This memo is biased in that I have posted articles I totally agree with and which express my sentiments better than I can do myself.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/
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Fight with Us Against the Leftists Ruining Americ By Townhall.com Staff
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Liberals Love to Hide Hate By Derek Hunter
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Principal Asked to Apologize for Email Urging Staff to Advocate for Sanctions Against Israel By Landon Mion
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With Ceasefire in Place, Biden Sends Former Obama
Official as Acting Israeli Ambassador
JNS News Service
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reportedly tapping former Obama administration official Michael Ratney to serve as acting U.S. ambassador to Israel until a new one is picked and confirmed by the Senate.
Ratney, who served as consul general in Jerusalem under former President Barack Obama from 2012 to 2015—and later, as special envoy to Syria—is expected to arrive in Jerusalem on June 1, reported Axios.The Biden administration has been criticized for its delay in choosing an ambassador to Israel. The absence became more evident these past two weeks when the United States lacked a senior official on the ground. Last weekend, Blinken dispatched Hady Amr, deputy assistant secretary of state of Israeli-Palestinian affairs, to help negotiate a ceasefire.
Ratney has drawn heat in the past for his involvement in groups that led to efforts to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 2015, when Ratney was the consul general in Jerusalem, the State Department spent $465,000 on a group called OneVoice, which then joined a group called Victory 15 (V15) that worked to defeat Netanyahu and his Likud Party in Israel’s elections, reported Breitbart News. Further, a 2016 Senate subcommittee report found that Ratney had deleted key emails related to the OneVoice grants.
According to reports, Biden is close to choosing a new ambassador. The candidates are Thomas Nides, a former State Department official and Morgan Stanley executive; and former Florida Rep. Robert Wexler, who has been endorsed by prominent Jewish members of Congress.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Israel and Gaza militants may have agreed to end their latest flare-up, but without a political solution to the greater Palestinian-Israeli conflict, grassroots violence and miscalculations by factions on both sides could still escalate into another war.
Israel and Gaza militants may have agreed to end their latest flare-up, but without a political solution to the greater Palestinian-Israeli conflict, grassroots violence and miscalculations by factions on both sides could still escalate into another war. +++ Sad day in America. Will it eventually come own to the equivalent of Christians havingto hide their Christmas ornaments and trees? The answer is yes if radical Democratshave their way.source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2021-05-22&utm_medium=email ++++++++++++++++++++++ Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Another article sent by a dear friend and fellow memo reader: What the Media Gets Wrong About IsraelThe news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news, a former AP reporter says.By Matti Friedman+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ America pours money down the rat hole sending tax dollars to corrupt nations in South and Latin America believing it will buy less border insurgencies and we waste even more tax payer dollars all over the world allowing corrupt dictators in Africa to benefit from our largess. The Truth about U.S. Aid to Israel By Kevin D. Williamson Aid to Israel isn’t aid to Israel. It is corporate welfare for U.S.-based military contractors. With Hamas rockets and Israeli reprisals thundering back into the headlines, President Joe Biden must face a tough question —or, rather, whoever it is who explains to President Biden what he thinks must face a tough question: As rich people tend to do for obvious reasons, Americans will labor mightily to make a financial issue out of a nonfinancial one, and so the question of U.S. aid to Israel — a poorly understood and often misrepresented issue — returns periodically to prominence. Nicholas Kristof, writing in the New York Times, laments: “As American taxpayers, we don’t have much influence over Hamas, while we do have influence over Israel and we provide several billion dollars a year in military assistance to a rich country and thus subsidize bombings of Palestinians.” Most people think of U.S. military aid to Israel as Washington doing Jerusalem a favor — the truth is almost exactly the opposite. It is important to understand that there is really no U.S. military aid to Israel. Of course there is, on paper, just under $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. Why provide aid to a country that is, as Kristof correctly notes, affluent? Because aid to Israel isn’t aid to Israel — it is corporate welfare for U.S.-based military contractors, which is where the money ends up. Joe Biden, of all people, should know this: He worked for the administration that set up the current system. The Israeli government is contractually obliged to spend a certain percentage of U.S. military aid with U.S.-based firms; historically, about three-fourths of the money is encumbered that way. You can think of $1 in aid to Israel as 75 cents in support of Lockheed Martin (Israel is the first non-U.S. operator of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter) and similar firms. During the presidency of Barack Obama, that aid was further conditioned. At the demand of National Security Adviser Susan Rice, the 2016 aid agreement established a timeline for phasing out the share (only 26.4 percent to begin with) of aid that could be converted from U.S. dollars to Israeli shekels and that thus could be used by the Israeli government for domestic procurement rather than to pay dollar-funded U.S. contracts. The same agreement also prohibited the Israelis from using aid funds to procure fuel, which generally is purchased from non-U.S. providers, making more money available to be spent on U.S.-sourced goods and services. The reasoning behind this was a familiar one if you have listened to the speeches of Joe Biden: economic nationalism. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reports, the Obama administration insisted that “it is unacceptable for Israel to convert American dollar aid into shekels and then use those funds to develop state-of-the-art products that eventually compete with American products throughout the world.” U.S. aid to Israel isn’t about saving Israeli lives — it is about creating U.S. jobs and fattening U.S. profit margins. If you have followed Veronique de Rugy’s fascinating and urgent work on the Export-Import Bank, the underlying financial arrangements will be familiar. In addition to the direct aid, Washington provides Israeli military buyers with sweetheart financing, loan guarantees, and the like to keep the flow of cash moving — not to Israel, only through Israel, and thence back home to employers represented in the Senate by Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kaine, and Ben Cardin. As I have argued at length elsewhere, the U.S. government often appears to be a bank that sometimes acts like a state rather than a state that sometimes acts like a bank. Suspending U.S. military aid to Israel would not slow down the Israeli military — it might even strengthen Israel’s military by giving it a broader range of real choices about how to arm and supply itself. Israel doesn’t need the money — it needs the relationship with Washington. And so it allows its national-security apparatus to be used as a conduit for old-fashioned American payola politics. The questions facing the United States in our relationship with Israel are only incidentally financial. They are in the main questions of values and interests, which are what matter in international relations. And that puts President Biden in a tough spot, too: His party is home to a great many traditional, pro-Israel Democrats, and a commanding majority of Jewish voters supported him in 2020. Jewish Americans are not a homogeneous political bloc, but the Democratic Party at the moment goes out of its way to accommodate anti-Israel radicals such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and anti-Semites such as Representative Ilhan Omar and Representative Rashida Tlaib. Those present ultimately irreconcilable sets of values, which makes for a delicate coalition. Joe Biden, rolling through the world scene as stately and as relevant as a Studebaker, seems to believe he can finesse such questions as he pursues his own variation on Donald Trump’s nickel-and-dime diplomacy. About that, he is mistaken. Anti-Semitism is not simple bigotry or race-hatred. It is a political ideology, which is why the problems plaguing our Democrats also have plagued other left-wing parties around the world, notably U.K. Labour. In fact, in 2019 Representative Tlaib, Representative Omar, and the recently ousted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn were grouped together by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the world’s most significant anti-Semites in a 2019 report. A Democratic president cannot ignore this. The ideology that heaps scorn and hatred on the Jewish state also heaps scorn and hatred on the United States, insisting that the United States and Israel are two local expressions of the same global phenomenon — and they are not wrong about that. The Left may give that phenomenon any number of damning names — capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, etc. — but the Noam Chomskys of the world are entirely correct to believe that the United States and Israel represent one possible way of being in the world while Hamas and Cuba and Iran and Venezuela represent a different way of being in the world. We know which side Representative Ocasio-Cortez is throwing in with. What about President Biden? The important question for the United States in this conflict is not the petty logrolling associated with foreign-aid payments amounting annually to approximately 30 hours of Social Security spending. With Israel on one side and Hamas on the other, the question for the United States is whether we still know how to take our own side in a fight. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Mayor Lightfoot treads heavy when it comes to being a racist. She needs to take her foot out of her mouth. Like anti-Semitic Jews named Bernie Sanders and Soros, Lightfoot is a disgrace to her race: So wrong: Chicago mayor declares she will only grant interviews to 'journalists of color'This past week we saw America at its worse. As I have written and now repeat, hatred always lies beneath the surface waiting for an event The New Furies of the Oldest Hatred Take a good look at who is speaking out against Jew-hate.
And who is staying silent. PETER SAVODNIK The furies have been unleashed. They were everywhere you looked these past two weeks, though you won’t read about them much in the papers. We saw them on Thursday, when pro-Palestinian protesters threw an explosive device into a crowd of Jews in New York’s Diamond District. We saw them on Wednesday, when two men were attacked outside a bagel shop in midtown Manhattan. We saw them on Tuesday, at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood, when a group of men draped in keffiyehs asked the diners who was Jewish, and then pummeled them. And in a parking lot not far away, when two cars draped in Palestinian flags roared after an Orthodox man fleeing for his life. And in the story of the American soccer player Luca Lewis, cornered by a band of men in New York demanding to know if he was a Jew. Then there was the caravan careening through Jewish neighborhoods in North London carrying people screaming: “Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!” And the rabbi, outside London, who was hospitalized after being attacked by two teenagers. And the demonstrator in Vienna shouting, “Shove your Holocaust up your ass!” — the crowd of young people, mostly women, cheering. The synagogue in Skokie that was vandalized. The synagogue in Tucson that was vandalized. The synagogue in Salt Lake that was vandalized. The pro-Israel demonstrators in Montreal pelted with rocks. And the pro-Palestinian agitators in Edmonton driving around in search of Jews. The teeming crowds in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Bangladesh, Philadelphia and Boston and San Francisco and, of course, across the Arab world. The seemingly ubiquitous accusations of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.” The Turkish president, reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages, accusing Israelis of “sucking the blood” of non-Jewish children. Every hour on the hour, the celebrities posted their memes and the elected officials and the influencers — it’s hard to tell the difference — called Israel an “apartheid” regime. Apartheid regimes, like regimes guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing, are meant to be overthrown. Violently, if need be. So bloodshed is warranted, yes? The silence-is-violence people — those who are quick to “call out” anyone deemed inadequately antiracist, experts at digging up any dusty book passage — have been remarkably quiet when it comes to Jews being dehumanized and hunted down. Let us dispense with the fiction, once and for all, that hating the Jewish homeland, which contains the largest Jewish community on Earth, is different from hating Jews. It has been exceedingly difficult in our blinkered, hyper-secularized present, so removed from the primal animosities of not so long ago, to conceive of a world in which tens or hundreds of millions of people who have never visited Israel or never met a Jew want Jews dead. We’ve been blinded by the oceanic success of life under the Pax Americana. We think this is how people are. This is not how people are. This is a wondrous aberration. There were 2,000 years of ghettos, blood libels and pogroms, of dehumanization and second-class citizenship that culminated with the Shoah. For the past several decades — a sneeze in the span of Jewish history — we American Jews have been maundering through the happy, mournful echoes of the recent past. That recent past meant that we weren’t shocked to see this violence from the Europeans, who have never stopped hating Jews, but who had been forced, by the camps, to camouflage their Jew hate in their criticism of Israel, their obsession with it. But America? We were not steeped in the Old World hatreds. We were deeply flawed — who wasn’t? — but our flaws were always in conflict with our identity. One of the many problems with antisemitism, like Jim Crow, was that it made a mockery of our ideals, which made it impossible to hold onto the old bigotries forever. One had to reject Jew-hate and support the Jewish right to self-determination for the same reason one had to dismantle literacy laws that limited voting rights: It was central to the American weltanschauung. It was part of our animating ethic. The progress was glacial and uneven but inexorable. It was America becoming more American. We were supposed to have transcended the old blood-and-soil stupidities. But they can’t be transcended. That was a beautiful myth, a myth that was fundamental to our idea of ourselves. But we are losing ourselves +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Finally: Unlike most political titles "Honest Reporting" is what it says. I have been a supporter for years. Politicians craft words that mean the opposite of what they say. Democrats are famous for blaming others as a cover for doing it themselves. Reagan said the most laughable/dangerous eleven words ever formed were; "I'm from the government and I am here to help you." Biden told us if we elected him he would unify the nation.
We’ve been on a war footing for almost two weeks: our team is simultaneously energized and exhausted. Living through rocket fire is hard, but doing meaningful work makes it feel easier, as does your support. We operated at the rate of about a month’s worth of content per week, to counter the biased messaging in international press and social media, while also running constant press conferences and field trips, live TV interviews and debates. For example, I represented HonestReporting alongside former
ambassador to the United States, Dr. Michael Oren, in front of the
international press corps in Israel. I also participated in many other live
television appearances, often in hostile news environments. Unfortunately, I don’t know of another person or organization that is functioning as effectively as HonestReporting, to confront the false and slanderous narratives continually articulated by the Palestinian leadership, terror groups and their many allies around the world. As the danger is hopefully ending for Israelis, it appears to be just beginning for Jews around the world, who are suffering violent antisemitic attacks in New York, London, Los Angeles, Paris and more: all a result of the false and hostile narrative propagated by an irresponsible media industry. For example, let’s look at the false yet largely accepted claim of how this war started and HonestReporting’s response. The false claim: The situation began when Israeli soldiers attacked peaceful Palestinian worshipers on the Temple Mount, while trying to evict Palestinians from their homes. Israel then bombed Gaza, causing massive harm to civilians. Truth: Palestinian families were living in four homes in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, that previously belonged to Jews, before Jordan invaded in 1948. The Palestinian families acknowledged that Jews came first, and the sides worked to find coexistence and compromise. The Palestinian Authority government threatened the Palestinian families to prevent a deal and then used the story to incite hundreds of violent rioters at the “Al Aqsa” Mosque Muslim holy site, where explosive devices and rocks were thrown at Israeli security forces attempting to quell the unrest. Israeli police responded with non-lethal crowd control methods to protect the holy sites and innocent people. Total fatalities: zero. Only then did Hamas begin firing some 4,000 rockets at Israel (including at Jerusalem and its holy sites) -- one third of which fell inside of Gaza, causing many of the Palestinain casualties. Israel’s response was strong but careful, and targeted military assets. As an organization we’ve done some amazing work, but we want to do more: we are a small team and we have to grow: not just for wartime, but for all the time. Al Jazeera, for instance, is funded by billions in oil money from the rulers of Qatar - that’s the kind of scale that we’re up against. But we can compete, and we can succeed! Here is a sneak-peak at our strategic plan: additional staff to our editorial team; a professional social media manager; and an administrative assistant who can help arrange additional television appearances and other proactive activities. Each position will cost from $60,000 to $80,000 per year, plus equipment and in some cases travel budgets. It’s the kind of strategic, measured growth that can make a meaningful difference. Please support us now to your maximum possible ability. Thank you for your wonderful loyalty and partnership. Best wishes for health, safety and peaceful days ahead. Daniel Pomerantz - CEO HonestReporting You're receiving this because you're an HonestReporting subscriber who powers our U.S. 501(c)(3) charitable non-profit with your tax-deductible donations. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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