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In Defense of us.
By Joe Lonsdale
Condemning the West is as morally dangerous as it is intellectually bankrupt.
For centuries, science fiction has captured the Western imagination, fueling our sense of the future with tales of wonder as well as words of warning. But in modern times, the genre has all too often fallen captive to writers who have gone sour on humanity itself. In a recent episode of the new Star Trek series Picard, the crew crashes in Los Angeles in the year 2024. There, amid a throng of vagrants and ICE agents, an alien resident on Earth since the eighteenth century condemns the backwardness of the human species.
The scene is hardly an isolated incident. The hopelessness and stupidity of humanity is one of the show’s central themes. How willfully ignorant does a TV writer have to be to believe that someone—even an alien—who witnessed hundreds of years of human history, watching things improve rapidly, would somehow end up with a hostile view of the early twenty-first century? We have serious problems to fix, but an eighteenth century human would laugh about what we include as problems in the twenty-first century. One of the problems the characters complain about as a prime example of humanity’s failure is “online disinformation”—as though this issue legitimately ranks among war, pestilence, and famine as a problem of historical significance. Somehow, the more petty our foibles, the more harshly they condemn us.
What’s behind the largely negative mood of the current historical discourse? The doomsaying comes in disproportionate measure from people tweeting about the mistakes of the past in high-rise apartments in clean and functional neighborhoods in the richest country in the history of the world. Safe and comfortable in their pods, they vehemently scorn those of us who are proud of our civilization and what it has uniquely accomplished for humanity.
It’s not totally clear why so many hold our past (and even the present) in such extreme contempt, but there is probably a combination of factors:
The West “won,” and some feel guilty about that;
There are far more written records of the West’s mistakes and crimes than those of other civilizations;
In its decadence, the West has become bored and enjoys self-criticism;
Attacking the past is a good pretext to seize political power today.
If it were just these adults sitting around alone being cynical, maybe we could put up with it. But the negativity has been percolating for some time, infecting education, politics, and other institutions with a constant demand for historical shame, abject apology, and, somehow, a new civilization purified of all that came before. This misanthropic revolution threatens our future as well as our past. It’s time we deal with it.
To start, we can identify key elements that constitute “the West” as a value system that has grown and developed for millennia, drawing from classical wisdom, Judeo-Christian faith, and Enlightenment politics.
No one of these on its own is enough to make a just society. The classical world was brutal. The deeply fractured world of pre-Enlightenment Europe suffered from slow and volatile growth. The extremes of the Enlightenment, striving to cleanse life of all that was “irrational” in tradition, led to the Terror of the French Revolution and other destructive obsessions aimed at imposing social uniformity. But America’s history has shown that classical wisdom, modern knowledge, and ancestral faith can combine to foster achievements unique in history, an unparalleled track record of self-improvement. Under our leadership, the West hasn’t just triumphed over others; we’ve triumphed against ourselves.
In the thirteenth century, with Magna Carta, America’s mother country England placed the King firmly under the rule of law; centuries later, amid the Glorious Revolution, England rejected the arbitrary power of the monarch and the star chamber and introduced a Bill of Rights; and in 1776 and 1789 some former English colonies rejected monarchy outright and forged, on classical, modern, and biblical foundations, a truly novel government.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That one sentence marks the origin point for a 250-year arc of radical global progress, and not just in the new nation that produced it. America wasn’t perfect, but it had exactly the right framework in place to realize the goals of the Declaration and to pursue over time the expression of extraordinary ideals.
In this country, we have cultivated a unique respect for the rights of the individual. Our Constitution has served as a positive governance model to countries all over the world, including those with cultural milieus quite distinct from our own. Our cultural and governance frameworks allow different people to live and prosper together more than any other society in history. And when problems need to be addressed, our value system provides the corrective mechanisms. Fully conscious of this advantage, Martin Luther King, Jr. directly invoked the Founding in his “I Have a Dream” speech: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
That note was first redeemed when in 1865 the U.S. rectified the crime of slavery. Slavery was, of course, not at all unique in history; what is unique in history is the vision of our national founders, who have served as a font of moral authority for successive generations, even across a considerable difference of time and relative values.
It’s unacceptable to brainwash young people deprived of a historical background to believe that America or the West is evil and that we should be ashamed of ourselves. History is full of sins and contradictions, no doubt. But on the big questions—is America a terrible place? Are Europeans in the last 500 years uniquely bad in history? Are we so immoral as to warrant the systematic destruction of our nation and Western civilization?—there is really just one answer: No.
To show why, let’s recall a few points of history.
The Americas
My alma mater, Stanford, has recently erased the name of the Catholic missionary Saint Junipero Serra from its campus. Serra, in many ways the founder of modern California, has a mixed record by today’s standards (like a lot of people from the sixteenth century). He was canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. Just a few years later the university, under pressure from activists, denounced Serra and purged his name. At around the same time, they introduced an official university “land acknowledgment” for the Muwekma Ohlone, one of the indigenous groups that lived in the area where Stanford is today. The trustees of Stanford aren’t going to give the land back—obviously—but this kind of empty virtue signaling is now all but mandatory at many universities.
Given that Stanford seems to have a lot of thoughts about Europeans in the colonial period, one wonders whether they have any opinion about the relative moral virtue of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and its history. But moral judgements at Stanford and other universities apply only to one side: the colonizers, the Europeans, the Christians, the Americans—in sum, the West. We don’t ask any questions about whether non-Western groups in history may have also done bad things—perhaps because of how uncomfortable it would be for a left-wing university to take a look at the history of the Americas before the supposedly evil Europeans arrived.
The Americas were an incredibly cruel place. In the Aztec Empire, one of the best-developed American civilizations, human sacrifice was a centrally important state practice. Conservative estimates put the scale of the sacrifice in the range of tens of thousands per year, for centuries. Living people had their chests slashed open by priests, their hearts torn out, and their mutilated bodies thrown down the temple steps.
The Australian historian Inga Clendinnen details the Aztec ritual of child sacrifice:
The children were kept by the priests for some weeks before their deaths (those kindergartens of doomed infants are difficult to contemplate). Then, as the appropriate festivals arrived, they were magnificently dressed, paraded in litters, and, as they wept, their throats were slit: gifted to Tlaloc the Rain God as “bloodied flowers of maize.” (They were thought then to enter the gentle paradise of Tlaloc, which may have assuaged the parents’ grief.) The pathos of their fate as they were paraded moved the watchers to tears, while their own tears were thought to augur rain.
It should not be controversial to say that the sixteenth-century Catholic or Spanish visions of the world aren’t remotely comparable to the cult of Tlaloc. The Inquisition was one of the worst periods in pre-modern Europe, especially for Jews. But there are single weeks in Aztec history during which more were sacrificed than were killed in centuries of the Spanish Inquisition (estimated in the thousands).
It’s a good thing for humanity that the Aztec moral vision of the world—that slitting babies’ throats makes crops grow—is no longer current. And while nobody is taking a victory lap about the deaths of Mexica (the main Aztec group) or any other indigenous groups, the Christian transformation of Mexico was for the better. And we should also recognize that it wasn’t the Spanish alone that put an end to the Aztecs. The conquest would have never succeeded if not for other Mesoamericans, former victims of Aztec cruelty, who joined with the Spanish.
As is clear to anyone, Christianization and colonization didn’t make Mexico a perfect society, but I, like so many others, have no regrets that Aztec sacrifices are in history textbooks, and not the evening news.
The Aztec state, by modern estimates, was probably the most lethal state in history on a percentage basis, with greater figures dying in war than in any other. And yet, the Aztec state looks almost serene compared to the rates of war death in non-state societies, many of them in the Americas. The Kato people in Northern California had—by a considerable margin—the most violent society in human history.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Viking, 2011)
I wish I didn’t have to go back in history and point out these terrible things: I want to look to the future. But given the myopic focus on the negative aspects of our own history, the context is more than warranted.
Even more recently, Americans have had a grim history hidden from them. Take, for example, an Army sergeant’s recollection of what a band of Kiowas did to a wagon train in Texas in 1871:
Stripped stark naked and fastened by a chain in the fire was the body of the wagon master of the train. One side was burned to a crisp and the limbs were twisted out of all shape by the action of the flames. He had been scalped alive and hot ashes poured upon his bleeding skull, and, notwithstanding all this, life was not yet extinct, as was evidenced by his wildly rolling eyeballs.
Unfortunately, stories such as the Warren Wagon Train were common over the American frontier. And unless you’re able to realize just how harsh a lot of history is, you won’t realize just how good we have it. Values matter; individual rights matter.
The Twentieth Century
The twentieth century was a bloody mess, and arguably it poses the most direct challenge to the idea of the West, given that much of the bloodshed happened in Europe, in the shadow of Enlightenment and Judeo-Christianity.
But it’s worthwhile to take a quick look at the death toll in context. First: the vast majority of deaths in the Second World War were inflicted by the Empire of Japan against Chinese civilians and by Hitler’s military against Soviet and East European soldiers and civilians. And second: on a population-adjusted basis, there were periods of warfare and revolt in pre-modern Asia that killed more than the entire twentieth century combined.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker (Viking, 2011)
After the Second World War, the West led the world toward major course corrections: over the long competition with Communism, peoples increasingly embraced the restoration and adoption of Western values with a good conscience. The extreme divergence since then between societies that embraced Western values and those that didn’t is a compelling case for the utility and virtue of those values. And the horrific fate of Western nations that sought to transform themselves by force into a spiritually pure successor civilization is a potent lesson for today’s revolutionaries. The villains of the twenthieth century expressed a self-loathing strain in the West that sought to annihilate its core values of individual rights, human equality, and reason supported by revelation. Instead, they only succeeded in annihilating innocent life—and, finally, themselves.
The Westerners who picked up the pieces, by contrast, did remarkably well, both for themselves and others. The 1946 Japanese constitution, written largely by American lawyers under the supervision of Douglas MacArthur, with the review of Japanese scholars, produced one of the most prosperous countries in history. It’s almost unbelievable that Japan, which was destroyed in 1945 materially and spiritually, became the second-largest economy on earth by the end of the century. (West Germany, in shining contrast to East, experienced a similar renaissance.) While the Japanese GDP was exploding upward in the 1960s and while Singapore was developing into an impressive city state, just across the water the Chinese Communist government under Mao Zedong caused the largest famine in history, killing roughly the same number as the Second World War.
Where do the victims of Communism go to get their reparations? Where do they get their apologies? They don’t. The recourse for people in those societies is most often to exit, which they have done en masse. Perhaps it should serve as an indicator to us that something is going badly wrong in this country when those survivors warn us that their history is beginning to repeat itself here at home. And perhaps it’s an indicator of all we do right that the survivors of the worst regimes in recent memory are so desperate to get here. It’s not just economics influencing that decision. They understand the foundational importance of this country’s values, even though they weren’t taught them.
The Future
The story of human history is largely one of different groups oppressing other groups: wiping them out, enslaving them, abusing them, etc. It’s not a rosy picture. Humans are naturally tribal and envious. Fueled by vengeance and rivalry, we’ve treated one another horribly on this planet. But our humanity is not a problem to be solved or a sin to be expunged. It’s a destiny we can and should live up to.
I come from two groups that haven’t exactly received stellar treatment over the years—the Jews and the Irish. And contrary to accusations from some on the Internet against me: no, I don’t think that the crimes committed against Jews or anyone else were somehow “worth it” or that the present prosperity legitimizes the bad treatment. Of course not. But it’s simply not true that the historical negativities were inherent in the nature of the West. In most cases, it’s plain to see they were aberrations. If you can’t separate out the bad parts from the bigger story and recognize that today we have largely made up for our civilizational mistakes, then you shouldn’t be in the business of talking about history. No matter how ostensibly “ethical,” the lack of context is as ridiculous as it is dangerous.
To me, the Judeo-Christian worldview’s special emphasis on the equality of humans before God, and the dignity of each person as an individual, is essential. Judaism’s most important single teaching is our creation in the image of God—the bedrock of our equal and individual intrinsic value. From here sprung the idea that all human beings are family, all children of the same eternal parent, and that each of us has a soul bearing the stamp of the divine. This isn’t a trivial view, as we saw in the Americas.
But at its best, the West is confident enough to recognize that we do not have a monopoly on moral wisdom and values. There are great things to be studied in cultures the world over. Consider the East. Sacred texts like the Bhagavad Gita express deep truths about personal ethics, motivation, and duty; canonical teachings from Laozi, Confucius, and the Buddha impart enduring lessons about authority, responsibility, and rectitude.
Yet even in non-Western societies like India and China, it’s plain to see the utility of fusing tradition with the Western ideas about markets and freedom that have lifted up billions into an age of unprecedented global prosperity. In our own country, even as we benefit from lots of cultural traditions—maybe more than any other country in the world—we still need one set of values to ground ourselves, on which we wager our future. The only values that can ground us in this way are the same ones that have made our national culture genuinely unique from the beginning.
It’s absolutely fine to teach and learn about the beauty and wisdom that comes from other cultures. What isn’t fine is to teach that our own is evil and immoral. Our children will be bereft of the foundation they need to understand why our country works; why it is that people from all over the world want to be here; and how we can apply these values to make our future even better.
We should be biased toward pride in our civilization, and we should harness that pride in order to build new things. If we teach children that our past is evil and irredeemable, then they’re going to think our future is, too.
Solving problems is hard, and retrospective moral judgment is very, very easy. But we should have high expectations for ourselves, because we can be great. We should do the hard thing.
The word “nihilism” comes from the Latin nihil—nothing. If we continue to indulge the historical nihilism that ignores the unique and positive qualities of the West and of our country, that’s exactly what the future holds: nothing.
For my part, I’m doubling down on the values of our civilization. Let’s build great things, tell stories of human achievement, improve governance, inspire young people, and have appropriate reverence for the past—not out of pure nostalgia for yesterday, but as a reminder that it’s in our power to use the right values to build an even better tomorrow.
Joe Lonsdale is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and the managing partner of 8VC, a Texas-based venture capital firm. Before 8VC, Joe founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, and other mission-driven businesses. As a philanthropist, he is the founder and chairman of the non-partisan Cicero Institute, as well as a founding trustee of the new University of Austin. He lives in Austin with his wife, Tayler, and their four daughters. He hosts a video podcast called American Optimist about entrepreneurship and policy changing the future of the United States.
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President Biden is not a friend of Israel
The PA has significantly escalated its lawfare to delegitimize Israel’s existence in international forums, demonizing Israel and Israel’s Jewish supporters worldwide. And Biden has become complicit in the Palestinian lawfare against Israel. Op-ed.
By Dr. Aviel Sheyn-Stevens, INN
Joseph Biden, on his first presidential trip to the Middle East, visited Israel; he is not a friend of Israel. Before Biden became US President, the most important job he ever held was as vice president to the most anti-Israel administration in American history.
Back in March 2010, on an official visit to Israel, then Vice President Biden criticized an Israeli plan to build homes for Jews in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state. Prior to his visit, the Obama-Biden regime warned various Israeli government ministers that it viewed construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem with hostility. But it pressured Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in Jerusalem, and harshly opposed all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Area C.
Under the Obama-Biden regime, US foreign policy had one setback after another, punctuated by disasters. President Barack Obama made the regime’s decision that fundamentally transformed America’s foreign policy, which Biden implemented because he agreed with it.
From its beginning, the Obama-Biden regime indicated its willingness to alienate America’s friends and embolden America’s enemies, and stated its commitment to talk to Iran “without preconditions.”
After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, America imposed sanctions against Iran and expanded them in 1995 to include firms dealing with the Iranian government. The revolution replaced a pro-Western monarchy with an anti-Western authoritarian theocracy. American assets were confiscated. 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days.
The Obama-Biden regime ignored those US property claims against Iran, and Iran’s funding, providing equipment, weapons, training and giving sanctuary to terrorists. The administration offered Iran economic inducements “without preconditions,” and a pledge not to seek “regime change.” The preconditions were not whimsical excuses to avoid talks. They were unanimous resolutions of the UN Security Council, agreed upon after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The Obama-Biden regime’s years-long negotiations with Iran allowed time to multiply, disperse, and fortify Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Obama-Biden’s leakage of Israel’s secret agreement with Azerbaijan sabotaged Israeli preemptive attempts to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. Azerbaijan would have allowed Israeli warplanes to refuel during attacks on the nuclear facilities.
Iran’s goal is the destruction of America, yet the Obama-Biden’s solution was to appease Iran by letting Iran increase its destructive might, get nuclear weapons capability and get the ayatollahs $150 billion.
In October 2017, then President Donald Trump overruled his-then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, and declined to certify to Congress that Iran was in compliance with the nuclear deal, when the Iranians were breaching the deal.
In May 2018, Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iran deal, and imposed crippling sanctions on the ayatollahs.
In January 2020, Trump ordered a lethal strike against Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; a designated terrorist organization. Soleimani was considered the second most powerful person in Iran, subordinate to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Now, Biden has reportedly invited Russians to adjudicate a new deal, which will likely lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. In 2012, Obama invited Russians into the Middle East after a 40-year absence, as a prelude to the disastrous 2015 Treaty of Catastrophe. Biden will trump that disaster by enabling Vladimir Putin to become the nuclear protector of the old Obama goal of an Iran-Hezbollah-Muslim Brotherhood Middle East.
Biden’s scheme includes a radical transformation of the region, in favor of the ayatollahs, to make Iran the regional superpower in the Middle East; disfavoring America’s traditional allies: Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Arab monarchies.
In December 2017, against fierce opposition from Democrats, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. On May 14, 2018, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel, Trump effected the 1995 Act of Congress to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, which he described as the “eternal capital of the Jewish people.” As Trump stated, “Israel has made its capital in the city of Jerusalem, the capital the Jewish people established in ancient times.”
Furthermore, Trump’s decision to remove the US from the antisemitic UN Human Rights Council, which the Obama-Biden regime joined despite its open bigotry against Jews; Trump’s ending of funding to the genocidal, antisemitic UN Refugee Works Agency for the Palestinians, which the Obama-Biden regime expanded; Trump’s decision to cut funding to the terrorist-financing Palestinian Authority; which the Obama-Biden regime increased; Trump’s closing the PLO Diplomatic Mission in Washington, which the Obama-Biden regime upgraded; etc.; were moves of historic significance in the fight against antisemitism and for Jewish rights.
Previously, the Obama-Biden regime not only refused to transfer the US Embassy to Jerusalem, it rejected even symbolic acceptance of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem. The Obama-Biden State Department erased all the captions on archival photos of US dignitaries in Jerusalem that referred to the location as Jerusalem, Israel; demonstrating a deep-seated hostility and bigotry to the history of the Jewish people.
During the 2020 US election campaign, Biden pledged to reopen the PLO Diplomatic Mission in Washington, restore US funding to the terrorist-financing Palestinian Authority and open a consulate for the Palestinian Arabs in Israel’s capital city.
In June 2022, The Washington Free Beacon reported the Biden regime has decided to separate the Palestinian Affairs Unit from the US embassy to Israel in Jerusalem. The head of the “unit” will be directly appointed by, and be subordinated to, the Secretary of State, which is unlawful under US law. The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 makes the head of the Palestinian section of the US embassy in Jerusalem the subordinate of the US ambassador to Israel. Biden’s plan is also unlawful under international law, unless it is approved by Israel. Under international law, a foreign government that wants to open a diplomatic office in one nation’s capital to a different nation, must first receive the permission of the nation’s government. But Israel strongly opposes the plan; it contravenes Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.
During negotiations of the peace process in the 1990s, Israel and the Palestinians agreed that territories Israel transferred to Palestinian Arab control would be governed by an autonomous Palestinian governing authority called the Palestinian Authority (PA). Both sides stipulated in their signed agreements that the PA would not be a state, and would not operate against Israel in international organizations or apply for membership in international organizations as a state.
In 2011, PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas, in material breach of the agreements he signed, launched a campaign to have “Palestine” accepted as a member-state in international institutions; escalating Palestinians’ lawfare against Israel. In a New York Times op-ed, he stated: “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.” This is lawfare!
Lawfare is generally defined as the abuse of international institutions and the language of law to pursue strategic aims. The Palestinian Arabs and their allies have long used lawfare to supplement terrorism in their war to destroy Israel.
In 2018, four months after then-President Donald Trump, in accordance with US and international law, opened the US embassy in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, the Palestinian Arabs turned their lawfare campaign against the US. The PA, acting as the nonexistent “State of Palestine,” sued the US in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In the lawsuit, the Palestinians ask the ICJ to compel the US to remove its embassy from Israel’s capital.
The case is still pending before the ICJ. Biden should have suspended all US financial support and diplomatic contacts with the PA until it ends its lawfare against the US.
Biden’s plan to separate the Palestinian Affairs Unit from the US embassy, in a bid to open a distinct consulate for the Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem, aggrandizes the Palestinians’ spurious claims against Israel and the US, and encourages other US adversaries to resort to international institutions to erode the authority of US and international law, and undermine Israeli sovereignty.
The PA has significantly escalated its lawfare to delegitimize Israel’s existence in international forums, and to demonize Israel and Israel’s Jewish supporters worldwide. And Biden has become complicit in the Palestinian lawfare against Israel.
President Biden is not a friend of Israel. His presidency is the third Obama term, as far as Israel is concerned.
Dr. Sheyin-Stevens is a Registered Patent Attorney based in Florida, USA. He earned his Doctorate in Law from the University of Miami.
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You decide:
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British Military Chief: ‘Russia Has Strategically Lost Its War In Ukraine’
LONDON (VINnews) — UK’s Chief of Defense Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin claimed that Russia has already “strategically lost” its war in Ukraine and is now a “more diminished power”.
Radakin said that Russia was suffering heavy losses, running out of troops and advanced missiles and would never be able to take over all of Ukraine.
“This is a dreadful mistake by Russia. Russia will never take control of Ukraine,” Radakin told PA Media in an interview published Friday.
In the interview Radakin said that Russia had lost a quarter of its military power for “tiny” gains of less than 10% of Ukraine’s territory. He added that even if Putin achieved “tactical successes” in the coming weeks, he had lost significant portions of his military power and was running out of troops and hi-tech missiles.
“Russia has strategically lost already. Nato is stronger, Finland and Sweden are looking to join,” Radakin said.
“President Putin has used about 25% of his army’s power to gain a tiny amount of territory and 50,000 people either dead or injured. Russia is failing.”
Radakin’s claims echo British intelligence reports, the latest of which said some Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) – typically established at about 600 to 800 personnel – have only been able to muster as few as 30 soldiers. Russia has also lost some 1,700 tanks and 4,000 armored fighting vehicles since the February 24th invasion.
Despite some successes in the Donbas region, Radakin says that “measured against Russia’s original plan, none of the strategic objectives have been achieved. In order for Russia to achieve any form of success, it will require continued huge investment of manpower and equipment and is likely to take considerable further time,” he concluded.
However Radakin dismissed speculation that Putin’s personal position was under threat after the military failures. In a BBC interview, Radakin said that this was “wishful thinking.”
“As military professionals, we see a relatively stable regime in Russia. President Putin has been able to quash any opposition. We see a hierarchy that is invested in President Putin and so nobody at the top has got the motivation to challenge President Putin,” Radakin added.
Despite its weakened military capabilities, Radakin insisted that “Russia continues to be a nuclear power. It’s got cyber-capabilities, it’s got space capabilities, and it’s got particular programs underwater, so it can threaten the underwater cables that allow the world’s information to transit around the whole globe.
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I am not fearless, I am often wrong in my perception but I always am willing to touch the hot iron. No because I want to be controversial, for the sake of being so, but because I believe reasoned discussion is the way to gain greater insight.
When I sat on the Board of Visitors of St John's College, the 3rd oldest college founded in America, and for the last 50 plus years the sole remaining "GREAT BOOKS" College, discussion, using the original texts written in their original language, formed the curricula. Students were challenged to discuss with the intended goal of learning to reason. "Johnnies" are not intimidated by reading difficult texts. Though they took no courses in many required subjects to become doctors, etc. a large percentage of the student body became professionals in a variety of fields. Teaching predominated but I served with a Board Member, and former Johnnie, who became a worl-famous vintner, another, a movie producer and the variety of "Johnnie" pursuits is endless.
These prefatory comments and the reposting of my friend, Toameh's, op ed is because I want to discuss have black's become America's equivalent of Palestinians?
From the time Israel became a nation, until recently, the entire Arab world was opposed to Israel, wanted the tiny nation removed from the face of the globe and used the self-imposed plight of the Palestinian's as a way to gain support from the world's anti-Semites. Every time Palestinians were offered a nation of their own they rejected it because they were already being taken care of / funded by Europeans, America's Congress/State Department, the U.N.
To this very day, America sends hundreds of millions of tax dollars to Palestinian's so their corrupt leadership can continue paying Palestinian martyred family members who kill innocent Israelis. Our own State Department still contains a powerful elite group of Ivy League trained members who, themselves, are-anti-Semitic and who believe, as do the Arabs, Israel remains a thorn.
Initially their stance was related to our need for oil but that basis of reasoning has weakened over the years as we became energy independent. The recent pathetic Begging Biden Performance is the equivalent of Obama's disgusting bowing.
Many U.N personnel are employed and living high on salaries in comfortable conditions while attending,decades later, Palestinians stuck in refugee camps in Ramallah. I witnessed the neighborhood in Israel where UNRWA members live in nice homes, with white Chevrolet U.N cars they drive to the camps each day. They have no incentive to end their jobs nor did the Arab World, until recently, want them to accept Israel's existence because they had their own hateful reasons to keep the anti-Semitic pot boiling.
Eventually, even in the case of the Rulers of The Arab World, they too came to realize hating Israel carried enormous costs in addition to the money spent/wasted on Palestinians. Why? Because Palestinians were essentially controlled by Hamas, which was funded by Iran. Consequently, Iran was becoming a powerful and potential threat to their own survival.
Arab World leaders ultimately came to realize two important matters:
They and Israel had a common enemy in Hamas/Iran and second, Israel was growing powerful, productive and the Arab World was blowing the opportunity of benefiting from trade relations with their former enemy who also might become their eventual protector.
These realizations formed the basis of leverage Trump took advantage of to depart from what his predecessors tried for decades and failed to accomplish. Thus The Abraham Accords became a reality. By thinking outside the box ,Trump took a different road while his detractors laughed and warned he was playing with fire.
Since The Abraham Accords, trade has exploded, travel restrictions have been lifted and relationships/friendships are blossoming daily. Aligning themselves with Palestinians no longer serves any rational purpose, disengagement is occurring and Palestinians are becoming both irrelevant and a burden if not an embarrassment..
Is America's black population taking the place of the Arab World's former Palestinian problem?
In some ways, this is a growing fact as an overwhelming number, in the youthful black population, have no awareness of the previous relationship Jews and Blacks formed during the Civil Right's period.
Second, radical outside influence is making inroads with the growing number of black radicals to continue feeling aggrieved and, as Shelby Steele points out, racialized. Part of the problem is the fault of white liberals who want a secure voting segment beholden to and dependent on them. Over time, blacks have begun to realize they are being used and basically kept enslaved.
When blacks became emancipated no one cultivated them to accept the plusses and minuses of what freedom meant and how to act.
I remember when a large number of immigrant Russian Jews moved to Atlanta and, after several months, many longed to return to Russia because they could not handle the "burden" of being free. There is always a price to pay, a quid pro quo. In many ways, we have failed our black citizens but then how do you explain the multitude of blacks who have succeeded and prospered?
Because of their recent participation in civil disobedience, wanton murderous attacks, predominantly on their own, destruction of public property by rioting and blatant theft, the entire black population is bearing the brunt of such conduct.
Radical blacks are being taught the next best thing is find a scapegoat and they are taking advantage of the increasing use of intimidation and white guilt rather than altering their behaviour and accepting responsibility for their own aberrant acts. This is the way a civilized world is expected to act but barbarism seems to be the chosen path because it is easier to project than correct.
Since I am being called a racist for speaking my mind and intimidated because I resent what is happening to my country my own objectivity is being challenged. I resent the nonsense of Maxine Waters, I am tired of the lies by Stacey Abrams, I'm fed up with the weakness of Corporate American executives allowing themselves to be shaken down and organizations that profess to be what they are not in order to raise millions that are lining the pockets of hustlers. I bemoan the corruption of prominent black officials who run entire cities and tolerate, if not actually support/shield, the worst of their own society.
A solid education is the ticket to the benefits of the freedoms now available to all and I totally support the opportunity of choice, a solid curriculum and discipline. There will always be a top if there is a bottom and unachievable equity is a poisonous sauce offered to keep the racial divide and resentment ignited.
Just as the white community, according to Steele, must regain courage and start fighting back, speaking out, so the black community must stand up and quit allowing themselves to be tarred and feathered by their own radical element.
We have come too far for the black community to allow themselves to become a societal and intolerable burden which can ultimately lead to their irrelevance.
I invite your comments
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”Why Arabs Are Fed up With the Palestinians
by Khaled Abu Toameh
The Arabs are clearly not as naïve as the Americans and Europeans, who are continuing to pour millions of dollars annually on the Palestinians without conditions and without demanding accountability. Pictured: Palestinians burn a US flag in Bethlehem, on January 29, 2020. (Photo by Musa Al Shaer/AFP via Getty Images)
The Palestinians are disappointed: their Arab brothers have stopped providing them with financial aid. The truth is that most of the Arab countries long ago turned their backs on the Palestinians. They can only blame themselves for ruining their relations with the rest of the Arab world.
It is ironic that while the European Union recently announced its decision to resume unconditional financial aid to the Palestinians, the Arab countries continue to completely ignore the Palestinians. It is also ironic that while the Biden administration continues to talk about providing financial aid to the Palestinians, the Arab countries do not seem to care at all about their Palestinian brothers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians receive a lot of lip service from the Arabs, but see hardly any money being channeled to their coffers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Consequently, for the past few decades the Palestinians have become almost entirely dependent on American and European taxpayer money.
Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh recently revealed that, with the exception of Algeria, the Arab countries have stopped sending financial aid to the treasury of the PA.
Shtayyeh refrained from offering any reason as to why the Arabs had decided to cut off the funding to the Palestinians.
Shtayyeh and the PA have condemned the Arab countries that signed normalization agreements with Israel during the Trump administration era. Some of these countries, especially the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, used to help the Palestinians in many fields, including financial aid and providing jobs to tens of thousands of laborers.
The Palestinian leadership has accused the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan of "betraying" the Palestinian people, Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) by agreeing to make peace with Israel.
It is these serious allegations that have alienated these countries and other Arabs, who are accusing the Palestinians of being ungrateful and biting the hand that feeds them.
Earlier this year, prominent Kuwaiti journalist Ahmed Al-Jarallah explained why he and many others are fed up with the Palestinians. Reminding the Palestinians of what the Gulf states have done for them over the years, Al-Jarallah wrote:
"We are the only ones who rescued them [Palestinians] in the year 1970 when they launched their war on Jordan. The late Sheikh Saad Al-Abdullah evacuated their leader Yasser Arafat from Amman. The Arabian gulf states, led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, boycotted oil export to the western countries during the 1973 [Israel-Arab] war. Furthermore, Riyadh presented two initiatives to solve the conflict. Despite their [Palestinians'] support of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and their participation in acts of intimidation, abuse and killing against Kuwaiti citizens, the Gulf states continue to support the Palestinians. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg of what the Gulf states and their people offered to the Palestinians, who were and still are ungrateful."
The Arabs are apparently not only fed up with the Palestinian leadership, but also with international organizations and agencies that help the Palestinians. Arab financial aid to the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has dropped by 90% in the past few years, according to the agency's spokesperson Adnan Abu Hasna.
In another sign of Arab disregard for the Palestinians, the Palestinian Islamic-Christian Committee for the Support of Jerusalem and the Holy Sites warned of the repercussions of drying up the Arab financial support provided to the city.
The committee said that this year witnessed a "dangerous and unprecedented decline" in the level of financial support provided by a number of Arab countries to Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem.
The committee added that a number of governmental and civil bodies that were formed in some Arab countries to provide direct support to dozens of Palestinian institutions were suspended for reasons that were not disclosed.
"Cutting off this Arab aid caused the disruption of vital services that were provided to Jerusalemites, especially in the health and educational fields," the committee added. "Dozens of cultural, social and sports institutions are suffering from a stifling financial situation that threatens to close them and lay off their employees."
The Palestinians can only blame themselves for antagonizing their Arab brothers and consequently losing the Arab money. The Palestinians have been spitting in the face of the Arab countries, while at the same time expecting these countries to continue funding them.
The Arabs are clearly not as naïve as the Americans and Europeans, who are continuing to pour millions of dollars annually on the Palestinians without conditions and without demanding accountability.
Had the Palestinians welcomed the many peace accords between Israel and the Arab states instead of condemning them and bad-mouthing the Arab leaders, they would have been in a much better situation today. They would have continued to receive financial aid from the Arabs and been able to use this money to build a better future for their children.
The Palestinian leadership, however, chose to spit in the well it has drawn from for many years, and now it is drinking the bitter waters of its decisions.
The Arab countries have more urgent issues to deal with than the corrupt, thankless Palestinian leaders do. You can start with the welfare of their own people. The Palestinian leadership, by contrast, is happy to fail its people by indoctrinating generation after generation with bloodlust for Jews. When Palestinian society finds itself left in the global dust of progress, it can thank its leaders for bringing them to that sorry pass.
Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.
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I pretty much wrote Alan Dershowitz the same but not as eloquently. I warned him that his Cape Cod Vinyard Elites would eventually turn on him and invited him to come here and speak. He has Charleston relatives and I thought he would do that. He demurred.
An Open Letter to Alan Dershowitz
BY RABBI MICHAEL BARCLAY
Since you are both a legal and theological scholar, I am confident that you are familiar with the repeated phrase, “Justice, justice shall you pursue” (Deut. 16:20). Although I have often disagreed with your conclusions and the causes/people you have supported in your career, I have always held the highest respect for your integrity and pursuit of justice based upon your values.
You have recently been experiencing the vitriol of the left and cancel culture in your home of Martha’s Vineyard, and it is profoundly sad that you are being degraded by your local community members. But if we are honest, you should not be surprised by this development. As long as you were a champion for their causes, you were a celebrity. But you are now realizing what many of us “former Democrats” have sadly already experienced in recent years: the Democratic Party is currently controlled by an extremist faction that not only allows but encourages behavior that is disgusting and repulsive to any human being of ethics.
Also read: Alan Dershowitz and Norwegian Anti-Semitism
You have always presented your opinions with dignity and respect for your opposition: a quality that goes back to the roots of this nation. Our Jewish tradition is based on the respectful debates between the Talmudic sages two thousand years ago. Both our nation’s earlier leaders and the rabbis of old understood the importance of hearing divergent opinions in the search for deeper meanings and higher truths.
Nowhere have I seen respect for opponents more clearly than in your debate with Robert Kennedy regarding vaccinations. You both exemplified mutual respect, and this is the behavior of the leaders of this nation that both you and I grew up with.
But Professor Dershowitz, I implore you to embrace honest reflection. With a party that has leaders like Maxine Waters encouraging people to publicly attack all those who do not agree with her, are you really shocked that you are being treated so badly? With a speaker of the House, Democratic leaders, and even a president refusing to condemn the assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, are you honestly surprised that Larry David would scream at you during your lunch?
Professor, although I am now a rabbi who stands with other clergy fighting Governor Gavin Newsom, writes for conservative publications, and supports the freedom of choice of individuals, I was once a proud member of the Democratic Party and even worked on Jerry Brown’s 1990 presidential campaign. But at a certain point, I had to be honest and realize that the ethics of the Democrats had changed in a way that was antithetical to my core beliefs, and I allied myself with conservatives. I encourage you, Professor, to do the same for the benefit of your soul and this nation: reject the hate of the left and recognize that you may currently have more in common with the ethics and values of conservatism than you currently do with the left.
Consider, Professor, that within the conservative world, your differing opinions on social issues would be respected, if disagreed with. Through internal debate with other conservatives, you may be able to manifest the policies you believe in through dialogue much more effectively than fighting against the decayed values of the Democratic Party.
You have repeatedly demonstrated that you strive to express your values in your actions. I invite you to realize that you (and all those like you) can no longer attach yourself to a organizations, movements, or individuals who do not share any of your core values. And I encourage you to recognize that the healthiest thing for you (and any person) is to align yourself with people of shared values, even if they manifest those values in ways contrary to your own. Within a group based on shared values, you can effect the change you seek; without those common values, change will never occur.
My friend and teacher Rabbi Elijah Schochet is fond of saying that we can disagree without being disagreeable—a quality that you have always embodied but that the left now disdains. I remind you of the words of Rabbi Hillel, who said: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” Those who are persecuting you in Martha’s Vineyard are a reflection of the group that is really not “for you.” They can only be disagreeable and have rejected the wisdom of dialogue. And the time for you to be self-honest and make a change is, as always, now.
May you take these words to heart, and I look forward to being one of many who will embrace you and your opinions with respect.
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Van Brimmer would be well advised to keep his editorial commentary limited to sports. I am not a native of Savannah, my wife is. I have been a supporter and admirer of Justice Thomas ever since he fought malicious and scurrilous charges orchestrated by our current president who presided over the hearings of his nomination
Thomas is guilty of being a Conservative, independent of thought and has risen to be a power on SCOTUS. Therefore, an orchestrated effort has been created to accuse him of being an Uncle Tom. Any black like Sowell, Thomas, Steele etc. who think for themselves are a threat to the Democrat's hold on blacks because they have broken free and thus, can enjoy the independence freedom brings. What liberal hypocrisy. Keep the blacks down and beholden to Democrats who want to protect blacks from freedom. How disgusting.
Go Justice Thomas. You have one solid supporter in Savannah.
Since when has not asking questions become a "no no?" It is a pathetic and contrived accusation created in order to intimidate and attack Thomas. That his wife is also vocal is her God Given Constitutional right. Her real crime is that she is white and married to a brilliant black man. Democrat are such filthy hypocrites.
I thought they encouraged women to be free, to speak their minds, now these same radicals and progressives are about to destroy female sports while bringing the glass ceiling down in shards upon the entire domestic world of female sports
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And:
STAR'S CORNER
Why Are Blacks Still on Board With Biden?
By Star Parker
New polling from Pew Research and from NY Times/Siena College, released a few days apart, cast similarly dismal pictures regarding the popularity of President Joe Biden.
Overall approval for Biden from NY Times/Siena College stands at 33% and from Pew 37%.
However, both polls show approval for the president much stronger than the national average among minorities.
In a nation that is tearing itself apart over race, trying to speak honestly about the state of black America is a perilous task. Candor and thoughtfulness are often drowned by hysteria, expediency, and sentimentalism.
This week on CURE America with Star Parker, we’re joined by Dr. William B. Allen to discuss CURE’s recent publication, The State of Black America. We’re also rejoined by panel experts Jonathan Alexandre and Patrina Mosely to sort through the noise of the news in this week’s pressing headlines, and examine just how far we’ve witnessed a collapse in our culture.
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