Still Pesach

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The Speaker of The House , Mike Johnson, and several colleagues spoke with Jewish students at Columbia and then went on the campus and spoke to Columbia  students who have been harassing  Jewish students because of their religion.

Johnson gave the speech that Biden should have given because it was presidential and re-stated what America is and should always stand for and what the rioting fascists fail to understand.

I commend the Speaker for his eloquence, decency and courage along with his co Representatives. 

I asked Buddy Carter ( bcarter331@aol.com) to forward my email.  Being in public office has many rewards, maybe too many.  However, it also comes at a terrible price many times.  Speaker Johnson is a decent person and I know it would warm his heart, if you feel so inclined, to praise him  or his stand courageous and sincere comments.  He is a mensch,

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Mike Johnson is a Hero

By Star Parker

"As a Christian, Johnson understands that there is no understanding of what freedom is without appreciation that there is good and evil in this world.

Our tendency in our country is to emphasize individual rights when we think about freedom.

But the equal and opposite side of rights is responsibilities. Without responsibility, whether as individuals or as a nation, freedom is gone..."

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Money speaks, so it is time for the government to withhold funding Universities and Colleges that refuse to protect their Jewish students. Lamentably, morals are often held  hostage to money.  Biden is not going to do anything that solves the problem because to do so  threatens his presidency.

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Who were those masked men talking to Claudia?

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Bizarre! What else do you call it? A few days ago, Mrs. Claudia Sheinbaum, the woman likely to win the presidential election in Mexico, was approached by masked men while on tour in South Mexico. This is the story:

On Sunday, April 21, Mexican presidential candidate for the in-power National Regeneration Movement (Morena) Claudia Sheinbaum was stopped by hooded men at a checkpoint during her campaign tour in the southern state of Chiapas.

The men, who purportedly belong to the Sinaloa Cartel and carried images of the group’s notorious leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, used the opportunity to request that Sheinbaum remember them if elected into presidential office on June 2nd.

“We just want to tell you to remember the mountains and the poor people when you are in power; we are not against the government, keep that in mind, we are not against you,” the hooded men said during the exchange, which was captured on video and later distributed on social media.

“We don’t want Motozintla to be another disaster like Comalapa,” continued the group. “We want you, when you are president, to do us the favor of cleaning this section because we cannot travel there; if we pass through that section, they tear us into little pieces.”

Sheinbaum remained inside the vehicle throughout the confrontation, only nodding and making eye contact with the supposed cartel members.

As you can imagine, the reaction south of the border was quick. After all, we've posted here before about the candidate assassinations in this election: 16 candidates so far!

How did those masked me get that close to the leading presidential candidate? Your guess is as good as mine, but President Andres Lopez-Obrador called it "propaganda," whatever that means.

So what happened? Maybe it was all staged to show that Mrs. Sheinbaum will listen to the criminal elements. Maybe it was a security breach and the masked me just wanted to make a video with the candidate.

No one knows but the image is awful in a country where candidates get killed and cartels run sections of the countryside.

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National Security is Threatened by Incompetant Leadership

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan, in an opinion piece last week in the Wall Street Journal, stated the bad leadership Is a national-security threat.  She was, of course, speaking about the situation in the US.  In her piece she states: “The quality of our leaders is deteriorating, and we’re so used to it it’s not alarming us anymore.” 

In reading that sentence I could not help but see the parallels to our own situation here in Israel and the political process that almost ensures that the people who rise to the top are not necessarily the best people for the job. 

No doubt, our recent leadership is not up to the level of those who led us in the past – Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, Chaim Weizmann, Abba Eban, Chaim Herzog – people who, even if we disagreed with their decisions, we respected their integrity and professional acumen.  And more importantly, we never questioned that those decisions were always in the best interests of the State of Israel and not made to further their own political careers.

While the general populace seems to have accepted this situation and normalized it, the fact that this is the case is also noticed by our enemies.  After all, everything that goes on here is covered in the worldwide press as if Israel is the most important country in the world.   How else to explain the massive worldwide demonstrations against Israel and often against Jews as well who make up just 0.2% of the world’s 8 billion people?  

 

Given that all of this is seen by our enemies makes bad leadership a national security problem.  It is what makes our enemies think we are weak and even worse, stupid, for having put some of our leadership in the positions they now hold. 

 

What has contributed to this situation and how do we correct it, a correction that is needed now more than ever in light of the events of October 7th and the seemingly endless war  with Hamas, coupled with our inability to get all of our hostages released?

 

A major part of our problem is the structure of our parliamentary system which makes ministerial assignments a reward for party loyalty and support for the ruling coalition.  As a result, the people who head our ministries are not the best people in Israel for the job, but rather individuals who have “paid their political dues” and are rewarded by giving such people “suits” that are too big for them and “shoes” they cannot fill.  

 

How else to explain Bezalel Smotrich, a lawyer with no economic background, as Minister of Finance?  Or Itamar Ben Gvir, also a lawyer, convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism who was rejected for mandatory service in the IDF because of his extreme right wing political views, now serving as Minister of National Security?  Or Uriel Buso, another lawyer with no health management experience, now serving as Minster of Health.  And the list goes on. 

 

What Israel must do after the end of the current war with Hamas, is to restructure the ministerial cabinet so that the next Prime Minister can pick the best people in the country for each of the positions available. 

 

The Minister of Finance, for example, should be someone from the financial community who has experience in managing relatively large organizations in the sector with experience in world economics and the operation of capital markets.  The Minister of National Security should be a person experienced in the public sector, the defense arena and/or have a background in private security involvement with an understanding of national security issues.  The Minister of Education needs to be one of the most talented educational administrators in the country with experience in heading large educational institutions.  The same should be true for every ministry and, truth be told, Israel has a surfeit of qualified people in each of the sectors involved.  

 

The challenge, of course, has always been to get the best and the brightest to come into the political arena.  Generally, when such people are approached, they smile and say they are not willing to deal with the gutter politics that comes with running for office.  However, the above approach would make it possible for qualified people to enter government service and have their expertise tapped for the good and welfare of the country, without their having to negotiate the electoral swamp. 

 

On the assumption that Israel would be willing to accept this change in Cabinet structure, the next step, after identifying suitable candidates, would be for a small group of well-respected members of the community to meet with each prospect individually to encourage them to agree to give 2-3 years of their time to the rebuilding of Israel’s political platform.  As an optimist believing in the continued success of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, I am convinced that these prospects would rise to the occasion and answer the call. 

 

Former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis once tellingly said: “The example that America knows how to govern itself is one of the compelling aspects of our national security.”

 

This is no less true for us here in Israel.  Our future is dependent on the world’s perception of Israel as a militarily strong, politically well managed economic powerhouse.  Our future security as a nation depends on all three of these aspects being perceived as true.  It is now our job to make this happen.  We can do no less.

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As I always thought. The creeps in our society  surface.
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Rockefeller and Soros grants are subsidizing those who disrupt college campuses.

By Ira Stoll-'The Wall Street Journal'

https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-anti-israel-protesters-are-paid-soros-rockefeller-funding-activism-hamas-fba26c20

Since at least the Vietnam War, exasperated observers of student protests have rolled their eyes and thought: Get a job. In some cases today, activism is a job. Two of America’s largest philanthropic foundations are behind a group that has paid some of the anti-Israel activists for the kind of antics disrupting campuses across the country.

Consider Malak Afaneh, a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, and Craig Birckhead-Morton, a senior at Yale. Ms. Afaneh went viral this month for disrupting a dinner at Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s home. This week the Yale Daily News reported that Mr. Birckhead-Morton had been arrested for trespassing—and then re-emerged to address an anti-Israel crowd blocking an intersection in New Haven.

Ms. Afaneh and Mr. Birckhead-Morton have both been “youth fellows” of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, whose website identifies them by their first names. As of April 4, the campaign was soliciting applications for a new cohort, whose “campus-based fellows” would receive stipends of $2,880 to $3,360 for three-month terms of roughly eight hours of work a week. That “work” could include aiding campaigns that “demand federal or state politicians cut US military, financial, or diplomatic ties with Israel.”

The corporate entity behind these fellowships is Education for Just Peace in the Middle East. Where does it get its funding?

George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundation has put $700,000 into Education for Just Peace in the Middle East since 2018, most recently with a two-year grant in 2022, according to the Open Society Foundation’s website. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given Education for Just Peace in the Middle East $515,000 since 2019, most recently with a three-year grant for $225,000 awarded in August 2023.

While some policymakers have wondered whether activists receive money from overseas, it turns out that there’s a clear paper trail of funding at home. That ought to have policy implications. In considering whether to discipline students for rule violations, university administrators might more harshly punish activism done, at least in part, for pay.

Do the Rockefeller and Soros families want their money to be used to advocate for Hamas’s war aims? They should consider that themselves. Meantime, Congress, and the Internal Revenue Service might want to examine whether the grants fit the charitable purposes defined in the tax code.

Mr. Stoll writes at TheEditors.com.

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Will Jewish Voters Stop Voting For The Democrats Who Want To Kill Them?

By Kurt Schlichter

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