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Democrats say Biden’s pause on LNG is like “throwing a match in a bail of hay”
A robust chorus of congressional Democrats, business leaders, and Republicans, as well as international allies, are calling on President Joe Biden to undo the pause he placed on liquefied natural gas exports. Almost in unison, they say his decision actually undermines his climate agenda, jeopardizes national security, empowers Russia and Iran, and creates a schism with allies who depend on this clean energy from the U.S. to fuel their countries.
Longtime Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who retired last year, admitted in a post on X that the halt was “a major political issue that the D’s have just put themselves squarely on the wrong side” and would hurt his party’s ability to win seats in the Great Lakes Midwest.
He wasn’t the only Democrat complaining. Pennsylvania Sens. John Fetterman and Bob Casey Jr., the latter of whom is up for reelection this year, said in a joint statement to the Washington Examiner that as senators’ who represent the second largest natural gas-producing state, they were going to push Biden to undo his decision.
A robust chorus of congressional Democrats, business leaders, and Republicans, as well as international allies, are calling on President Joe Biden to undo the pause he placed on liquefied natural gas exports. Almost in unison, they say his decision actually undermines his climate agenda, jeopardizes national security, empowers Russia and Iran, and creates a schism with allies who depend on this clean energy from the U.S. to fuel their countries.
Longtime Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who retired last year, admitted in a post on X that the halt was “a major political issue that the D’s have just put themselves squarely on the wrong side” and would hurt his party’s ability to win seats in the Great Lakes Midwest.
He wasn’t the only Democrat complaining. Pennsylvania Sens. John Fetterman and Bob Casey Jr., the latter of whom is up for reelection this year, said in a joint statement to the Washington Examiner that as senators’ who represent the second largest natural gas-producing state, they were going to push Biden to undo his decision.
full story here: https://www.
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Just a little more professorial hatred on Penn's Campus.
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Penn Lecturer Is Behind Grotesque Anti-Semitic Cartoons
Dwayne Booth in one sketch drew Nazi flag with Star of David shown in place of swastika
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Do not all nations have a right to establish a formal military?
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Rumored plan to create Palestinian state sets up fresh showdown between Biden and Republicans in Congress
By Adam Kredo
Reports that the Biden administration is considering recognizing a Palestinian state—upending decades of U.S. policy—are generating intense criticism from Republican lawmakers who say the timing of these leaks marks a stunning betrayal of Israel as it fights to eradicate Hamas terrorists.
“As Joe Biden signals that the clock on his support for Israel is running out—a White House endorsement of a two-state solution would be the worst betrayal of our strongest ally in the Middle East, a reversal on decades-long U.S. policy, and a reward to Hamas terrorists who committed the most barbaric attacks against the Jewish community since the Holocaust,” Rep. Tom Emmer (R., Minn.), the House majority whip, told the Washington Free Beacon, echoing comments from other GOP offices.
“I will personally use every ounce of leverage at my disposal to ensure the Biden administration does not go through with this absurd idea,” Emmer told the Free Beacon, hinting at a looming showdown between the White House and pro-Israel leaders in Congress.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly asked U.S. diplomats to “conduct a review and present policy options on possible U.S. and international recognition of a Palestinian state,” according to Axios. The policy shift threatens to upend decades of U.S. policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which successive American administrations have said needs to be settled between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. A unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, long thought impossible, is certain to complicate relations between the United States and Israel at a time when the Jewish state is fighting for its survival against the Iran-backed terror group Hamas.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the creation of a Palestinian state would implant “an enclave for global terrorism” in Israel’s backyard, setting the stage for future conflicts with Israel.
“A Palestinian state would not only be an enclave for global terrorism and an existential threat to Israel, it would legitimize the aims of the attack on October 7, effectively rewarding Hamas,” Cotton told the Free Beacon. “It’s clear the Biden administration simply wants to appease the pro-Hamas wing of the Democratic Party. It’s shameful this is even a topic of discussion.”
The Biden administration has been under pressure from the Democratic Party’s left wing to push for a ceasefire that would end the nearly four-month-long conflict. Anti-Israel lawmakers like Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) have also floated proposals to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel and end military aid to the Jewish state.
Intra-party tensions over the ongoing war, as well as immense pressure from left-wing outside advocacy groups, are already threatening to erode liberal support for President Joe Biden as he winds up his 2024 reelection campaign.
The State Department, responding to reports, said there is currently no change in U.S. policy and declined to comment further when reached by the Free Beacon.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said during Wednesday’s press briefing that “there has been no policy shift in the administration,” but that the United States is “actively pursuing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state” and examining a range of proposals to achieve that goal.
“I’m not going to comment on the internal work that we do to advance that objective but I would say there are any number of ways you could go about accomplishing that,” Miller said. “We look at a wide range of options and discuss those with partners in the region.”
The White House does not appear to be eyeing the unilateral creation of a Palestinian state, with a spokesman for the National Security Council telling the Free Beacon: “It has been long standing U.S. policy that any recognition of a Palestinian state must come through direct negotiations between the parties rather than through unilateral recognition at the [United Nations]. That policy has not changed.”
The Axios report claims “the Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy.” The Biden administration has been hinting for months, even before Hamas attacked Israel, that a peace deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be tied to concrete movement on a two-state solution.
Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the rumored plan would further destabilize the Middle East as Iran and its terrorist proxies mount increasingly deadly strikes against America, Israel, and other Western allies.
“Joe Biden enriched Iran and Hamas terrorists with sanctions relief which they used to murder a thousand innocent Israelis, and now he wants to reward those terrorists with diplomatic recognition,” Banks told the Free Beacon. “He’s destabilizing the region. It’s dangerous for Israel and embarrassing for America.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the latest report indicates the Biden administration is trying “to appeal to the pro-Hamas progressives who control the Democrat Party.”
“I can only assume that this is a deliberately misleading story designed to appeal to the pro-Hamas progressives who control the Democrat Party,” Cruz told the Free Beacon. “That said, if Secretary Blinken and President Biden looked at the atrocities of October 7 and said, ‘You know what this means? We should declare there’s a Palestinian state,’ then they’re even more pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel than anyone suspected.”
This article was originally published in the Free Beacon and can be viewed here.
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Cease fire upon Israel but ot one for Chicago? More black stupidity?
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Chicago Votes for Hamas
Mayor Brandon Johnson supports a cease-fire . . . in Gaza, not Chicago.
The Council resolution calls for a “permanent ceasefire to end the ongoing violence in Gaza . . . for humanitarian assistance including medicine, food and water, to be sent into the impacted region; and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
In a statement last week, Mr. Johnson said he supports a cease-fire in Gaza because “the killing has to stop” and because he “want(s) to save lives.” He cited numbers from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry that the war has killed some 25,000 Palestinians.
The resolution created a flag-waving ruckus in Chicago City Hall Tuesday but has zero effect on Israel or Hamas. Its more proximate effect is to endear Mr. Johnson to the left and put Chicago in the same category as cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Atlanta and Detroit that have also aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause.
In the Windy City, the resolution was helped along by the Chicago Public Schools system, which offered students grace time to join Tuesday walk-outs supporting the cease-fire. Mr. Johnson said he was “incredibly proud” of students for “exercising their constitutional rights” and “speak(ing) up for righteousness.”
We hope those students got home safely from the walk-outs. Chicago had 617 murders in 2023, and its murder rate is five times that of New York City. On some weekends in the warmer months, dozens of people are killed by gunshots or stabbings. Two high school students were killed in the Loop last week in the early afternoon.
Amid national notice of this mayhem last summer, Mr. Johnson said critics had to live in Chicago before they had the right to criticize. Israel might ask the same of Mr. Johnson.
And:
How intersectional myths killed the black-Jewish alliance
Black pastors are pressuring President Joe Biden to save Hamas because they identify with “oppressed” Palestinians who launched a genocidal war, not a drive for civil rights.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
For the 1,000 black pastors who have joined a movement to pressure President Joe Biden to force a ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas, the issue is solidarity with the “oppressed.” This can be seen as part of a general revolt within the activist base of the Democratic Party against the administration’s policy in the Middle East. Much like the petitions signed by lower-level officials throughout the government, Democratic congressional staffers and even the president’s campaign staff. But as reports in The New York Times, NPR and other publications have made clear, the opposition of black churches, which have long been key to get-out-the-vote campaigns to elect Democrats, to Biden on an issue they say “isn’t marginal” poses a potentially lethal threat to his hopes for re-election.
But the key question to be asked about this effort is not so much about its political impact, significant though it may be. It’s why so many African-Americans, especially church leaders who have real influence among their congregants as well as the general black community, could come to believe that the cause of the Palestinians is somehow linked to their own interests and beliefs.
The answer to this puzzle is clear. Intersectional myths in which the Palestinian war to destroy the one Jewish state on the planet is somehow analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States are no longer merely a talking point of academic fashion. These toxic ideas have now been embraced by the African-American community. The teaching of critical race theory and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) divides the world into two immutable groups locked in a never-ending struggle: white oppressors and people of color, who are always the victims. Black pastors have swallowed the neo-Marxist lies that Jews are “white” oppressors and that Palestinian Arabs are victimized people of color—and are sharing that with their congregants.
Racial myths about the Middle East
That the conflict in the Middle East isn’t about race—Jews and Arabs are the same ethnicity—and that about half of Israeli Jews are themselves people of color because they trace their origins to the Middle East and North Africa, is left out of the discussion about American blacks’ opposition to Israel. They seem equally ignorant or disinterested in the Palestinians’ consistent rejection of every compromise offer, including those that would have granted them independence and statehood provided they were willing to live peacefully alongside a Jewish state. That a ceasefire existed before Oct. 7 and that Gaza hadn’t been occupied since 2005—or that Jews are the indigenous people in the place Americans call “the holy land”—is also omitted from these discussions.
The facts about the Palestinian Arabs’ century-long war against Zionism don’t matter if you believe that any struggle can be reduced to an intersectional equation of good people of color versus evil whites, with the “whites” always in the wrong no matter what either group does.
The language used by pastors in describing their campaign to bludgeon Biden, who knows all too well that he only won his party’s presidential nomination in 2020 and then the general election that year because of black support, is not so much a reflection of political calculations as an attempt to frame their stand as an extension of civil-rights advocacy.
Barbara Williams-Skinner of the National African American Clergy Network, a group that claims to represent 15 million black churchgoers, told the Times that “black clergy have seen war, militarism, poverty and racism all connected.” But she said that anger directed at Israel exceeded any protests heard from her members about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. She asserted that the images of Palestinians set off the sort of, “deep-seated angst among black people that I have not seen since the civil-rights movement.”
This was echoed by another pastor quoted in the Times, “We see them as a part of us,” said the Rev. Cynthia Hale, the founder and senior pastor of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Ga. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”
Missing from these statements is any sense of context about the war. Also left out of the equation is what it is the “oppressed” Palestinians want, as well as how they are going about trying to obtain their objectives and whether that has anything in common with the objectives of the civil-rights movement. Indeed, the narrative of solidarity with the cause of the Palestinians has erased Israel, the rights of Israelis, their suffering or their efforts to ensure that the atrocities of Oct. 7 never be repeated. It also should extinguish the last vestiges of support for something that many once took for granted: the alliance between African-Americans and Jews.
Erasing anti-Semitism
When pressed for any acknowledgment of how the current war started or about Israel, the pastors say that they are against terrorism and in favor of the release of the estimated 136 Israelis who continue to be held hostage in Gaza by Hamas. And they disclaim any connection with antisemitism. But the disconnect is not on the side of Jews who are wondering how a group that they had resolutely supported has effectively abandoned them.
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogroms against communities in southern Israel, there has been an unprecedented surge of antisemitism in the United States. This shocking increase in open Jew-hatred on the streets of American cities and college campuses, as well as in commentary in many mainstream outlets like the Times, is directly tied to efforts to demonize Israel and to treat its citizens and its American Jewish supporters as fair game for terrorism. Yet the very people that liberal Jewish groups have always worked closely with—black spiritual leaders—are so obsessed with their alleged common ground with Palestinians that they are completely ignoring the way their former friends are besieged by anti-Semitic incidents and hate speech.
This is a shocking turnabout, especially when you consider how loyally legacy Jewish groups have stuck with the African-American community even as the evidence that the relationship wasn’t reciprocally mounted. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee have endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement in spite of the fact that it was connected to and led by Jew-haters. They also remain determined to support DEI policies despite the way they provide a permission slip for antisemitism—something that has become obvious since Oct. 7 as colleges and universities failed to protect their Jewish students from the hate directed at them by anti-Israel mobs.
The truth about the Palestinians
The images that have pervaded the media about Palestinian suffering can explain some of the sympathy for their cause, but only if you don’t consider why that suffering occurred or the practical alternatives.
The population of Gaza has suffered terribly as a result of a war they started on Oct. 7 with an orgy of mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping that they initially cheered as a great “victory.” Having sown the wind with terrorism, they then reaped the whirlwind as Israeli forces began a systematic attempt to root out Hamas terrorists from their Gaza strongholds. The devastation has been great as Hamas had dug itself into the Strip building a tunnel network underneath homes, mosques, schools and hospitals. Gazans didn’t protest when billions in international aid money was diverted from humanitarian projects to turn the area into a subterranean fortress where terrorists can hide behind the civilians they deliberately expose to harm.
The notion that Israel has no right to attack Gaza after Oct. 7 is a novel theory of war. If terrorists are now granted the right to use populations as human shields while fighting a war—Hamas has shot more than 15,000 rockets and missiles at Israeli civilian targets since Oct. 7—then murderers will, in essence, be granted immunity for even the most barbaric crimes. And if a ceasefire is imposed on Israel before Hamas is eradicated, that’s what will happen.
At no point do black civil-rights activists who believe the Palestinian cause is no different from theirs acknowledge why Hamas started the fighting on Oct. 7. The terrorist organization based in the Gaza Strip is explicit about the fact that it aims to destroy Israel and slaughter its people. Contrary to some of Biden’s disingenuous statements about the issue, voting and polls have consistently shown that Hamas and its genocidal platform are widely supported by Palestinians.
This suffering for the Palestinians began when Hamas launched its murderous attacks on Israel. It could have been ended at any point by Hamas’s surrender and the freeing of all hostages. But Hamas and its allies don’t care about Palestinian suffering. On the contrary, they wish to maximize it in order to garner more foreign sympathy. Black pastors claim to oppose the “occupation” without understanding that to the Palestinians, that term refers to any land that Israel controls. These clergy leaders may claim to oppose everything Hamas stands for, and yet they support it because they have accepted the lie that the Jews are intrinsically evil by seeking to defend their homes and families.
How does that differ from the American civil-rights movement? African-Americans fighting against Jim Crow laws didn’t seek to kill whites or establish a principle that blacks must rule as the Islamists of Hamas do about Muslims. They wanted equal rights and an end to legal segregation. The goal of Martin Luther King Jr. was coexistence and a society where his children would be judged by “the content of the character rather than the color of their skin.”
Morally bankrupt pastors
It is only in the upside-down world of intersectionality and critical race theory that turns hope on its head that the American black community, which claims to be a champion of civil rights, would consider a cause rooted in genocidal intent and intolerance of any notion of coexistence with other faith or ethnic groups as seeing themselves in the actions and fate of the Palestinians.
Shockingly, people like the black pastors, who pretend to have moral authority would identify with a cause that would benefit the killers of Hamas. It’s equally astonishing that they stand with the mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel (“from the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“globalize the intifada”), rather than with their former Jewish allies as they suffer from prejudice and violence. But in this brave new intersectional world, that is what passes for civil-rights advocacy in the black community.
This is all the more disturbing when throughout the world, atrocities are being carried out against black Africans in countries like Nigeria, Mauritania or Sudan by Islamist forces, including mass killings, rape and even a modern-day version of slavery. Why aren’t these atrocities being spoken about by pastors to their congregations? Having accepted intersectionality, they are now prepared to ignore crimes committed against people with whom they ought to have a natural affinity—black Africans—because the perpetrators are Muslim or Arabs, while claiming to see Palestinians who want to slaughter Israelis as worthy not just of sympathy but the expenditure of their political capital.
It is long past time for the Jewish groups that have slavishly stuck to the pretense that these pastors and the organizations that they represent are allies to stop putting their heads in the sand. Those who enable antisemitism and wish to assist those who slaughter Jews are enemies, not friends. When it comes to support for Hamas and indifference to anti-Semitism, there is no middle ground. Black pastors who seek to demonize Israel and are silent about the Jew-hatred that is inherent in their intersectional stands embracing the cause of Israel’s destruction should be under no illusions about the choice they’ve made. For all of their high-flown rhetoric about compassion and the oppressed, these pastors are morally bankrupt. And American Jews who have long stood by their side in the struggle for civil rights should bluntly tell them that they are finished with such anti-Semites dressed in clerical garb.
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How ‘Our Democracy’ Became Undemocratic
The word used to signify elections and self-rule. Now it means whatever progressives want.
By
Barton SwaimThere are a lot of loose, baggy terms in American political discourse: “populism,” “liberalism,” “evangelical.” These words, applied with care, still have their uses. I’m not convinced the same is true of “democracy.” Maybe it’s still a noble word in some sense, but its repeated abuse over many decades has made it useless.
A democracy, when I was taught civics in the 1980s, was distinguishable from a republic. In a strict democracy, every citizen is asked to vote on every important public question. Should we raise taxes? Should we go to war with Carthage? Plebiscites on everything being impractical, the ancients invented republics, in which you vote for the people who make these decisions.
Asked what the Founders had accomplished at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin didn’t say “a democracy—if you can keep it.” Most of the Founders equated democracy with mob rule and wanted to avoid it. For a few, notably Thomas Jefferson, the word connoted self-government and decentralization of power. Andrew Jackson and his followers used it that way. Abraham Lincoln, who didn’t often use the word, treated democracy as a positive term signifying equality and self-rule.
With the rise of Progressivism at the turn of the 20th century, however, “democracy” took on meanings that had little to do with voting, elections, majorities and procedural freedoms. The activist and philosopher Jane Addams, in “Democracy and Social Ethics” (1902), defined democracy “not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all men, nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all men, but as that which affords a rule of living as well as a test of faith.” In “Democracy and Education” (1916), the theorist John Dewey observed that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.”
These and many similar claims suggest that for early-20th-century Progressives “democracy” meant more or less whatever political aims Progressives thought good and desirable.
Elsewhere in the world, the word “democratic” began attaching itself to distinctly undemocratic regimes and organizations. The Bolsheviks in Russia emerged from the Social Democratic Labor Party. Postwar Romania, in which dissent was outlawed, was run by the People’s Democratic Front. In the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, known in the West as North Vietnam, a favorable opinion of America or a desire to emigrate could get you and your family “re-educated” or murdered. In America, Students for a Democratic Society stood for an array of left-wing causes, but the right of people to vote against those causes didn’t compute. In the minds of SDS’s founders, its causes were democracy.
Plainly “democratic” was doing the work of legitimation. A democratic party or front or republic meant something everyone could favor, even if it might disappear its opponents from time to time. The term “democratic socialism,” widely used in Europe and North America since the middle of the last century, was meant to signify the sort of socialism that people voted for. It wasn’t imposed on an unwilling people, as in Soviet Russia, but embraced willingly.
The idealization of democracy took a break after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. Democracy, or “liberal democracy,” had won, and it was no longer necessary to defend it. That term “liberal democracy” denoted a loose collection of ideals including the rule of law, checks on government, personal autonomy, and a welfare state paid for by a robust market economy. You had the sense, though, in the ’90s and early 2000s, that the term’s most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy—a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.
Democracy as an ideal roared back with Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Suddenly it was being attacked. “Democracy dies in darkness” became the Washington Post’s official slogan (the Post meant this as a warning, though a skeptical observer might ask if it was an aspiration). Commentators worried that democracy was imperiled, menaced, on the verge of demise. Innumerable books and essays theorized about “threats” to and “assaults” on democracy.
By now the term was a jumble. Commentators and politicos who worried that democracy was under threat seemed to hold the Deweyan view that democracy wasn’t so much a form of government as a means of expanding novel individual rights and generating other allegedly benign policy ends. At the same time they embraced an aggressive majoritarianism, demanding an end to the Electoral College and the filibuster and threatening to add states to the union and justices to the Supreme Court to achieve their goals.
The word has only grown looser and baggier in recent years. In Israel, we were told in 2023, the Netanyahu government was assaulting democracy by attempting to curtail the Supreme Court’s power arbitrarily to strike down laws passed by democratic majorities. In the U.S., the 2024 election will be, according to President Biden, about “democracy.” In a speech commemorating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Valley Forge, Pa., Mr. Biden explained what he meant by the word.
“Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind,” he said, “to be who you are, to be who you want to be. Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change. Democracy—democracy is how we’ve opened the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, notwithstanding our mistakes.”
For Mr. Biden and his sympathetic listeners, democracy means things that are good and not things that are bad.
The word “democracy” doesn’t appear in the Gettysburg Address, but that document contains the finest definition of the term, taking it in its general sense, ever enunciated. Lincoln expressed the hope “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Democracy, if it’s to mean anything, has to include all three of these components.
Government “of” the people: The people own the government and, acting collectively and according to rules, may shake it up and change its policies when they wish. Government “by” the people: Ordinary citizens staff it and guide its decisions. Government “for” the people: Its policies are meant to benefit the citizenry as a whole.
The trouble with progressive thought—both in the early-20th-century and the 21st-century senses of that term—and with the way progressives speak of “democracy,” is that they ignore the first two parts of Lincoln’s formulation and care only about the third. Government, in the progressive view, ought to benefit the people. But it has to resist their crazy impulses, and it’s necessarily composed of credentialed experts empowered to overrule the people when they act against their own interests.
Maybe the 2024 election is about democracy. If it is, it’s about nothing.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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