The Washington Post's Reporting Can't Be Trusted - Daniel R. Street

 

by Daniel R. Street

A few examples will suffice to show what a wreck the Post's reporting is.

After the highly politicized raid on President Trump's personal residence at Mar-a-Lago by the Biden Department of Justice, Fake News Media kicked into high gear to justify it.  Chief among the legacy media culprits is The Washington Post.  In an article published on August 11, 2022, The Washington Post claimed that the FBI had searched former President Trump's home looking for nuclear documents.  This article claimed that "classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought" in the search.  The alleged "sources" for the article were "people familiar with the investigation."

The Washington Post followed up on this article on September 6, 2022, with another piece claiming that nuclear secrets were among the classified documents seized by the FBI in the raid.  This article claimed that a document "describing a foreign government's military defenses, including its military capabilities" was seized in the raid.  The alleged source or sources for this article were "people familiar with the probe."

The Post followed that report on November 14, 2022, with yet another anonymously sourced report claiming that investigators believe that Trump's ego prompted him to keep classified documents after he left office, though according to "people familiar with the matter," thus far, no indications have been found that Trump tried to sell or use government secrets.

The Washington Post reports on the Mar-a-Lago raid bear the hallmarks of fake news.  The stories rely solely on anonymous sources.  The paper provides no facts whatsoever tending to show that the anonymous sources are well placed enough to know what they are talking about.  The claims made in the articles cannot be otherwise verified.  Essentially, the paper asks readers to trust its reporting about these sensitive matters.  But can The Post's reporting be trusted?  A review of a few of The Post's other anonymously sourced articles relating to President Trump confirms that the answer is no.

Comey asked for more Russia investigation funding

Recall when then President Trump fired FBI director James Comey on May 9, 2017?  The very next day, May 10, 2017, The Washington Post ran a story claiming that Comey had sought more funding for the Russia investigation only days before he was fired.  The article claimed that the request was made by Comey to deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein.  The sources for the WaPo story were two anonymous "officials with knowledge of the discussion."  The article suggested that the request for more Russia investigation funding contributed to the president's decision to fire Comey.  The Post's story, with its anonymous sources, supposedly confirmed an earlier anonymously sourced report on the same issue by The New York Times.

The stories were not true.  The same day the reports came out, May 10, 2017, a Justice Department spokesperson labeled the report "100% false" after conferring with deputy A.G. Rosenstein directly.  Thereafter, Rosenstein also confirmed to Congress that the former FBI director had not requested more resources for the Russia probe.  Furthermore, on May 11, 2017, the day after the WaPo's report, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe confirmed in testimony before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that the Russia investigation was adequately funded; that funds are not typically requested for one case; and that funding requests are made to Congress, not the A.G.  In short, the anonymous reports were dead wrong.

Russian bounties for Taliban killing American Troops

On June 28, 2020, The Washington Post published a story claiming that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops.  This article, based on anonymous "people familiar with the matter," claimed that the Russian bounty scheme had resulted in the deaths of "several U.S. Service members."  The "people said" the intelligence about the program was "passed up from the U.S. Special Operations forces based in Afghanistan and led to a restricted high-level White House meeting in late March."  The problem with the story is none of the reporting is true.

The very next day, the United States Department of Defense issued a press release stating that it had no evidence corroborating the media claims.  Shortly thereafter, Gen. Kenneth McKenzie with the U.S. Central Command confirmed that the intelligence on the issue "wasn't proven" and had "very, very low levels of authenticity" and that his personnel were still investigating.  United States secretary of defense Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed in testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on July 9, 2020 that the the reports about the Russian bounty program were not confirmed.  Furthermore, contrary to the WaPo reporting, the director of National Intelligence at time the the reports came out, John Ratcliffe, verified that former DNI Richard Grenell and President Trump were not briefed on the intelligence, which both former DNI Grenell and President Trump also confirmed.  As late as April 2021, the Biden administration continued to maintain the Russian bounty reports were still unconfirmed.  (This a particularly damning admission, since then-candidate Biden prevaricated repeatedly about the "Russian bounty" story after it came out in 2020 and lambasted President Trump over it.)  Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watchdog group, published a devastating takedown of the Fake News peddled by The Washington Post, and others, on this "Russian bounty" story.

The "find the fraud in Georgia" story

The Washington Post published a report on January 9, 2021, claiming that President Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator to "find the fraud" while investigating the 2020 election.  The article was revised later, but it originally implied that President Trump urged the investigator to fabricate evidence of fraud, claiming he told her to "find the fraud" and that she would be a "national hero" if she did.  The story was based on an anonymous source, which the WaPo claimed was "an individual briefed on the call" who remained anonymous "because of the sensitivity of the conversation."  The WaPo went on claim President Trump's phone call could amount to obstruction of justice or other criminal violations.  (The previous links are to articles about the WaPo article due to the extensive revision made to the original.)

The truth came out a couple of months later, when an audio recording of the phone call was found and produced in response to a public records request.  The quotes published by The Post were made up.  The media reports about the call were all wrong.  President Trump did not tell the Georgia investigator to "find the fraud" or that she would be a "national hero" if she made some fraud up.  Further, the Georgia investigator, Frances Watson, confirmed in an interview that she was not pressured by President Trump during the call.  (In a follow-up report, The Washington Post disclosed that its anonymous source was Jordan Fuchs, the Georgia deputy secretary of state, who supposedly talked to the investigator after her conversation with Trump.)  The fabricated quotes from President Trump published by The Post in its false report were cited by Democrats in the second bogus impeachment of President Trump in January 2021.  Fake news can be serious business indeed.

There are more factually incorrect stories peddled by The Washington Post about President Trump, but these prove the point: The Washington Post's reports about President Trump simply cannot be trusted.  While Americans are all understandably interested in more background on what the DOJ is up to with its raid on the home of a former president, we are not likely to get the real story from The Washington Post, about this or anything else pertaining to former president Trump.

Image: Ron Cogswell via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).

Daniel R. Street

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_washington_posts_reporting_cant_be_trusted.html

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How Corporations and a Nonprofit Partnered to Stop the Red Wave - Daniel Greenfield

 

by Daniel Greenfield

The IRS let the Left 'Rock the Vote' in the midterms

 

[Order David Horowitz’s and John Perazzo’s new booklet: “Internal Radical Service: Abuse Of Taxpayer Dollars To Advance Leftwing Causes Illegally And Unconstitutionally”: CLICK HERE.]

The Left’s most successful youth voter turnout operation began when a Fort Lauderdale record store owner was busted for selling 2 Live Crew’s ‘As Nasty as They Wanna Be’ album.

The record store owner was convicted of obscenity charges after Judge Jose Gonzalez had denounced the rap album, containing numbers such as ‘Me So Horny’ and ‘Dick Almighty’, for its “references to violence against women and abusive sex”. The record store owner would later be busted for selling cocaine and was accused of pushing crack through his store.

While he did not have a happy ending, music industry executives at Virgin Records, worried about the impact of obscenity rulings on their bottom line, created Rock the Vote. Officially its purpose was to mobilize youth turnout to avoid having the country run by older politicians who just didn’t “get the youth”, or at least the destructive culture that older executives were pushing on the youth, but RTV was a Democratic voter turnout operation from the very beginning.

“Did you know youth voters canceled out every voter over 65+ for 2022?” Rock the Vote recently bragged. The voters they wanted to cancel out were Republicans and moderate Democrats.

Music industry executives co-founded Rock the Vote with Steve Barr: a finance chair of the Democratic Party. The voter turnout operation, famous from its MTV days, helped turn the Democrats away from the party of Tipper Gore and the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In the 80s, Hollywood and the Democrats had attempted to appeal to Middle America and normative values. By the 90s, they triumphantly tossed those overboard and redefined themselves as the hip edgy transgressives who were leaving the stodgy Republicans behind. Democrats in the 80s had criticized the excesses of the entertainment industry, but by the 90s, beginning with Bill Clinton, they had become politically and culturally inseparable from it.

And that’s how ‘Me So Horny’ led to a youth voter turnout operation that played a significant role in midterm elections where Democrats depended on their vote.

Facing widespread discontent from virtually every adult demographic, with Latino, Jewish, Asian and even black voters shifting toward Republicans, they bet on Generation Z. And it delivered.

In the midst of a terrible economy and a crime wave, Democrats were boosted by a demographic least likely to share adult concerns about the economy, schools and public safety, and most likely to be animated by phantom ideological narratives about social justice, abortion and global warming.

Democrats enjoyed the highest turnout for younger voters in a generation with a 31% turnout. Especially in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan.

That doesn’t just happen.

Rock the Vote, which claims to be nonpartisan and can only operate only on the condition of not expressing a party preference, published an officially branded table, boasting that, “Why wasn’t 2022 a red wave? The youth vote. Young voters were the only age group with a strong majority support among Democrats.”

This partisan message, like the entire RTV agenda, is one big violation of the tax code.

In the midterms, Rock the Vote used social media influencers to target the youth vote. Afterward the organization posted a list of Gen Z politicians whom they described as “dominating the polls and being elected.” All three were Democrats. There were no Republicans on the list.

Maxwell Alejandro Frost, had been the organizing director of March for Our Lives, which partners with Rock The Vote. Nabeela Syed was a veteran of Emily’s List. Cassandra Levesque was backed by Planned Parenthood. RTV was championing not only Democrats, but leftists backed by the partisan groups it was partnering with. Yet another abuse of its nonprofit status.

RTV’s Featured Civic Technology Partners is a damning list of radical leftist groups and political allies like Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, MoveOn, Planned Parenthood, The Arab American Institute, assorted unions, the NAACP, the National Iranian American Council: known by some as the ‘Iran Lobby’ and CAIR. ‘As Nasty as They Wanna Be’ indeed.

Missing from the list is anything remotely resembling a right-leaning or conservative group.

What began with Madonna rhyming, “Dr. King, Malcolm X/ Freedom of speech is as good as sex” now has Black Lives Matter’s DeRay McKesson as a director at RTV. But behind the pop culture were the industries that were able to influence elections while partnering with a nonprofit.

Rock the Vote has partnered with NBA teams, Cox cable, Foot Locker, Gap, WarnerMedia, Macy’s and Yelp to name a few of the companies partaking in its ‘Brands for Democracy’.

While officially RTV is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit, its director, Jessica Reeves currently serves, “as a political appointee in the Biden-Harris Administration as Director of Public Engagement at the Small Business Administration.”

Rock the Vote is not only nonpartisan, it has a direct connection to the Biden administration’s public engagement team. That makes it not only partisan, but is being partly supervised from inside the administration of a prospective presidential candidate. That’s blatantly illegal.

RTV’s upper echelons are stacked with Democrat political operatives.

Muthoni Wambu Kraal, another director, worked for the DCCC, Obama and as the National Political & Organizing Director for the Democratic National Committee. She also sits on the board of ActBlue. RTV’s president, Carolyn DeWitt worked on the 2012 Democrat convention.

Amanda Brown Lierman, RTV’s co-chair, doubles as the campaign director for a leftist SuperPAC and formerly worked for Obama. An official with a partisan SuperPAC playing a role in what claims to be a nonpartisan nonprofit involved in elections is a major red flag.

But there’s little ambiguity about the fact that Rock the Vote is a Democrat voter turnout operation under people who have specialized in turning out Democrat voters.

Rock the Vote was ahead of the curve in combining corporate partnerships and nonprofits to boost Democrat voter registration and turnout. Rock the Vote’s blueprint has since become the Democrat standard without the IRS ever lifting a finger against a nonprofit blatantly violating the tax code.

As discussed in Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, a pamphlet from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the IRS has allowed leftists to build massive nonprofit networks aimed at achieving their political agenda. That includes campaign operations.

In my recent talk, I broke down how the Democrats have replicated every element of their campaign operations through nonprofits so that every public estimate of election spending is far off because it does not take into account the massive impact of 501(c)(3) cash that secures voter registration, messaging and turnout to invisibly shape and sway election results.

The effects, like the recent midterms, appear unnatural and impossible unless you understand what the machine fed by massive amounts of harvested data and virtually unlimited amounts of tax-exempt cash from major donors and corporate alliances is doing behind the scenes.

Rock the Vote’s agenda, which it’s not at all shy about, is championing leftist agenda items and electing Democrats to implement them. Or as RTV put it, “Whether it’s climate justice, healthcare, inflation, reproductive rights, education, or something else, there’s a lot on the ballot right now. Don’t let your voice go unheard!”

RTV’s partisan activities mean that it has no right to operate as a 501(c)(3). It is directly involved in fundraising to mobilize partisan voter registration and election turnout. Voter registration and outreach by nonprofits is only legal on the condition that it’s “conducted in a nonpartisan manner.” RTV never operated in a nonpartisan manner and it certainly isn’t doing that now.

But Rock the Vote’s abuses of the tax code have become too commonplace among nonprofits as discussed in the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s series on the IRS and nonprofit abuses.

The midterms demonstrated how effective Democrats have become at illegally using their nonprofits to find voters to outweigh the public will.

And what that means is that we are all subsidizing a leftist political machine.

As Internal Radical Service by David Horowitz and John Perazzo lays out, Democrats have built a massive nonprofit political machine funded by taxpayers and abetted by the IRS. The DNC can afford to spend a mere $5 million on its voter registration campaign because most of the work is already being done for it by an army of nonprofits  with nearly infinite budgets.

But a new generation of elected officials and investigators may be ready to rock Rove the Vote.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-corporations-and-a-nonprofit-partnered-to-stop-the-red-wave/

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The Strange Morality of the Bay-Area Billionaire Left - Victor Davis Hanson

 

by Victor Davis Hanson

Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate expression of the most toxic culture in America.

 

“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
—Sam Bankman-Fried

The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his “dumb game” cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives. Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.

Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing “philanthropist” and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.

As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake.

How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?

For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, “Bankman” may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft.

His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: “This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his “everyone” as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.

Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers.

“Effective Altruism,” Ponzi-Style

Yet Bankman-Fried is merely one in a long line of Bay Area social-justice hypocrites and frauds. They share in common loud but cynical left-wing politics. They choreograph their personas to win exemption from left-wing government regulators, to guarantee puff pieces from a toady media, and to romance the rich, left-wing elite. Consider how the Washington Post gushed of the scam artist:

Harnessing the enormous wealth created by FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that Sam Bankman-Fried had founded, they undertook a project to spend potentially billions of dollars on pandemic prevention, a long-neglected priority on Capitol Hill even amid the coronavirus crisis. The plan, drawn from the brothers’ adherence to a philosophy called effective altruism, sought to maximize philanthropic giving in ways that can have the most impact.

Bankman-Fried surely has had “the most impact.” If he had worn a suit, and said the wrong “shibboleths,” he would now be behind bars.

What were the moral seeds of FTX? Bankman-Fried grew up on the progressive, moralistic Stanford campus, the son of two crusading Stanford law professors who often wrote about morality and the dispossessed.

SBF, as he is known, was groomed and prepped at an exclusive nearby Hillsborough private academy before being packed off to MIT. Progressive souls like Bankman-Fried distrust capitalism so much that, in his case, he retreated to the Bahamas to maximize its rewards. There he embraced a hedonistic lifestyle, tax breaks and lack of regulations, all in order to better short taxpayers of hundreds of millions of dollars in income tax revenue.

Such vulture capitalism is predicated on the presumption that young, loudly left-wing Bay Area hipsters in ratty clothes are the cool “good guys” if they have deep Democratic pockets and talk of “equity” and “fairness.” And so, they use the system to defeat the system—defined in their view as toxic traditional mores and values.

Indeed, Bankman-Fried’s mother, Stanford Professor Elizabeth Fried was a “utilitarian,” perhaps best defined as advocating any means necessary to achieve what she felt were the best ends for everyone. She moonlighted from her supposedly full-time job by running “Mind the Gap,” a central collection agency for Silicon Valley dark money to be funneled secretly to the “right causes.” The means of getting the millions was always excused by the ends of how it was used.

Apparently, some of her fund’s wherewithal was dripped in by some in her son’s stash circle—or rather his investors’ cash. Mind the Gap’s specialty was funding “to get out the vote.” To understand these dark-money operations in 2020, simply reread Molly Ball’s obnoxious Time magazine story of February 2021—a long boast of how stealth left-wing money, a toady progressive media, an army of lawyers, and social media combined to change voting laws, modulate the Black Lives Matter/Antifa street protests, and warp dissemination of news to craft a good utilitarian “conspiracy” that saved us from Donald Trump.

Will the Bankman-Fried family now atone, and try to give back to the robbed and deluded any of the real money that was funneled into Democratic candidates from the massive fraud? Does the water flow uphill?

So how can the progressive embryos of Silicon Valley, Stanford University, Bay Area prep schools, and progressive humanitarian politics birth such an utter fraud who destroyed so many? Rather the question might be reversed, how could all that not?

Performance Art Grifting

In the context of Bankman-Fried, we recall another kindred Bay-Area erstwhile momentary billionaire charlatan. Do we remember the now felonious and prison-bound young prodigy and Hillary-Clinton aficionado Elizabeth Holmes? She, too, was birthed and swam in similar Stanford-Silicon Valley waters.

Her scheme was Theranos. That was the pretentiously named fake-blood testing corporation that duped some of the most powerful investors in the United States to fork over billions of dollars to a twentysomething con artist. Holmes, like Bankman-Fried, was sired in the orbit of Stanford. She eschewed the slob props of Bankman-Fried, and instead preferred copy-catting Steve Jobs’ slicker all-black outfits.

Holmes assembled on her fake corporate board some of the biggest names associated with Stanford University and Silicon Valley, whose brands masked what was likely the greatest corporate medical fraud in American history.

There is a pattern here of the “good” people doing “good” things with their “good” money that turns out very badly for everyone else.

Silicon Valley multibillionaire and fellow leftist Mark Zuckerberg prefers T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans to the Bankman-Fried bum-look or Holmes’ Apple black-draped getup. He is now laying off thousands of Facebook employees as his Meta disaster erodes his stock value and takes his net worth down tens of billions of dollars.

But it was just two years ago that Zuckerberg answered the utilitarian call of fellow leftists to use his mega money and power to stop the prince of darkness, Donald Trump. So Zuck, as he is known, poured $419 million into pro-Biden left-wing activist groups. That unprecedented sum was used to absorb the work of state election officials in key precincts to ensure the right people voted in the right way to ensure the right winner.

Leftists still brag how the good mega-money sandbagged dullard Republicans and helped to give Biden the election.

Zuckerberg recently confessed that his left-wing company had also worked with the FBI to suppress online social media expression. Translated, that meant that the FBI partnered with Facebook to quash news deemed not helpful to the Biden election cause, such as the all-too-true revelations from the incriminating Hunter Biden laptop that was falsely passed off as “Russian disinformation.”

Is that a very liberal, civil libertarian thing to do—to weld the state and the media to punish political enemies and censor the news? Was the FBI-Facebook fusion a sort of “electronic insurrection” designed to warp democracy—absent the buffoonish cow horns and face paint? Might Zuckerberg have passed on channeling his dark money to “nonprofit” leftist organizations, and instead banked it to save a few of his now laid-off employees?

This column could become endless if it referenced all the Silicon Valley and Stanford progressive politico saints with feet of clay. Do we remember Tom Steyer, the Silicon Valley zillionaire, Stanford University board member, and former left-wing green presidential candidate, who spent $191 million without winning a single delegate?

At least candidate Michael Bloomberg got a few delegates at roughly $18 million a pop for the hundreds of millions of virtuous dollars he blew up in 2020. Steyer used his 2020 campaign to lecture us on ending the fossil fuel economy—but only after he had made a fortune in financing dirty coal burning plants in the impoverished Third World.

Posh Virtue

What is going on?

The 21st-century globalized economy saturated the corridor between San Francisco and San Jose with wealth never before seen or imagined. Its beneficiaries discovered a number of things about the arts of becoming and staying ultra-rich.

One, they never needed to worry about the essentials of life that troubled the other 99 percent of the country—affordable fuel, food, and housing, safe streets, and a fair and legal immigration system.

Or to put it another way, they could pose as progressive utopians—preening their moral superiority to the media, pouring money into the Democratic Party, funding foundations and PACs devoted to woke causes, climate change, and diversity, equity, and inclusion—and all the time never subject to the ramifications of their own exalted agendas.

They could not have cared less about crippling $6 a gallon gas, the exorbitant kilowatt cost of air conditioning, out-of-reach $1,000-a-square foot bungalow housing, the mayhem on San Francisco streets, or the reparatory elite university admissions policies that drastically curtailed working-class male admissions. Their wealth guaranteed them leverage, and leverage ensured exemptions.

But Bay Area morality was not just a pragmatic matter of the exempt elite force-feeding utopia down the throats of others who had no such immunity. Boutique, rich leftism also provided penance for the anointed, a mechanism that alleviated any residual guilt of talking like Eugene Debs while living like Marie Antoinette.

The multimillionaire, social justice warrior House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) assumed, as one of the Bay Area’s liberal icons, that she had a right to break quarantine and sneak off to her private hairdresser, or cluelessly boast of her $13 a pint ice cream, home delivered to her $24,000 twin imported refrigerators—all in the midst of a near depression as the national COVID-19 shutdown ruined millions of small business and devastated the educations of tens of millions of children.

As a member of the classy Bay Area elite, she knew the bankrupt political morality of the Left all too well: acts like tearing up the Trump State of the Union speech on national television veneered her privilege and made her one of the proverbial good people fighting for us from one of her various mansions.

Bay Area ZIP codes have produced the now-familiar rich, liberal politicians whose exempt lives are not damaged by the ideology that damages others. Consider the billionaire Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who for two decades was chauffeured by a Chinese spy while head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, or multimillionaire former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), now ensconced in Rancho Mirage as a registered foreign agent for a Chinese surveillance firm, or multimillionaire Gavin Newsom, who bragged how the COVID lockdowns might greenlight “progressive capitalism,” as he pushed social distancing and mask-wearing—while he palled around with lobbyists, maskless, at the French Laundry.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America. If he did not exist, someone like him would have to be invented.

Originally posted at American Greatness.

Victor Davis Hanson

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-strange-morality-of-the-bay-area-billionaire-left/

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The Unspoken Genocide of Christians in Nigeria - Raymond Ibrahim

 

by Raymond Ibrahim

The black lives that don’t matter.

 

Did you know that, all throughout sub-Saharan Africa—in Nigeria, Mozambique, the Central African Republic, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo—Muslims have for many years been terrorizing and slaughtering Christians?

Nor is there any hope on the horizon: problems that cannot be honestly addressed are doomed to persist in perpetuity.

Enter the so-called “mainstream media.” As far as they are concerned, the persecution of Christians in Africa is a byproduct of economic and territorial grievances.

One report, titled, “How poverty and corruption fuel terrorism across Africa,” is emblematic.  After citing  an incident where “jihadis” connected to the Islamic State slaughtered dozens, it insists that such terrorist attacks, which  “are on the rise across the African continent,” are “a consequence of poverty, domestic grievances new and old…”

This has been the mainstream media’s argument, and they’re sticking to it — no matter all the mountains of contradictory evidence.

Take the little-known genocide of Christians in Nigeria. According to an August 2021 report, since the Islamic insurgency began in earnest in July 2009, more than 60,000 Christians have either been murdered during raids or abducted, never to be seen again. During this same timeframe, approximately 20,000 churches and Christian schools were torched and destroyed by “Allahu Akbar” screaming Muslims.

According to the World Watch List’s latest reporting, 79 percent of all Christians killed for their faith were killed in Nigeria, for a total of 4,650.

Who, exactly, is behind this travesty?  Two groups, primarily.  First is Boko Haram, Nigeria’s premier terrorist organization, whose full name means “Sunnis for [Islamic] Propagation and Jihad.”  “Boko Haram,” their nickname, means “Western education is a sin” (not “we kill because we’re poor”).  Their stated goal is the establishment of a pure sharia state and the brutal subjugation or slaughter of Nigeria’s Christians.

The other group, which has in recent years terrorized and slaughtered even more Christians than Boko Haram is the Fulani—Muslim herdsmen who regularly raid the villages of and slaughter Christians.   They, too, are acting on jihadist teachings and hate for Christians.

Considering that, on average, 13 Christians are slaughtered every day for their faith in Nigeria, it is almost pointless to list any particular incidents.  Those interested in following this tragedy can consult my “Muslim Persecution of Christians” series, where I collate the main instances of persecution that surface every month around the world.  Needless to say, when it comes to the slaughter of Christians, Nigeria dominates.  Here are just some of those that occurred for the month of September 2022:

• 1: Muslim Fulani herdsmen hacked to death with machetes six Christians.
• 11: Muslims murdered a Christian while abducting a pastor and wounding his wife.
• 18: Muslim Fulani killed three Christians during a raid on a Christian village, “after slaughtering at least 22 others in the same area in the past three weeks.”
• 21: More machete-wielding Muslim herdsmen massacred 15 Christians in midnight raids on two Christian villages.
• 23: Muslim Fulani raided six predominantly Christian villages in the same region of Benue state. “These attacks by the herdsmen have left dozens of Christians dead and several more with gunshot injuries and machete attack wounds,” an area resident said.
• 17: During an all-night prayer vigil inside a church, Muslim Fulani broke in and abducted dozens of Christians. Less than one week earlier, 60 other Christians were abducted from the same denomination in another region of the country.
• 4: Gunmen kidnapped dozens of Christians from church, including the pastor’s son.

Responding to these and other attacks, a recent statement from the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union said,

There is still no breathing space for Christian communities … as terrorists, jihadists, bandits and armed herdsmen have continued to plunder and wreck Christian communities…

The atrocities are, indeed, nonstop.  Most recently, according to an Oct. 27 report, along with slaughtering 15 more Christians—mostly women and children, as they slept during the night—Muslim Fulani also, and quite sadistically, cut off the breast of a Christian woman.

Despite all this, the American “mainstream” remains committed to describing the jihad in Nigeria as a byproduct of “inequality” and “poverty,” to quote Bill Clinton, as he once explained what was “fueling all this stuff” (the “stuff” being a reference to the genocide of Christians in Nigeria).

In their quest to blame anything and everything but reality, even climate change has been added to the mainstream arsenal of reasons fueling the jihad on Christians. After Muslim Fulani massacred some 50 Christians as they peacefully worshipped inside their church on Pentecost Sunday (Jun. 5, 2022), the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins, issued a statement precisely making such an absurd claim.

But as one Nigerian nun, Sister Monica Chikwe, once observed, “It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black, chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.’”  Or as the Christian Association of Nigeria once asked, “How can it be a [secular or economic] clash when one group [Muslims] is persistently attacking, killing, maiming, destroying, and the other group [Christians] is persistently being killed, maimed and their places of worship destroyed?”

Perhaps worst of all has been the Biden administration’s response.  In 2020, Trump placed Nigeria on the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern—that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom.  Under Biden, however, the State Department removed Nigeria—this nation where one Christian is killed every two hours—from the list.

Needless to say, many observers slammed the State Department for this unexpected move. As Sean Nelson, Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom for ADF International, noted:

Outcry over the State Department’s removal of Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria’s religious freedom violations is entirely warranted. No explanations have been given that could justify this decision. If anything, the situation in Nigeria has grown worse over the last year. Thousands of Christians, as well as Muslims who oppose the goals of terrorist and militia groups, are targeted, killed, and kidnapped, and the government is simply unwilling to stop these atrocities. … Removing Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria will only embolden the increasingly authoritarian government there.

Incidentally and to his credit, along with placing Nigeria on the list, Trump once forthrightly asked the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari—whom many Nigerian officials insist Obama helped bring to power—“Why are you killing Christians?”

At any rate, such is the current state of affairs: a jihad of genocidal proportions has been declared on the Christian population of Nigeria—and has since spilled over into several other sub-Saharan nations—even as American media and government present Nigeria’s problems in purely economic terms that defy reality.

The inability to accept the straightforward facts; the inability to factor ideological or existential motives, seeing only material motives (money, land, etc.); the almost instinctive conclusion that Muslim violence is proof positive of a legitimate grievance—all of these are so ingrained in the predominant paradigm, from the mainstream media to mainstream politicians, and all of these are poisoning Western civilization from within, and eroding its influence and capacity to act from without.

It also means that, for most American media and politicians, black lives do not matter—at least not when they’re Christian, and being terminated by Muslims.

This article first appeared on The Stream.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-unspoken-genocide-of-christians-in-nigeria/

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Respect for Marriage Act pending in Senate is raising constitutional concerns - The Center Square Staff

 

by The Center Square Staff

Supreme Court has ruled Congress doesn’t have the constitutional authority to define marriage under Article 1 of the Constitution.

 

Several groups argue the Respect for Marriage Act (ROMA) currently before the U.S. Senate is unconstitutional, and if enacted, will eventually be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The bill, HR 8404, was introduced in the House by U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-NY, on July 18 and passed by a vote of 267-157 the next day. The U.S. Senate took it up on Nov. 14.

It would provide "statutory authority for same-sex and interracial marriages” and repeal several provisions of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The 1996 law received bipartisan support including from then U.S. Sen. Joe Biden and U.S. Rep. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and from Democratic President Bill Clinton, who signed it.

When a constitutional amendment was proposed to ban same-sex marriage in 2006, Sen. Biden told Meet the Press’ Tim Russert, “I can’t believe the American people can’t see through this. We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act … where I voted and others … that marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. … Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

Sixteen years later, President Biden now supports replacing DOMA provisions, which “define, for purposes of federal law, marriage as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex,” with ROMA provisions “that recognize any marriage that is valid under state law,” according to the bill summary.

The summary also notes that the Supreme Court ruled three marriage-related laws as unconstitutional: DOMA (U.S. v. Windsor, 2013) and state laws banning same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015) and interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia 1967).

The bill would also allow "the Department of Justice to bring a civil action and establishes a private right of action for violations,” its summary states.

When filing a cloture motion on a substitute amendment on Nov. 17, now Senate Majority Leader Schumer said the Senate would vote on ROMA when it returned on Monday after Thanksgiving. He said, “Let me be clear,” passing it “is not a matter of if but only when.” He also thanked his colleagues from both sides of the aisle “who led this bill.”

Twelve Republicans voted with Democrats to allow it to move forward, eliminating a filibuster threat: Sens. Roy Blunt, Richard Burr, Shelley Capito, Susan Collins, Cynthia Lummis, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Dan Sullivan, Thom Tillis, Joni Ernst, Lisa Murkowski, and Todd Young.

After their vote, Biden said, “Love is love, and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love,” adding their vote made “the United States one step closer to protecting that right in law.”

Schumer also said he had “zero doubt” the bill “will soon be law of the land.”

But multiple groups disagree, arguing it’s unconstitutional for the same reasons the Supreme Court struck down DOMA. Because the court already ruled Congress doesn’t have the constitutional authority to define marriage under Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, and because ROMA is nearly identical to DOMA, they argue it will also likely be struck down.

In a letter to Congress, the nonprofit religious freedom organization Liberty Counsel argues the court ruled in Windsor, “DOMA, because of its reach and extent, departs from this history and tradition of reliance on state law to define marriage.” It also ruled, “[b]y history and tradition the definition and regulation of marriage . . . has been treated as being within the authority and realm of the separate States.”

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver, said, “The Constitution cannot be said to prohibit the exercise of power to define marriage in one manner yet authorize the opposite definition of that same unconstitutional exercise of power. If Windsor noted that Congress lacked authority in this realm, then it necessarily lacks the power here.”

While a bipartisan amendment was introduced claiming to protect religious liberty, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, argues it really doesn’t.

“Religious Americans will be subject to potentially ruinous litigation, while the tax-exempt status of certain charitable organizations, educational institutions, and non-profits will be threatened. My amendment would have shored up these vulnerabilities,” he said.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said, “Conservatives are deeply disappointed by the betrayal of Senate Republicans to protect Americans’ religious freedom and won’t soon forget the votes of the 12 Republican senators who cast aside an essential right in a bill that will weaponize the federal government against believers of nearly every major religion.”

Gregory Baylor, senior counsel with Alliance for Defending Freedom, also said the law is “unnecessary and could have a disastrous effect on religious freedom. While proponents of the bill claim that it simply codifies the 2015 Obergefell decision, in reality it is an intentional attack on the religious freedom of millions of Americans with sincerely held beliefs about marriage.”

It also “threatens religious freedom and the institution of marriage” by codifying a “false definition of marriage in the American legal fabric,” ADF argues. It also “opens the door to federal recognition of polygamous relationships, jeopardizes the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that exercise their belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, and endangers faith-based social-service organizations by threatening litigation and liability risk if they follow their views on marriage when working with the government.”

The Center Square Staff

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/us-senate-vote-respect-marriage-act-several-groups-say-its

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Syria, Iran deploy increased air defenses near Damascus - report - Tzvi Joffre

 

by Tzvi Joffre

Air defense supplied by and through Iran were reportedly brought to the area to deter Israel from conducting airstrikes in Damascus.

 

The IRGC's Bavar-373 air-defense system

(photo credit: MEHR NEWS AGENCY)

Syria and Iran have been deploying new air defense systems, including jamming and early warning systems, around Damascus in order to prevent Israeli airstrikes in the area, according to the Syrian Capital Voice site.

According to the report, the new systems were built by Korean and Chinese companies and provided by Iran as part of agreements reached between Syria and Iran.

Sources told the Capital Voice that the Syrian Defense Ministry tested jamming systems in October, succeeding and getting Israeli aircraft to leave Syrian airspace at least twice.

The sources additionally claimed that Iran had brought two "Bavar-373" air defense systems to the Damascus area, with one being placed near the town of Rakhlah, located near the border with Lebanon and just about 30 kilometers north of the Golan Heights.

The Bavar-373 systems were brought into Syria in August after an agreement was reached with Russia and the Syrian government, according to the report. The systems were brought through Iraqi territory and stored in eastern Syria until recently.

IRGC radar system (credit: MEHR NEWS AGENCY)

Earlier this month, the IRGC announced a successful test of the Bavar-373 system using the "Sayad B-4" interceptor. Israeli intelligence analyst Ronen Solomon, who runs the Intelli Times blog, published that the system was developed under the purview of Iranian researcher Abdollah Mehrabi, who serves as the chief of the IRGC's Research and Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization (SSJO).

The Sayad B-4 interceptor was developed at a base belonging to the SSJO in Tehran, near the headquarters of the IRGC's Aerospace Forces, the Mehrabad airport and the logistics centers of the IRGC, according to Intelli Times.

The Capital Voice added that a recent month-long break during which no alleged Israeli airstrikes were reported in Syria was caused by the new systems. The sources claimed that Israel tried more than once during October to carry out airstrikes but failed.

Syrian loyalist sources have reported an increase in flights of Israeli and American reconnaissance aircraft near Syrian territory in recent months, with sources telling the Capital Voice that Israel and the US were likely trying to locate the new air defense systems in order to target them.

The last alleged Israeli airstrikes reported in Syria were conducted last week and targeted sites in the coastal and central regions of Syria.

The last alleged Israeli airstrikes to target the Damascus area were reported in late October when three separate strikes targeted sites in the area over a period of a week.

Report comes just days after IRGC official linked to air defenses killed in bombing

The Capital Voice report comes just days after Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Col. Davoud Jafari was killed in a roadside bombing that Iran has blamed on Israel.

The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency reported that Jafari served as an adviser for the IRGC Aerospace Force in Syria and was among one of the Iranian officials responsible for the seizure of two US Navy command boats carrying 10 US personnel in the Persian Gulf in January 2016.

פרסום ראשון: תחקיר שערך הבלוג "אינטלי טיימס", על סמך מקורות מאיראן, מגלה כי בכיר משמרות המהפכה, דאוד ג'עפרי, שחוסל בדמשק ונקבר בדרגת תא"ל, עסק בליווי פריסת מערכות ההגנה האווירית של איראן בסוריה ולבנון, פרויקט שמוביל תא"ל פרידון מוחמדי סקאאי, מתאם הכוח האווירי של משמרות המהפכה. pic.twitter.com/9IfhPvTm5T

— אינטלי טיימס - Intelli Times (@IntelliTimes) November 26, 2022

The Intelli Times blog revealed on Saturday night that Jafari was involved in the deployment of Iranian air defense systems in Syria and Lebanon, a program led by IRGC Brig.-Gen. Fereydoun Mohammadi Saghaei. A photo of Jafari showed that he had the insignia of the air defense units on his uniform.

Saghaei was spotted at Jafari's funeral this past week.

IRGC's Aerospace Force hit by explosions, casualties in series of incidents

A series of incidents in the past year and in the past decade has resulted in damage and casualties at facilities affiliated with Iran's missile and space program and the SSJO, with many of the incidents blamed on Israel.

In the past year, the Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group missile base in Karaj, near Tehran, was hit by a blast blamed on a drone attack, two IRGC Aerospace Force personnel were killed while "carrying out their mission" in June in Iran and an additional member of the Aerospace Force was killed during a "mission" in southeastern Iran in September.

 

Tzvi Joffre

Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-723439

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Why Israel Should Reach Out to the Turkic Countries - Rachel Avraham

 

by Rachel Avraham

If you really want to destroy the Mullahs in Tehran . . .

While many people in the West may not realize it, the road to destroying the mullahs in Tehran runs through Baku.  In the wake of Iran’s aggression against Turkic speaking peoples inside of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Turkic world is beginning to unite against the mullahs in Tehran and move increasingly towards Jerusalem.   In recent days, Azerbaijan decided to open up an embassy in Israel, after arresting an Iranian spy ring within its borders and actively protesting Iranian aggression alongside the country’s border.

Around the same period of time, Turkey has more or less reconciled with the Jewish state, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are strengthening their relationship with Israel, and there is much potential for the Jewish state to build a strong alliance to counter Tehran that will include over 200 million people in the Turkic speaking world.  Throughout this entire process, Azerbaijan has a key role to play in uniting Jerusalem together with the Turkic world, as Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev is beloved among Turkic speaking people across the world.

At the 9^th Summit of the Organization of Turkic states in Samarkand, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev proclaimed: “Azerbaijan has always contributed to the close unity of the Turkic world and will continue to be committed to the goals of the unity of the Turkic world.   The Turkic world covers a vast geography inhabited by more than 200 million people and has great economic potential, energy resources, transportation routes and advanced military capabilities.   The Turkic world is a large family.   Taking each other’s national interests into account, we must continue to show mutual support and solidarity.    The Turkic world does not consist of independent Turkic states only; its geographical boards are broader.”

According to him, “I believe the time has come to permanently keep in mind issues such as preventing the assimilation and protecting the rights, security and national identity of our compatriots living beyond the countries that are members of the Organization of Turkic states.    The young generation of the Turkic world should have the opportunity to study in their mother tongue in the countries of their residence.   Unfortunately, a majority of the 40 million Azerbaijanis living outside Azerbaijan are deprived of these opportunities.”

Azerbaijan’s President at this conference essentially called upon the other Turkic countries to unite against Iran’s repression of ethnic Azerbaijanis living in the Islamic Republic.     Among the Organization of Turkic Countries, his words have a lot of weight and influence, and they are already pushing the Turkic world to be ripe for the formation of a bloc against Tehran.

Of course, there is still work to be done to transform this anti-Iranian sentiment within the Turkic world into an alliance with Jerusalem.  Turkish Jewish journalist Rafael Sadi claimed, “In order to establish a coalition against Iran, first we have to establish a realistic friendship and economic cooperation with those countries.   The Turkic coalition is not yet built between Turkey and those Turkic countries.   The reason is that some of them still engaged in a closed economy and had political ties with Russia.”   However, in the wake of the Ukraine War, this is starting to change, as Russia has lost much of its prestige and this has led these post-Soviet Turkic republics to move away from Moscow and to look more inwards towards each other, and to look at Israel as a potential partner.

Rafael Nabizade, an Azerbaijani activist based in Israel, noted: “The relations between Israel and the Turkic world cover many spheres.   Both sides strongly cooperate in the security and economic fields.   Azerbaijan, which is considered one of the key allies of the Jewish state, enjoys 30 years of unbreakable relations and is aimed to deepen its cooperation by opening its embassy in Israel.   Israel backed Azerbaijan during the Second Karabakh War and contributed a lot to the restoration of the Karabakh region after the war.   Turkey, a mighty state, recently normalized and exchanged ambassadors for the first time in years.  I have to mention President Ilham Aliyev’s role in mediating the relationship between Ankara and Jerusalem.  Iran, the southern neighbor of Azerbaijan, consists of the Turkic power bloc as a threat to itself.”

Yusuf Siyret Aktan, a law professor at Istanbul Gedik University and a member of the Advisory Board of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, stated that Iran is a prison for the Iranian people yet the disintegration of Iran creates a power gap in Central Asia that should be filled up by Azerbaijan and Israel: “Azerbaijani-Israeli cooperation creates a strong energy and trade corridor in the region connecting the Mediterranean and Central Asia via the Caspian Sea.  It will offer free markets as an alternative to the countries of the region.    Those countries today have no other choice than what Russia and China offer them.   Terrorism cannot survive for a long time when there are economic expectations.   Economic freedom leads to all human rights.”

Fariz Ismailzade, the executive vice rector of Ada University, added: “There is already a strong history of cooperation between Turkic countries and Israel.    For example, the more than thirty years of independence for Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan demonstrate a very good relationship with Israel in all fields: political, economic, humanitarian, military, and of course, Turkey has for centuries had great cooperation with Jewish people.   In the twentieth and twenty-first century in the State of Israel, this cooperation has expanded.   In fact, Turkic countries are among the few countries in the world which have not only hosted Jewish people during turbulent times of war but have built a diplomatic relationship with Israel.      In the future, this will continue.  I think that there is a great potential for cooperation for greater peace in the region.  Turkic countries recognize the State of Israel and do not have any animosity.    I believe that this will continue in the future.”

Professor Nursin Gunay, a member of the Advisory Board of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, concurred, adding that the rapprochement between Israel and Turkey is only the beginning: “Turkish and Israel rapprochement is very important.   Even during the Mavi Marmara times, the economic relations continued in a normal manner.  And now, the two sides are approaching one another.   So, they both have ambassadors and it will be influential regarding a new alliance in the region.  Turkic states organization is also very important and Turkey is part of it.  So, if Israel gets closer to these countries, it will make headway.  I believe the rapprochement between Israel and Turkey will be a win-win for both sides.”

Considering these developments, the time has come for the State of Israel to start to build an anti-Iran coalition together with the Turkic countries.   These countries can in turn incircle the mullahs in Tehran and be used as a base to help the South Azerbaijanis secede from Iran, obtaining their freedom and independence once again.   They can also help the Turkmen in Iran to do likewise and create a momentum that will lead to many nations seceding from Iran, thus causing the disintegration of a nation that routinely chants “death to America” and “death to Israel,” and is developing nuclear weapons in violation of international law.

The disintegration of Iran will in turn lead to the weakening of Russia and China in Central Asia, as a pro-Western anti-Iran coalition will move in to fill the power void in Central Asia, thus strengthening moderation and reason across the region, leading to peaceful coexistence and fruitful cooperation between Israel and other Turkic countries.   Thus, the sky’s the limit regarding the bright future prospects between Israel and the Turkic states, with the opening of a new Azerbaijani Embassy being only the beginning that will kindle a flame that will light up the entire Middle East and Central Asia.

 
Rachel Avraham is the CEO of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy and an Israel-based journalist.  She is the author of “Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab Media.”

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-should-reach-out-to-the-turkic-countries/

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Israelis shunned at Qatar World Cup: 'You are not welcome' - Jerusalem Post Staff

 

by Jerusalem Post Staff

Israeli journalists and fans are being boycotted and yelled at by fans, locals, and officials at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

 

Scotland v Israel - Hampden Park, Glasgow, Scotland, Britain - October 9, 2021 General view as people display signs and Palestine flags outside the stadium before the match Action

(photo credit: REUTERS/LEE SMITH)

Multiple Israelis have reported an atmosphere of hostility and hatred at the World Cup in Qatar, with fans refusing to speak to Israeli journalists, waving Palestinian flags in the background of their videos and yelling at them.

Moav Vardy, KAN's foreign affairs reporter, was yelled at by a Saudi fan, who told him that "You are not welcome here, this is Qatar, this is our country, there is only Palestine, no Israel."

"You are not welcome here.."

A Saudi football fan refuses to talk to an Israeli reporter during the #FIFAWorldCup2022 in Qatar. pic.twitter.com/toWi68xlzL

— PALESTINE ONLINE 🇵🇸 (@OnlinePalEng) November 26, 2022

 

Other videos from Qatar show people immediately walking away when they find out the person interviewing them is Israeli. In one particular video, N12's Ohad Hemo begins to interview a group of Lebanese men who walk away when Hemo tells them he's Israeli. One of them then turns back and asks Hemo what he's doing there and then tells him that Israel doesn't exist.

In other videos, people stand behind various Israeli reporters and raise Palestinian flags to protest against Israel.

A fan displays a Palestine flag in the stands during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, November 23, 2022 (credit: REUTERS/SUHAIB SALEM)

Anti-Israel sentiments

Israeli soccer legend and KAN panel member at the World Cup Eli Ohana also faced anti-Israel sentiments when he was driven by a Qatari policeman. When Ohana mentioned that he is Israeli, the officer asked him if he was joking, and Ohana then said that he was Portuguese in order to avoid trouble.

The officer told him that if Ohana was Israeli, he would turn the car around and refuse to drive him around.

"אם הייתם מישראל הייתי עוצר ונוסע בחזרה"
אלי אוחנה במפגש מתוח עם שוטר קטארי@avico21 pic.twitter.com/kHMjJueKRy

— כאן (@kann) November 25, 2022

Raz Shechnick, Yedioth Ahronoth's reporter for the World Cup wrote on his Twitter account about his experiences in Qatar regarding the atmosphere for Israeli media and fans. In a series of tweets, Shechnick described an atmosphere of rejection and hostility from both locals and non-locals. 

"We didn't want to write these words, we are not the story here. but after ten days in Doha, we cannot hide what we are going through. We are feeling hated, surrounded by hostility, not welcomed."

Raz Shechnick

"We didn't want to write these words, we are not the story here. but after ten days in Doha, we cannot hide what we are going through. We are feeling hated, surrounded by hostility, not welcomed."

He also described an incident in which he and his colleague had lied about their country of origin, saying they were Equadorian in order to prevent them from being harassed by fans.

Israeli journalist Dor Hoffman reported on Thursday that a Qatari taxi driver kicked him out of his cab after he discovered he was Israeli, refusing to take his money.

He later continued to a restaurant on a Qataru beach, where he was escorted out of the premise of the restaurant by security, with the owner of the restaurant demanding that he delete every photo taken in his restaurant. Hoffman said that the owner took his phone and that he felt threatened.

On Saturday, Tunisia fans waved a banner saying "Free Palestine", despite Qatar and FIFA's policy of not allowing political protests in matches, a policy that led to the confiscation of rainbow-colored items in support of the LGBTQ+ community, and Iranian anti-regime signs.

Jerusalem resident Michael Janekowitz, a former Jewish Agency spokesman, who is attending the World Cup, refuted the claims that Israelis are being targeted and said his experience has been without incident.

"Qatar is very welcoming to the Israeli visitors," he said. "These Israeli journalists are going with magnifying glasses to find haters of Israel. Most of these Israel bashers have come to the World Cup from outside of Qatar. They are like being provoked by headline-seeking Israeli journalists.

"Qatar has a population of about 3.3 million of whom only 300,000 are  Qataris. The other 3 million are mostly workers from mainly India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines and Sudan," he added, saying that was where the antagonism against Israelis was emanating from.

 

Jerusalem Post Staff

Source: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-723449

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Tehran Dangles the Samson Option Again - Amir Taheri

 

by Amir Taheri

The myth of the Khomeinist despotism as a people-based regime, peddled by characters like Noam Chomsky, has been punctured.

• The new enrichment program is taking place in the Fordo nuclear center which, built deep underground, is supposed to be immune from possible air strikes.

• As on the eight previous occasions when this trick was used, Tehran's message is addressed to Western powers, notably the United States: resume the nuclear talks or else!

• The mullahs played that trick with presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In every case, except that of Trump, the trick worked.

• At the same time, Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian plays reluctant debutante by claiming that the US "is begging us to resume talks." Over the past two weeks, he has been pestering Omani and Qatari foreign ministers with phone calls demanding they persuade Washington to return to the stalled talks.

• Last week, Tehran announced that 41 foreign nationals have been seized as hostages and charged with helping the current anti-regime protests across the country. That brings the number of hostages now held by the mullahs to 81, the highest since they seized 52 American diplomats in 1979.

• Will the trick work again? I am almost certain that, had it not been for the current uprising against the Islamic Republic, the Biden administration would have fallen for the trick with a big smile, if only to save Obama's only legacy while settling scores with Trump.

• It is not hard to expose Tehran's game as a cheap trick. For years, Tehran, through its lobbyists and useful idiots in Washington, has been selling the story that Khamenei has issued a fatwa banning the production of nuclear weapons under Islamic law.

• To be sure, no one has ever seen that fatwa except supposedly Obama, who claimed he had some knowledge of it. But if there is such a fatwa and the mullahs don't intend to build a bomb, why would they need to enrich uranium up to 60 percent?

• The mullahs' game worked for as long as it concerned only themselves and the cynical or lily-livered Western politicians.

• This time round, however, a third player is in the field: a good chunk of Iranian people who feel they cannot take it anymore.

• The myth of the Khomeinist despotism as a people-based regime, peddled by characters like Noam Chomsky, has been punctured. Even Bill Clinton is now tweeting support for young Iranians calling for regime change in Tehran.

Iran's ruling mullahs have effectively announced that they intend to speed up uranium enrichment to 90%, which would give them the material needed for producing nuclear weapons. As on the eight previous occasions when this trick was used, Tehran's message is addressed to Western powers, notably the United States: resume the nuclear talks or else! Pictured: The Isfahan uranium enrichment facility in Isfahan, Iran. (Photo by Getty Images)

Like a one-trick pony, Iran's ruling mullahs have played unpredictable so often that they have become predictable in their unpredictability.

Facing a nationwide uprising that seems to continue despite massive repression and shaken by the International Atomic Energy Agency's unexpectedly tough stance on the never-ending nuclear dispute, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered fresh use of an old recipe, which has two ingredients.

The first ingredient is an announcement that the Islamic Republic has started enriching uranium UF6 up to 60% instead of the 3.67% allowed under the moribund Obama "nuclear deal". This means that the mullahs intend to speed up enrichment to 90%, which would give them the material needed for producing nuclear weapons.

The new enrichment program is taking place in the Fordo nuclear center which, built deep underground, is supposed to be immune from possible air strikes.

As on the eight previous occasions when this trick was used, Tehran's message is addressed to Western powers, notably the United States: resume the nuclear talks or else!

Over the years, Tehran accumulated over 10,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, for which it had no use except for diplomatic blackmail.

The mullahs played that trick with presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In every case, except that of Trump, the trick worked.

It didn't work with Trump because he wanted a photo-op with the top mullah as he had clinched from North Korean despot Kim Jong-un. My guess is that had they given Trump the photo-op he wanted, they would have received much more than his predecessors gave.

The mullahs need the process of talking about the nuclear deal to counter charges that their regime is a global pariah.

Endless talks also enable them to pose as a major power dealing with other major powers. The daily Kayhan boasts that "all big powers need to talk to Islamic Republic" because "they know that our revolution can bring down their palaces on their heads."

The official Fars News reports that Tehran now has enough advanced ballistic missiles to set the whole of West Asia, as Tehran now calls the Middle East, ablaze.

In other words, the mullahs are contemplating the "Samson option."

At the same time, Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian plays reluctant debutante by claiming that the US "is begging us to resume talks." Over the past two weeks, he has been pestering Omani and Qatari foreign ministers with phone calls demanding they persuade Washington to return to the stalled talks.

The second ingredient in the Khomeinist recipe is the seizure of hostages, something that the mullahs have practiced since day one of their 43-year control of Iran.

Last week, Tehran announced that 41 foreign nationals have been seized as hostages and charged with helping the current anti-regime protests across the country. That brings the number of hostages now held by the mullahs to 81, the highest since they seized 52 American diplomats in 1979.

Will the trick work again? I am almost certain that, had it not been for the current uprising against the Islamic Republic, the Biden administration would have fallen for the trick with a big smile, if only to save Obama's only legacy while settling scores with Trump.

It is not hard to expose Tehran's game as a cheap trick. For years, Tehran, through its lobbyists and useful idiots in Washington, has been selling the story that Khamenei has issued a fatwa banning the production of nuclear weapons under Islamic law.

To be sure, no one has ever seen that fatwa except supposedly Obama, who claimed he had some knowledge of it. But if there is such a fatwa and the mullahs don't intend to build a bomb, why would they need to enrich uranium up to 60 percent? That degree of enrichment has no obvious use either as fuel for nuclear power plants or research reactors that need only 20% enriched uranium.

As for seizing hostages as a tool in diplomacy, the past four decades must have taught everyone not to be impressed. We have been there, seen that and bought the T-shirt a dozen times.

When it comes to the "Samson option" that Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps propaganda is musing about, it would do the mullahs much good to reread the Bible story.

Samson is the Bible's Hercules, who kills a lion with his bare hands and dispatches 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. He has the body of a giant but the brain of a pygmy and lets himself fall for a woman, a symbolic way of saying he fell for his own delusion of grandeur and lost the divine grace that had given him such strength.

The mullahs' game worked for as long as it concerned only themselves and the cynical or lily-livered Western politicians.

This time round, however, a third player is in the field: a good chunk of Iranian people who feel they cannot take it anymore.

The myth of the Khomeinist despotism as a people-based regime, peddled by characters like Noam Chomsky, has been punctured. Even Bill Clinton is now tweeting support for young Iranians calling for regime change in Tehran.

The Khomeinist regime reminds one of the ancient Greek parable about the hedgehog who knows only one thing and the fox who knows many. The hedgehog could protect himself for as long as the fox was not willing to use its wider knowledge against it.

In dealing with a despotic regime such as the one the mullahs have imposed on Iran, the choice is not limited to either surrender or invasion, as Tehran's lobbyists in Washington claim. The best option, perhaps, would be to let the mullahs stew in their own juice, thus exposing their anachronism while Iran's younger generations wish to be part of the modern world, warts and all.

For the first time since the mullahs seized power, the real battle over the future of Iran is being fought inside Iran itself. Even assuming that the Khomeinist regime ever enjoyed divine grace, it is now becoming increasingly clear that it has now lost it, becoming a caricature of the biblical Samson.

This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat

 
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19160/iran-samson-option

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