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Iran literally playing with fire:
Explosion hits Israeli-owned cargo ship in Gulf of Oman, no injuries
Maritime intelligence firm says blast likely stemmed from ‘asymmetric activity by Iranian military’; ship identified as MV Helios Ray owned by Israeli shipping magnate Rami Ungar
And:
The ‘Most Brutal Attacks’ on Jews in Europe Driven by Anti-Zionism,
Says Algemeiner Editor-in-Chief
By Algemeiner Editor-in-Chief Dovid Efune
Animus toward Israel is increasingly responsible for attacks on
Jews in Europe, said Algemeiner editor-in-chief Dovid Efune
during an interview with i24 News Wednesday, on a new survey showing that a
majority of French voters see a link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
“The most brutal attacks and a great deal of the most horrific
offenses that we have seen across the continent — but especially in France —
have been driven by anti-Zionist antisemitism,” said Efune. “[It’s] a
relatively new and unique brand of antisemitism that has been taking hold
across the globe, and really, in many ways, has been driving the rise in
antisemitism that we’ve been seeing across the planet.”
The IPSOS survey found that 63 percent of respondents thought it was not possible to support the destruction of the State of Israel without being antisemitic. Another question asked how voters understood the term “anti-Zionism;” 43 percent said it meant support for the end of Israel as a sovereign, independent state, with 19 percent saying it was criticizing Israeli government policies and 38 percent who weren’t sure.
“The fact that this is gaining wider understanding among the
French public is vital to be able to avoid and defend against such attacks in
the future,” said Efune. “The further, obviously, that this is understood in
French society, the better off the French Jewish community has a chance of
being.”
The poll was commissioned by CRIF — the representative body of
Jews in France — to mark the 15th anniversary of the murder of Ilan Halimi, a
young French Jew.
Efune said the survey “draws a line under efforts that we have
seen in other places in Europe, and frankly around the world, about this battle
over the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of
antisemitism.”
“The fact that it’s been fought against so vociferously really
underscores the pernicious nature and the threat of anti-Zionist antisemitism,
and obviously this poll is encouraging to see that there are many people that
push back against it,” he continued.
++++++++++
Like that old song, "It's Magic."
Joe Biden’s Mixed
Iran Messages
He orders a strike against Iran-backed
militias but makes concessions to Tehran.
By The Editorial Board
Friday morning’s airstrike against Iran-backed militias in eastern Syria sends a clear message: President Biden will use force to defend American lives. But this welcome development is an exception to the rest of Mr. Biden’s emerging Iran policy.
The President authorized the mission Thursday as a response to
deadly rocket attacks against American and allied personnel in Iraq this month.
The strikes, meant to target the Iranian proxies Kataib Hezbollah and Kataib
Sayyid al-Shuhada, destroyed several weapons storage facilities.
The Pentagon didn’t confirm casualty numbers, but media reports
suggest well over a dozen pro-Iranian fighters were killed as the U.S. also
struck trucks loaded with weapons. The message will be heard in Tehran and by
other U.S. adversaries.
On the other hand, there’s Mr. Biden’s seemingly eager desire to
return to the flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. After announcing that
Washington couldn’t “snap back” United Nations sanctions, the new
Administration is consulting with South Korea about releasing at least $1
billion in frozen Iranian assets. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this
week the U.S. wants to “lengthen and strengthen” the accord—good—but then said
President Trump’s sanctions on Iran had failed.
How giving up sanctions will get Iran to agree to a better deal
is left unsaid. And, no surprise, Tehran has responded to the overtures by
curbing access for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and
threatening to further enrich uranium.
The White House is also making the mistake of counting on Europe
to help bring Iran into a better nuclear deal pact. Talk about false hope. The
U.K., Germany and France failed to help Mr. Trump improve the deal. France and
Germany also recently embarrassed the new Administration by rushing to sign a
major investment deal with China.
So much for “restoring alliances.” The Europeans have convinced
themselves that the nuclear deal will change Iran’s behavior, but this
diplomacy is about little more than serving their commercial interests with
Iran.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is giving the back of its hand to the
countries most endangered by Iran—Israel and the Sunni Arab states. The
Administration paused arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
last month. It also withdrew support for a Saudi-led coalition fighting
Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen while lifting sanctions against the Houthis.
On Friday the Administration released a scathing intelligence report about
Saudi officials’ involvement in journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing (see
nearby). Amid a flurry of other activity, Mr. Biden also made a point of
delaying his first calls to Saudi and Israeli leaders.
All this looks and sounds like Barack Obama redux, though the
Middle East has changed in four years. The Administration is still courting
Iran, as if the regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have shown any
desire to change their imperial behavior. These concessions jeopardize the
progress of the landmark Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries and
the containment of Iran, where sanctions have stoked public anger at the regime
and undermined its ability to project power around the region.
Mr. Biden says he
wants to focus less on the Middle East and more on the Indo-Pacific. The way to
do that is to build on the alliances of the Trump Administration and persuade
the Europeans to join a united front against Iran. Otherwise Mr. Biden is on a
path to strategic disappointment and time-consuming distractions in Iraq, Syria
and the Arabian peninsula.
And:
There Should Be No Ambiguity Around a Genocide': Human Rights Group Responds to Biden's China Flip-Flopping
And: And: |
Just Asking’
for Censorship
Democrats expand their effort to shut down
speech by targeting newsrooms.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
The Democratic House majority this week put on a bold
demonstration of its newest governing strategy—one it continues to perfect.
Call it the “Just Asking” tactic.
The exhibit took place at Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce
subcommittee hearing on “disinformation and extremism in the media.” While
lawmakers have spent years fretting over “disinformation” on social media, this
was the first time they used a hearing to accuse news outlets of deliberately
fomenting it.
The precursor to the hearing was a revealing letter sent Monday
by two California Democrats, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney. The duo
demanded the CEOs of a dozen cable, satellite and broadband providers explain
what “response” they intended to take to the “right-wing media ecosystem” that
is spreading “lies” and “disinformation” that enable “insurrection” and
provokes “non-compliance with public health guidelines.” Specifically they
asked each CEO: “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax and
OANN . . .? If so, why?”
Just asking.
When Republican members of the committee and outside groups
shouted censorship, Ms. Eshoo shrugged. “The First Amendment, my friends,
starts with four words: Congress shall make no laws,” and she, Anna Eshoo, had
no intention of enacting a law to shut down conservatives. She was merely
asking “strong, important questions”—i.e., whether private regulated companies
understand that (if they know what’s good for them) they’ll do the dirty work
for her, thereby saving her the hassle of complying with the Constitution. She
was just asking.
And why wouldn’t she? It’s been
working so well for Democrats in other areas. Left-wing activists and
politicians spent four years “just asking” social media companies what they
intended to do about “disinformation”—today’s code word for conservative ideas.
An emboldened left-leaning Silicon Valley is now happily doing Democrats’
bidding, censoring like mad. Twitter, Facebook and others are banning prominent
conservatives from their platforms. Twitter locked the account of a newspaper
(the New York Post) for the sin of accurately reporting unflattering news about
the Democratic presidential nominee’s son. Google and Apple dropped Parler from their app stores.
Amazon this week jumped into the virtual book-burning business, purging “When
Harry Became Sally” by Ryan T. Anderson, a three-year-old book that addresses
tough questions about gender identity.
“Right now, the greatest threat to free speech in this country
is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a
bulwark,” says Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. “The threat
comes in the form of legislating by letterhead. Politicians have realized that
they can silence the speech of those with different political viewpoints by
public bullying.”
What was new this week was Democrats’ brazenness: their shocking
and open targeting of news organizations. The left has long worked to shut down
speech with which it disagrees, but officials in the past did it with more
subterfuge. It came via legislation for “campaign finance reform,” or via their
successful effort to push the IRS to target conservative nonprofits; or via
Sen. Dick Durbin’s campaign to pressure companies out of funding free-market
nonprofits. Liberal activists have honed intimidation campaigns, threatening
boycotts and other actions against companies that advertise on disfavored
platforms or donate to right-leaning groups.
Congress’s engagement this week is an acknowledgment of the
limits of that activist effort. As Angelo Carusone, president of the left-wing
outfit Media Matters keeps noting, activists have discovered that their
campaign against Fox’s advertisers isn’t enough, since Fox gets much of its
revenue from subscription fees. So the only way to kill it off is to bully
cable companies into dropping the network. Activists began a grassroots effort
to do that last year but haven’t made headway. Enter Ms. Eshoo and Mr.
McNerney. (Disclosure: Fox’s and the Journal’s parent companies share common
ownership, and I am a Fox News contributor.)
Democrats may have a harder time bending these providers to
their demands than they did Big Tech. Carriage decisions are governed by
contract law; disappearing a cable channel isn’t as easy as disappearing a
Twitter account. And customers would likely revolt, with financial implications
for providers.
There’s also growing political risk from the other side. The GOP
finally understands what is happening and is beginning to counter it. Gov. Ron
DeSantis’s vow to protect Florida’s citizens from Big Tech overreach is a shot
across the censors’ bows. There’s also this week’s letter to cable providers
from West Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey urging them
to think “very carefully” about how they respond to Democratic pressure, given
any wide deplatforming of conservative channels could very easily raise
questions of “collusive, coordinated and anticompetitive behavior.”
But don’t doubt
that Democrats will escalate their overt demands that companies act as their
political enforcers, outsourcing the censorship the Constitution forbids. And
don’t buy the excuse that this is “oversight.” As law professor Jonathan Turley
told Ms. Eshoo at the hearing: “Making a statement and putting a question mark
at the end of it doesn’t change the import of the statement.” This isn’t just
asking. It’s an order.
And:
The Censorship
Party
House Democrats use a hearing to target
conservative media.
By The Editorial Board
Imagine if a pair of Donald Trump’s allies in Congress had sent a letter to cable company CEOs in 2017 blasting CNN and other progressive media outlets and asking why their content is still broadcast. Then imagine that a GOP-run committee in Congress staged a hearing on the societal menace of fake news and the need for government and business to rein in the hostile press.
The media would have treated that as a five-alarm political
fire, an existential threat to a free press, the First Amendment and political
norms, and a step toward authoritarian rule. “Democracy dies in darkness,” and
all that. Yet that’s exactly what Democrats in Congress did this week,
targeting conservative media outlets, but the media reaction has
On Monday Democrats
Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney sent letters pressing 12 cable and tech CEOs to
drop contracts with right-of-center media outlets including Fox News. Two days
later the Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing about “disinformation and
extremism” in conservative media. The only notable extremism on display was the
majority party’s appetite for regulating and policing the free press.
Rep. Mike Doyle, chair of the subcommittee on communications and technology, declared in opening remarks that “it is the responsibility of this subcommittee to hold these institutions”—meaning press outlets he doesn’t like—“to a higher standard.” He said later that “more free speech just isn’t winning the day over the kind of speech that we’re concerned about.”
Democrats chose witnesses to lay the rhetorical foundation for
press restrictions. One was Kristin Urquiza, whose father died of coronavirus
and who spoke at the Democratic convention against Donald Trump. She said “the
media didn’t pull the trigger” in her father’s death, “but they drove the
getaway car,” because he watched and listened to news that downplayed the
virus.
Rep. Eshoo bristled at Republican concerns about government
officials investigating broadcast media with the aim of deplatforming disfavored
networks. “I call them lies,” she said of the content described by Ms. Urquiza.
“I don’t know what you call them. You call that the open market, something
that’s competitive?” Rep. Marc Veasey said he saw a tension between “the
freedom of speech versus other peoples’ safety.”
Chairman Rep. Frank Pallone generously conceded that the First
Amendment protects speech that is “controversial” but distinguished
“misinformation that causes public harm.” Apparently Mr. Pallone wants someone,
perhaps the government, to determine what constitutes public harm and when
speech causes it. Would two years of false Democratic narratives about Russian
collusion with Mr. Trump qualify as public harm? How about apologias for riots
in the streets last summer?
Progressives seem to believe that they are in a position to
dictate the terms of what is acceptable speech in a more controlled media
environment. As committee witness Emily Bell of Columbia Journalism School put
it, “there has to be a will among the political elite and the media elite and
the technology elite to actually do the right thing, as it were.” That means
tightening speech restrictions. To borrow another progressive cliche, this is a
dog whistle for tech companies and other businesses to censor or block conservatives
if government can’t.
This thinking is
dangerous at any time, but especially so now as the Democratic Party runs both
Congress and the executive branch with the power to punish companies that don’t
oblige. The danger is worse since most of the media are abdicating their role as
defenders of the free press because they aren’t the political targets. The
First Amendment dies in media darkness.
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