Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Events Haunts. Soros Agenda.Civiization Inflection Point.BBC.

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The events of the last few days will come back to haunt us because our authority as a nation that rests upon the foundation of equality, the same standard of justice for all, has been smashed on the anvil of hypocrisy.  Like tooth paste, it is out of the tube never to be returned.

If that is not serious enough, the fact that a sitting president, who is potentially crooked, sought to have his opponent eliminated through trumped up legal maneuvers defies the mind.

Furthermore, that the mass media completely ignored this event  sends a message how far America has been corrupted .

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The Soros Agenda

'No person has done more to damage Israel’s standing in the world, especially among so-called progressives than Soros' -  

By Alan M. Dershowitz.

Who is George Soros? Why does the mere mention of his name provoke a torrent of pejorative comments including many expletives? Antisemites are accused of using his name to foster hatred against Jews in the same way they used to invoke the Rothschilds. Soros is an easy target not only because he is Jewish, but more importantly because of what he does to undermine the West and specifically the US, which he calls “the main obstacle to a stable and just world.”

Attempt to Transform America

To learn more about Soros’ plan to transform the US, I turned to Rachel Ehrenfeld’s latest work The Soros Agenda. (Rachel Ehrenfeld, The Soros Agenda, New York: Republic Book Publishers, 2023 ISBN: ‎978-1645720478). Ehrenfeld is the director of the American Center for Democracy and its Economic Warfare Institute, and an expert on terrorism and corruption, including terror financing, economic warfare, and narcoterrorism.

She exposes his strategy to advance radical causes by supporting Left-wing public figures, groups and politicians that have significantly increased the violence and sown discord and division in the country, while “weakening” the nation from within and reducing its prestige and influence throughout the world. By identifying his modus operandi and his “tenuous” direct and indirect links that effect domestic and international affairs, Ehrenfeld hopes to thwart them from implementing his “full-scale revolution.”

Soros’ objective is to liberate the US “from the restraints of constitutionalism, American exceptionalism, free-market capitalism, and other obsolete isms,” according to the late journalist Stefan Kanfer, whom Ehrenfeld quotes.

Through his myriad of nonprofit organizations and foundations, Soros and his family fund the elections of Democrat candidates on the local, state and presidential level and district attorney campaigns, providing him with enormous influence. The media documented his very significant support of the elections of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and others, although the amount of his direct and indirect contributions is by design not made available.

Soros has invested millions of dollars in the “defund the police,” movement, “social justice” projects and Left-wing grassroots organizations advocating for environmentalism, gun control, court-packing, legalizing drugs and abortion.

During an interview in 1994 with Steve Kroft on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Soros claims his character was formed during the German occupation of Hungary. When he was 14, Soros’ father bribed Baumbach, a Nazi Hungarian official at the Ministry of Agriculture, to hide his son in his home and introduce him as his godson. George accompanied Baumbach on his mission to identify Jewish property for confiscation. “I was only a spectator,” he said. “I had no role in taking away the property.” Yet, as Ehrenfeld noted, on that show “Soros failed to use the opportunity to convey his regret.”

Soros and the Jewish State of Israel

“I don’t deny the Jews right to a national existence,” Soros said, “but I don’t want to be part of it.” He argued that sometimes Jews have chosen “to identify with their oppressors,” and even “try to become like them.” He funds groups that deny the right of Israel to exist including Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab Leftist groups as well as anti-Israel media. He supports pro-Palestinian Arab groups that promote boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel (BDS), as well as pro-Palestinian Arab Jewish, Christian, and Muslim organizations in the US.

Several groups, Ehrenfeld said, “have links with the US -designated Palestinian terrorist groups and support the elections and appointments of anti-Israel proponents in the US government and international organizations.”

Gerald M. Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, adds that Soros supports organizations involved in international campaigns “to undermine the elected governments of Israel.”

In August 2016, after Barack Obama became president, Soros funded organizations that “began an ambitious project to persuade Europe and the US to hold Israel accountable for violations of international law.” From leaked documents, it was clear Soros did not want the information about his involvement made public.

To increase anti-Israel sentiment among Christians in the US, Soros funds fringe American evangelical Christians in order to “flip” them from being pro-Israel to being pro-Palestinian Arab. In Hijacked: How George Soros and Friends Exploit Your Church, John Aman, director of communications at D. James Kennedy Ministries, reveals that “for a decade, Soros has been giving six-figure grants to the Telos Group, which takes evangelical influencers on expense-paid tours to Israel and brings "Israeli and Palestinian leaders and activists" to speak in the US as part of a propaganda or cognitive war against Israel.”

“In plain terms,” Aman says, “that means cooling evangelical fervor for Israel.” As of 2021, “Telos has taken more than 110 groups to Israel, giving evangelical leaders a decidedly pro-Palestinian perspective.” There is no question support among younger evangelicals has been eroding for some time.

Ehrenfeld suggests the Soros’ assistance to the Palestinian Arabs “seemed to have influenced US Secretary of State [Antony] Blinken’s decision to drop the Trump administration’s demand that the PA stop paying salaries to terrorists for murdering Israelis as a condition for aid.”

She also comments that Tom Nides, Biden’s ambassador to Israel, candidly expresses his empathy for the Palestinian Arabs and openly castigates Israel. In a pro-BDS group webinar, he proclaimed “Your agenda is where my heart is.”

“No single person has done more to damage Israel’s standing in the world, especially among so-called progressives than George Soros,” asserts Alan M. Dershowitz in a Wall Street Journal article. “His financial support has multiplied the influence of the two major organizations that have done the most to shift the left-wing paradigm against Israel. One of them is Human Rights Watch…. The “organization’s one-sided reports were used to justify selective condemnation of Israel by the United Nations and its divisions. They were circulated on university campuses around the world.”

The other organization is J Street. Despite its claim to be a progressive pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian organization, J Street has done much to turn most progressive and some liberal Democrats—including members of Congress, academics and media figures—against Israel.”

A Final Note

“The idea that by criticizing George Soros, I am antisemitic, or I’m indicating antisemitic tendencies,” asserted David Friedman, former US Ambassador to Israel, “when George Soros is himself one of the great enemies of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, turns the world on its head. Just because he is nominally of the Jewish faith does not mean he gets a free pass on being criticized.”

One must be very careful in allowing George Soros, his son Alex or any other Jewish individuals associated with his nefarious operations to dismiss attacks against them as motivated by antisemitism. At the same time, indisputably antisemitic assaults levelled against them must not be tolerated.

Former U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey praised Rachel Ehrenfeld’s “skill and passion” for “presenting a damning indictment of a dangerous man,” an act for which she deserves our utmost appreciation.

Dr. Alex Grobmanis the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

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An inflection point for civilisation

Israel's uprising is more relevant to the west than most realise

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

Last weekend, I delivered a presentation at the Young Israel of North Beverly Hills synagogue in Los Angeles. Here’s what I said.

Talking to people since I’ve been here, it’s impossible not to be struck by a sense of deep alarm and perplexity. It’s hard to remember a time when the Jewish community — in Britain, too, and elsewhere — has been more anxious, with antisemitism at epidemic levels.

And it’s not just Jews who feel this way. So many feel the world is spinning out of control. Foreign affairs are terrifying: Putin and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, Iran which may already have passed the point of nuclear return. Worse still, America seems to have retreated from its role as the protector and guarantor of the free world. As a result, the enemies of civilisation are advancing.

At home, there are ever more grotesque and harmful developments in race and gender identity politics. There’s a climate of intimidation, bullying and the silencing of dissent. All of this has created a profound loss of moorings and disorientation.

For its part, Israel has been convulsed for the best part of six months with hundreds of thousands of protesters regularly on the streets demonstrating against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

What’s likely to happen there is anyone’s guess. It appears that Netanyahu is abandoning most of the judicial reform proposals — the ostensible cause of the unrest — but it remains to be seen if he can do this and keep his coalition together. 

However, the battle in Israel is more relevant to both the Jewish diaspora and the broader west and its current convulsions than might have been thought.

Several elements have contributed to Israel’s uprising.

There is concern over the impact of the judicial reforms. There’s a deep hatred of Netanyahu and the aim of bringing down his government. And there’s a fear of certain coalition ministers who are deemed to be extremists.

Three other factors, however, are providing the deeper impetus behind these volcanic passions. These factors have great relevance to both Jews and gentiles in the west.

There’s the terror by the educated, progressive classes of a loss of political power. There’s the profound hostility by that class to religion. And there’s the yearning by that class for Israel to be like every western country. These three things are all closely related to each other. 

Israel’s progressive elites — the lawyers, doctors, financiers, titans of high-tech, journalists, broadcasters, novelists —  think of themselves as western. That means they subscribe to the dominant mindset among their equivalents in Britain and America: socially liberal views on sexuality and gender, a belief in trans-national institutions like the UN, EU and international human rights law, and a corresponding disrespect for national representative democratic institutions.

As in Britain and America, these elite groups in Israel view with contempt the lower social classes who have socially conservative views — sometimes characterised as “faith, family and flag”. In America, someone once termed them the “deplorables”. In Britain, this division has been characterised by the writer David Goodhart as between the lower-class “somewheres”, for whom their nation and its particular culture are everything, and the upper-class “nowheres”, who view themselves as citizens of the world and whose values are deemed universal. 

In Israel, this division is sharpened by race and religion. The universalist elites are white-skinned, European-origin Ashkenazim; the people they disdain tend to be dark-skinned Mizrahim from Arab and other eastern countries, who have socially conservative views and also believe in the right of the Israelis to all the land, including the disputed territories. So while the Ashkenazi elites accuse the “deplorable” lower classes of racism, that charge is actually more applicable to the elites themselves.

The further crime committed by the Mizrahim — which puts them beyond the pale altogether in liberal eyes — is that they tend to be religiously observant. 

Israeli liberals are uncomfortably aware that they are steadily losing power to the Mizrahim and other religious conservatives, who are all growing in number. Liberals have lost political power through the ballot box, as the result of their persistent attachment to a “two-state solution” in which other Israelis long ago lost all confidence because of Palestinian Arab rejectionism. Yet liberals have been able to resist the conservatives’ agenda through the judges of the supreme court, who since 1993 have increasingly set themselves above laws passed by the Knesset in pursuit of supposedly higher universal ideals.

These liberals are now terrified that judicial reform will deprive them of that power. This fear has been brought to boiling point by the fact that Israel now has a governing coalition composed entirely of religiously observant ministers except for Netanyahu, who ironically — since he is reviled by hysterical liberals as a proto-fascist — is now seen as the liberal in the government. 

And it is religion that terrifies secular liberals above all. Their deepest desire, as they acknowledge, is to be just like other secular western countries. They want Israel, they say, to be a “normal” society.

Well, it’s true that living in Israel is utterly exhausting. But Israel isn’t like any other country.  Jews aren’t like any other people. 

The roots of this argument lie in the very beginnings of modern Israel. The pioneers then were divided over whether the new state was to represent the apotheosis of Jewish destiny going back to biblical times, or whether it would inaugurate the “New Jew” who would break with this ancient religious paradigm. It’s an argument that has never been resolved. The tension has always been there, although until now it was under the surface.

But if Israel is just like any other country, it loses its point. It is in fact a unique country for a unique people with a unique history. Judaism, after all, is a kind of three-legged stool comprising the people, the religion and the land. That doesn’t mean you have to be religiously observant or live in Israel to be a Jew. But knock out any one of those legs and the stool disintegrates. Without the connection to its historic culture, and the religion that is inextricably bound up with that culture, Israel would lose its identity and with that the point of its existence. 

The desire by Jews to be just like everyone else, however, is as old as the Jewish people itself. The seductive charms of societies that have hosted the Jewish people go back to Egypt and Babylonia, causing the loss of countless thousands of Jews through assimilation.

Moreover, the assumption that western liberalism is “normal” is now very far from the mark. There’s nothing “normal” about the west today, which in many respects has come off the cultural rails altogether.  

Identity “victim” politics of race and gender has fuelled “cancel culture”, bullying and intimidation, and a repudiation of reason altogether. The doctrine of “intersectionality,” which has at its core the antisemitic belief that the Jews can’t be an “intersectional” victim group because they run the world in their own interests and to the disadvantage of others, has led to rampant antisemitism and anti-Zionism. And women and even lesbians, once at the cutting edge of radical sexual politics, are finding their rights erased by the transgender madness as the revolution eats its own.

These dogma derive from a decades-long internal onslaught upon western civilisation — whose fundamental principles were drawn from the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that gave them expression in the west, and which have been replaced by ideologies of race and gender, radical individualism and moral and cultural relativism. 

These ideologies all deny objective truth and draw their authority instead from feelings, emotions and subjective experience. No hierarchy of values or cultures is permitted. No-one is allowed to say that the western nation or traditional lifestyles are better than any alternative. 

This revolutionary situation, which has had many components, dates back to the Holocaust. The attempted genocide of the Jews took place not in some backward part of the globe but at the very apex of high western culture. 

As a result, a profound demoralisation and loss of cultural self-belief set in among the west’s ruling elites. The resulting vacuum was filled by revolutionaries who seized their chance to re-make the world by destroying normative values and the very idea of the nation-state, replacing the particulars of western and national culture by universal values ushering in the supposed brotherhood of man. The nation-state was deemed to be inherently exclusive, bigoted and oppressive. National laws and cultural traditions therefore needed to be subordinated to supposedly universal principles. 

This was all not just anti-west but anti-Jew. Ancient Israel was the paradigm nation-state, and the moral values of the west are fundamentally Jewish values.

Identity politics and victim culture deny objective reality. Jews do objective truth.

Progressive universalism puts self-centred demands at centre of everything and calls them rights. Judaism puts duty and responsibility at the centre to create a community of shared, particular values.

Liberal dogma has a “year zero” approach to re-make the world in its image. Judaism exists through the transmission of culture and the sacralisation of memory. 

In short, the anti-west onslaught is an attack on biblical religion. Jews are always in the way of universalising ideologies. So it’s not surprising to find the Jews in the cross-hairs of today’s cultural firing-squads, with antisemitism enmeshed with progressive politics and now rampant across the west.

This is why so-called human rights law has been weaponised against Israel through NGOs and the UN. It’s why Israel’s massive protests are being backed and funded by the New Israel Fund and the Movement for Quality of Government in Israel, which undermine Israel at every turn and oppose Jewish particularism and national identity. 

The majority of Israeli protesters may not think this is what they’re saying, but it’s what they are all actually endorsing. 

Few may realise it, but Judaism is central to the fight for the west. But too many Jews are on the wrong side in this great battle. 

The majority of American Jews, who belong to progressive denominations, have embraced identity politics. This is particularly disastrous, since these Jews have persuaded themselves that these anti-Jewish dogmas are Jewish values. 

In Britain, many Jews have gone back to supporting the Labour party. Following the catastrophe of its previous hard-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, under whom antisemitism exploded among its members, its current leader, Sir Keir Starmer, is attempting to position it as a centrist party. Nevertheless, Labour members still overwhelmingly subscribe to identity politics, disdain for the nation and hostility to Israel — the default narrative of “progressive” politics throughout the west.

In the diaspora, assimilation is currently happening at a rate of knots; but the Jewish community doesn’t seem to notice or care. The ever-expanding orthodox aren’t bothered because this isn’t their own problem. Progressives aren’t bothered because they are the problem.

Yet scratch below the surface, not just among Jews but among the wider community, and you find a hunger for a different set of messages. Among the young in particular, there are huge levels of mental illness and psychological distress such as depression, eating disorders and suicidal tendencies. 

Young people are, as ever, desperate for causes through which they can express their idealism. But the causes to which they have signed up — transgender activism, climate change, anti “white privilege” —  either offer wholly unrealisable individual goals or are predicated on a sense of hopelessness, anger and despair. 

People want hope and purpose; but instead they have been given disempowerment. We are constantly told we are all helpless victims of circumstance, whether it be economic, political, racial or sexual. 

This sense of being the helpless victims of fate is what the ancient Greeks believed — and their civilisation died. The Jews, by contrast, gave themselves moral agency, or the belief that their behaviour mattered and that they could thus affect their own destiny and the circumstances of others — and the Jews survived. With increasing assimilation to victim culture, however, the Jews are now themselves placing that invaluable moral agency at risk.

The crisis in the west is a moment that calls for moral and spiritual leadership. The Jews are well placed to provide it — but they are currently too timid to do so, or themselves support anti-biblical discourse, or are preoccupied with fighting each other. With the right leadership, however, the Jews have an important role to play. This is why.

The assimilationist young think that Judaism has nothing to do with what they most care about. They need to be shown that it has everything to do with what they most care about. 

Among western liberals, disdain for religion is widespread. In one box, labelled modernity, are supposedly all the good things that we value: reason and intelligence, progress, science, justice, compassion, freedom. In the other box, labelled religion, are supposedly only bad things: irrationality and obscurantism, superstition, authoritarianism, brutality, enslavement, repression. 

Secular people tend to claim that all the things that are good about the world emerged from repudiating religion.  Or else that they were invented by the Greeks. Or else that we’re all somehow born with innate noble instincts and that religion beats them out of us.

In fact, the values most cherished by secular people as the building blocks of a civilised society were created by the ancient Israelites.

Compassion, fairness, looking after the poor and putting others first were all introduced to the world by the Hebrew Bible. This produced the then-revolutionary idea that every individual was worthy of equal respect. 

It was also crucial to science, progress and modernity. It was the Hebrew Bible which stopped us from going round and round in circles for ever, and instead gave us the idea of linear time and therefore progress.

Western science grew from the idea that the universe was rational and that there were comprehensible laws in nature. That belief was given to us by the book of Genesis, which set out the — once again revolutionary — proposition that the universe had a rational creator.

Judaism also helped create the political structure of western modernity, whose hallmarks have been justice, the rule of law and the consent of the people. The Mosaic laws were not enforced by despotic authority but were voluntarily adopted through individual self-discipline. This gave the world the concept of individual accountability, equality and the rule of law.

It also gave rise to the idea of limited government. The Hebrew Bible held that no earthly ruler could enjoy ultimate sovereignty. That belonged to God alone. The people chose a king and appointed judges, placing limitations on the king’s power. In other societies, the land was owned by palaces or temples; by contrast, the Torah gave an entire land to the people. It introduced egalitarian measures that were hitherto unknown: for example, the novel notion of a working week and a day of rest that instituted a relief from labour for all.

In short, the Jews have a great story to tell. But we don’t seem to want to tell it even to ourselves. We place far too much emphasis on the negative, on the dead Jews murdered in the Holocaust; or on the relatively remote in the State of Israel, where few American or British Jews actually want to go and live. Of course we should teach our young people about both the Holocaust and the State of Israel. But neither can provide an identity for the majority of diaspora Jews.

We should be teaching our children Jewish history and values and to have pride in being a people and a nation. That means having pride in being different and distinctive — and not being “like everyone else”. 

The divisions within the Jewish world are intimately linked to the crisis in the west. If the west plunges off the edge of the cultural cliff towards which it is sliding, diaspora Jews will go with it. If the west pulls back from that cliff-edge, diaspora Jews will pull back too. 

The desire by Israel’s elites to join that western slide is ignorant and self-destructive. Israel’s current internal ructions are not only of great significance for that country. They also stand proxy for the seismic battle in the west: between those defending the biblical values of its civilisation and the secular forces determined to destroy them.

We should be in no doubt that we are not just fighting to establish the truth about Israel and push antisemitism back underneath its stone. We need to fight to rescue the Jewish people from themselves — and to rescue a western world that has simply lost its collective mind and has a hole in its heart. 

The opportunity is there. We just have to seize it.

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Carrying on its long tradition of unfairly attacking Israel, Amnesty International has published another hatchet job masquerading as a serious investigation this week.

The report accuses Israel of committing a war crime in its pursuit of Islamic Jihad terrorists in the Gaza Strip last month.

Given that Amnesty so clearly has an anti-Israel axe to grind, one would think that reputable news organizations, like the BBC, which prides itself on its commitment to impartiality, would take anything published on the Amnesty website with a pinch of salt.

Alas, not so.

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