Deal Approved By Israel's SCOI. Democrats Want Me To Vote For Their Candidate. Haley Strays? "Unwoke" Spring Cleaning.

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Deal approved by Israel's Supreme Court?

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Israeli Government Approves Deal: 4-Day Pause for 50 Hostages

JERUSALEM, Israel — The Israeli government approved a deal Tuesday night that will see the Palestinian Hamas terror group release at least 50 female, child, and elderly hostages over four days, in return for a pause in the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

In return, Israel will release a greater number of convicted Palestinians — though none who have been convicted of murder. Israel will resume the fight as soon as the hostages are delivered and the four-day period is over, as it works to destroy Hamas.

The Times of Israel reported:

Hamas has said it has 210 of the about 240 hostages taken from Israel during the October 7 atrocities. Islamic Jihad is said to be holding the remaining hostages.

According to the developing deal, Hamas will release at least 50 Israeli hostages, mainly women and children, in exchange for a ceasefire of four days, the release of between 150 and 300 Palestinian prisoners, and the entry of fuel and other goods into Gaza.

Some 12-13 hostages will be released per day as the ceasefire takes effect, the source says, adding that Israel will release women and minor prisoners, with each returning to the city or town where he lived prior to imprisonment, including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In a briefing to reporters Tuesday, Israeli negotiation adviser Moty Cristal said that Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, had likely already decided to die as a martyr when he launched the October 7 attack. That did not mean, however, that he would not use negotiations to achieve other goals in the interim.

Cristal emphasized that the main motivation for Israel in the war was freeing the hostages, even if the stated, equal policy goal was ending Hamas as a military threat in the Gaza Strip.

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Democrats want me to vote for them because:

1) They have not protected our borders.

2) They have done nothing to stop fentanyl flooding our nation.  

3)  The have done nothing to stop criminals entering our nation.

4)  The have not been aggressive in  protecting or troops from missile attacks.

5) They have done nothing to stop anti-Semitism and protect Jewish students.

6)  Their evacuation from Afghan was an unmitigated disaster.

7) Their management of the economy has also been disastrous.

8) Biden has dragged his feet in sending arms to Ukraine.

9) Biden has proven to be the leader I thought, ie. weak, wrong on most every decision.

10) Biden is corrupt and should be impeached.

11) They hate Trump and are doing everything in their power to prevent him from being a candidate for another presidential run.

12) They have allowed their party to be taken over by radical Islamists, have turned against Israel and many hate Jews.

13) Their party appeals to the worst elements in our nation and are in bed with communist empathizers.

14) They are fiscal "whores" and socially irresponsible.

15) Every city they govern  they have destroyed because they do not know what they are doing.

16) The are in bed with unions and oppose school choice.

17) They do not think in a logical manner.

18) Their abortion views are  sick.

19) They are fixated on color more than competence and are hypocrites.

20) Biden's Administration has done nothing to withdraw funds from Universities that have allowed anti-Semites to take over their campuses.

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I continue to support De Santis but will vote for Trump if he is nominated,  I continue to distrust Haley but unable to put my finger on why.

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Did Nikki Haley Just Tank Her Campaign by Threatening Free Speech?

Many have seen Nikki Haley as the presidential candidate to beat for the #2 position.
 

Recently, she attacked the First Amendment, and people are questioning whether she’s the candidate they thought she was.
 

-=-=-d out what she’s saying.

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Israel Policy Discussion feat. Shoshana Bryen - 12/17

This is a reminder to join Temple Sinai for a community event featuring Shoshana Bryen, Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center, on Sunday, December 17 at 4:00 PM.

The topic of Shoshana's discussion is "OCTOBER 7: THE DIVIDING LINE?" where she will be leading the conversation on issues of importance to the American Jewish community.

Mrs. Bryen is the Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly. A leading specialist in U.S. defense policy and Middle East affairs, she is the former Executive Director and Senior Director for Security Policy at JINSA. She has worked with the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and lectured at the National Defense University in Washington

RSVP is required. Please RSVP by responding to Lynne Schultz at atlrjc@gmail.com. Please include guest names.

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 IN the next chapet  of "Unwoke" Cruz discusses his own experience, as a guest commencement speaker at a California University, where the student body's cultural Marxists protested and the assistant dean made her own speech rather than address the raucus protester's behaviour.

Cruz used ugly protests against a Circuit Court Judge, at another university,  as a further example of methods embraced by leftist radicals to reject/intimidate speakers whose message conflicts with their own thinking and offends their delicate "sensibilities."

He ended the chapter on an upnote, It entailed a serious discussion he had with a student who "attacked" him for being racist because of questions he put to a Justice nominee.  He explained none of his questions were directed at the nominee but only at her decisions and his responsibility as a Senator etc. and then he contrasted his questioning with the behaviour of liberals.

Cruz is of the opinion the  sequence of past events are shifting but his book was written before Hamas attacked Israel and university campuses are now ablaze with anti-Semitic outbursts.  

The fist chapter I reviewed, in a previous memo, laid the foundational background for how Marxism has spread/broadened to encompass topics dealing with issues between America's bourgeois and proletariats. 

I listened today  how workers are seeking to unionize non-traditional companies (bank offices in this instance) and want to bring back pension plans as part of their compensation packages.

No doubt Biden's failed economic plans and the rise in inflation has brought havoc to family budgets.  Over 60% of American households are said to be  living hand to mouth.

And:

The Ivory Towers need a lot of shaking up and a lot of university boards,  administrators and presidents need to be fired.  It may not Spring Time but a Spring Cleaning is obviously overdue.

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Hamas’s Barbarity Heightens the Crisis in Higher Education

Jewish students bear the brunt of colleges’ culture of intolerance, conformity and ‘safe spaces.’

By Michael R. Bloomberg

The barbaric attack by Hamas against Israel—the intentional slaughter of defenseless civilians, including children and babies, and the taking of hostages—should have been a unifying moment for America. Shamefully, it has become something else: a wake-up call about a crisis in higher education.

It has been painful to watch students at elite colleges implicitly or explicitly endorse Hamas’s attack. They aren’t old enough to remember 9/11, and it’s clear they never learned its lesson: Intentionally targeting civilians for slaughter is inexcusable no matter the political circumstances.

For Americans, this isn’t a matter of defending Israel but of defending our nation’s most sacred values. One can support the Palestinian people and still denounce the intentional slaughter of civilians.

Why have so many students failed to do so? The answer begins where the buck stops—with college presidents. For years, they have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned “trigger warnings” that shield students from difficult ideas. They have refused to defend faculty who run afoul of student sentiment. And they have created “safe spaces” that discourage or exclude opposing views.

College presidents have also allowed campuses to become institutions of conformity. In a 2014 commencement speech at Harvard, I warned that many of America’s top colleges had become Soviet-like in their lack of viewpoint diversity. As I noted, 96% of donations from Ivy League faculty and staff in the 2012 presidential election went to Barack Obama, while only 4% went to another Harvard alumnus, Mitt Romney.

Over the past decade, this combination of campus conformity and intolerance has only gotten worse. It is no surprise that support for terrorism, dressed in the language of social justice, has emerged from this environment. The road to tyranny and genocide lies in refusing to countenance a challenge to one’s definition of justice and pursuit of it. That is precisely the culture universities have been coddling if not cultivating, and they are now reaping what they have sown.

When students haven’t been taught to engage in constructive argument and debate, they default to slogans and slurs. As this has happened, it’s fair for students to wonder why schools that issue trigger warnings for classic novels allow groups to scream for intifada.

Similarly, the public has wondered why some college presidents who were quick to condemn the murder of George Floyd were slow to condemn the murder of 1,200 Israeli citizens. Others might wonder why the presidents issued no statements on Sudan’s civil war or the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Instead of issuing statements on selective issues, college presidents should adopt the policy the University of Chicago has stuck to since 1967, when it declared: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Only a few other universities, including North Carolina and Vanderbilt, have adopted this policy.

I understand why some donors are angry with college presidents who failed to condemn Hamas, but the best response isn’t to demand that presidents issue more or stronger statements. We should demand that they stop making them altogether. Let students and faculty freely debate issues on their own, even when speech makes people uncomfortable.

To be clear, no student should ever feel physically intimidated or unsafe going to or speaking in class, as many Jewish students have lately. Students who wish to hurl epithets and reveal their bigotry should be able to do so, but they can’t throw rocks. They can chant slogans, exposing their inability to communicate in ways that college students should be capable of, but they can’t issue violent threats or disrupt others’ studies. Any student who runs afoul of those basic principles should be thrown out of school, and any outsider who does so should be removed from campus. That is the obligation college presidents owe matriculating students.

As part of addressing this crisis in higher education, presidents and deans should make a priority of hiring faculty with greater viewpoint diversity to teach students how to engage in civil discourse, while challenging and expanding their minds. Professors may resist, but administrators must make clear that such diversity is a requirement of academic freedom.

Trustees have a crucial role to play in holding presidents accountable for this work. Running a school and managing professors is difficult and complex, as administrators well know, but organizational complexity can’t be an excuse for faculty conformity.

The bigotry infecting campuses will spread until college presidents directly address its causes and their own role in fostering them. If not now—as students cheer the intentional slaughter of civilians—when?

Mr. Bloomberg is founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies. He served as mayor of New York, 2002-13.

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The Sat./Sun. (11/18-19) edition of the WSJ in "The Exchange Section" has an article about foreigners losing interest in buying U.S. Treasury Debt. China seeks to replace the dollar and this article has to be music to their ears.  Our deficit and rise in interest rates. resulting in the cost of funding our debt. cannot be dismissed as a minor signal that all is well and can be sustained.

Schumer and his spenders does not seem concerned and sees funding the government as a political football. China, along with it's aggressive moves, like it's various Silk Road Projects, can be likened to a torpedo.

Time will tell will our voracious appetite for incurring deficits will knock us off the hill.

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