Lately, I have been having trouble with spacing and some of the posted items have been too wide making it difficult to read these memos. My computer guru showed me how to correct this issue and hopefully, from this point forward, I will be able to overcome this problem.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Will Warnock's Anti-Israel Views Determine who Controls the Senate?
Newsweek
Op-Ed
Alan Dershowitz
Control of the United States Senate may turn on whether the Democratic candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock defeats the Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler in the January 5 Georgia runoff. As a liberal Democrat I would rather see a Warnock victory that could create a 50-50 tie in the Senate capable of being broken by future vice president Kamala Harris. But as a strong supporter of Israel, I am deeply concerned about the fact that Reverend Warnock signed a statement in 2019 and gave a sermon in 2018 that demonstrated strong antagonism to the nation state of the Jewish people.
Some have deliberately distorted Warnock's anti-Israel views in an attempt to garner Jewish support for Warnock. For example, here is the way The Forward described the content of the letter:
Warnock recently came under fire from some Atlanta Jews after Jewish Insider noted that he signed onto a 2019 statement from a group of Christian clergy that visited Israel and the West Bank that likened the "heavily militarization of the West Bank" to "the military occupation of Namibia by apartheid, South Africa." The statement specifies that its signatories "support a two-state solution."
The Forward then says "Jewish political observers disagree with the notion that Warnock is not a strong supporter of Israel."
In order to assess the accuracy of the foregoing description, let us look at the text of the letter itself.
The letter accuses Israel of "state-sanctioned violence in the form of detention, interrogation, teargassed [sic], beatings, forced confessions and death." It characterizes the separation barrier that has saved so many lives as "ever-present physical walls that wall in Palestinians in a political wall reminiscent of the Berlin Wall." Never once does the letter mention why the separation barrier was necessary. The word terrorism never once appears in the letter.
The letter goes on to talk about the Gaza Strip and alleges "excessive use of force by Israel to subjugate the people in collective punishment of whole population [sic] in the debilitating confinement that renders Gaza as one big densely populated prison." There is not a single mention of the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza that have killed, injured and traumatized Israelis living within the 1967 borders. Not a word is said about the terror tunnels, dug from Gaza to the outskirts of Israel Kibbutzim to murder innocent Israeli men, women and children.
The letter purports to describe the "laws of segregation that allow one thing for the Jewish people and another for the Palestinians." That is entirely false. There are different rules for Israelis and non-Israeli residents of the West Bank, but they are not based on religion. Palestinians who live in Israel—whether Muslim or Christian—are full citizens with equal protection under Israeli laws. There are no roads for "Jews only" as is often alleged. Because of the threat of terrorism against Israelis, there are secure roads for Israeli citizens, but Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel have full access to those roads.
The letter applauds the Palestinian Authority for its "conscious decision to forgo armed solutions to the conflict." No mention is made of the "pay-to-slay" policy of the Palestinian Authority that encourages and rewards terrorism and that has been condemned by every American administration and by Congress.
The letter also criticized the United States' decision to recognize Jerusalem as "Israel's official capital," without mentioning that every American administration since the 1990s pledged to do it.
The letter condemns "the increasing hardening of the hearts of the Israeli powers that be," without mentioning Israel's offers to end the occupation of the West Bank and establish a Palestinian state—all of which the Palestinian Authority rejected on numerous occasions.
The letter's authors pray for an end to "weapons sales," which would mean a weakened Israel subject to attack by Iran and its surrogates, as well as by terrorists.
Finally, the letter expresses support for "utilizing economic pressure as a means of bringing recalcitrant dominant forces to the negotiating table." This remark fails to recognize that Israel has extended an open offer to the Palestinian Authority leadership to sit down at the negotiation table and that it has been the Palestinians who have refused to negotiate.
I urge everyone to read the entire letter and listen to the entire sermon because not only are their words reflective of a strong anti-Israel bias and one-sided criticism of Israel, but their tone is biased in the extreme. For those who argue that Warnock merely signed on to a group letter that may not have reflected his own views, please listen to his sermon, which accuses Israel of "shoot[ing] down unarmed Palestinians sisters and brothers like birds of prey." This is a mendacious blood libel, pure and simple. You wouldn't know that from reading the misleading description of the letter and sermon in The Forward. Nor would you know that Warnock is an admirer of Reverend Jeremiah Wright and a defender of the anti-American and anti-Semitic sermon that President Obama condemned.
So it is important for everyone who is considering voting for Reverend Warnock to read the letter and listen to the sermon in their entirety. I have done so and I find it difficult to support anyone who has such animosity toward Israel. Nor can I believe that anyone who holds such views can be characterized as "a strong supporter of Israel."
I am prepared to change my mind about Reverend Warnock, but only if he changes his mind about Israel. The mere fact that after announcing his candidacy, he renounced support for BDS and mouthed some talking points about Israel's security (see his recent op-ed, "I Stand With Israel") is not enough for me. I want to know what he really believes and, more importantly, how he will vote.
The last thing the Democratic Party needs is yet another prominent politician who harbors negative views about America's most reliable ally, Israel. I hope Reverend Warnock will reconsider his past mistakes and express views that allow liberal Democrats like me, who are also strong supporters of Israel, to support him in his bid to become a United States senator. I genuinely want to be able to support Reverend Warnock and a Democratic Senate, and I truly hope he can convince me and the voters of Georgia that he really does "stand with Israel."
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of the book, Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo,
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I previously thought the Dominion Software heist took place in Spain but turns out it was in Frankfort. Turns out Dominion was designed in Spain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Bret Stephens, Group Think and Greta
Groupthink Has Left the Left Blind
A constricted view of the world leaves progressives surprised by the world as it is.
By Bret Stephens
This
year, several high-profile writers have left left-leaning publications after
running afoul of what they describe as a pervasive
culture of censoriousness, groupthink and intellectual-risk
aversion. This month, Donald Trump once again stunned much of the
liberal establishment by dramatically beating polling expectations to come
within about 80,000 votes of another Electoral College victory.
It’s
worth asking whether there’s a connection between the two — that is, between
the left’s increasingly constricted view of the world and the increasing
frequency with which leftists are surprised by the world as it is.
What,
today, is leftism, at least when it comes to intellectual life? Not what it
used to be. Once it was predominantly liberal, albeit with radical fringes. Now
it is predominantly progressive, or woke, with centrist liberals in dissent.
Once it was irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best
discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can
be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is
obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain
multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or
of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.
The list goes on. But the central difference is this: The old liberal left paid attention to complexity, ambiguity, the gray areas. A sense of complexity induced a measure of doubt, including self-doubt. The new left typically seeks to reduce things to elements such as race, class and gender, in ways that erase ambiguity and doubt. The new left is a factory of certitudes.
It’s from that factory that writers like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have fled, and from which many other independent-minded thinkers will, sooner or later, follow. For them, the loss isn’t devastating: They have large followings and can use new digital platforms like Substack to make a generous living.
For the
new left — and the publications that champion it — the loss is much greater. It
makes them predictable, smug and dull. It alienates readers. A current article
on the New York magazine website is titled, “I
Think About Björk’s Creativity Animal a Lot.” For gems such as this
they got rid of Sullivan?
But
worse than making it dull, the purge (or self-purge) of contrarians has made
the new left blind.
According
to the incessant pronouncements of much of the news media (including a few of
my own), Donald Trump is the most anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-woman
president in modern memory. Yet the CNN exit poll found
that Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary
Clinton and Joe Biden. He also improved his vote share over 2016 with both
Latino and Black voters, while losing most
of the advantage he previously had with college-educated white males —
precisely the demographic his policies had supposedly done most to favor.
If the catechism of
today’s left determined reality, none of this would have happened. Racial,
ethnic or sexual identity would have trumped every other voting consideration.
But as the Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar recently told Axios:
“Trump did a much better job at understanding Hispanics. Sometimes, Democrats
see Hispanics as monolithic.” Latino voters in his South Texas district were
particularly turned off by progressive rhetoric about defunding the police,
opposition to fossil fuels and decriminalizing border crossings.
Editors’ Picks
What is
true of Cuellar’s constituency is true of everyone: People are rarely reducible
to a single animating political consideration. Nor should they be subject to a
simple moral judgment. Motives are complicated: It is perfectly possible to see
Trump for the reprehensible man he is and still find something to like in his
policies, just as it is possible to admire Biden’s character and reject his
politics.
The
apparent inability of many on the left to entertain the thought that decent
human beings might have voted for Trump for sensible reasons — to take one
example, the unemployment rate reached record lows before the pandemic hit —
amounts to an epic failure to see their fellow Americans with understanding,
much less with empathy. It repels the 73 million Trump voters who cannot see
anything of themselves in media caricatures of them as fragile, bigoted, greedy
and somewhat stupid white people.
It also
motivates them. The surest way to fuel the politics of resentment — the
politics that gave us the Tea Party, Brexit and Trump, and will continue to
furnish more of the same — is to give people something to resent. Jeering moral
condescension from entitled elites is among the things most people tend to
resent.
Which
brings me back to the flight of the contrarians. As the left (and the
institutions that represent it) increasingly becomes an intellectual
monoculture, it will do more than just drive away talent, as well as
significant parts of its audience. It will become more self-certain, more
obnoxious to those who don’t share its assumptions, more blinkered and more
frequently wrong.
To the enemies of the left, the self-harm that left-leaning institutions do with their increasingly frequent excommunications is, ultimately, good news. The mystery is why liberals would do it to themselves.
+++
Observers Shocked at Greta Thunberg’s Inability to Answer
a Simple Question Without a Script
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Yesterday the founders of Twitter and Facebook testified for the second time in three weeks before The Senate.
Several things are critical and were revealed.
First, it is evident these two corporations have, in fact, colluded with each other in developing software and seem to have aligned themselves for the purpose of defeating Trump as well as preventing those they oppose from exercising their constitutional right to engage in free speech.
Furthermore, Facebook withheld damaging information about Hunter Biden, from The New York Post, claiming they needed to assess the accuracy of the information only to subsequently release it two weeks after the 2020 election.
The second crucial point is, two Senators, Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Chris Coons (Delaware) apparently favor suppression of one's right to free speech.
If you do not agree with their views they believe it is acceptable to increase technological restrictions on one's right to have their views published.
It is sad indeed to learn we have reached the level of intimidation both Strassel and Rand warned us would occur. Hirono has proven to be a buffon in prior hearings and Coons is as dangerous but more subtle.
There is mounting evidence the "swampers" Trump sought to pursue, in the end, may well have defeated him. The bad guys won because they are more powerful, more entrenched and more in control of our nation.
Whether Trump can win his right to re-election in the courts remains to be seen. If you believe there was no concerted effort on the part of technology billionaires, their compliant friends in government, in the mass media and, finally, those in charge of our intelligence agencies then you are biased to the point of being blind and lamentably are actually dangerous as well.
It is not a matter of different political philosophy. It is a matter of swallowing lies and disregarding facts because of deep seated, blinding prejudice and hatred.
It is the responsibility of every citizen voter to participate, to be informed so as to further the best interests and continuance of our great republic.
This is why the Georgia Senate race is critical and why Warnock and Ossoff must be defeated. We have had enough radicalism and fraudulent behaviour. It must end in Georgia.
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