Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association last week by the organization’s members. She will take office in July 2023.
And:
We just keep at shooting ourselves in our feet:
Biden offered Iran an olive branch but it isn't working - opinion
The only viable approach is not half-hearted but a full-court press of restrictive economic measures against the Islamic Republic’s rulers. We must ask ourselves, do these sanctions work?
Iranian commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Hossein Salami, second from right, and Iran's Chief of General Staff Major General Mohammad Bagheri, third from left, attend the graduation ceremony of Imam Hussein Military University in Tehran, Oct. 3, 2021. (photo credit: Iranian Leader Press Office/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For four decades, the US State Department has called the Islamic Republic of Iran the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism.” For 40 years, US officials claimed that Iran had continued funding, providing weapons, training terrorists, and giving sanctuary to several terrorist groups. Since its inception, the Islamic Republic has existed in an environment of conflict, isolation, and sanctions.
Iran has a nuclear program that is not, despite its claims, for peaceful purposes. The country kept its nuclear program secret for several years. Its leaders intend to prolong the program’s existence only long enough to get their hands on the bomb so they can feel invincible and continue their control over the unarmed Iranian people and ultimately export their Islamic revolution and terrorism around the globe.
Since 1987, the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union, among others, have levied significant economic sanctions on Iran. The goal of these sanctions is to force Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment and allow unfettered supervision of its nuclear operations.
During the previous administration, the US used maximum pressure on the Iranian regime. Through economic sanctions, the US was pursuing an extreme pressure campaign to compel Iran’s regime to permanently scrap its nuclear weapons ambitions and halt its terrorist financing. Meanwhile, US allies in the European Union have ignored US sanctions and responded to them by calling on countries to disregard threats from Washington.
Hence, US President Joe Biden's recent appeasement move (déjà vu) to restore sanctions waivers to Iran, as indirect American-Iranian talks on revitalizing the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran enter the ultimate stretch, is nothing new.
“The Obama Administration finally admitted something its critics had long suspected,” John Hayward, Breitbart’s national security deputy editor wrote in September 2016. “The entire $1.7 billion tribute paid to Iran was tendered in cash – not just the initial $400 million infamously shipped to the Iranians in a cargo plane – at the same moment four American hostages were released.”
Recently, Iran’s parliament has demanded that the US remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from its Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list, as one of the required measures to renew the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal. In 2019, then-US President Donald Trump’s administration put the IRGC on the FTO list, saying that Iran is “an outlaw regime that uses terrorism as a key tool of statecraft.” The Biden Administration, dealing from a position of weakness, is considering the removal of the group, just as the Obama Administration delisted the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Mujahedin-e Khalq) on Sept. 28, 2012.
Iran’s mullahs only understand the language of strength. They will take advantage of any perceived weakness and will assault if they feel retreat.
The US administration’s double-standard vis-Ã -vis Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran is shocking. While the US calls Vladimir Putin a war criminal for committing genocide in Ukraine and imposes massive sanctions on Russia’s economy, it allows Russia to negotiate on its behalf over Iran’s nuclear program. Iran was dishonest about the old deal from the very start and used its profits to destabilize the Middle East. That is exactly what it will do again, thanks to the new worst deal in history, brokered by Russia at the Biden Administration’s behest.
When dealing with the mullahs ruling Iran, what you see is not what you get, and what you hear is not what they mean. Transparency and honesty are not their strong suit.
The best predictor of future behavior is past performance. The religiously fanatical mullahs’ record is one of deception, dissimulation, treachery, violence, and more. They have perfected the art of deception.
The only viable approach is not half-hearted but a full-court press of restrictive economic measures against the Islamic Republic’s rulers. Unfortunately, it would make the Iranian people, particularly those outside the ruling apparatus, suffer hugely. But Iran’s people are willing to suffer a temporary hurt of this nature to get rid of the scourge that is the Islamic Republic.
We must ask ourselves, do these sanctions work? If sanctions must be pursued, then selective sanctions are the best method for preventing nuclear proliferation. The goal of sanctions is not to inflict pain and suffering but to affect a change in the policy or behavior of the target state.
The best strategy – the one that stands the greatest chance of success and entails the least risk of starting a cataclysmic chain reaction – is for a "coalition of the willing," to borrow a phrase, to rally behind the Iranian opposition. Democracy-seeking secular Iranians are thoroughly capable of dislodging the tyrannical mullahs.
The misguided advocates of negotiation with the mullahs must beware. The mullahs are on a fanatical mission. They are intoxicated with petrodollars and aim to settle for nothing less than complete domination of the world under the Islamic ummah. They consider America and the West a dying system, while they believe their Islamism is the rising order. They are in no mood to negotiate for anything less than the total surrender of democracy to Islamism.
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Former Goldman Sachs PhD: "Never returning to normal" |
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PhD Economist: “Don’t Bet on It” According to former Goldman Sachs executive, Nomi Prins… Americans who are hoping for a ‘return to normal’ are going to be shocked when they see what happens next in America. She says, “If you’re betting your job, savings, or retirement accounts on a return to ‘normal’ you’re about to be left behind by a brand-new crisis few see coming.” Click here now to see America’s next crisis. +++ |
Dr. Iman Foroutan is the chairman of the board and executive director of The New Iran.
Finally:
Wokeness, free speech and the Jews
The decline in respect for open discourse caused by new orthodoxies on race, gender and politics are a threat to religious minorities even if many Jews don’t see themselves at risk.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(April 25, 2022 / JNS) Each new academic year provides fresh evidence of something that is recognized by most observers across the political spectrum as a disturbing reality of American higher education: the decline in respect by both students and faculty at American universities and colleges for open discourse. The 2021-22 year that’s coming to a close in the upcoming weeks has proved no exception. Sometimes, its controversial speakers are being disinvited due to fear of protests and accusations of insensitivity to the feelings of those who might disagree. Or it can concern the attempts to fire or deplatform those who say or tweet things deemed by the intellectual fashion of the day to be beyond the pale. Some of the most recent examples at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown universities are just more proof of how ubiquitous this trend has become.
But probably even more troubling than incidents involving speakers or individual students and faculty is the more pervasive phenomenon affecting students in general. Various opinion surveys from sources like the Pew Research Institute and the Knight Foundation have shown that more Americans are curbing their speech on controversial topics out of fear of being ostracized or even attacked in the current climate, where cancel culture prevails in so many forums. At the same time, growing numbers of people think that there’s nothing wrong with canceling those with opinions they consider to be offensive.
Public discourse has become a dialogue of the deaf in which we refuse to listen to each other. It’s also one in which those who disagree are not merely refuted but castigated and often shunned or silenced. Yet despite the growing chorus of those who lament this, there also seems to be a general refusal to comprehend just how illiberal the new intolerance for disagreement has become. At the same time, much of the organized Jewish community, as well as many who are thought of as opinion leaders, doesn’t understand that among those who should be most concerned by the collapse of classical liberal beliefs about free speech are the Jews.
This is reflected in the way social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter operate. In the name of enforcing community standards that are supposed to reflect shared values, these Big Tech giants have ruthlessly silenced opinion pieces and news stories that either contradict the progressive views of their owners and staff or serve to undermine liberal political goals and politicians. While damning their opponents as purveyors of “disinformation,” these same companies and their press allies are spewing out plenty of it themselves. Meanwhile, the possibility that free speech might be restored on Twitter with its purchase by entrepreneur and business magnate Elon Musk is being greeted with howls of outrage from many on the left who believe that it should only exist on the virtual public square if it conforms to their beliefs.
That’s even more true for those who are placed in the hothouse atmosphere of academia, where woke mobs of students and their enablers in the faculty and administration are always ready to silence anyone who dares to transgress against current orthodoxies on race, gender or liberal politics. Indeed, even citadels of institutional liberalism like The New York Times, which has itself transitioned from being the country’s paper of record to an openly progressive and partisan forum, have noticed that this isn’t good for society or democracy.
Part of the problem is that many people don’t understand that while we often use the terms liberal and progressive interchangeably to describe one side of the right-left political divide, they have come to mean very different things. Of course, that’s also true about the word “liberal” itself. The notion that the primary purpose of government should be to defend individual rights against the power of the state was the essence of 19th-century liberalism. But in the 20th century, as liberal political movements embraced the power of government in order to achieve policy aims, such libertarianism and suspicion of government power more often became the chief concern of those on the political right.
Politicians, no matter their ideology or affiliation, tend to be for whatever increases their own power and influence. Yet that turn away from classical liberal ideas on the left has turned into open rejection with the rise of ideologies like intersectionality and critical race theory (CRT). These notions, which embody the woke catechism, don’t merely depart from liberalism; they flatly contradict it since they categorize people by race as members of groups that are either victims or victimizers. Instead of promoting the free exchange of ideas, they are focused on anathematizing those who point out the flaws of this new faith as, in an act of epic gaslighting, racist and intolerant.
On college campuses, this has bred not merely anger at opposing views but a belief that to be exposed to ideas that challenge your pre-existing assumptions is a form of violence that “triggers” justified fear, forcing the supposed victims of these ideas to seek shelter in “safe spaces.” This is the opposite of the ideals of a free and open exchange of ideas that higher education was supposed to foster. But for progressives, traditional liberalism is an antiquated ideology since it is intended to promote debate, not uniformity with those on the outside of the new ideologies, who are damned for their retrograde views. That explains their increasing confidence in demanding that those who disagree be fired or shut up. Rather than identifying with the plight of those being canceled, this spirit of righteous indignation causes the woke to act as if their political foes deserve to be silenced rather than argued with.
So while respondents are telling pollsters that they are self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of Twitter mobs or cancelation, many don’t understand that the consequences for democracy—a principle that progressives say is being threatened by the right—when debate is curtailed or squelched.
Let’s understand that there is a clear difference between cancel culture and the public pushback against woke teaching that has led to calls for a ban on the use of CRT in public schools or calls for curbs on the imposition of other leftist ideology among small children. Opposition to indoctrination is not a suppression of free speech but a defense of it.
Just as important are the consequences specifically for the Jewish community and Jewish students.
The most obvious is the way woke attacks on Jews as beneficiaries of “white privilege,” as well as on Israel and Zionism as expressions of oppression, have marginalized many Jews in left-wing strongholds, especially college campuses. A new survey of Jewish millennials from the American Jewish Committee showed that a significant percentage—though still a minority—of those in the 26 to 41-year-old age group felt that the anti-Israel atmosphere on campuses and elsewhere had impacted their personal friendship, commitment to the Jewish state or even their willingness to hide their Jewish identity. It’s easy to imagine that the same will be truer for the Gen Z generation now in college.
Intolerance and orthodoxy are always bad news for religious and ethnic minorities, especially those who don’t currently qualify for preferred minority status, like Jews and Asians, in the eyes of the woke.
Yet rather than understand that this represents a fundamental challenge to Jewish security, much of the organized community, including those tasked with defending it against anti-Semitism, like the Anti-Defamation League, are on the wrong side of this debate. While paying lip service to the nation that Jew-hatred exists on both the left and the right, they are also supporting ideas like CRT that underpin the surge of anti-Semitism.
As another academic year ends with free speech under threat everywhere but especially on campuses, it’s vital that the Jewish community stop pretending that it’s possible to fight anti-Semitism without being just as prepared to combat wokeness and cancel culture and the ideas that reinforce this illiberal plague of intolerance.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org, a senior contributor for The Federalist and a columnist for the New York Post, Newsweek and Haaretz.
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A pushback against the Great Lunacy?
Elon Musk's coup against the Twitterverse isn't the only sign that something has shifted
By Melanie Phillips
Straws in the wind, perhaps — but are we witnessing the beginning of a fightback against the great madness we’ve been living through in the west?
The richest man in the world, Elon Musk, has bought Twitter for $44 billion. Apparently, he was provoked into doing so after Twitter suspended the Babylon Bee for making a joke about the transgender US assistant secretary for health and human services, Rachel Levine.
The reaction to his purchase of Twitter has plumbed truly epic levels of imbecility — much of it, naturally, on Twitter.
Here, Musk’s coup reminds the writer of Weimar Germany; here, Musk apparently wants to “gaslight” and discredit his critics; here, he will apparently have a “chilling effect on journalism”; here, he is said to run, in Tesla, a racist company; here, he is said to want to use Twitter to promote “white power”; here, his free speech promise is said to threaten to unleash “lawless hate, bigotry and misogyny”; here, he is said to be “behaving like a movie super-villain”; here, a tweeter speculates that if he purchased Twitter “it could result in World War Three and the destruction of our planet”; here, he was denounced as an “imperialist” because he wants to colonise Mars.
To all such people Musk has said:
Wow — some super-villain, eh?! But of course. As this individual tweeted:
In Germany we know for a fact where free speech without borders and limits may lead to.
To which impressive grasp of fascism the satirist Titania McGrath tweeted in sarcastic response:
If Elon Musk buys Twitter, there’s a real danger that people will start saying whatever they want, whenever they want. That’s exactly how Nazi Germany started.
Musk himself has said of his motives:
Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.
How very white imperialistic, chillingly super-villainous, eh?
Of course, no-one has any idea what Musk will actually do with Twitter and whether he will achieve anything good at all. But the reason for the culture warriors’ meltdown is the threat he self-evidently poses to their ability to stamp out any and all opposition to their Maoist war against conservatives, white people and what it actually means to be a human being.
That war lies behind the ruthless censorship practised on Twitter and by the other social media giants, Facebook, Google and YouTube.
Yet the main threat to civilised values isn’t censorship, however inimical that is to a free society. The real menace of Twitter doesn’t lie in its suppression of views it doesn’t like. It is that Twitter is a cesspit of pyschopathic cruelty, imbecility and hysteria. It is a rolling emotional spasm in 280 characters, the regurgitus of a culture in the grip of pathological decay — a culture that coerces conformity, has erased moral responsibility and put rationality into reverse.
And all this has been enforced not just by social media giants but also by the mainstream media, universities and other institutions of western culture.
But have we now reached a tipping point? For Musk’s coup against the Twitterverse is the latest of several signs of a pushback against the lunacy.
Last month Karey Burke, Disney's President of General Entertainment Content, tearfully announced that as “the mother of two queer children . . . one transgender and one pansexual”, she wanted 50 per cent of characters in Disney productions to be LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning, intersex, and asexual) by the end of the year. Mail Online reports:
Another Disney executive boasted in a private meeting leaked online that she regularly made a point of “adding queerness” — such as the odd same-sex kiss in a background shot — to children's cartoons…
Last year, Disney decreed that all loudspeaker announcements at its theme parks would be “gender neutral”; “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” would be replaced with “dreamers of all ages’’.
Disney's even been tinkering with its classics. A 2019 initiative called “Stories Matter” adds on-screen warnings to older films: a chopstick-wielding Siamese cat in The Aristocats is flagged up for racism, as are the African-American crows in Dumbo, and the “stereotypical” portrayal of Native Americans in Peter Pan.
Disney insiders say the Stories Matter team’s review of Peter Pan expressed concern over Tinker Bell because the fairy is “body conscious” and jealous of Peter Pan”s attention; while having Captain Hook as the villain could expose the company to accusations of prejudice against people with disabilities.
Now, though, the tables have been turned on this inanity and insanity. The Mail continues:
Disney World is Florida's top attraction. But last Friday, the state’s ruling Republicans stripped the company, which employs 75,000 people there, of the right to govern its vast resort and theme park itself….
The move is in retaliation for the decision by Disney bosses to publicly attack new legislation introduced by Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, to ban primary schools from teaching children aged five to nine about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Now children, clap your hands if you believe in biology….
Next, at those twin shrines of the American media woke cult CNN and the New York Times, a dim light has dawned that they’ve trashed their brand by substituting partisan advocacy for journalism. They seem finally to have realised that they’ve thus turned off great swathes of the public who no longer believe a word they say.
CNN this week abandoned a newly launched streaming service after only 100,000 users had signed up. And the New York Times appointed a reported “centrist” to correct its, erm, egregious left-wing bias. The Guardian (even!) reports:
At an Oprah Winfrey-hosted company meeting on the Warner Bros lot in Burbank, California last week, David Zaslav, chief executive and president of CNN’s corporate parent, reportedly said he wanted CNN to focus on the facts and set itself apart from a cable-news industry monopolised by “advocacy networks”.
“If we get that, we can have a civilised society,” Zaslav reportedly said. “And without it, if it all becomes advocacy, we don’t have a civilised society”…
Addressing the bleed-through of opinion into news has also been on the menu at the New York Times, though less overtly so given the gift that would present to the paper’s enemies.
This week, the controlling Sulzberger family tapped Joe Kahn, a former China correspondent, to be the new executive editor.
Though top editors felt by some staff to have overlooked limitations on which opinions were fit to publish have left the paper, the publisher, AG Sulzberger, has said he believes “in the principle of openness to a range of opinions”.
This week, a Times insider told New York magazine: “There is a sense — and this makes a lot of people very happy — that [Kahn] is much less willing to indulge the complaining and the constant cries of activism and that he is somebody who has expressed little patience for the newsroom culture-war eruptions that have been such a distraction for us lately”.
In Britain, the grip of left-wing groupthink in broadcasting is now being challenged by GB News and the latest kid on the (self-professed) anti-woke block, TalkTV. And even the universities — culture meltdown ground-zero — are showing faint signs of independent thinking in the wake of a new government bill to combat the suppression of ideas on campus. This bill will give academics and students a direct route to compensation if they are censored or silenced. The Telegraph reports:
Only on Monday, in a sign of a “turning tide” against “threats, intimidation and harassment”, Reading University rejected an open letter from its students’ union telling it to “reconsider consent” for a talk by gender-critical academics about gay conversion therapy.Amid a protest of around 50 students outside the talk calling for “safeguards” to protect trans people, the university stressed it was “committed to freedom of speech”.
Universities minister Michelle Donelan told a meeting at the Policy Exchange think-tank that university vice-chancellors must actively promote, not just protect, freedom of speech.
Ms Donelan said “too often, university leadership turns a blind eye” to an “intolerant mob”, singling out the “deplorable” campaign against Prof Kathleen Stock, who quit Sussex University last year in a trans row, and LSE students who hounded the Israeli ambassador.
“This intolerant few have decided that protecting people from offence is more important than advancing human knowledge,” she said, pointing to surveys showing hundreds of scholars feel forced to self-censor their views.
“Let me take a moment to inform the intolerant few — their brief period of power is over,” she added.
Well, it’s not going to be that simple. But suddenly, something in the air has shifted — and for the better.
About time.
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