant mismatches and errors that occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and collateral Chinese institutions both in Wuhan and elsewhere in China during the decade preceding the onset of the pandemic, as well as thereafter. A question arising from that inquiry is whether those mismatches and errors were cases of negligence or deliberate obfuscation. The latter unfortunately appears to be predominant.

The list of anomalies is long. It includes:

• scientific papers with incoherent data/findings
• unexplained gaps, inconsistencies, and contradictions
• meaningless and twisted chronologies
• illegitimate non-transparency
• elimination and distortion of records and databases
• obscuring and possible destruction of existing viruses (including the index virus) and genomic material
• pressure put on disobedient scientists, physicians, and officials
• disappearance of key persons
• expedient interchangeability between military/defense and civilian institutions (and other entities).

All this misconduct was allegedly meant to serve one principal purpose: to hamper the tracing of the roots of the index virus. These deliberate obfuscations collectively form a powerful argument in support of the unnatural contagion concept.

In further support of this argument, deliberate and systematic obfuscations about the real epidemic impact of the virus during the first months of the outbreak were recently unveiled in detail across 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province). These documents are largely marked classified and for internal use only.

No reference is made in the documents to the roots of the virus. Curiously, however, they do mention “facilities at a bacterial and toxic species preservation center.” “Bacterial” could refer to “microbial” (including viruses) and “toxic” to “virulent.”

This debate is very complicated and contains the potential for explosive revelations on many levels, but intelligence communities around the world have stayed largely silent on the matter. This is both intriguing and unsurprising. Several Western countries, as well as Russia, India, Japan, and Australia, had formed intelligence estimates as early as January 2020 but kept their conclusions quiet.

The very persistence of intelligence agencies’ silence implies that they judge the initial contagion to have been unnatural. Had they concluded that the pandemic resulted from a natural contagion, they would probably have made that conclusion public. The US administration did indicate, several months ago, that unnatural contagion was likely, but no such statement has been formally released by US intelligence. At the levels of NATO and the “Five Eyes,” thorough intelligence estimates have likely been produced internally but they too have not been made public.

On the scientific level, as long as time passes without identification of a non-laboratory animal—with roughly the entirety of its viral genome—as the primary host of SARS-CoV-2, the argument that the initial contagion was unnatural gains indirect credibility. (It is fairly clear that the mink, while an important non-laboratory animal host, was not the direct source of the index virus.)

Independently, many scientists from various countries around the world, including Russia, maintain that the initial contagion was unnatural. They include, for example, Prof. Joseph Tritto of Italy, who is president of the World Academy of Biomedical Sciences and Technologies (an NGO founded in 1997 under the auspices of UNESCO). He has contended that:

providing [by China] the virus [that infected Patient Zero] would have meant recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 was created in the laboratory. The presence of certain genomic inserts in a virus that developed in nature could never occur. The experiments at WIV attracted the interest of the Chinese military and medical-biological sector, which deals with biological weapons… Thus, physicians and biologists who belong to the Chinese political-military sphere joined the experiments… It is reasonable to think that Prof. Shi Zhengli (the principal investigator of WIV) acted only from the point of view of scientific prestige, without however taking into account the risks in terms of security and the political-military interests that the research would have aroused. …[T]he virus [was] created by means of genetic engineering in a military-supervised lab of WIV, and accidentally leaked.

Within the intelligence dimension, Tritto said in August that “negotiations are underway between the intelligence agencies of five countries—the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan—and China. Perhaps the former, during diplomatic negotiations, would be willing to defer the Chinese responsibilities of which they have proof in exchange for the possibility of obtaining the [index] virus [in order] to develop a universal vaccine.”

In terms of vaccine development, it is of note that the most productive effort in China was conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, a facility linked to the defense establishment that has been working with SARS-like viruses at its National Engineering Technology Research Center for Combined Vaccines, in collaboration with WIV, since 2017.

Like Prof. Tritto, senior Russian scientist Prof. Peter Chumakov (a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences) said Chinese scientists at WIV had taken extremely dangerous steps during their studies of tentative vaccines, including inserts in the genome, that gave the virus the ability to infect human cells. He added: “No one excludes [the possibility] that behind the scientists stood curators who [pointed their] actions in another direction that they needed.” Various Chinese military institutes outside Wuhan also worked with important SARS-like bat viruses, often in collaboration with WIV.

The independent scientific argument posed by Italian, Russian, and many other scientists weakens the analyses that support natural contagion and strengthens the plausibility of the argument for unnatural contagion. Their reasoning and concept have been disputed but not convincingly refuted.

There is also speculation surrounding a mysterious, highly virulent, pneumonia-causing bat SARS-like virus that was in all probability isolated in 2012 in China from miners but that has strangely not been registered out in the open. The WIV was involved in that affair, too. Prof. Stuart Newman, a leading expert at New York Medical College, called it “the best-sourced explanation yet of the origins of SARS-CoV-2.” It is probably not the sole possible root of the pandemic virus, but it nonetheless deserves special attention as it might have been the primordial key virus.

It would be extremely difficult to incriminate China conclusively as the developer of the index virus—whether or not it was created as a bioweapon, and whether or not it was intentionally released. Doing so could cause chaotic geopolitical polarization and prompt demands for retaliation against China. Refraining from any form of retaliation would be unreasonable if there were indeed conclusive proof, but retaliation could also wreak havoc on a massive scale. A minimized blaming of China as guilty of a preventable accidental leakage of a naturally derived virus held in an academic lab is less likely to wreak such havoc, but the likelihood that this is in fact what the intelligence agencies have determined is decreasing with time. And even if that was the extent of China’s error, its devastating outcome—the spread of the virus across the rest of the world, with all the attendant consequences—remains.

Beyond the question of the mode through which the initial pandemic virus came into existence is the matter of compiling all possible vital information for developing an upgraded vaccine, anti-serum, and drug. Deciphering the roots of SARS-CoV-2 is hence highly desirable for many reasons, a main one being the need to fully comprehend the intrinsic sophistication of the virus—whether natural or man-made—so as to incapacitate it. It is also essential to trace the roots of the virus completely in order to prevent the emergence of similar pathogens. In all senses (both scientific and intelligence-based), the roots of the virus will have to be uncovered thoroughly and objectively. This will be a global task.

One oddity is the uncanny clustering of certain peculiar properties, the common denominator of which is the exceptionally amplified and/or pathogenic affinities of the index virus toward humans. The likelihood that such a clustering took place naturally in the bio-geographic region of Wuhan is faint, but the likelihood that it took place inside WIV is high in view of the type of experiments on coronaviruses conducted there for years. This is further supported by a large variety of collateral occurrences (the above-cited examples of misconduct), which should neither be ignored nor regarded as coincidental. The complicated interplay between science and intelligence is expected to objectively account for what occurred, but geopolitical forces and geostrategic vectors might hinder progress toward that clarity.

If the only thing at issue was genomic origin or the direct source of the index virus, the whole matter would be much simpler. But the combination of the two supports the likelihood of an unnatural contagion. Close examination of the combination will prove much more meaningful than separate examinations of the two issues.

The roots of the pandemic virus are schematically analyzed in the following table.

Possible variations of the modes underlying the generation and appearance of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, 2019, and their presumed likelihood interrelations

Table created by Dany Shoham

* The direct source represents the course through which Patient Zero contracted the virus.

** The genomic origin represents the way in which the genome of the virus that infected Patient Zero formed.

*** Within the context under discussion, intentional release is basically regarded as unlikely at this point in time.

# Serial passages of capable precursor virus(es) in certain tissue cultures and/or lab animals, conducted in Wuhan.

## There could be, in principle, a combination of genetic engineering and evolvement via passages, in Wuhan.

The purple arrows represent ascending likelihoods (at different rates which are not indicated, except that intentional release is considered of lowest likelihood), while the green arrows represent roughly equivalent likelihoods.

Notably, each of the three variations related to accidental leakage (reading the table vertically) has two alternative sub-variations: either that the virus was the subject of academic study or that it was explored as a potential bioweapon. This is still an open question. A definite precursor virus has not yet been found for any of the mentioned variations and sub-variations (10 in total). New scientific or intelligence findings might clarify the assessment summarized in the table. Only time will tell.

View PDF

 

Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Dany Shoham, a microbiologist and an expert on chemical and biological warfare in the Middle East, is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He is a former senior intelligence analyst in the IDF and the Israeli Defense Ministry.

Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/covid-pandemic-roots/ 

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The Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated Britain - Andrea Widburg

 

​ by Andrea Widburg

Almost two million CCP members work in Britain’s corporations, educational institutions, and its government – but American news won’t tell you that.

News emerged on Sunday that the Chinese Communist Party has 1.95 million registered, loyal party members working in British corporations, government, and educational institutions. The American media, however, was completely disinterested in this story.

The Daily Mail spells out some of the details:

Loyal members of the Chinese Communist Party are working in British consulates, universities and for some of the UK's leading companies, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

An extraordinary leaked database of 1.95 million registered party members reveals how Beijing's malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defence firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants.

[snip]

While there is no evidence that anyone on the party membership list has spied for China – and many sign up simply to boost their career prospects – experts say it defies credulity that some are not involved in espionage

[snip]

The database was originally leaked on Telegram, the encrypted instant messaging app, and passed in September by a Chinese dissident to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), which comprises more than 150 legislators around the world who are concerned by the influence and activities of the Chinese government.

[snip]

Detailed analysis of it by this newspaper reveals that:

• A party member who studied at St Andrews University worked at various consulates in Shanghai including that of the UK;
• Chinese academics who swore the oath to assist the party attended British universities where they were involved in potentially sensitive areas of research including aerospace engineering and chemistry;
• There were more than 600 party members across 19 branches working at the British banks HSBC and Standard Chartered in 2016. Both have drawn criticism for their response to Beijing's crackdown in Hong Kong;
• The pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and AstraZeneca – both involved in the development of coronavirus vaccines – employed a total 123 party loyalists;
• Firms with defence industry interests including Airbus, Boeing and Rolls-Royce employed hundreds of party members.

There’s much to be concerned about that list. First, according to The Conservative Treehouse, the American media has refused to report on it:

The massive data-file [Download Here w/ Caution] was offered to all major international journalists and media organizations. All of the major U.S. media outlets did not want the data. As a consequence, media outlets within Australia and the U.K. are leading the release.

NOTE: At the same time U.S. media were refusing the leaked information they were simultaneously criticizing a U.S. executive order blocking CCP members from visas’ longer than one month in duration, by claiming no-one had any way to know who was a CCP member. In essence, the U.S. corporate media did not want to know.

By any standard, it’s a major news story that the West’s greatest geopolitical rival has infiltrated Britain’s major businesses and institutions, but our American media resolutely closes its eyes. They’ll report on Trump’s two scoops of ice cream, but not that an ally has been infiltrated by communists.

Second, Britain is part of the “Five Eyes” network of nations that share intelligence information. Others in the network are Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. If the CCP members on the list have infiltrated British intelligence, they’ve also infiltrated American intelligence.

Third, there must be a comparable list for CCP members and fellow travelers embedded in American institutions. We can already name a handful: Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s driver of 20 years, Rep. Eric Swalwell’s girlfriend, a Harvard professor charged with selling biological secrets to China, and a UCLA professor convicted for selling missile chip technology to China.

And of course, there’s Hunter Biden, who’s under investigation for his China ties. A recently released email from Hunter strongly implicates Joe Biden too:

In an email dated September 21, 2017, Hunter Biden wrote to Cecilia Browning, the general manager of an office building called “House of Sweden,” requesting that “keys” be “made available for new office mates.”

Hunter Biden listed the “new office mates” as being Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden, and Gongwen Dong (Chairman Ye CEFC emissary). Hunter Biden also requested a sign made for his office that stated “The Biden Foundation” and “Hudson West (CEFC US).”

CEFC China Energy was a Chinese conglomerate that was among the largest energy companies in China before going out of business a couple of years ago. CNN notes that the company “aligned itself so closely with the Chinese government that it was often hard to distinguish between the two.”

Biden and the Democrats have China ties and pro-China policies, but the America media has shut down any reporting about this information. In the geopolitical war between China and America, the recent massive election fraud – which may have been funded and abetted by China – has given us an American governing class that has pro-China, not pro-America, policies.

 

Andrea Widburg  

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

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Biden may stay out of JCPOA for now, leverage US sanctions - Ariel Kahana

 

​ by Ariel Kahana

 

According to some officials in the president-elect's orbit, it would be a mistake to squander the gains of the outgoing administration by turning back the clock.

 

Although president-elect Joe Biden's foreign policy team has publicly said that the new administration would seek to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal and make it "longer and better," according to new information obtained by Israel Hayom, several advisers to the future president have been pushing for a new approach that favors embracing some of President Donald Trump's "maximum pressure" policy components. 

Israel Hayom has learned that among some of Biden's advisers, there is a belief that adopting a conciliatory tone toward Iran would be counterproductive. 

According to some officials in Biden's orbit, it would be a mistake to squander the gains of the outgoing administration by turning back the clock in one fell swoop and returning to the Iran deal along the terms set by the official document, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action from 2015.

Instead, they call for using the tough US sanctions that have been imposed over the past several years as leverage against Iran so that it agrees to amend the nuclear deal, essentially adopting the strategy pursued by Trump, who has hoped the crippling sanctions would convince Iran to agree to add restrictions on its missile program and other aspects that were all but left out of the JCPOA, such as its regional aggression. 

The conventional wisdom is that Biden will eventually opt to strike a balance between the two approaches: He would stay out of the deal in the immediate future but would also extend various good-will gestures that could entice Tehran to change the deal. 

Some in the transition team have also been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his public warning that the US should not re-enter the deal. According to a person close to the transition team, the "new administration would like to engage in dialogue with Israel on the necessary changes that need to be introduced in the deal, but this discussion has to be held behind closed doors." The sources said that "we have avoided statements on Israeli positions, wheres as the prime minister and his ambassador in Washington have [expressed comments on US views].

The source said that "Biden is not Barack Obama, and it is no coincidence that the senior appointments in his foreign policy team are not Obama's people." 

Ariel Kahana  

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/12/14/source-biden-may-stay-out-of-jcpoa-for-now-use-sanctions-as-leverage/ 

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The New Greeks - Caroline Glick

 

​ by Caroline Glick

The progressive elite are now the new American elite. Now in charge, they have dusted off the old anti-Semitism of the WASP elites and updated it.

 

Last week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview to Michael Doran from the Hudson Institute. As a scholar, rather than a reporter, Doran asked questions that related to the ideas that have animated Netanyahu’s actions over the years.

The first part of their discussion revolved around Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress in March 2015 where he laid out the case against the centerpiece of then-president Barack Obama’s foreign policy – the nuclear deal with Iran. Standing before the US lawmakers, Netanyahu explained that Obama’s gambit would guarantee that Iran would develop a nuclear arsenal inside of a decade.

That address is widely considered to have been a turning point in Israel’s history. It cemented Israel’s position as a regional leader and set the conditions for strategic cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab states of the Persian Gulf which, like Israel, are threatened by Iran and its nuclear weapons program.

Doran, who is Catholic, chose to begin his discussion of the speech not with the impact it had on the Arab world, but its impact on American Jews. Members of the US Jewish community, Doran recalled, were frightened by the speech which pitted the leader of the Jewish state against the President of the United States. He quoted a friend who told him, “2,000 years of history have taught us that you shouldn’t clash with kings.”

The American Jewish anxiety over Netanyahu’s speech is notable because it revealed a harsh truth that has only grown harsher in the five years that have passed since then. The self-confidence that characterized American Jewry in the second half of the 20 century has all but disappeared.

Until the 1950s, the most common expression of anti-Semitism in America was elitist snark and ostracism. The country club anti-Semitism of high society kept Jews out of fancy country clubs, law firms, and investment banks. Jews were subjected to admission quotas at top universities and the Jews that got in were expected to behave like good Presbyterians.

In the early to mid-1950s, as the dimensions of the Holocaust were absorbed by the American ruling classes, the gates to high society began opening to American Jews, and what is widely considered the Golden Age of American Judaism began.

Fifty years later, at the start of this century, things began slipping back. The Golden Age began to rust. It wasn’t the WASP elite of yesteryear that rejected the civil rights of Jews. It was the new progressive elite that began undermining the Jews’ position as they moved from the margins of American society to center stage. Like the Soviets, who exchanged the old anti-Jewish bigotry that rejected Jews as individuals, for the new anti-Jewish bigotry that rejected Jews as a nation, the progressives rejected Israel’s right to exist and ostracized Jews who embraced their attachment to the Jewish people and homeland.

The progressive elite are now the new American elite. Now in charge, they have dusted off the old anti-Semitism of the WASP elites and updated it. Whereas the old elite anti-Semitism involved the social and financial ostracism of Jews due to their religion, today’s elite anti-Semitism involves the social and financial ostracism of Jews due to politics and racism.

As Netanyahu spoke with Doran, the online Jewish magazine Tablet published a story of such contemporary elite anti-Semitic ostracism suffered by a group of Jewish women in Los Angeles. The women had been members of an exclusive, members-only Facebook page for women in LA called “Girls Night Out.”

GNO, with its 30,000 members is considered a valuable networking tool. As the article explained, the page, “offers valuable work opportunities for LA’s large freelance population. By commenting on threads, fitness trainers, chefs, makeup artists, and the like can prove their bona fides and, if they are lucky, get new clients. Artists can sell their wares and PR pros can announce hot new openings and popup stores.”

With the economic shutdowns caused by the coronavirus, membership in the networking rich Facebook page is considered a precious resource.

In late August, as the Black Lives Matter riots spread to Los Angeles, the page’s administrators made supporting BLM official policy. BLM’s LA riots were rife with specifically anti-Semitic attacks against synagogues and Jewish businesses. Anti-Semitic banners were posted on highway overpasses and the atmosphere in Jewish neighborhoods, in particular, was fearful.

One such banner on highway 405 caught the attention of a Jewish GNO member. She posted a comment about the banner, which read, “The Jews Want a Race War,” on GNO and expressed her concern. Other Jewish women joined her and they recommended that the page appoint a Jewish woman as one of its administrators to aid in the fight against anti-Semitism.

In response, another GNO member suggested that only Jews who agree to “acknowledge the occupation of Palestine,” should be permitted to administer the page. That is, only Jews who accept the progressive elite’s anti-Semitic constraints on their rights to participate in polite society can have the job.

All the Jewish women who posted objections to this self-evidently bigoted post were thrown off the page. And, a Jewish woman who accepted the condition, and wrote a post condemning Israel was given the job of an administrator.

The Jews who were thrown off took their case to the group founder. She proceeded to do nothing for three months. Finally, last month, the founder pushed out the anti-Semitic administrators and moderators, including the Jewish anti-Zionist, brought back the Jewish women who were expelled, and appointed two pro-Israel Jewish women as moderators on the page.

Given its happy end, the GNO story is a nice story. But the fact that for three months, the Jewish women who stood up for themselves were denied the opportunity to participate in the valuable networking opportunities provided by the Facebook page simply because they stood up against bigotry testifies to the prevalence and power of progressive anti-Semites.

This elite progressive anti-Semitism isn’t expressed only as hatred for Israel and Jews who support Israel. It is also characterized by a sneering contempt for Judaism and Jewish practices – for instance, the practice of celebrating Hanukkah.

Last week, the New York Times published an opinion piece under the headline, “Saying Good-bye to Hanukkah.” The article was written by a non-Jewish woman, with an assimilated Catholic mother and an assimilated Jewish father. In her column, she declared that she and her non-Jewish spouse will not be lighting the menorah with their non-Jewish children because it just isn’t meaningful to them.

It ought to go without saying that a non-Jewish woman’s decision not to celebrate a Jewish holiday is a non-event. So why did the NYT publish it?

Today, the New York Times is the newspaper of record for the progressive elite. As such, the NYT published the article to tell the faithful that contempt for Judaism and Jewish ritual is the way to go. The article can be seen as of a piece with the paper’s hostile treatment of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

To date, the Jewish community’s institutional leadership has been utterly incompetent in contending with the resurgence of the country club anti-Semitism of America’s progressive ruling class. This owes, in large part to the fact that many powerful members of the community are progressives and as such, they side with the anti-Semites against their fellow Jews.

Last month, William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations asked the group’s members to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s definition of ant-Semitism. The IHRA definition, along with the examples of anti-Semitism it includes has been adopted by the US government and dozens of other governments worldwide.

The progressives at Americans for Peace Now refused. In an open letter to Daroff, the pro-Palestinian group aped Jeremy Corbyn insisting that the examples of anti-Semitism attached to the IHRA definition – rejecting Israel’s right to exist, campaigning for its boycott and the ostracism of its supporters and using a double standard to judge Israel – are not anti-Semitism.

Rather than boot APN out of the Conference of Presidents for endorsing discrimination against Jews, Daroff shrugged his shoulders. Everyone has a right to his opinion, he responded. It was just a suggestion.

Netanyahu’s response to Doran’s recollection of his friend’s fear over the premier’s bold defiance of Obama was instructive, both in terms of what it says about the nature of Jewish history and the nature of Jewish leadership.

Netanyahu said he rejected Doran’s friend’s “general rule,” that Jews “shouldn’t clash with kings.”

“I think Jewish history is a little more complex than that. It goes back actually almost 4,000 years,” he noted.

And then Netanyahu turned to Hanukkah.

“Next week we’re marking down one episode alone, just one example of resistance to kings without which we wouldn’t be here today. It’s called Hanukkah, it’s the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire and Antiochus. Without that revolt, there wouldn’t be a Judaism, there wouldn’t be Christianity either.”

Netanyahu then rejected Doran’s friend’s characterization of Obama as a king.

“I wasn’t there dealing with a king. I was dealing with the elected president of our great valued ally, the United States.”

While many American Jews were scared that Netanyahu’s courageous challenge of Obama’s central foreign policy would provoke anti-Semitism, in fact, it empowered many Americans to oppose the deal. Republicans rallied against it. Every Republican presidential candidate in 2016 pledged to abandon the deal, and President Donald Trump kept his promise.

By being a leader, Netanyahu also empowered the American Jewish community to defy Obama, even as he and his advisors channeled anti-Semitism by demonizing the deal’s opponents as being in the pockets of nefarious donors and foreign interests.

AIPAC launched a major campaign to oppose the nuclear deal in Congress and tens of thousands of otherwise uninvolved American Jews attended demonstrations across the US to voice their opposition to the deal that paved the way for Iran to become a nuclear power.

Netanyahu explained that in dealing with leaders like Obama, with whom he had profound disagreements, “You seek compromise where you can, but you have to avoid compromise where you can’t and you have to distinguish between the two and that’s what I tried to do.”

This lesson in leadership is perhaps the key message of our time. Like the Greeks of yesteryear, the progressive elites today insist that, to be accepted in polite society, Jews have to give up an essential part of their identity – and their civil rights. The Greeks demanded that the Jews give up the Torah. The progressives demand they give up their Jewish peoplehood. These are things that cannot be compromised, only fought, even when those demanding their forfeiture are Jews themselves.

Originally published in Israel Hayom.

 

Caroline Glick 

 Source: http://carolineglick.com/the-new-greeks/ 

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Newsom getting alarmed at California's growing support for a recall referendum - Monica Showalter

 

​ by Monica Showalter

 

A new recall petition has surpassed the 750,000 halfway point in number of signatures collected and it's filling up fast.

 

According to press accounts, California's Gov. Gavin Newsom is in the catbird seat. 

The headline in yesterday's The Hill says it all: Biden appointments give Newsom chance to reshape California politics.

And for him, it's supposed to be great. After all, his leftist-extremist Bay Area, San Francisco and Berkeley political machine, once reviled as impossible to replicate across the country, is now ascendant throughout the U.S.

San Francisco's House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is gearing up for yet another term as the most powerful person in Congress. Berkeley-born Sen. Kamala Harris looks set for the vice presidency, after having been put there based on pressure from the California machine, which, now that it's done, leaves him a Senate slot to fill. His attorney general, Xavier Becerra, is also off to Washington, too, leaving him another appointment of his choosing. And possibly the same with secretary of state Alex Padilla.

As for matters back home, hain't he got the power? Newsom's COVID lockdowns have pretty well put a stop to all those pesky small business owners who run San Francisco's and Los Angeles's restaurants, bars, schools, and gyms. He's ordered them all shut down, leaving them now dependent on his government for sustanance. Oh, and he had no problem getting $3 million for himself for the federal PPP COVID loans, too bad about the rest.

Just one problem though: California's voters want to throw him out. A new recall petition has surpassed the 750,000 halfway point in number of signatures collected and it's filling up fast. What's more, it might just make it to the finish line because a judge has extended the signature period from Nov. 17 to March 17. Hollywood celebrities are signing it. The easy-access petition includes a workable download and five spaces to sign and get your friends. It can be can be downloaded and turned in here.

According to the SFGate.com, Newsom's minions are getting nervous.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already survived five long-shot recall attempts in his two years in office, but those close to him are reportedly worried that the current recall effort amidst frustration over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic could prove successful.

Near the bottom of a Politico report on Newsom's chief of staff Ann O'Leary preparing to depart Sacramento for a potential job in the Biden administration rests this spicy nugget: "As Newsom begins his third full year in office, the governor’s team is increasingly concerned with a long-shot conservative recall that could mushroom into a major threat in 2021 if it attracts significant financial support."

The report also states, "Sources close to Newsom said the governor's office has been disorganized over the past month and has not responded effectively to damaging headlines" including his French Laundry trip, controversial new stay-at-home order and delay in naming Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' replacement in the United States Senate. In addition, most of the state's public schools remain closed while they are open in other deep blue states such as New York and Massachusetts, and small business owners were particularly irate over the lack of evidence presented to support certain business closures.

There's plenty of reason for him to feel that prickly feeling on the back of his neck.

One, California has ousted governors before, notably Gray Davis in 2003. His replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was a complete disaster, but that was no consolation for Davis. The direct-democracy parallel government mechanisms in California, via petition, can have unforeseen effects.

Two, multiple ballot-harvested congressional districts in California flipped right back to being red in this past 2020 election. Apparently, the red wave was too hard for the vote manipulators to overcome. Democrats in fact, gained nothing, and only lost quite a few weakly buttressed districts. Meanwhile, solid blue enclaves such as Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks saw major pro-Trump rallies and protests. There is still a hint of Reagan Country within Newsom's state.

Three, Newsom's lockdowns, in a state famous for its small business innovations, even as smarter East Coast Democrat governors know better than to get involved with that, have taken a monster toll on Newsom's popularity. This may be the single biggest factor in driving the recall petition. The lockdowns are zero-science, they take an outsized toll on some of the most beloved of California's quality of life institutions, its beloved restaurants with their world-class cuisine, its gyms, spas, and other emblems of the California lifestyle. The previous church and beach closures, were also very unreasonable, unsupported by science and extremely unpopular.

Four: Newsom is little more than Joe Isuzu in his lunatic lies and claims, asking Californians to eat their meals with their masks on, putting them on and taking them off between every last bite. Compare and contrast that of course with his fancy unmasked indoor dinner at The French Laundry with a gaggle of medical lobbyists. Newsom in fact today has taken steps to rein those guys in, but it's too little, too late.

Five, the fact of the matter is, the state is losing population as residents who can, flee, to other states. Inflated energy prices and skyrocketing taxes, and some of the nation's worst unioned-up schools, are just a few reasons. Newsom never talks about that embarassing detail, but for every Californian who gets out, preferring the challenging weather and vast spans of Texas to the spectacular scenery and glorious climate of California, rest assured, there are thousands more who are thinking about it, or who wish they could follow. That's quite a backdrop for the unpopular COVID lockdowns and the attending hypocrisy he's shown.

Yes, Newsom's gotten all he wants on the national front, having succeeded at least temporarily in exporting the California model nationwide. But there's also a few Eumenides waiting to take him down, from the very people he placed dead last in his quest for unlimited power. As a message to Joe Biden and other disgusting leftists embracing the California model, let's all hope the voters can take Newsom down.

 

Monica Showalter  

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

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Israeli ventilation system could give COVID the smart treatment - ILH Staff

 

​ by ILH Staff

 

Innovation described as "tremendous breakthrough is nothing less than a game changer" because it allows to monitor several patients simultaneously.

 

An Israeli startup's groundbreaking innovation may provide a much-needed remedy to the shortage of ventilators and the overwhelming of staff in COVID wards.

"Yehonatan Medical, in collaboration with Professor Ori Efrati, director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Unit at Sheba Medical Center, devised a state-of-the-art, first-of-its-kind ventilation system that can treat between three and five patients simultaneously. That means more patients treated by fewer ICU staff," the company said in a statement.

"Conventional ventilators, aside from being very costly, are limited in that they can only be used with one patient at a time," explained Prof. Efrati. "Their capacity factor and programming functions were designed for single-patient use, and there is also the danger of cross contamination."

According to Professor Ori Efrati, director of the Pediatric Pulmonary Unit at Sheba Medical Center, "we were able to use the relatively simple and inexpensive BipaP non-invasive ventilation machine as the basis for the Advanced Ventilation Technology." He added that "thanks to the high-power output and built-in disinfecting mechanism, the new system can safely treat three to five patients simultaneously."

Efrati declared the new development a "tremendous breakthrough is nothing less than a game changer."

The startup said that additional features based on artificial intelligence technology include the ability to create a hierarchy and classification of alerts; the ability for automatic parameter correction according to set criteria, and respiratory rehabilitation for the patient by adjusting to changes in the patient responsiveness.

Yehonatan Medical is the medical department of Mofet Etzion, a company that for over two decades has developed various security and military innovations for the Israel Defense Forces.

 

ILH Staff 

 Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/12/14/israeli-ventilation-system-could-give-covid-the-smart-treatment/ 

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Biden faces the Iran-Venezuela alliance - Ben Cohen

 

​ by Ben Cohen

 

The upcoming administration may not succeed in ridding the world of Nicolás Maduro and the ayatollahs, but it is in a position to disrupt and break their goings-on through increased policing of commercial traffic, military transfers and financial transactions between the two.

President Donald Trump will leave office with the regimes in Venezuela and Iran far weaker in structural terms than when he arrived. That is indisputable. At the same time, his presidency has seen the alliance between these two morally and financially bankrupt regimes reach new heights. That, too, is indisputable.

As democracy takes effect in the United States with an elected change of government, its painful absence in Iran on one side of the world and Venezuela on the other means that President-elect Joe Biden will be confronted with the question of regime change in both – much as Trump was, and before him, presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. In terms of the immediate context, Biden will enter the White House a little more than a month after the latest set of fraudulent elections in Venezuela, which saw dictator Nicolás Maduro and his allies win 91 percent of the vote in elections for the National Assembly that was boycotted by the opposition and denounced by both America and the European Union.

Around the same time as that rigged election, a flotilla of 10 ships departed from Iran carrying petroleum to Venezuela, where a combination of international sanctions and chronic corruption and mismanagement by the Maduro regime has resulted in a devastating fuel shortage in a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world. This terrible irony is part of a broader humanitarian emergency in the country that has left tens of thousands of Venezuelans without food or adequate medical attention.

According to Bloomberg, after discharging their loads in Venezuela, the Iranian ships will return home carrying supplies of Venezuelan crude. It is a route that Iranian ships have been pounding since May of this year when Maduro theatrically greeted the first Iranian flotilla bearing supplies of oil as a gesture of solidarity. This latest flotilla was twice the size of the original, and there is every reason to expect that the two regimes will increase the volume of each shipment, regardless of the malign effects of these transactions on the living standards of their own citizens.

Could Biden deliver the killer blow to these two regimes that his various predecessors either held back from or couldn't execute? Does he want to do so? Relatedly, how much effort is his administration prepared to invest in preventing the Venezuela-Iran alliance from functioning in a practical sense for as long as these regimes remain in power?

One expectation is that Biden will reverse Trump's policies; in the Iranian case, by reviving diplomatic outreach as a prelude to a renewed nuclear deal, and in the Venezuelan case, by backing away from the Trump administration's recognition (along with dozens of other democratic nations) of opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimately elected president of Venezuela.

In terms of the first problem, the hope – and at the present time the expectation – is that Biden will not bow to the inflated demands the Iranian mullahs will inevitably make as their price for allowing limited international oversight of their nuclear facilities. In terms of the second problem, Guaido's failure thus far to bring about the regime's overthrow doesn't logically mean that Biden will embrace Maduro.

Indeed, as vice president in the Obama administration, Biden went further than other senior US officials in condemning Venezuela's rulers, to the extent that Maduro fulminated against Biden's "aggression" and "desire for revenge" back in 2014. Biden's offense back then was to observe in a newspaper article that Venezuela's predicament reminded him of "previous eras" in Latin America, "when strongmen governed through violence and oppression; and human rights, hyperinflation, scarcity and grinding poverty wrought havoc on the people of the hemisphere." He went on to accuse Maduro of trying to "distract his people from the profound issues at stake in Venezuela by concocting totally false and outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States."

More recently, Biden told a group of Venezuelan-Americans during a campaign stop in Florida that he viewed Maduro as "a dictator, plain and simple," promising that the punishing sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on Caracas would not be lightened. And following the fraudulent elections on Dec. 6, Biden's aides confirmed that he would not recognize the result. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported last Wednesday that Biden wants to the Europeans to increase their pressure on Maduro and his cohorts.

If Biden continues to follow this trajectory on Venezuela, the question of Iran is certain to enter the frame sooner rather than later. Those who believe that Biden will faithfully restore Obama's own foreign-policy stances should pause to recall that, at just the time that the Obama administration was wooing the Iranians over the nuclear deal, the United States was largely turning a blind eye towards the political repression in Venezuela, making it clear that while America condemned the beating of protestors and the rigging of elections, it was not going to follow its rhetoric with meaningful action.

What is different now is that Biden is coming into office with an established record of opposition to Maduro – any softening of his position would represent an unambiguous climb-down, handing Maduro a political victory.

By the same token, any weakening of the US position on Iran under Biden will send the signal to Tehran that it can continue its operations in Venezuela and, indeed, much of the rest of Latin America. Advocates of the 2015 nuclear deal would dismiss as overheated the contention that Iran's actions in Venezuela should be a fundamental concern for US policy, but the reality is that even under the Trump administration, Iran has not rolled back its presence and influence in Venezuela. For example, at the beginning of December, Adm. Craig Faller, head of United States Southern Command, revealed that operatives from Iran's Quds Force – the international wing of the regime's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – had arrived in Venezuela to assist with Maduro's project of remaining in power and that there had been an "uptick" in weapons exchanges between the two regimes.

A Biden administration may not succeed in ridding the world of Maduro and the ayatollahs, but it is in a position to disrupt and break their ongoing alliance through increased policing of commercial traffic, military transfers and financial transactions between the two. Conversely, restoring the Iranian nuclear deal will do little to reduce Iran's footprint in Latin America, whatever other security benefits a Biden administration believes it might bring.

I'm not going to predict definitively which path Biden will take. However, I do think there's another, deeper difference between Biden and Obama that should be accounted for in any assessment of our new commander in chief. In his dealings with Iran, Venezuela and many other authoritarian regimes, Obama clearly communicated his belief that all these countries had legitimate historical gripes with the United States – and that as a consequence, the US stance towards them should be chastened. During his half-century in politics, Joe Biden has yet to exhibit the same tendency.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

 

Ben Cohen  

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/biden-faces-the-iran-venezuela-alliance/ 

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SCOTUS opens up a constitutional can of worms - Mark Landsbaum

 

​ by Mark Landsbaum

 

An ugly truth is revealed about how the United States enforces its laws.

 

Have we opened a can of worms, constitutionally speaking? 

The highest court in the land ruled that Texas, and the 18 other states that supported its lawsuit, have no standing to seek relief for gross and obvious violations of the U.S. Constitution. 

Texas alleged that four swing states blatantly violated the Constitution's Electors Clause by allowing unauthorized politicians and bureaucrats to change election law when the supreme law of the land grants that power exclusively to state legislatures.  The Lone Star State also charged that those swing states, which are now determinative in deciding who won the presidency for the entire nation, also violated equal protection under the Constitution's 14th^th Amendment by writing rules for some counties within a state that did not apply to other counties.  For good measure, Texas said those constitutional violations opened the door to widespread cheating, including illegal voting, unverifiable ballots, ballot box–stuffing, and a host of other crimes backed up by hundreds of sworn affidavits by eyewitnesses and election and computer experts. 

But in a decision Friday, the high court dismissively refused even to hear Texas's complaint.  Two justices indicated they would hear the case but not give Texas the relief it asked for.  Oddly, the decision came after SCOTUS asked defendants Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to submit responses to Texas's charges.  Why bother with responses if the lawsuit was ineligible for the court to even consider? 

Fine.  Up to a point, we longtime supporters of states' rights sympathize with the logic.  Who is Texas to tell Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin which portions of the Constitution they may or may not violate?  Let that thought sink in. 

If SCOTUS's reasoning is followed to its logical extension, then what about these ramifications? 

• If Louisiana decides that it wants to reinstitute human slavery in violation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, who are the other 49 states to complain?  Why would they have standing to seek relief? 
• How about if Alaska decides to limit voting rights to only men in clear violation of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution?  What legitimate basis would Nebraska or New York have to complain? 

Texas sought protection from electoral harm by invoking an original provision of the Constitution, adopted in 1787.  The 13th Amendment outlawing slavery wasn't adopted for another 68 years.  And women's suffrage provided by the 19th Amendment was adopted 131 years after the Constitution.  Do those Johnny-come-lately amendments deserve different treatment from what the original document they amended gets? 

The reflexive explanation for the national court's current inconsistency is that constitutional disputes are not supposed to be hashed out between states.  Instead, such disagreements are the purview of the national Department of Justice.  According to that reasoning, the federal DOJ may intervene when the Constitution is blatantly violated, as it did to prevent black children from being barred from entering unconstitutionally segregated Southern public schools in the 1950s and 1960s.  

So where has the DOJ been amid the revelation of massive fraud in the 2020 election?  If you say "silent," you've been paying attention.  One might say absent without leave. 

Does anyone seriously believe that the DOJ would have shown such a lack of interest if polling places had turned away voters based on their skin color or sex?  Why the difference?  The cynical explanation may be the best.  It's because enforcement of your "rights" boils down to what elite people in positions of authority decide are rights worth defending. 

So what are Texas and its like-minded 18 states to do?  If they choose to secede as did the original colonies from England in 1776, my guess is that you will find out real fast what the touted Department of Justice considers worth enforcing. 

If you think our esteemed authorities will turn a blind eye to serious secession efforts the way they did to blatant violations of the Electors Clause and 14th Amendment in the Texas case, go ahead and try.  But something tells me your effort won't get far before it's met with overwhelming opposition from the national government, including its courts. 

As I am wont to say at such times, it's a fallen world. 

Once again I ask, have we opened a can of worms, constitutionally speaking?  

Or, perhaps, have we merely exposed how arbitrarily the United States enforces the rights it claims to recognize for all its people, just as all self-serving authorities have in every civilization from the beginning of time?  Yours truly suspects that the second question has become rhetorical. 

 

Mark Landsbaum is a Christian retired journalist, former investigative reporter, editorial writer, and columnist.  He also is a husband, father, grandfather, and Dodgers fan.  He can be reached at mark.landsbaum@gmail.com.

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

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