WE HAVE MUCH TO BE THAKFUL FOR (L TO R, 1ST ROW THEN 2D ROW)
ME,ABBY, BRIAN, TAMMY, MAX, DANIEL, LYNN
BLAKE, STELLA, DAGNY
++++++++++++++++++++
BE CAREFUL, YOU COULD SLIP:
Frank Raasch wrote: Great News to be Thankful For. The Antarctic Just had its coldest 6 months ever recorded. In 2014 Nasa said Ice was the largest ever recorded. Ice at the Antarctic has only grown since then. Meanwhile Arctic Ice Is reaching its highest point in 20 years.
According to the latest data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Arctic sea ice 'volume' has been on something of a tear in recent weeks — it is now tracking above all recent years and shows no signs of abating. It may hit a 30 year record before warmer weather .
PURE INSANITY ON THE PART OF MANAGEMENT:
Who are these people!! Wonder if they needed them after the OJ Simpson Trial.
Levi Strauss and Best Buy offer counseling to employees distressed over Rittenhouse acquittal, including session with 'racial trauma specialist'BY PAUL SACCA
After Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges from the Kenosha shooting, Best Buy and Levi Strauss reportedly offered their employees counseling to those distressed over the verdict. Levi's offered a session with a "racial trauma specialist" for workers distraught over the acquittal of Rittenhouse — who is white — shooting three white men who assailed him.
Elizabeth Morrison — Levi's chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer — sent an email to employees of the San Francisco-based clothing company following the Rittenhouse verdict in Wisconsin.
"With the news that Kyle Rittenhouse was not convicted in the shooting of three individuals — two of whom lost their lives — during racial justice protests last year, this is a difficult day for many," the email read.
"The pain and trauma of race, identity and belief-based tragedies is a reality that many of us are struggling with on an ongoing basis," Morrison stated. "It can feel physically, mentally and emotionally draining to continue to relive these moments, and I want you to know, it's okay to not be okay."
Don't miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now."To help promote safety, sharing and to encourage healing, I'll be hosting a fireside chat and Q&A with Dr. Jamila Codrington, a licensed psychologist and racial trauma specialist in early December," the DEI head wrote. "Dr. J and I will talk about the mental and psychical impacts of back-to-back social and racial justice events and trauma coping mechanisms during our discussion."
Morrison advised employees pained by the verdict to seek a "trained counsel." She also recommended workers use "resources to help [employees] impact social justice, equality and drive positive change," including "getting educated and informed on the issue of gun violence" and "reaching out to your elected officials to let them know just how important common-sense gun laws are to you."
In 2018, Levi Strauss partnered with gun control organization Everytown for Gun Safety and Bloomberg to push for stricter gun regulations.
A spokesperson for Levi Strauss confirmed to Fox Business that the "email was sent to all US employees and that the purpose of the fireside chat is accurately described in the email."
Best Buy is reportedly also offering "mental health resources" and "counseling services" to employees distressed over the Rittenhouse acquittal.
"The verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse's trial stirs many emotions, and it's another difficult moment for our nation," reportedly wrote Mark Irvin, the chief inclusion, diversity, and talent officer for Best Buy.
"While these events can be challenging and deeply hurtful, I hope you will take a moment to reflect on the values that unite us as a company and as a nation," Irvin said, according to The Post Millennial. "We can do better, as each of us as individuals, allies, and human beings press together for better outcomes."
"I know events like these can take a toll on mental health and emotional well-being," he stated. "Please know that best Buy is here to support you."
Irvin then provided links to "mental health resources" and "counseling services" that are offered by the company's employee benefits.
MEANWHILE IN CHICAGO:
After Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges from the Kenosha shooting, Best Buy and Levi Strauss reportedly offered their employees counseling to those distressed over the verdict. Levi's offered a session with a "racial trauma specialist" for workers distraught over the acquittal of Rittenhouse — who is white — shooting three white men who assailed him.
Elizabeth Morrison — Levi's chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer — sent an email to employees of the San Francisco-based clothing company following the Rittenhouse verdict in Wisconsin.
"With the news that Kyle Rittenhouse was not convicted in the shooting of three individuals — two of whom lost their lives — during racial justice protests last year, this is a difficult day for many," the email read.
"The pain and trauma of race, identity and belief-based tragedies is a reality that many of us are struggling with on an ongoing basis," Morrison stated. "It can feel physically, mentally and emotionally draining to continue to relive these moments, and I want you to know, it's okay to not be okay."
Don't miss out on content from Dave Rubin free of big tech censorship. Listen to The Rubin Report now.
"To help promote safety, sharing and to encourage healing, I'll be hosting a fireside chat and Q&A with Dr. Jamila Codrington, a licensed psychologist and racial trauma specialist in early December," the DEI head wrote. "Dr. J and I will talk about the mental and psychical impacts of back-to-back social and racial justice events and trauma coping mechanisms during our discussion."
Morrison advised employees pained by the verdict to seek a "trained counsel." She also recommended workers use "resources to help [employees] impact social justice, equality and drive positive change," including "getting educated and informed on the issue of gun violence" and "reaching out to your elected officials to let them know just how important common-sense gun laws are to you."
In 2018, Levi Strauss partnered with gun control organization Everytown for Gun Safety and Bloomberg to push for stricter gun regulations.
A spokesperson for Levi Strauss confirmed to Fox Business that the "email was sent to all US employees and that the purpose of the fireside chat is accurately described in the email."
Best Buy is reportedly also offering "mental health resources" and "counseling services" to employees distressed over the Rittenhouse acquittal.
"The verdict in Kyle Rittenhouse's trial stirs many emotions, and it's another difficult moment for our nation," reportedly wrote Mark Irvin, the chief inclusion, diversity, and talent officer for Best Buy.
"While these events can be challenging and deeply hurtful, I hope you will take a moment to reflect on the values that unite us as a company and as a nation," Irvin said, according to The Post Millennial. "We can do better, as each of us as individuals, allies, and human beings press together for better outcomes."
"I know events like these can take a toll on mental health and emotional well-being," he stated. "Please know that best Buy is here to support you."
Irvin then provided links to "mental health resources" and "counseling services" that are offered by the company's employee benefits.
MEANWHILE IN CHICAGO:
Read This Alert >>>
FINALLY:
A Tale of Two Cities: Kenosha vs. WaukeshaVICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The media’s blatant lies amount to racial arson.
Both Wisconsin towns, Kenosha, and Waukesha, about 50 miles apart by car, were the recent sites of multiple deaths. The violence in both made national news. Yet in contradictory ways both reflected the common themes of America’s current legal, media, and societal corruption.
The relevant public prosecutors in both were in the news for alleged ideological bias. Specifically, they habitually calibrated the charging, indicting, and trying (or not) of defendants through ideological lenses and community pressure rather than on the basis of the facts and the law.
Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old armed youth who volunteered to protect business properties at the height of the August 2020 arson, riots, and looting in Kenosha. He was pursued and attacked by three members from a larger group who chased the armed youth, presumably either to disarm, injure, or kill him—or perhaps all three.
Rittenhouse variously was assaulted, kicked, and had a firearm pointed at him. In reaction, he fatally shot two of his pursuing attackers and wounded a third. Kenosha prosecutors reviewed videos of the altercations. They saw clearly that Rittenhouse was running away from his assailants. He was variously rushed by one assailant, kicked by another, and struck with a skateboard by still another. Again, a final pursuer pointed a gun at him at close range.
No matter. The Kenosha district attorney’s office charged Rittenhouse with several felonies including two first-degree homicide charges. All four whom Rittenhouse fired at—whether he missed, wounded, or fatally shot—had lengthy arrest records. Three were convicted felons; the fourth had a long arrest record.
Given the lengthy and quite horrific rap sheet of Rittenhouse’s first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum (including multiple counts of pedophiliac rape), it is difficult to understand why the latter was not in jail (he had been released earlier that day from a mental facility to which he had been committed after a failed suicide attempt). The common denominator to the various prior convictions of his other three assailants was that they should have led to consequences far worse, given that many of their arrest charges were dropped, or bail was sometimes waived, or plea bargaining turned serious charges into merely bothersome ones. The release of violent offenders on little or no bail seems now thematic in Wisconsin.
Shortly after the August 2020 shootings, the media, Joe Biden, and most of the left-wing commentariat had claimed Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” even though there was no evidence of such a libel, then or now. Remember, the Kenosha shootings took place just nine weeks before the November presidential elections, at a time when the Left was framing the incumbent Trump as a “white supremacist” and Joe Biden a “healer.”
The Racist Construct
The shootings were immediately declared to be “racial.” Yet both the shooter Rittenhouse and all of his attackers who were wounded or killed were white (a fourth assailant, an African-American who kicked Rittenhouse while he was on the ground escaped without injury).
What followed in the media was the most egregious example of concocted fictions since the Russian collusion hoax. Rittenhouse was falsely accused of crossing “state lines” (plural), while unlawfully armed with an “illegal automatic weapon.”
In truth, he did not buy the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle, much less bring it into nearby Waukesha, Wisconsin from nearby Aurora, Illinois. It was legal for Rittenhouse to possess and use the firearm. The gun itself was not unlawful. He did not purchase it but had been given it by a friend. And Kenosha was his alternate home in that it was where his father and other relatives lived. Rittenhouse, then, was constructed as the proverbial white supremacist of the sort warned about by the likes of Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley.
At various times during the trial, the prosecuting attorneys called Rittenhouse a coward. They claimed he should have faced the pursuing mob of at least a dozen and willingly taking a beating from them face-to-face, in at least one case at gunpoint. The jury inter alia was told that the ongoing arson and other violent acts were not serious crimes, and that the three who attacked Rittenhouse were near-heroic victims.
Protestors outside the courthouse tried to intimidate the defense and jurors. A journalist sought to follow the jury bus, ostensibly to divulge their identities or to intimidate them (MSNBC was subsequently banned from the courtroom).
The piece de resistance was the lead DA’s pointing an empty semi-automatic weapon at the jury, with his finger on the trigger—all in the aftermath of Alec Baldwin’s accidental shooting with an “empty” loaded gun of two bystanders on a film set.
The DA apparently wished to scare the jury into a guilty verdict through the sensation of having a rifle pointed at them. Given the jury appears post facto to have been made up of reasonable people, that puerile gambit probably backfired. All that the imbecilic DA confirmed by his actions was the same recklessness as those in state and city government who had permitted parts of Kenosha to burn in the first place.
There were lots of suicidal prosecutorial stunts such as these in what turned out to be a circus of sorts. The DAs also sought to deprecate the constitutionally protected Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They bizarrely saw their key witness admitting under cross examination that he had first pointed a handgun at Kyle Rittenhouse who then understandably fired at him. And they deliberately released an inferior version of the video record of the shooting to the defense while keeping the superior one to their perceived advantage.
So, the state’s madness raised strange questions. Were the incompetent DAs simply a window into a dysfunctional Kenosha County district attorney’s office where bumbling was an institutionalized force-multiplier to bias? Were the state prosecutors deliberately inept in order to prompt a mistrial and thus a retrial/second chance of their botched case? Or were they lazily going through the motions to satisfy the mob, but did not really believe Rittenhouse was guilty? Or were they just mediocre camera-hungry wannabe celebrities, who wished to win cheap media attention for as long as the bewildered judge would put up with their bizarre antics?
The Message of Acquittal
A jury unanimously cleared Rittenhouse of all charges. It apparently concluded correctly that if law enforcement and the state either could not or would not protect lives and property in Kenosha, and if because of that dereliction of duty some citizens stepped up to take up the role that the police had utterly abandoned, then as citizens they had a right to defend themselves if attacked by those committing violence.
For some time, media demand has exceeded the available supply of clear-cut cases of white oppressors and black victims, at least if the Jussie Smollett hoax, the “hands up don’t shoot” lie, and the photoshopped pictures and edited tapes of George Zimmerman are any indication.
Yet the real reason the Left strained to gin up the theme of white-on-white violence as an example of racism was their larger agenda of sending a message to middle America: no American, in times of riot, arson, and looting, should have the right to use firearms to protect property. And under no circumstances could a citizen use a gun to ward off those intending to maim or kill him. Had Rittenhouse been found guilty, there no longer would be recourse for citizens living in cities where criminals were freely given the streets.
In other words, had such a clear-cut case of self-defense morphed into a successful murder conviction, then the most powerful figure in the nation would become the local district attorney. De facto, a DA could empower a mob to loot, burn, steal, and injure by refusing to indict those arrested—even if an increasingly politicized mayor and police chief chose to allow their officers to keep the public safe. We would then assume that in this state of nature anyone protecting property during a riot would be fair game for the mob, given the target would know he could become a convicted felon by defending himself from attack.
So, the Left understood well the messaging of attacking the open city and undefended town of Kenosha and the conviction of a “murderer” Rittenhouse: accept our political agendas and premises or otherwise your culpable community will be torn apart with impunity, and any who chose to combat the violence with violence will be charged with capital crimes.
Those Criminal SUVs Not long after one Rittenhouse was acquitted, one Darrell Brooks, Jr., an African-American with a 20-year record of serious felonies, allegedly drove his car deliberately into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, killing 6 innocents and injuring over 60.
Unlike the dishonest media reaction lying about Rittenhouse, who had no criminal record, there was initial careful restraint not to identify the career criminal Brooks as the murderous driver who weaponized his vehicle against parade-goers. Despite first-hand accounts from bystanders that the lethal driver was an African-American with dreadlocks, the media, feigning unaccustomed professionalism in this instance, withheld rush-to-judgment identification and culpability. Joe Biden—for a moment—was commendably quiet in editorializing about the racial motivations or ideology of a suspect.
For a while the media ran with its own concocted rumor that Brooks merely was fleeing from an “altercation” and apparently had mistakenly turned the wrong way into a crowd—despite videos showing the driver deliberately ramming through street barriers repeatedly to seek out targets. Intent likely explains why he killed and injured so many innocents.
Finally, the news settled into the present narrative of a “car crash,”—as if a driverless vehicle on autopilot had simply bumped into various people in the street—before burying the murders altogether on their back pages and dropping the crime from the evening news. Or as the Washington Post put it, “Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV.”
That media-generated ruse continued even when details of Brooks’ lengthy felony record were finally released. At the time he was mowing down strangers, he had five open arrest charges, including two felonies. Brooks had been released on $1,000 bail just two days earlier, in another eerie “coincidence” after being arrested for attempting to run over a woman and her child—the same modus operandi reified at the Waukesha Christmas slaughter.
An alien from Mars who examined Brooks’s life of crime, his recent violence, and the ease with which he was serially let loose upon the public might have concluded some sort of “privilege” as the cause of exemption.
Brooks posed on social media as an incompetent but narcissistic rapper. He left a video trail not just of his mediocre recordings, but of clear evidence of virulent anti-Semitism and anti-white racism, “So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD.”
As pundits strained to deny any connection between the climate of BLM anger over the Rittenhouse verdict and Brooks’ murders, Brooks’ own testimonies point to a connection, at least in the sense of hating people on the basis of their race. Indeed, regional Milwaukee BLM activist Vaun Mayes quickly alleged that the Rittenhouse acquittal had earned the homicidal payback.
A low-level Democratic functionary tweeted that the dead children of Waukesha were proper karma for Rittenhouse walking free: “I’m sad anytime anyone dies. I just believe in Karma and this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin.” Or as Mayes further elaborated: Brooks was an insurrectionist whose violence had jumpstarted a supposed “revolution,” his apparent euphemism for mass murder. “But it sounds possible that the revolution has started in Wisconsin. It started with this Christmas parade.”
Brooks is, for a while, in jail. Yet for some crazy reason he can be freed on a $5 million bond. He awaits charges of mass homicide—although one never quite knows. The Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisolm is a controversial “reformer” DA, whose campaigns have been funded in part by the George Soros conglomerate.
Creepier still, in the past a prescient Chisolm had boasted about his own future to the Milwaukee Sentinel, namely that his prosecutorial and bail policies would eventually release career criminals onto the street who would “inevitably” kill some innocents. Yet he riffed that such carnage was acceptable collateral damage from his decriminalization agendas: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
One wonders whether Chisolm will take that argument to the families of the Waukesha deceased—that the loss of their loved ones was a reasonable sacrifice to ensure that misunderstood 20-year criminals like Darrell Brooks, Jr. were not kept behind bars.
So, what are we left with from these horrors of two cities?
In Kenosha the media and the Left ginned up race when there was no such component in the trial. But in Waukesha they perpetuated racial arson and smothered the truth. That is, they kept largely silent when there clearly was racial hatred—given Brooks’ own record of anti-white and anti-Semitic venom. Again, the media can turn from creation to suppression on a dime, given the common theme of ginning up racial strife and hatred.
An amoral media and Left, so far, have kept an inconvenient Waukesha “car crash” out of the mainstream news—reversing their wild sensational obsessions with Kenosha. After all, in their unhinged racialized worldview, the demonization of a 17-year-old white male, who shot three other white males, still could be squeezed for racial juice, given the larger contextual landscape of a riot over a police wounding of an African-American male.
The shooting of Jacob Blake that set off the Kenosha riots was later determined to be justified, given the armed suspect was heading toward his car, after fighting with police, who were called to the residence to protect a woman who had a restraining order against the career violent felon.
In sum, Rittenhouse had no criminal record; all four of his assailants had lengthy arrest records. Three of them were ex-felons. He had no record of the racial hatred of which he was accused.
In contrast, Brooks was an abject violent racist whom the media sought to shield. And he was a career felon, who both long ago and quite recently should have been kept behind bars so that he would not murder innocents.
How a Wisconsin ex-felon received a $1,000 bail bond and freedom to mow down innocents, after trying to run down two with his car, while another juvenile without an arrest record, with good grounds to claim self-defense, was required to post a $2 million bond (and so stayed incarcerated pending charges without running water in his cell) is a commentary on the abject implosion of the American justice system.
Rittenhouse should have never been charged; Brooks should not have been out of jail. The effort to make the former a beneficiary of white supremacy and the latter a victim of it required a level of amoral media deceit that finally was unsustainable even in this bankrupt age. +++++++++++++++++++++Three cheers for ‘Let’s Go Brandon’BY Marc A. Thiessen
Columnist WASHINGTON – As someone who served six years in the White House, I respect the office of the presidency – even when I don’t particularly like or respect the current occupant. So when chants of 'F––– Joe Biden!' began to spontaneously erupt at college football games, National Football League games and even the Ryder Cup, I was not a fan. But 'Let’s go Brandon!'? Now, that’s a whole different story.
The 'Let’s go Brandon!' chant emerged at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway, while NBC reporter Kelli Stavast was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown. As the raucous crowd behind him broke into a loud 'F––– Joe Biden' chant, Stavast told Brown 'You can hear the chants from the crowd – let’s go Brandon!' Anyone watching knew that was not what the crowd was saying. Suddenly a meme was born. Instead of 'F––– Joe Biden' crowds at sporting events began chanting 'Let’s go Brandon!' instead. The phrase has been emblazoned on T-shirts, highway billboards and banners flown behind planes over football stadiums.
Count me among those in favor of the new chant.
First, it replaces a vulgar epithet with a sarcastic commentary on Biden’s presidency. The focus shifts from insulting Biden the person, to well justified mockery of Biden’s actions in office. Worst inflation in 30 years? Let’s go Brandon! Gas prices up $1.31 a gallon since his election? Let’s go Brandon! Home heating prices skyrocketing? Let’s go Brandon! Self-inflicted crisis at the southern border? Let’s go Brandon! Left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan? Let’s go Brandon! Can’t find a Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas gifts your kids want because store shelves are bare?
Let’s go Brandon! Approval rating dropped to 36%? Let’s go Brandon!
Second, the new chant literally arose from 'fake news' – a reporter misreporting what an anti-Biden crowd was saying. The moment encapsulated everything many conservatives find wrong with the president’s media enablers, who they believe lie about them to cover for him. 'Let’s go Brandon!' mocks not just Biden, but pro-Biden media bias.
Third, it’s funny. In Virginia, someone broke into the control cabinets for two electronic road signs and changed the messaging to read 'Let’s go Brandon!' When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a signing ceremony for a legislation barring vaccine mandates in his state, he held it in Brandon, Fla. In Brandon, Minn., someone put the words 'Let’s go' in front of six signs welcoming visitors to the city.
For those outraged by it, ask yourself: Is 'Let’s go Brandon!' really worse than the chants of 'Not my president!' that greeted Donald Trump on his election? And let’s not forget that Trump opponents did not hesitate to use vulgarity to express their disgust with him. At the 2018 Tony Awards, Robert De Niro got a standing ovation when he yelled 'F––– Trump!' from the Broadway stage. And after Trump lost to Biden in 2020, 'FDT' ('F––– Donald Trump') by rappers YG and Nipsey Hussle became the No. 1 song on iTunes. A raucous crowd of Biden supporters playing the song and holding 'F––– Trump' signs even made it onto a CNN broadcast. The network did not bother to come up with a euphemism.
'Let’s go Brandon!' is far from the worst thing that has been said about an American president. During the George W. Bush administration, I listened to protesters beat drums in Lafayette Square day and night while chanting 'Bush lied and people died!' During Watergate, Richard M. Nixon faced chants of 'Jail the Chief!' from his opponents. When President Grover Cleveland was rumored to have fathered a child out of wedlock, his opponents chanted:
'Ma, ma, where’s my pa?' (To which Cleveland’s supporters responded: 'Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!') Ulysses S. Grant was called 'a drunken trowser-maker.' Franklin Pierce was called the 'pimp of the White House.' Abraham Lincoln was mocked by his opponents as 'the nightman' (someone who empties commodes at night). John Adams was declared 'a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, not the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.'
By those standards, 'Let’s go Brandon!' seems tame. The only ones hurt by the chant are kids named Brandon whose parents can no longer cheer for them at sporting events. Otherwise, it is a harmless and humorous way for Americans to express their frustration at a flailing – and failing – presidency.++++++++++++++++++++GO CANDACE. HOW COME FLORIDA HAS NO MASK POLICY, NO MANDATES ETC AND ALSO HAS THE LOWEST COVID INCIDENCE IN THE NATION?
Candace Owens HUMILIATES Dr. Fauci With An EXPLOSIVE Speech, Gets A Standing OvationThis speech is fantastic and delivered extemporaneously. Unbelievable.
++++++++++++++THERE COMES A TIME WHEN YOU STAND YOUR GROUND AND FIGHT BACK. ISRAELI'S LEARNED THAT LESSON OR THEY WOULD NO LONGR HAVE A NATION.
SOLD OUT BY “LIBERAL” JEWS AND THEIR ESTABLISHMENTBy Rabbi Aryeh Spero, AMERICAN THINKER (First published in Sept 2019)
The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago. We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.
You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.
My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”
Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.
Preoccupation with black civil rights is for most Jewish groups “their spiritual life and the continuum of their days.” We can also add sexual lifestyle rights, abortion-on-demand, open borders, and promotion of Muslim immigration. Jewish groups are in the forefront of demanding even higher levels of Islamic immigration, knowing full well that it’s precisely the recent influx of Muslims into Europe that accounts for the last fifteen years of beatings and murder of Jews in France, Belgium, and Germany. These Jewish organizations call their support of Islamic immigration a “Jewish value,” ignoring that a cardinal Jewish value is protecting Jewish life and safeguarding Jews.
Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.
A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing. II
This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.
Some Jewish organizations have jelly-like offered programs speaking of the downside of general “hate and intolerance,” unwilling to call it by its real name: anti-Semitism. These Jewish leaders would invoke the specific term Islamaphobia if the victims were Muslim, likewise with anti-Black or anti-Hispanic activity.
Nor does it help that many of the college deans and professors are themselves Jewish and have chosen to protect their jobs rather than stand up for Jewish students; something Black or Muslim professors/administrators would never do to their people. (Ron Lauder is refreshingly singular in announcing that he is no longer donating to Columbia University, which this week is sponsoring Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, a proud and vocal anti-Semite.)
This obsession to universalize everything Jewish sends a message that the Jewish people and their needs are insignificant and must take a back seat. Even the Holocaust has been universalized by many Jewish organizations and rabbis so that now detention centers at our southern borders are labelled “concentration camps,” and ICE and Homeland security as Nazis, and Trump, the lover of Zion and Brooklyn’s Jews, as Hitler. By universalizing Judaism they belittle its need for existence as something in and of itself.
Worse, many have fashioned an avant-garde Judaism that consists of belittling Jewishness and being over-the-top critical of Israel while adoring its enemies — Peter Beinart/Thomas Friedman Judaism. They sit around in their Upper West Side salons and bash Jewish Jews and Israel. No Irishmen or Frenchmen in America want to dismantle Ireland or France. In contrast, an awfully high percentage of American Jews invest enormous time, energy, and money into trying to bring down and defame the country of their origin, Israel. This form of self-hate is pathological and unique among mankind. Something craven, suicidal, and unnatural is happening within much of American Jewry.
III
It is true that establishment Jewish organizations and liberal rabbis vociferously condemned the attacks on synagogues during this past year. But those attackers were characterized as “right-wingers.” Jewish organizations are always eager to attack anything considered right-wing. But their silence in the face of dangerous, loud, and undeniable anti-Semitism coming from a wide variety of liberal/progressive sources, including the social justice warriors, leads to one inevitable conclusion. Major Jewish organizations will not imperil the Left or the “social justice” causes; they have chosen liberalism and the Democratic party over particular Jewish needs. Jewish politicians such as Chuck Schumer, Eliot Engel, Nita Lowey, Steve Cohen, Jan Schakowsky, and Adam Schiff, for example, have been silent about the Omar/Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.
Furthermore, many Jewish groups will insidiously parlay anti-Semitism in the hopes of tarnishing Trump and his supporters and to further their decades-old efforts to characterize conservatives as anti-Semites and racists. A previous editor of the Forward once said: “Our greatest enemy is ‘majority-ism,’” in other words, the American white, Christian majority. Most Jews still feel that “minorities” are their allies and that white, Christian Americans are the ones to fear. Ari Gordon of the AJC said so recently when he announced: “Jews and Muslims are natural allies in fighting off the bigotry out there and protecting our shared democratic freedoms.” As a pulpit rabbi, especially during my Manhattan years, I was upset to hear the nonchalant bigotry of many brethren against southerners, whites, and Christians, especially patriotic whites who displayed their love of America. In the end, liberal Jews generally feel more comfortable around minorities and want to belong to the political and social Left, no matter what.
This past Sunday we held a rally in front of the NYC City Hall on lower Broadway regarding attacks against Jews in Brooklyn. I ended my speech by saying it’s obvious we can’t depend on the leaders of major Jewish organizations. They are not really leaders, rather big-shot bureaucrats. It seems we are witnessing once again the Rabbi Stephen Wise phenomenon of the 30s and 40s: leadership replaced by self-glorifying photo ops, fancy dinners, bland statements, meetings, and dialogue. We, the grassroots, will have to defend the Jewish people, defend ourselves in our neighborhoods. Self-defense is a biblical mandate, a mitzvah.
At the rally, we chanted: “Jews Fight Back.” It’s time Jews carried an aura of self-respect, an aura of self-value, so that would-be perpetrators know their attacks come with a downside for them.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is president of Conference of Jewish Affairs, author of Push Back, and of Why Israel Matters to You.++++++++++++++++ CAN'T ALLOW THIS. BIDEN, HOW WILL YOU UNDO?
DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS: How the deal with the Gulf states is helping Israel improve relations with its ‘first generation’ of Arab partners. ENERGY MINISTER Karin Elharrar signs a climate cooperation deal with Jordan in Dubai this week. (photo credit: Courtesy)
John Kerry, the former US secretary of state currently serving as President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy, finally got to help hammer out and watch the signing of a Middle East agreement on Monday.
It wasn’t, however, an Israeli-Palestinian accord, one that former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon said Kerry was “obsessive and messianic” about brokering.
Rather, it was the signing in Dubai of a tripartite energy-water accord between Israel, the United Arabs and Jordan.
Under this accord, a government-owned UAE firm will build a massive solar energy facility in southern Jordan, which will then sell the energy to Israel. Israel, in turn, will either build a new desalination plant or provide Jordan – via its current desalination facilities – with some 200 million cubic meters of water per year, quadrupling the amount of desalinated water it currently sells the Hashemite Kingdom.
Kerry, standing alongside UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, looked on as Energy and Water Resources Minister Karin Elharrar, UAE Climate Change Minister Mariam Almheiri, and Jordan Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammed Al-Najjar signed the agreement.
The irony was striking since it was Kerry – in a terrible prediction that will always accompany a discussion of his Mideast diplomatic legacy – who famously said, at a conference in 2016, that Israel would never reach a separate peace with any Arab nation without first signing an agreement with the Palestinians.
(L-R) Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, Energy Minister Karin Elharrar and John Kerry. (credit: Courtesy)(L-R) Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, Energy Minister Karin Elharrar and John Kerry. (credit: Courtesy)
Not only would this not happen, he stressed, but he was completely sure it would not happen.
“I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians. No, no, no and no,” Kerry said at the Saban Conference in 2016.
“There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace,” he continued with complete certainty. “Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”
Those comments came less than a month before the Obama administration, in which Kerry served, enabled during its final month in office a sharply worded anti-settlement UN Security Council resolution, and just before Kerry delivered a rambling swan-song speech at the State Department on the Mideast where he pinned the onus of the blame for the diplomatic stalemate with the Palestinians on Israel.
Yet, there he was on Monday, standing next to the UAE crown prince, watching the fruits ripen from just precisely the type of separate peace agreement that he was so certain would never materialize, and did nothing to advance.
The importance of what was signed on Monday goes beyond the supply of renewable energy to Israel and desalinated water to Jordan. This deal moves the benefits to be accrued from the Abraham Accords to other countries in the region, and not just to each of the Arab countries with which Israel reached an agreement: the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
As Ghaith al-Omari and Simon Henderson wrote in an article for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, this deal “demonstrates additional ways to build on the Abraham Accords.
“So far, most of the diplomatic activity surrounding the accords has focused on adding new countries or deepening bilateral relations between Israel and its new partners,” they wrote. “These efforts should be continued, but the solar/water deal shows how the accords can simultaneously deepen Israel’s relations with the first generation of Arab peacemakers.”
And deepening Israel’s relations with “the first generation of Arab peacemakers,” namely Jordan and Egypt, is critically important, given that Israel’s relations with both those countries have been defined as a cold peace, especially – of late – with Jordan.
This deal could significantly warm up ties with Jordan, which the Bennett government has tried to put on a healthier footing than was the case under prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett did this immediately after taking office by secretly traveling to Amman to meet King Abdullah II, and by announcing that Israel would increase the amount of desalinated water sold in the kingdom.
The deal also takes the relationship between the two countries beyond the security field, where – with the exception of Israel’s sale of natural gas to Jordan – it has rested almost exclusively until now, and widens it to the civilian realm.
Not everyone was cheering, however. Reflective of this was an article in the anti-Israel UK-based Middle East Monitor, which quoted “Palestinian expert” Saleh al-Naami as saying the deal “proves that the Jordanian regime is increasingly serving Israeli interests.”
Naami said the plan will benefit the “settlements” and allow Israel to dump its industrial waste on Jordan.
“Jordan has the desert in the south, and this will be used for a massive solar plant to generate electricity to be exported to the Israeli settlements in the Negev and the West Bank,” he said. “Part of the Israeli industrial infrastructure, which has polluting emissions that harm the densely populated areas in Israel, will be relocated to the Jordanian desert under the pretext of hiring Jordanian workers.”
Notwithstanding these sentiments – which will surely be echoed by those in Jordan fiercely opposed to any cooperation with Israel – the deal could serve as an example for further cooperation with Jordan, as well as with Egypt, and demonstrates just how the Abraham Accords are transforming the region.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE came two days later, when Defense Minister Benny Gantz flew to Morocco for a two-day visit, the first visit by an Israeli defense minister to one of the countries with which Israel has begun to cooperate as a result of the Abraham Accords.
The Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Gantz and his Moroccan colleague Abdellatif Loudiyi signed a groundbreaking defense memorandum of understanding.
Let that sink in for a moment. Israel’s defense minister went to an Arab state that for years refused to acknowledge any ties with Israel, and signed a defense memorandum that “formalizes defense relations” between the two countries and “establishes a foundation that will support any future cooperation.”
This memorandum will enable the defense establishments of both countries to enjoy “increased cooperation in the fields of intelligence, industrial collaboration, military and training,” the statement read.
Three years ago, such a development would have seemed a pipe dream. This week the Moroccan press ran stories of how the agreement will enable the manufacture in Morocco of killer drones equipped with Israeli technology, and last week how the North African country bought Israel’s SKYLOCK dome system – an anti-drone weapon that detects and destroys enemy drones.
According to The North African Post, “The Israeli military equipment and technologies give Morocco a strategic advantage and superiority in the region, making Algerian generals, de facto rulers, extremely nervous.”
Indeed, Algeria – Morocco’s neighbor and arch-foe – was infuriated by the Moroccan-Israel rapprochement and the fact that the US recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara as a result of Rabat joining the Abraham Accords. Algeria has long backed the Polisario Front in Western Sahara against Morocco.
Shortly following the visit of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to Morocco in August, Algeria severed ties with Morocco, using remarks Lapid made in Rabat voicing concerns about Algeria’s role in the region and its relationship with Iran as one of many pretenses for the move.
If Algeria was infuriated by the visit of Israel’s foreign minister, one can only imagine how it must be steaming now that the Jewish state’s defense minister was hosted in Rabat on a formal visit and talked about security cooperation and arms deals.
One Algerian reaction to the Israeli-Moroccan rapprochement has been closer ties with Iran, a friendship that will only drive Morocco and Israel further into each other’s embrace – further proof of how the Abraham Accords have thoroughly realigned the region. +++I KNOW, INTIMIDATE A WEAKER ISRAEL PRIME MIISTER:
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/
POSTED BY RUTHIE BLUM
Israel too afraid of US and coalition friction to strike Iran - opinion
FINALLY:
A Tale of Two Cities: Kenosha vs. Waukesha
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The media’s blatant lies amount to racial arson.
Both Wisconsin towns, Kenosha, and Waukesha, about 50 miles apart by car, were the recent sites of multiple deaths. The violence in both made national news. Yet in contradictory ways both reflected the common themes of America’s current legal, media, and societal corruption.
The relevant public prosecutors in both were in the news for alleged ideological bias. Specifically, they habitually calibrated the charging, indicting, and trying (or not) of defendants through ideological lenses and community pressure rather than on the basis of the facts and the law.
Kyle Rittenhouse was a 17-year-old armed youth who volunteered to protect business properties at the height of the August 2020 arson, riots, and looting in Kenosha. He was pursued and attacked by three members from a larger group who chased the armed youth, presumably either to disarm, injure, or kill him—or perhaps all three.
Rittenhouse variously was assaulted, kicked, and had a firearm pointed at him. In reaction, he fatally shot two of his pursuing attackers and wounded a third. Kenosha prosecutors reviewed videos of the altercations. They saw clearly that Rittenhouse was running away from his assailants. He was variously rushed by one assailant, kicked by another, and struck with a skateboard by still another. Again, a final pursuer pointed a gun at him at close range.
No matter. The Kenosha district attorney’s office charged Rittenhouse with several felonies including two first-degree homicide charges. All four whom Rittenhouse fired at—whether he missed, wounded, or fatally shot—had lengthy arrest records. Three were convicted felons; the fourth had a long arrest record.
Given the lengthy and quite horrific rap sheet of Rittenhouse’s first attacker Joseph Rosenbaum (including multiple counts of pedophiliac rape), it is difficult to understand why the latter was not in jail (he had been released earlier that day from a mental facility to which he had been committed after a failed suicide attempt). The common denominator to the various prior convictions of his other three assailants was that they should have led to consequences far worse, given that many of their arrest charges were dropped, or bail was sometimes waived, or plea bargaining turned serious charges into merely bothersome ones. The release of violent offenders on little or no bail seems now thematic in Wisconsin.
Shortly after the August 2020 shootings, the media, Joe Biden, and most of the left-wing commentariat had claimed Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” even though there was no evidence of such a libel, then or now. Remember, the Kenosha shootings took place just nine weeks before the November presidential elections, at a time when the Left was framing the incumbent Trump as a “white supremacist” and Joe Biden a “healer.”
The Racist Construct
The shootings were immediately declared to be “racial.” Yet both the shooter Rittenhouse and all of his attackers who were wounded or killed were white (a fourth assailant, an African-American who kicked Rittenhouse while he was on the ground escaped without injury).
What followed in the media was the most egregious example of concocted fictions since the Russian collusion hoax. Rittenhouse was falsely accused of crossing “state lines” (plural), while unlawfully armed with an “illegal automatic weapon.”
In truth, he did not buy the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle, much less bring it into nearby Waukesha, Wisconsin from nearby Aurora, Illinois. It was legal for Rittenhouse to possess and use the firearm. The gun itself was not unlawful. He did not purchase it but had been given it by a friend. And Kenosha was his alternate home in that it was where his father and other relatives lived. Rittenhouse, then, was constructed as the proverbial white supremacist of the sort warned about by the likes of Joe Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley.
At various times during the trial, the prosecuting attorneys called Rittenhouse a coward. They claimed he should have faced the pursuing mob of at least a dozen and willingly taking a beating from them face-to-face, in at least one case at gunpoint. The jury inter alia was told that the ongoing arson and other violent acts were not serious crimes, and that the three who attacked Rittenhouse were near-heroic victims.
Protestors outside the courthouse tried to intimidate the defense and jurors. A journalist sought to follow the jury bus, ostensibly to divulge their identities or to intimidate them (MSNBC was subsequently banned from the courtroom).
The piece de resistance was the lead DA’s pointing an empty semi-automatic weapon at the jury, with his finger on the trigger—all in the aftermath of Alec Baldwin’s accidental shooting with an “empty” loaded gun of two bystanders on a film set.
The DA apparently wished to scare the jury into a guilty verdict through the sensation of having a rifle pointed at them. Given the jury appears post facto to have been made up of reasonable people, that puerile gambit probably backfired. All that the imbecilic DA confirmed by his actions was the same recklessness as those in state and city government who had permitted parts of Kenosha to burn in the first place.
There were lots of suicidal prosecutorial stunts such as these in what turned out to be a circus of sorts. The DAs also sought to deprecate the constitutionally protected Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. They bizarrely saw their key witness admitting under cross examination that he had first pointed a handgun at Kyle Rittenhouse who then understandably fired at him. And they deliberately released an inferior version of the video record of the shooting to the defense while keeping the superior one to their perceived advantage.
So, the state’s madness raised strange questions. Were the incompetent DAs simply a window into a dysfunctional Kenosha County district attorney’s office where bumbling was an institutionalized force-multiplier to bias? Were the state prosecutors deliberately inept in order to prompt a mistrial and thus a retrial/second chance of their botched case? Or were they lazily going through the motions to satisfy the mob, but did not really believe Rittenhouse was guilty? Or were they just mediocre camera-hungry wannabe celebrities, who wished to win cheap media attention for as long as the bewildered judge would put up with their bizarre antics?
The Message of Acquittal
A jury unanimously cleared Rittenhouse of all charges. It apparently concluded correctly that if law enforcement and the state either could not or would not protect lives and property in Kenosha, and if because of that dereliction of duty some citizens stepped up to take up the role that the police had utterly abandoned, then as citizens they had a right to defend themselves if attacked by those committing violence.
For some time, media demand has exceeded the available supply of clear-cut cases of white oppressors and black victims, at least if the Jussie Smollett hoax, the “hands up don’t shoot” lie, and the photoshopped pictures and edited tapes of George Zimmerman are any indication.
Yet the real reason the Left strained to gin up the theme of white-on-white violence as an example of racism was their larger agenda of sending a message to middle America: no American, in times of riot, arson, and looting, should have the right to use firearms to protect property. And under no circumstances could a citizen use a gun to ward off those intending to maim or kill him. Had Rittenhouse been found guilty, there no longer would be recourse for citizens living in cities where criminals were freely given the streets.
In other words, had such a clear-cut case of self-defense morphed into a successful murder conviction, then the most powerful figure in the nation would become the local district attorney. De facto, a DA could empower a mob to loot, burn, steal, and injure by refusing to indict those arrested—even if an increasingly politicized mayor and police chief chose to allow their officers to keep the public safe. We would then assume that in this state of nature anyone protecting property during a riot would be fair game for the mob, given the target would know he could become a convicted felon by defending himself from attack.
So, the Left understood well the messaging of attacking the open city and undefended town of Kenosha and the conviction of a “murderer” Rittenhouse: accept our political agendas and premises or otherwise your culpable community will be torn apart with impunity, and any who chose to combat the violence with violence will be charged with capital crimes.
Those Criminal SUVs
Not long after one Rittenhouse was acquitted, one Darrell Brooks, Jr., an African-American with a 20-year record of serious felonies, allegedly drove his car deliberately into a Christmas parade in Waukesha, killing 6 innocents and injuring over 60.
Unlike the dishonest media reaction lying about Rittenhouse, who had no criminal record, there was initial careful restraint not to identify the career criminal Brooks as the murderous driver who weaponized his vehicle against parade-goers. Despite first-hand accounts from bystanders that the lethal driver was an African-American with dreadlocks, the media, feigning unaccustomed professionalism in this instance, withheld rush-to-judgment identification and culpability. Joe Biden—for a moment—was commendably quiet in editorializing about the racial motivations or ideology of a suspect.
For a while the media ran with its own concocted rumor that Brooks merely was fleeing from an “altercation” and apparently had mistakenly turned the wrong way into a crowd—despite videos showing the driver deliberately ramming through street barriers repeatedly to seek out targets. Intent likely explains why he killed and injured so many innocents.
Finally, the news settled into the present narrative of a “car crash,”—as if a driverless vehicle on autopilot had simply bumped into various people in the street—before burying the murders altogether on their back pages and dropping the crime from the evening news. Or as the Washington Post put it, “Here’s what we know so far on the sequence of events that led to the Waukesha tragedy caused by a SUV.”
That media-generated ruse continued even when details of Brooks’ lengthy felony record were finally released. At the time he was mowing down strangers, he had five open arrest charges, including two felonies. Brooks had been released on $1,000 bail just two days earlier, in another eerie “coincidence” after being arrested for attempting to run over a woman and her child—the same modus operandi reified at the Waukesha Christmas slaughter.
An alien from Mars who examined Brooks’s life of crime, his recent violence, and the ease with which he was serially let loose upon the public might have concluded some sort of “privilege” as the cause of exemption.
Brooks posed on social media as an incompetent but narcissistic rapper. He left a video trail not just of his mediocre recordings, but of clear evidence of virulent anti-Semitism and anti-white racism, “So when we start bakk knokkin white people TF out ion wanna hear it…the old white ppl 2, KNOKK DEM TF OUT!! PERIOD.”
As pundits strained to deny any connection between the climate of BLM anger over the Rittenhouse verdict and Brooks’ murders, Brooks’ own testimonies point to a connection, at least in the sense of hating people on the basis of their race. Indeed, regional Milwaukee BLM activist Vaun Mayes quickly alleged that the Rittenhouse acquittal had earned the homicidal payback.
A low-level Democratic functionary tweeted that the dead children of Waukesha were proper karma for Rittenhouse walking free: “I’m sad anytime anyone dies. I just believe in Karma and this came around quick on the citizens of Wisconsin.” Or as Mayes further elaborated: Brooks was an insurrectionist whose violence had jumpstarted a supposed “revolution,” his apparent euphemism for mass murder. “But it sounds possible that the revolution has started in Wisconsin. It started with this Christmas parade.”
Brooks is, for a while, in jail. Yet for some crazy reason he can be freed on a $5 million bond. He awaits charges of mass homicide—although one never quite knows. The Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisolm is a controversial “reformer” DA, whose campaigns have been funded in part by the George Soros conglomerate.
Creepier still, in the past a prescient Chisolm had boasted about his own future to the Milwaukee Sentinel, namely that his prosecutorial and bail policies would eventually release career criminals onto the street who would “inevitably” kill some innocents. Yet he riffed that such carnage was acceptable collateral damage from his decriminalization agendas: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.”
One wonders whether Chisolm will take that argument to the families of the Waukesha deceased—that the loss of their loved ones was a reasonable sacrifice to ensure that misunderstood 20-year criminals like Darrell Brooks, Jr. were not kept behind bars.
So, what are we left with from these horrors of two cities?
In Kenosha the media and the Left ginned up race when there was no such component in the trial. But in Waukesha they perpetuated racial arson and smothered the truth. That is, they kept largely silent when there clearly was racial hatred—given Brooks’ own record of anti-white and anti-Semitic venom. Again, the media can turn from creation to suppression on a dime, given the common theme of ginning up racial strife and hatred.
An amoral media and Left, so far, have kept an inconvenient Waukesha “car crash” out of the mainstream news—reversing their wild sensational obsessions with Kenosha. After all, in their unhinged racialized worldview, the demonization of a 17-year-old white male, who shot three other white males, still could be squeezed for racial juice, given the larger contextual landscape of a riot over a police wounding of an African-American male.
The shooting of Jacob Blake that set off the Kenosha riots was later determined to be justified, given the armed suspect was heading toward his car, after fighting with police, who were called to the residence to protect a woman who had a restraining order against the career violent felon.
In sum, Rittenhouse had no criminal record; all four of his assailants had lengthy arrest records. Three of them were ex-felons. He had no record of the racial hatred of which he was accused.
In contrast, Brooks was an abject violent racist whom the media sought to shield. And he was a career felon, who both long ago and quite recently should have been kept behind bars so that he would not murder innocents.
How a Wisconsin ex-felon received a $1,000 bail bond and freedom to mow down innocents, after trying to run down two with his car, while another juvenile without an arrest record, with good grounds to claim self-defense, was required to post a $2 million bond (and so stayed incarcerated pending charges without running water in his cell) is a commentary on the abject implosion of the American justice system.
Rittenhouse should have never been charged; Brooks should not have been out of jail. The effort to make the former a beneficiary of white supremacy and the latter a victim of it required a level of amoral media deceit that finally was unsustainable even in this bankrupt age.
+++++++++++++++++++++
Three cheers for ‘Let’s Go Brandon’
BY Marc A. Thiessen
Columnist WASHINGTON – As someone who served six years in the White House, I respect the office of the presidency – even when I don’t particularly like or respect the current occupant. So when chants of 'F––– Joe Biden!' began to spontaneously erupt at college football games, National Football League games and even the Ryder Cup, I was not a fan. But 'Let’s go Brandon!'? Now, that’s a whole different story.
The 'Let’s go Brandon!' chant emerged at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway, while NBC reporter Kelli Stavast was interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown. As the raucous crowd behind him broke into a loud 'F––– Joe Biden' chant, Stavast told Brown 'You can hear the chants from the crowd – let’s go Brandon!' Anyone watching knew that was not what the crowd was saying. Suddenly a meme was born. Instead of 'F––– Joe Biden' crowds at sporting events began chanting 'Let’s go Brandon!' instead. The phrase has been emblazoned on T-shirts, highway billboards and banners flown behind planes over football stadiums.
Count me among those in favor of the new chant.
First, it replaces a vulgar epithet with a sarcastic commentary on Biden’s presidency. The focus shifts from insulting Biden the person, to well justified mockery of Biden’s actions in office. Worst inflation in 30 years? Let’s go Brandon! Gas prices up $1.31 a gallon since his election? Let’s go Brandon! Home heating prices skyrocketing? Let’s go Brandon! Self-inflicted crisis at the southern border? Let’s go Brandon! Left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan? Let’s go Brandon! Can’t find a Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas gifts your kids want because store shelves are bare?
Let’s go Brandon! Approval rating dropped to 36%? Let’s go Brandon!
Second, the new chant literally arose from 'fake news' – a reporter misreporting what an anti-Biden crowd was saying. The moment encapsulated everything many conservatives find wrong with the president’s media enablers, who they believe lie about them to cover for him. 'Let’s go Brandon!' mocks not just Biden, but pro-Biden media bias.
Third, it’s funny. In Virginia, someone broke into the control cabinets for two electronic road signs and changed the messaging to read 'Let’s go Brandon!' When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a signing ceremony for a legislation barring vaccine mandates in his state, he held it in Brandon, Fla. In Brandon, Minn., someone put the words 'Let’s go' in front of six signs welcoming visitors to the city.
For those outraged by it, ask yourself: Is 'Let’s go Brandon!' really worse than the chants of 'Not my president!' that greeted Donald Trump on his election? And let’s not forget that Trump opponents did not hesitate to use vulgarity to express their disgust with him. At the 2018 Tony Awards, Robert De Niro got a standing ovation when he yelled 'F––– Trump!' from the Broadway stage. And after Trump lost to Biden in 2020, 'FDT' ('F––– Donald Trump') by rappers YG and Nipsey Hussle became the No. 1 song on iTunes. A raucous crowd of Biden supporters playing the song and holding 'F––– Trump' signs even made it onto a CNN broadcast. The network did not bother to come up with a euphemism.
'Let’s go Brandon!' is far from the worst thing that has been said about an American president. During the George W. Bush administration, I listened to protesters beat drums in Lafayette Square day and night while chanting 'Bush lied and people died!' During Watergate, Richard M. Nixon faced chants of 'Jail the Chief!' from his opponents. When President Grover Cleveland was rumored to have fathered a child out of wedlock, his opponents chanted:
'Ma, ma, where’s my pa?' (To which Cleveland’s supporters responded: 'Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!') Ulysses S. Grant was called 'a drunken trowser-maker.' Franklin Pierce was called the 'pimp of the White House.' Abraham Lincoln was mocked by his opponents as 'the nightman' (someone who empties commodes at night). John Adams was declared 'a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, not the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.'
By those standards, 'Let’s go Brandon!' seems tame. The only ones hurt by the chant are kids named Brandon whose parents can no longer cheer for them at sporting events. Otherwise, it is a harmless and humorous way for Americans to express their frustration at a flailing – and failing – presidency.
++++++++++++++++++++
GO CANDACE. HOW COME FLORIDA HAS NO MASK POLICY, NO MANDATES ETC AND ALSO HAS THE LOWEST COVID INCIDENCE IN THE NATION?
Candace Owens HUMILIATES Dr. Fauci With An EXPLOSIVE Speech, Gets A Standing Ovation
This speech is fantastic and delivered extemporaneously. Unbelievable.
++++++++++++++
THERE COMES A TIME WHEN YOU STAND YOUR GROUND AND FIGHT BACK. ISRAELI'S LEARNED THAT LESSON OR THEY WOULD NO LONGR HAVE A NATION.
SOLD OUT BY “LIBERAL” JEWS AND THEIR ESTABLISHMENT
By Rabbi Aryeh Spero, AMERICAN THINKER (First published in Sept 2019)
The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago. We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.
You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.
My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”
Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.
Preoccupation with black civil rights is for most Jewish groups “their spiritual life and the continuum of their days.” We can also add sexual lifestyle rights, abortion-on-demand, open borders, and promotion of Muslim immigration. Jewish groups are in the forefront of demanding even higher levels of Islamic immigration, knowing full well that it’s precisely the recent influx of Muslims into Europe that accounts for the last fifteen years of beatings and murder of Jews in France, Belgium, and Germany. These Jewish organizations call their support of Islamic immigration a “Jewish value,” ignoring that a cardinal Jewish value is protecting Jewish life and safeguarding Jews.
Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.
A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing.
II
This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.
Some Jewish organizations have jelly-like offered programs speaking of the downside of general “hate and intolerance,” unwilling to call it by its real name: anti-Semitism. These Jewish leaders would invoke the specific term Islamaphobia if the victims were Muslim, likewise with anti-Black or anti-Hispanic activity.
Nor does it help that many of the college deans and professors are themselves Jewish and have chosen to protect their jobs rather than stand up for Jewish students; something Black or Muslim professors/administrators would never do to their people. (Ron Lauder is refreshingly singular in announcing that he is no longer donating to Columbia University, which this week is sponsoring Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, a proud and vocal anti-Semite.)
This obsession to universalize everything Jewish sends a message that the Jewish people and their needs are insignificant and must take a back seat. Even the Holocaust has been universalized by many Jewish organizations and rabbis so that now detention centers at our southern borders are labelled “concentration camps,” and ICE and Homeland security as Nazis, and Trump, the lover of Zion and Brooklyn’s Jews, as Hitler. By universalizing Judaism they belittle its need for existence as something in and of itself.
Worse, many have fashioned an avant-garde Judaism that consists of belittling Jewishness and being over-the-top critical of Israel while adoring its enemies — Peter Beinart/Thomas Friedman Judaism. They sit around in their Upper West Side salons and bash Jewish Jews and Israel. No Irishmen or Frenchmen in America want to dismantle Ireland or France. In contrast, an awfully high percentage of American Jews invest enormous time, energy, and money into trying to bring down and defame the country of their origin, Israel. This form of self-hate is pathological and unique among mankind. Something craven, suicidal, and unnatural is happening within much of American Jewry.
III
It is true that establishment Jewish organizations and liberal rabbis vociferously condemned the attacks on synagogues during this past year. But those attackers were characterized as “right-wingers.” Jewish organizations are always eager to attack anything considered right-wing. But their silence in the face of dangerous, loud, and undeniable anti-Semitism coming from a wide variety of liberal/progressive sources, including the social justice warriors, leads to one inevitable conclusion. Major Jewish organizations will not imperil the Left or the “social justice” causes; they have chosen liberalism and the Democratic party over particular Jewish needs. Jewish politicians such as Chuck Schumer, Eliot Engel, Nita Lowey, Steve Cohen, Jan Schakowsky, and Adam Schiff, for example, have been silent about the Omar/Tlaib/Ocasio-Cortez anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel.
Furthermore, many Jewish groups will insidiously parlay anti-Semitism in the hopes of tarnishing Trump and his supporters and to further their decades-old efforts to characterize conservatives as anti-Semites and racists. A previous editor of the Forward once said: “Our greatest enemy is ‘majority-ism,’” in other words, the American white, Christian majority. Most Jews still feel that “minorities” are their allies and that white, Christian Americans are the ones to fear. Ari Gordon of the AJC said so recently when he announced: “Jews and Muslims are natural allies in fighting off the bigotry out there and protecting our shared democratic freedoms.” As a pulpit rabbi, especially during my Manhattan years, I was upset to hear the nonchalant bigotry of many brethren against southerners, whites, and Christians, especially patriotic whites who displayed their love of America. In the end, liberal Jews generally feel more comfortable around minorities and want to belong to the political and social Left, no matter what.
This past Sunday we held a rally in front of the NYC City Hall on lower Broadway regarding attacks against Jews in Brooklyn. I ended my speech by saying it’s obvious we can’t depend on the leaders of major Jewish organizations. They are not really leaders, rather big-shot bureaucrats. It seems we are witnessing once again the Rabbi Stephen Wise phenomenon of the 30s and 40s: leadership replaced by self-glorifying photo ops, fancy dinners, bland statements, meetings, and dialogue. We, the grassroots, will have to defend the Jewish people, defend ourselves in our neighborhoods. Self-defense is a biblical mandate, a mitzvah.
At the rally, we chanted: “Jews Fight Back.” It’s time Jews carried an aura of self-respect, an aura of self-value, so that would-be perpetrators know their attacks come with a downside for them.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is president of Conference of Jewish Affairs, author of Push Back, and of Why Israel Matters to You.
++++++++++++++++
CAN'T ALLOW THIS. BIDEN, HOW WILL YOU UNDO?
DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS: How the deal with the Gulf states is helping Israel improve relations with its ‘first generation’ of Arab partners.
ENERGY MINISTER Karin Elharrar signs a climate cooperation deal with Jordan in Dubai this week. (photo credit: Courtesy)
John Kerry, the former US secretary of state currently serving as President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy, finally got to help hammer out and watch the signing of a Middle East agreement on Monday.
It wasn’t, however, an Israeli-Palestinian accord, one that former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon said Kerry was “obsessive and messianic” about brokering.
Rather, it was the signing in Dubai of a tripartite energy-water accord between Israel, the United Arabs and Jordan.
Under this accord, a government-owned UAE firm will build a massive solar energy facility in southern Jordan, which will then sell the energy to Israel. Israel, in turn, will either build a new desalination plant or provide Jordan – via its current desalination facilities – with some 200 million cubic meters of water per year, quadrupling the amount of desalinated water it currently sells the Hashemite Kingdom.
Kerry, standing alongside UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, looked on as Energy and Water Resources Minister Karin Elharrar, UAE Climate Change Minister Mariam Almheiri, and Jordan Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammed Al-Najjar signed the agreement.
The irony was striking since it was Kerry – in a terrible prediction that will always accompany a discussion of his Mideast diplomatic legacy – who famously said, at a conference in 2016, that Israel would never reach a separate peace with any Arab nation without first signing an agreement with the Palestinians.
(L-R) Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, Energy Minister Karin Elharrar and John Kerry. (credit: Courtesy)(L-R) Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, Energy Minister Karin Elharrar and John Kerry. (credit: Courtesy)
Not only would this not happen, he stressed, but he was completely sure it would not happen.
“I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world is in a different place now, we just have to reach out to them and we can work some things with the Arab world and we’ll deal with the Palestinians. No, no, no and no,” Kerry said at the Saban Conference in 2016.
“There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace,” he continued with complete certainty. “Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.”
Those comments came less than a month before the Obama administration, in which Kerry served, enabled during its final month in office a sharply worded anti-settlement UN Security Council resolution, and just before Kerry delivered a rambling swan-song speech at the State Department on the Mideast where he pinned the onus of the blame for the diplomatic stalemate with the Palestinians on Israel.
Yet, there he was on Monday, standing next to the UAE crown prince, watching the fruits ripen from just precisely the type of separate peace agreement that he was so certain would never materialize, and did nothing to advance.
The importance of what was signed on Monday goes beyond the supply of renewable energy to Israel and desalinated water to Jordan. This deal moves the benefits to be accrued from the Abraham Accords to other countries in the region, and not just to each of the Arab countries with which Israel reached an agreement: the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
As Ghaith al-Omari and Simon Henderson wrote in an article for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, this deal “demonstrates additional ways to build on the Abraham Accords.
“So far, most of the diplomatic activity surrounding the accords has focused on adding new countries or deepening bilateral relations between Israel and its new partners,” they wrote. “These efforts should be continued, but the solar/water deal shows how the accords can simultaneously deepen Israel’s relations with the first generation of Arab peacemakers.”
And deepening Israel’s relations with “the first generation of Arab peacemakers,” namely Jordan and Egypt, is critically important, given that Israel’s relations with both those countries have been defined as a cold peace, especially – of late – with Jordan.
This deal could significantly warm up ties with Jordan, which the Bennett government has tried to put on a healthier footing than was the case under prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett did this immediately after taking office by secretly traveling to Amman to meet King Abdullah II, and by announcing that Israel would increase the amount of desalinated water sold in the kingdom.
The deal also takes the relationship between the two countries beyond the security field, where – with the exception of Israel’s sale of natural gas to Jordan – it has rested almost exclusively until now, and widens it to the civilian realm.
Not everyone was cheering, however. Reflective of this was an article in the anti-Israel UK-based Middle East Monitor, which quoted “Palestinian expert” Saleh al-Naami as saying the deal “proves that the Jordanian regime is increasingly serving Israeli interests.”
Naami said the plan will benefit the “settlements” and allow Israel to dump its industrial waste on Jordan.
“Jordan has the desert in the south, and this will be used for a massive solar plant to generate electricity to be exported to the Israeli settlements in the Negev and the West Bank,” he said. “Part of the Israeli industrial infrastructure, which has polluting emissions that harm the densely populated areas in Israel, will be relocated to the Jordanian desert under the pretext of hiring Jordanian workers.”
Notwithstanding these sentiments – which will surely be echoed by those in Jordan fiercely opposed to any cooperation with Israel – the deal could serve as an example for further cooperation with Jordan, as well as with Egypt, and demonstrates just how the Abraham Accords are transforming the region.
ANOTHER EXAMPLE came two days later, when Defense Minister Benny Gantz flew to Morocco for a two-day visit, the first visit by an Israeli defense minister to one of the countries with which Israel has begun to cooperate as a result of the Abraham Accords.
The Defense Ministry released a statement saying that Gantz and his Moroccan colleague Abdellatif Loudiyi signed a groundbreaking defense memorandum of understanding.
Let that sink in for a moment. Israel’s defense minister went to an Arab state that for years refused to acknowledge any ties with Israel, and signed a defense memorandum that “formalizes defense relations” between the two countries and “establishes a foundation that will support any future cooperation.”
This memorandum will enable the defense establishments of both countries to enjoy “increased cooperation in the fields of intelligence, industrial collaboration, military and training,” the statement read.
Three years ago, such a development would have seemed a pipe dream. This week the Moroccan press ran stories of how the agreement will enable the manufacture in Morocco of killer drones equipped with Israeli technology, and last week how the North African country bought Israel’s SKYLOCK dome system – an anti-drone weapon that detects and destroys enemy drones.
According to The North African Post, “The Israeli military equipment and technologies give Morocco a strategic advantage and superiority in the region, making Algerian generals, de facto rulers, extremely nervous.”
Indeed, Algeria – Morocco’s neighbor and arch-foe – was infuriated by the Moroccan-Israel rapprochement and the fact that the US recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara as a result of Rabat joining the Abraham Accords. Algeria has long backed the Polisario Front in Western Sahara against Morocco.
Shortly following the visit of Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to Morocco in August, Algeria severed ties with Morocco, using remarks Lapid made in Rabat voicing concerns about Algeria’s role in the region and its relationship with Iran as one of many pretenses for the move.
If Algeria was infuriated by the visit of Israel’s foreign minister, one can only imagine how it must be steaming now that the Jewish state’s defense minister was hosted in Rabat on a formal visit and talked about security cooperation and arms deals.
One Algerian reaction to the Israeli-Moroccan rapprochement has been closer ties with Iran, a friendship that will only drive Morocco and Israel further into each other’s embrace – further proof of how the Abraham Accords have thoroughly realigned the region.
+++
I KNOW, INTIMIDATE A WEAKER ISRAEL PRIME MIISTER:
https://m.jpost.com/opinion/
POSTED BY RUTHIE BLUM
Israel too afraid of US and coalition friction to strike Iran - opinion
Despite his pronouncements, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is hesitant to arouse Washington’s ire.
OR:
Iran Has Biden’s Nuclear Number
Tehran wants a ‘less for more’ deal that would be weaker than Obama’s.
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The flag of Iran waves in front of the the International Center building with the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in May.
Photo: Florian Schroetter/Associated Press
The Iran nuclear talks resume on Monday in Austria, and pessimism seems to be the order of the day. Iran refuses to make concessions, while the U.S. is signaling that its patience may be limited. But don’t underestimate the Biden Administration’s desire for a deal—any deal.
For months the U.S. has been all but begging Iran to return to the table, though the U.S. won’t literally even be at the table in Vienna. Iran refuses to talk to the U.S. directly, so American negotiators must work through European intermediaries. The U.S. seems undeterred by this intentional humiliation.
Since Iran walked away from talks earlier this year, Tehran has elevated an even more hardline president and accelerated its enrichment of nuclear fuel. Iran has also continued to restrict international inspectors’ access to its nuclear sites. Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported last week that talks about verification have “proved inconclusive”—diplomatic-speak for they failed.
Uranium particles found at three locations that Iran hasn’t declared to the agency are cause for alarm. Mr. Grossi said this “is a clear indication that nuclear material and/or equipment contaminated by nuclear material has been present at these locations.” The U.S. and its European allies have declined to censure Iran for refusing to cooperate.
They’re hoping the talks will yield concessions, perhaps with the inducement of more U.S. sanctions relief. Iranian diplomats are demanding that any deal will remain in force beyond President Biden’s tenure. And they won’t commit to anything beyond a return to the 2015 deal struck by President Obama. That deal allowed Iran sufficient leeway to advance on the path to a weapon with limited inspections, which is why Donald Trump withdrew in 2018.
The latest reports are that the U.S. has floated the idea of an interim accord that would give more time to negotiate a larger deal. The interim accord would offer sanctions relief to Iran in return for some restraint on Iranian enrichment on nuclear fuel. This sounds like what Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies calls a “less for more” deal—that is, less restraint on Iran than in the 2015 deal in return for more sanctions relief.
The signs are that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and new President Ebrahim Raisi have no intention of slowing their march to the brink of a bomb. They may offer token concessions for sanctions relief, but they will continue to hide their nuclear development from inspectors. China is now openly buying Iranian oil in defiance of U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. doesn’t seem to care.
Tehran is also escalating support for terror attacks in the region. U.S. officials say Iran was responsible for a drone attack on a U.S. base in Syria last month, and Iraqi officials believe an Iran-backed militia was behind the attempt to kill Iraq’s prime minister this month.
All of which suggests that all of Team Biden’s entreaties have merely made Iran more determined to demand a deal that is even weaker than Mr. Obama’s. Such an agreement will reassure no one beyond the spreaders of revolution in Tehran.
++++++++++++++++++CALIFORIA EDUCATION CRUMBLING?
A California Attempt to Repair the Crumbling Pillar of U.S. EducationA proposed California ballot measure would make good schools a constitutional right.By Andy Kessler
Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over half of first-year community-college students in the U.S. take at least one remedial course in reading or math. In the U.S., 43 million adults are illiterate. This is a disgrace.
Crypto Is Shedding Its Tether October 24, 2021In pre-pandemic California, only 32% of fourth-graders were at or above proficient for their grade in reading. Only 19% of eighth-grade Hispanics read at grade level, and only 10% of eighth-grade blacks did. Those who find disparate impact everywhere should be screaming from the rooftops that public education is racist. Instead, silence.
Despite these poor results, spending per student goes up each year. New York spent $25,139 per student in fiscal 2019. In California, it’s over $20,000. So why haven’t outcomes improved? Parents know why. Bad teachers don’t get fired. Because of tenure, even some capable teachers mail it in. Bad school districts don’t get fixed. Caps on charter schools, even those with proven records, limit their ability to put pressure on public schools. Teachers unions are all-powerful.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch is trying to improve California’s education system. He tells me we need “accountability of quality education.” You may recall the 2014 Vergara v. California decision, a suit Mr. Welch and others funded. Filed on behalf of nine public-school students, the ruling found that five California statutes related to teacher tenure, firing bad teachers and layoff policy violated the state’s Constitution. In his ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu noted, “Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
No matter. The California Court of Appeal reversed Vergara in 2016 stating: “With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes.” In the court’s view, the California Constitution guarantees merely a free public education.
So Mr. Welch was back where he started, with, he says, an “educational system that doesn’t prioritize its actions to educate the children to a degree necessary to function in our society.” Bad teachers are constitutionally protected.
But with his background as a logically thinking Cornell-educated engineer, he set out to prove bad teaching was “a constitutional violation.” In the Democrat-controlled California Legislature, that was going to be a tough sell. Teachers were the fourth-largest campaign contributors to California’s legislative races in 2020 behind energy, prison guards and healthcare. “The Legislature won’t listen to the people,” Mr. Welch grumbles.
Fortunately, Californians can change their constitution through ballot initiatives. And voilà, a group named Kids First including Mr. Welch filed the Constitutional Right to a High-Quality Public Education Act. Here’s the key provision: “Any law, regulation, or policy, or any official action affecting students generally, which does not put the interest of the students first, shall be deemed to deny this right.”
Critics will focus on the lack of a definition for “high-quality public education.” Mr. Welch explains, “The metric for existing or any future legislation, and every school board decision, is ‘Does it make students better or worse?’ ” Pretty simple, yet I suspect it would be deadly effective. This would, by necessity, launch many lawsuits to challenge the status quo of tenure, of the inability to fire bad teachers and of everything else. It would become the guiding principle for any new legislation: Does it put kids first? “The corollary to this right is the existence of a high-quality teaching profession,” Mr. Welch says.
And then there is this provision: “The remedies for this right shall not include new mandates for taxes or spending.” It’s smart for two reasons. It will help the initiative pass, and history has shown that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work.
The cost? Around $8 a signature—they need a million to get on the ballot—plus the cost of the inevitable TV-ad battle with the California Teachers Association and its 310,000 members. That could get expensive.
I asked Mr. Welch why he wants to spend his time and hard-earned capital on this. “What we’re doing to our kids is horrific,” he says. “I can’t think of a greater loss of potential than the poor quality of education of our children. And all the other societal problems that come with it. The prison system uses educational outcomes—fourth-grade reading levels—to determine what size correctional facilities they’ll need.” Scary.
I think a successful Kids First ballot initiative would do more for “equity” than any government program. “The best way in making a productive functioning society is making sure everyone lives up to their potential,” Mr. Welch says. “Education is one of the basic pillars of American democracy.” That pillar is crumbling.+++++++++++++++++++++++
NEWS ++++++++++++++++++
CALIFORIA EDUCATION CRUMBLING?
A California Attempt to Repair the Crumbling Pillar of U.S. Education
A proposed California ballot measure would make good schools a constitutional right.
By Andy Kessler
Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over half of first-year community-college students in the U.S. take at least one remedial course in reading or math. In the U.S., 43 million adults are illiterate. This is a disgrace.
Crypto Is Shedding Its Tether October 24, 2021
In pre-pandemic California, only 32% of fourth-graders were at or above proficient for their grade in reading. Only 19% of eighth-grade Hispanics read at grade level, and only 10% of eighth-grade blacks did. Those who find disparate impact everywhere should be screaming from the rooftops that public education is racist. Instead, silence.
Despite these poor results, spending per student goes up each year. New York spent $25,139 per student in fiscal 2019. In California, it’s over $20,000. So why haven’t outcomes improved? Parents know why. Bad teachers don’t get fired. Because of tenure, even some capable teachers mail it in. Bad school districts don’t get fixed. Caps on charter schools, even those with proven records, limit their ability to put pressure on public schools. Teachers unions are all-powerful.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch is trying to improve California’s education system. He tells me we need “accountability of quality education.” You may recall the 2014 Vergara v. California decision, a suit Mr. Welch and others funded. Filed on behalf of nine public-school students, the ruling found that five California statutes related to teacher tenure, firing bad teachers and layoff policy violated the state’s Constitution. In his ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu noted, “Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students. The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”
No matter. The California Court of Appeal reversed Vergara in 2016 stating: “With no proper showing of a constitutional violation, the court is without power to strike down the challenged statutes.” In the court’s view, the California Constitution guarantees merely a free public education.
So Mr. Welch was back where he started, with, he says, an “educational system that doesn’t prioritize its actions to educate the children to a degree necessary to function in our society.” Bad teachers are constitutionally protected.
But with his background as a logically thinking Cornell-educated engineer, he set out to prove bad teaching was “a constitutional violation.” In the Democrat-controlled California Legislature, that was going to be a tough sell. Teachers were the fourth-largest campaign contributors to California’s legislative races in 2020 behind energy, prison guards and healthcare. “The Legislature won’t listen to the people,” Mr. Welch grumbles.
Fortunately, Californians can change their constitution through ballot initiatives. And voilà, a group named Kids First including Mr. Welch filed the Constitutional Right to a High-Quality Public Education Act. Here’s the key provision: “Any law, regulation, or policy, or any official action affecting students generally, which does not put the interest of the students first, shall be deemed to deny this right.”
Critics will focus on the lack of a definition for “high-quality public education.” Mr. Welch explains, “The metric for existing or any future legislation, and every school board decision, is ‘Does it make students better or worse?’ ” Pretty simple, yet I suspect it would be deadly effective. This would, by necessity, launch many lawsuits to challenge the status quo of tenure, of the inability to fire bad teachers and of everything else. It would become the guiding principle for any new legislation: Does it put kids first? “The corollary to this right is the existence of a high-quality teaching profession,” Mr. Welch says.
And then there is this provision: “The remedies for this right shall not include new mandates for taxes or spending.” It’s smart for two reasons. It will help the initiative pass, and history has shown that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work.
The cost? Around $8 a signature—they need a million to get on the ballot—plus the cost of the inevitable TV-ad battle with the California Teachers Association and its 310,000 members. That could get expensive.
I asked Mr. Welch why he wants to spend his time and hard-earned capital on this. “What we’re doing to our kids is horrific,” he says. “I can’t think of a greater loss of potential than the poor quality of education of our children. And all the other societal problems that come with it. The prison system uses educational outcomes—fourth-grade reading levels—to determine what size correctional facilities they’ll need.” Scary.
I think a successful Kids First ballot initiative would do more for “equity” than any government program. “The best way in making a productive functioning society is making sure everyone lives up to their potential,” Mr. Welch says. “Education is one of the basic pillars of American democracy.” That pillar is crumbling.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
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