Biden's Chanukah Gift to Israel is Helping Islamic Terrorists Seize Jerusalem

 Some 2,200 years ago, Antiochus IV set up an idol in the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and had pigs sacrificed on the altar. Joseph Biden II has his own plans for a pig and an altar in Jerusalem.

Bidentiochus’ Chanukah gift to the Jews is an Islamic terrorist consulate in Jerusalem.

Like Antiochus, the Biden administration has spent the past few months alternately terrorizing and bribing Israelis to accept its plans for a consulate to the terrorists killing Jews in Jerusalem.

“We want the American Consulate to constitute the seed of a U.S. embassy in the State of Palestine,” Mohammad Shtayyeh, the PLO’s current prime minister, had boasted.

Biden is clearly on the same page.

Russia and China operate diplomatic missions to the PLO in Ramallah. If the Biden administration really wanted to open a consulate to be closer to the terrorists, they would stick it in that terrorist capital: a former Christian city taken over by Islamic killers as their base in Israel.

Instead like the old dead Syrian-Greek tyrant, Biden wants to plant his idol in Jerusalem.

Antiochus had forbidden the Jews to keep the Sabbath, inaugurate the new monthly moon of Rosh Chodesh, and celebrate the holidays. Biden followed in his footsteps by forbidding the Jews to celebrate Jerusalem Day marking the liberation and reunification of the city.

The joyous celebration in which children sing and wave Israeli flags, and thousands of people from across the country and the world take part in a parade through the Old City, was denounced by Biden's State Department as a "provocation". What else is a provocation?

Prayer.

The Biden administration ordered Israel to “preserve the historic status quo on the Haram al-Sharif / Temple Mount – in word and in practice.” This “historic status quo” was imposed by the Muslim occupiers and bans Jews from praying at their own holiest site.

The Trump peace plan had proposed that, “People of every faith should be permitted to pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, in a manner that is fully respectful to their religion, taking into account the times of each religion's prayers and holidays, as well as other religious factors."

The PLO, Hamas, and the Biden administration rejected this call for basic religious freedom.

Instead the Biden administration, following in the footsteps of Antiochus, has ordered that only Islamic idolatry should be permitted on the site of the Holy Temple.

The only thing Biden hasn’t done is erect an altar to Zeus and sacrifice a pig on it.

Maybe he’s saving that for his next Chanukah party.

The Biden administration restarted the flow of cash to the PLO even though the Islamic terrorist group continues to incite and finance the murder of Jews. In the week before Chanukah, an Islamic terrorist opened fire in Jerusalem’s Old City killing Eliyahu David Kay, a 26-year-old guide at the remnant of the Temple known as the Western Wall, and wounding 4 others.

The PLO’s Palestinian Authority media declared that the terrorist had “died as a martyr.”

In response, Biden’s State Department warned its employees to stop visiting the Old City so that none of its personnel will be caught up in the terrorist attacks that the administration is funding.

When Biden isn’t sending hundreds of millions of dollars in “aid” to the Taliban in Afghanistan, he’s dispatching hundreds of millions to the Palestinian Industrial Terrorist Complex. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year is what the PLO spends on its “Pay-to-Slay” program for terrorists.

Meanwhile the Biden administration is applying diplomatic pressure on Israel by refusing to vote against a UN resolution calling for the destruction of the Jewish State and warning against allowing Jews to live in homes in parts of Israel claimed by its Islamic terrorist allies.

The creation of a terrorist consulate in Jerusalem is against both Israeli and American law.

When President Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he followed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. The Act had been co-sponsored by Biden and stated in plain language that, “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel.”

Before that, Biden had co-sponsored 1992's SR-113 which had congratulated "the residents of Jerusalem and the people of Israel on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reunification of that historic city" and called on "the President and the Secretary of State to issue an unequivocal statement in support of these principles." Maybe Biden ought to follow his own resolution.

In 1990, Biden co-sponsored SSR-0106 which had gone even further by denouncing "ambiguous statements by the Government of the United States concerning the right of Jews to live in all parts of Jerusalem" which "raise concerns in Israel that Jerusalem might one day be redivided and access to religious sites in Jerusalem denied to Israeli citizens."

From that Biden has gone on to denounce the right of Jews to live and pray in Jerusalem.

When an Israeli court ruled that Muslim occupiers who had been illegally resettled by the UN in Jewish homes in Jerusalem when Jordan invaded, occupied, and ethnically cleansed the holy city had to pay rent or leave, the Biden administration warned Israel not to evict the occupiers.

While Jews don’t have a right to live in their own homes in Jerusalem, Biden wants to impose his terrorist consulate on Jerusalem on behalf of the Islamic terror state he hopes to create.

Having turned over Afghanistan to Al Qaeda, ISIS-K, and the Taliban, he wants to turn over Jerusalem to the PLO and Hamas.

Biden had vowed during his campaign to open a terror consulate in Jerusalem without even consulting the Jewish State. Now as Chanukah approaches he is ramping up the pressure. The Islamists and appeasers in Biden’s State Department have reportedly taken to yelling and threatening Israeli officials over their refusal to place Biden’s PLO pig on the altar.

But the legacy of Chanukah tells us that the fortitude of faith can prevail over tyranny.

The Democrats and the media pretended that their problem wasn’t with Israel, but with Netanyahu. And yet now that Netanyahu is out of office, nothing has changed at all.

They didn’t hate Netanyahu: they hated the Jewish State. Just like they don’t hate any particular Republican president, when they burn American flags and cities: they hate America.

Like Antiochus, they hate the religious conviction and moral tradition that Israel represents. It’s what drives their obsession with denying Jews the right to pray at the Temple Mount, and with struggling to keep Jews out of every house in the city that exists as a living testament of G-d.

Why is the Biden administration following in the footsteps of Obama’s religious war to claim Jerusalem for Islam? How better to destroy the roots of the Jewish and Christian religions?

The Biden administration wants to turn Chanukah from a celebration of religious rebirth to its suppression in the very city where the faith and arms of a tiny people defeated the might of an evil empire and unleashed a heavenly fire from a neglected flask of oil in the Holy Temple.

As Jews light the menorah once again the way that their ancestors thousands of years lit that single menorah, flooding the courtyards and alleyways of Jerusalem with a golden glow, they send a message to Antiochus IV and Biden II that faith in G-d is stronger than any tyrant.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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The Real USC Scandal is How Democrat Pols, Not Celebs, Got In

The arrest of Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas over a bribery scheme was nothing special. Recent arrests and indictments have decimated the ranks of the Cincinnati and Detroit city councils. The corruption of urban Democrat machines is a dog bites man story and the responsibility of those machines for much of the misery they blame on the myth of “systemic racism” may well be the single most underreported story in the establishment media.

What makes the Ridley-Thomas arrest stand out is that the bribe was academic.

Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Mark's son, had followed his father into Democrat politics, and was elected to the California State Assembly before being accused of sexual harassment. The second generation of the Democrat dynasty was falling apart and Sebastian stepped down while blaming health problems. The health problems didn’t prevent him from creating Millennial Advisors, and the Policy, Research and Practice Initiative to “research” black voters.

And he got a job at the University of Southern California.

USC named Sebastian a  "professor of practice of policy and social work" and also gave him a scholarship to study for a master’s in social work. Prosecutors allege that Marilyn Flynn, the dean of USC's School of Social Work, and a major donor to Mark Ridley-Thomas, told "multiple USC officials about Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, explaining who his father was and saying his admission should be given the highest priority."

An hour earlier, the dean had been told that a $9 million contract was ready to go.

Flynn urged USC figures to rush it through “in the interests of showing MRT that we can deliver.” The indictment emails show the USC dean greedily salivating that, “there are significant amounts of county funds available” and “should give us $1M each year for three years.”

Where was that money coming from? Contracts with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Department of Mental Health. Some of the most vulnerable members of society, the people whom the Democrats and the USC social workers claimed to be protecting were actually being used as counters in a corrupt scheme to enrich Democrats.

The whole thing came apart when the Mark Ridley-Thomas Committee for a Better L.A. funneled $100,000 through the USC School of Social Work to Sebastian's Policy, Research and Practice Initiative. Whistles were blown and both Mark and Marilyn Flynn were busted.

Despite the massive abuse of taxpayer money, the corruption of both government and academia by the largest social work program in the country and a Democrat dynasty, this USC scandal has received practically no coverage outside the local media. The difference between the national media’s gleeful coverage of allegations that B-list celebs had bent the rules to get their kids into USC and this much more serious case is strikingly revealing. And it’s not over.

While Mark Ridley-Thomas may be an obscure name to most people outside Los Angeles, that’s not the case with Rep. Karen Bass, a member of Congress, who had been touted as one of the top two Biden VP picks, and is considered a front-runner to become LA’s next mayor.

Bass, a Castro supporter with Communist ties (“‘I’m Not a Communist’: Potential Biden Running Mate Reassures” an NBC News headline had read last year) hasn’t been charged with anything, but her case is in some ways even more curious than that of Sebastian.

The lefty House Democrat had received an unsolicited $95,000 tuition award from the USC School of Social Work allowing her to “earn” an online master’s degree.

The Los Angeles Times noted that, “some of her coursework was supervised by a prominent campaign donor who was also a USC professor at the time”. Flynn, “offered the scholarship to Bass even though she had not directly applied to the social work program.”

Flynn approached Bass and offered her a "scholarship" that was not available to students. The USC School of Social Work dean claimed that Bass was chosen because she "demonstrated an exceptional potential for contribution to the field" and had “obvious leadership skills.”

What did Flynn actually expect from Bass’ “contribution to the field”? Good question. Just don’t expect the same national news media that was defending Bass over her support for Castro and other Communists to ask any such basic questions even while the Castroite runs for mayor.

The LA Times also noted that, “The full value of Bass’ scholarship was not listed on her congressional disclosure forms until 2019, when forms from several years were amended and a total of more than $80,000 in free tuition was added to her gift disclosures.”

Academia’s lefty bias is nothing new, but USC represents a more complicated financial entanglement with the Democrats. The university spends half a million a year on lobbying, it takes in millions in government contracts, and its faculty, administrators and other employees plowed over $2.6 million into political campaigns in 2020 alone. The vast majority of that money, 96.5% or nearly $1.8 million donated to federal election candidates, went to Democrats.

The USC School of Social Work had grown so big because of an online “deal with the devil” that the university had struck with 2U, a multi-billion dollar online education platform founded and run by Christopher “Chip” Paucek who had served as the deputy campaign manager for Democrat Senator Barbara Mikulski. (Another Mikulski alum is Democrat political consultant Bob Shrum, who heads the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, and was quoted by the LA Times.)

USC and 2U offered a $115,000 online social work master's degree, aggressively targeting minority and underperforming students with GPAs as low as 2.5 and leaving them with huge debts and low income careers. 2U allegedly got 60% of the revenue from the program which helped make it a huge player in the online education space while USC was left with the debt.

Mass education and the welfare state have proven to be quite profitable for Democrat elites while poisoning everything that they touch and leaving broken lives in their wake.

The real scandal at USC was the familiar one of Democrat elites exploiting black people in the name of empowering them and black leaders happily participating in the program. Some of the damage was passed along to taxpayers in the form of scholarships, and the varied players were able to move money around to each other until a few of the players became too brazen.

It’s a much bigger scandal than a Full House cast member trying to get her daughter into USC.

Marilyn Flynn, now the USC School of Social Work's former dean, has been indicted, and pled not guilty. Mark Ridley-Thomas also pled not guilty and was suspended from the Los Angeles City Council. In a bizarre arrangement, his chief of staff is serving as the district’s “caretaker”.

But it’s implausible that Flynn or Ridley-Thomas acted alone. In their alleged corrupt actions, they consulted and coordinated with multiple USC and local government officials. This isn’t the story of a few corrupt people, but a corrupt system which exploits those it claims to be helping.

How did Rep. Karen Bass, with her six-figure government salary, qualify for a $95,000 scholarship? Don’t ask USC whose spokesperson sneered that they had no idea, “what policies and procedures were in place at the School of Social Work 10 years ago.”

The cynicism is almost as breathtaking as the corruption.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Don’t Ask About Empty Shelves, Our Leaders are Too Busy Saving the World

While the supply chain crisis left American store shelves bare, Biden went to a UN climate conference to save the world. Saving the world is a whole lot easier than stocking shelves. Ask any teenager.

Saving the world used to be the preoccupation of dilettante intellectuals who could solve all of the problems of the world in their heads, but couldn’t handle the simplest life tasks. The rise of socialism has reduced much of the world to the same grandiose incompetence. The western world has been put into the hands of men and women who can’t get anything done, but promise to change the world.

Like the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, we have become a nation of moral crusaders and misery where goods shortages are papered over with wars against intangible social problems. Public officials no longer solve problems, like ivory tower academics they delve into root causes and produce theories explaining why the problems can’t be solved without changing society and humanity.

It’s as if you invited a plumber to fix your toilet only to lectured about the history of plumbing in ancient Egypt, gender roles, and social expectation while your toilet goes on flooding the floor.

While Democrats go down the rabbit hole of root causes, their cities are overrun with crime and human waste, prices for everything skyrocket, and some goods can no longer be had at any price. Confronted with this reality, they build walls of words, seizing on talking points to convince the public that the problems don’t exist or that they’re actually symptoms of deep social problems going back centuries even though they only date back to last week. Either approach frees them from having to solve them.

Do elites turn socialist as they become more incompetent or do they become more incompetent as they embrace socialism? The chicken and the egg problem that made even formerly prosperous Eastern European and Latin American countries into miserable failed states, that divided the two Koreas between booming industry and mass hunger, is arriving in America with much the same outcome.

American bureaucracy is bigger than ever. The growth of administrators in every field outpaces that of ordinary workers, clients, and products produced. No single decree from a scowling boss in Moscow turned a booming nation of individualists into a timid managerial state with endless rules that apply to every facet of work and everyday life. It was the slow accumulation of individual inertia, cultural safetyism, and crises, real and manufactured, that fossilized into a state of permanent administration.

The hunger of the administrative state for more power and the natural insecurities of its wards gave us everything from the welfare state to universal masking. The shutdowns and mandates of the pandemic are only the latest inevitable development from a system that reacts to every crisis with collective panics that transfer power from the public to unelected bureaucrats. Whatever the details of a crisis, its primary function is to generate more regulations and more overseers to see everyone follows them.

None of these regulations do anything except generate more insecurity and seize more power. Each succeeding generation views unrestricted freedom as an increasingly alien condition. A generation terrified of the Second Amendment birthed a generation terrified of the First Amendment. Each set of restrictions is deemed insufficient by the frightened generation that is raised under their rule.

If you think today’s college students are snowflakes, wait until the children who were raised to fear their own parents as sources of infection and to wear masks everywhere finally come of age.

It’s no great challenge to convince a society of frightened people that the end of the world is near.

Call it the ice age, global warming, climate change, or whatever panic brand replaces them when the marketers and pollsters decide that the current term is insufficiently triggering: to people who have been taught to be afraid of everything the end of the world is an entirely plausible scenario.

Environmentalism, like every root cause crisis, tells us to be afraid of ourselves. The terror of our words, our faces, our thoughts, and our possessions has always haunted the Left. Where visionaries saw possibilities, socialism has only seen threats. Its promises to save the world don’t spring from a place of courage, but of fear of others and of the inability of its acolytes to come to grips with real life.

Those who can, do. And those who can’t, warn others that doing anything is the root of all evil.

What else could such a worldview bring forth other than the incompetence, corruption, and tyranny that we see all around us. Problems become power grabs and so there’s no incentive to solve them, only to make them worse. Leftist ideology rationalizes most problems as inherently unsolvable in the short term, only in some long term utopian eventuality that reboots all of human society around its ideals.

Problems like empty store shelves or crime in the streets are ultimately caused by capitalism, individualism, the nuclear family, and the existence of humanity. There’s no solving them without addressing root causes like human nature, civilization, and the survival instinct. Like the USSR, the goal posts for solving even the most mundane problems get moved all the way into infinity.

This arrangement is quite convenient for the bureaucracies, public and private, from which leftist systems and ideologies draw their power. It frees teachers not to teach, companies not to innovate, and officials not to solve problems even as they organize moral crusades against the end of the world.

The true purpose of bureaucracy is always to eliminate competition. The chaos of individualism is collectively managed by stultifying regulations whose goal isn’t fixing problems, but preventing surprises. The administrative state can accept the deaths of millions as long as it follows the rules. That’s why all the administrators who forced nursing homes to accept coronavirus infected patients were never held responsible for the mass deaths that resulted from their horrifying decisions.

Most were even rewarded.

The pandemic shutdowns weren’t motivated by fear of infections, but of unscheduled and uncontrolled infections. The administrative state doesn’t mind people dying, as long as they decide who dies.

And who lives.

World leaders fleeing problems at home to talk global warming at the UN’s COP26 are leaving behind real challenges that they’ve given up trying to solve and are saving the world. What makes leaders like Biden or Boris Johnson, Merkel or Trudeau, who have badly screwed up the prosaic problems they were tasked with believe that they can change the climate when they can’t do much smaller things?

Western leaders no longer tackle real problems that can be solved, only imaginary ones that can’t. Like their socialist forebears they define an overwhelming problem, economic classes, systemic racism, or climate change, and then spend all their time at seminars on how to best tackle its root causes. The solution invariably involves moving money around in ways that favor them and their power base.

This brand of messianic workshopped Communism is even worse than the original because actual Communist regimes at least cared about production while wealthy western leftists outsource production to third world countries so they can spend more time fighting systemic racism or the weather.

Our shortages may be currently less severe than those of a proper Communist dictatorship, but our leaders are even more detached from the basic responsibility of elected officials which is not to “safeguard democracy”, but to justify their work to the system and the people who elected them.

With Biden, America skipped past Lenin and Stalin to go right to the Brezhnev era with senescent apparatchiks overseeing the decline of a country and an economy they don’t actually understand.

America’s elites, bad or good, used to understand how things actually worked. And then they became the products of Ivy League institutions which traded practical skills for abstract theories. Our elites have learned how to lie to us and to rob us, and tell us it’s for our own good, and how to retreat into academic theories to avoid dealing with reality. They’ve learned how to manipulate the artificial systems of bureaucracy and its abstract rule sets, but know next to nothing about the real world.

They’re happy to save the world. Just don’t ask them where the beef is.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Build Back Better Act Offers Media Billions To Go After Republicans

Biden claims that the Build Back Better Act will help ordinary Americans, but the legislation, like so much in Washington D.C., is a collection of pork for corrupt special interests. One of those special interests is the media which suppressed negative stories about Biden and the Democrats, like the FBI investigation of Hunter Biden, while promoting disinformation, like the Steele Dossier, targeting President Trump: Biden’s opponent in the presidential election.

The media operates like a Democrat messaging operation and its partisanship has undermined its business model, especially for local news outlets which, unlike major national outlets, cannot simply ignore their existing readers and viewers to focus exclusively on radical urban leftists.

Congressional Democrats, with the complicity of some Republicans, had previously proposed media subsidy schemes that included tax credits for media companies, tax breaks for subscribing to papers, and even a $5,000 tax credit for taking out an ad in the local paper.

The media subsidy scheme in Biden’s Build Back Better Act offers $1.9 billion to the media with a payroll tax credit covering 50% of salaries, as much as $25,000, for the Democrat propagandists on media company payrolls, and another 30% over the next four years.

While the Democrats claim that this $1.9 billion special interest giveaway to the media is helping "local news", it's capped at 1,500 employees. The Washington Post has only a little over 1,000 “journalists” on its payroll. The legislation is written in a typically convoluted fashion, so it’s not altogether clear if the premier propaganda outlet of the Democrats, owned by the richest man in the country, would qualify for these subsidies at a time when Americans are struggling to get by.

Lest there be any doubt that the so-called "local journalism" provision is a State Media scheme to subsidize hit pieces on Republicans, Democrats explained that's exactly what it's there for.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer touted the ability of "local journalism" to stop Republican candidates like  Edward Durr, a truck driver who spent $153 to defeat New Jersey Senate boss Steve Sweeney: the biggest Democrat power broker in the state.

“There was no opportunity for local media to provide even basic information about the candidates,” Rep. Blumenauer whined. “The guy would never have been elected if he had gotten any scrutiny at all.” By scrutiny, the leftist Democrat means hit pieces, of the kind that the media belatedly began generating after the truck driver’s unexpected election night win.

Give the media $1.9 billion in subsidies and they can stop the next truck driver from beating their Senate boss through lies, smears, intimidation, and disinformation campaigns.

If this dirty deal were any more corrupt, it would be taking place in a brothel.

But Democrats are not just relying on the innate biases of the media. One of the biggest dark money investments of their political machines have been fake news local operations.

Democrat groups like Report for America and Courier Newsroom have embedded subsidized reporters and created fake local news outlets to push leftist agendas. Report for America is funded by the usual Democrats megadonors, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, as well as by Big Tech monopolies like Google and Facebook.

Courier Newsroom, backed by the controversial Acronym/Pacronym network, had begun generating fake local news sites for the 2020 election with names like “UpNorth News” in Wisconsin. It's being rebooted with the backing of George Soros and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman who had previously been caught pushing fake news through the Alabama Project.

The Alabama Project had, in its own words, targeted the state's Senate election, by having "orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

The LinkedIn co-founder apologized, claimed that he knew nothing and that it would never happen again. And here he is, alongside Soros, backing Good Information Inc. which will fund non-profit propaganda media and invest in for-profit media that pushes its political agenda.

Good Information Inc., is just a rebooted version of Courier Newsroom’s fake news network.

The Build Back Better Act’s $1.9 billion media subsidy isn’t just funding an industry aligned with the Democrats, but one that has become a false flag operation for its messaging apparatus.

The Dems might just as well add $1.9 billion in subsidies for their own political consultants.

The connection between the media’s political fake news operations and the pork isn’t even being disguised.

CNN’s Brian Stelter quotes “Report for America co-founder Steven Waldman, who has helped lead the drive for the tax credit”, saying, "It's a huge breakthrough for local news if it becomes law.” Report for America is indeed vocally advocating for the Democrat media subsidy. And it would be a “huge breakthrough” if part of the cost of Democrat messaging operations were being subsidized by American taxpayers freeing Dem megadonors to wage war elsewhere.

But the core business model of the leftist machine has been to not simply establish political operations that can swing elections, but figuring out how to make them into permanent taxpayer-funded features of public life so they can move on to their next “startup”.

Waldman, like CNN and Report for America, not to mention many of RFA’s megadonors, operate out of New York City. Their interest isn’t in local news, it’s in winning elections. Local elections are now routinely swung by rivers of cash coming out of New York and California. Not satisfied with using billions to rig local elections in places they would never visit, they want American taxpayers to subsidize their political activists and their fake news operations.

The media has gone to work telling Americans that giving them billions is actually a wonderful idea in the ultimate example of a conflict of interest. What the media neglects to mention is that its outlets are facing hard financial times because they have alienated two thirds of their audience. Unable to convince Americans to watch, read, and pay for their lies, they’re now resorting to extracting the money through the politicians they’ve been working to elect.

The same radical shift in the media that alienated its readers and viewers also vested the industry with the political power to steal billions from Americans and put it in their pockets.

The media is no longer an independent industry, it’s an arm of the ruling party.

The $1.9 billion in media subsidies is a timely reminder that the only thing that the trillions in special interest pork are actually “building back better” is the Democrat Party.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Soldiers Forced To Bunk Outdoors While Afghan Refugees Slept in Their Barracks

In 2019, members of the 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry returned home from Afghanistan. In early October, the 127th left Appleton, Wisconsin and traveled to Fort McCoy for training.

Unfortunately, Fort McCoy was already occupied by an estimated 13,000 Afghan “refugees”.

According to Rep. Tom Tiffany, who has paid several visits to Fort McCoy, the base only has the capacity to house 10,000 people, and is struggling to cope with the overflow in tents. When they first arrived some 600 Afghans had been quarantined with a variety of infectious conditions.

Fort McCoy, located in rural Wisconsin between the small cities of Sparta and Tomah, started out as an artillery range and its barracks were intended to house military personnel arriving for training exercises, not huge numbers of foreign migrants. The barracks, which were built during World War II, are in poor condition and a new construction project only recently got underway.

Even while hosting the largest population of Afghan migrants in the country, Fort McCoy struggled to maintain its training role. Over 100,000 troops had trained there during the fiscal year with personnel from all of the services participating in everything from cold weather operations (it gets pretty cold in that part of the country) and various exercises.

When the 127th arrived, the barracks they were meant to sleep in had already been taken. With Afghans sleeping in their barracks and their beds, they reportedly had to sleep outside instead.

“The summers are warm and wet; the winters are freezing, snowy, and windy,” is how the local weather has been described. In October the weather had begun its slow descent from warm and wet to freezing, but it was not the Afghans who were expected to deal with the weather.

According to a Department of Defense spokesperson, “The 2-127 Infantry Battalion was offered access to the hard structures in the field, as the barracks on post are currently occupied by our Afghan guests.” The spokesperson also insisted that, “There were no unexpected weather events during the training and no impact to the Fort McCoy mission or training for the service members.” And yet according to some the impact on morale has been quite serious.

The displacement of American soldiers to make way for Afghan migrants was symbolic of events in Washington D.C. and at Fort McCoy where refugee meals closely follow Islamic Sharia and liquor was removed from the shelves of the PX so as not to offend the Afghans.

The men of the “Red Arrow” are used to challenges. With a history that includes the Iron Brigade of the Civil War and the Les Terribles in WWI, and as members of the Wisconsin National Guard, they’re not afraid of weather. But the displacement drove home to them where the priorities of the military brass lie, not with the soldiers who served in Afghanistan, but the Afghans whom the Taliban waved past their terrorist checkpoints in Kabul and on to America.

Some no longer recognize Fort McCoy, divided into Afghan “neighborhoods” where the hated Shuras (an Islamic form of tribal governance) have been reconvened and are dictating to base personnel the way that they did during the failed “hearts and minds” efforts in Afghanistan.

The national media, which had little interest in Fort McCoy when it was filled with American heroes training to save lives and win wars, has swarmed over the place. The Today Show, among many others, has filmed canned propaganda segments touting carefully selected Afghan refugees, usually young, western, and female, who locals say are unrepresentative of the thousands of covered and frightened young women, many of them pregnant, in the barracks.

Sources say that reporters are asked to leave their cars behind in the visitor lot and then bused over to selected locations. Camera interviews are usually conducted at the main gate to avoid anything problematic in the background.

What are they worried about?

Since the Afghans swarmed into Fort McCoy, two Afghan refugees are federal facing charges, one for "attempting to engage in a sexual act with a minor" and another for "assaulting his spouse by strangling and suffocating her". But that may only be the tip of a very large iceberg.

A leaked State Department document contained multiple reports of "child brides" and polygamous marriages at Fort McCoy. Wisconsin Democrats however tried to shut down reports by whistleblowers about the abuse of young girls happening right on our military bases.

"There are no cases in Fort McCoy right now with child, 15-or- under, who is married," Sen. Tammy Baldwin contended in a very precisely worded denial leaving open the question of whether such cases had existed in the past or whether the children weren’t technically married.

Locals in nearby Sparta whose medical resources have been drafted into the Afghan refugee crisis however describe large numbers of pregnant women, some looking very young and a threatening atmosphere where calls to emergency services in the small city are a constant.

The media plays up stories of impoverished refugees, but sources say that the Fort McCoy Post Exchange keeps running out of smaller bills because the Afghan refugees have plenty of hundred dollar bills to spend. Not to mention credit cards and cell phones.

While locals have generously donated their own clothing, the Islamic Society of Milwaukee has been conducting its own clothing drive focused on hijabs and "traditional" and "modest clothing" for the women. The infidel clothes apparently weren’t sufficiently compliant with Sharia law.

Despite media disinformation, few if any of the Afghans were “interpreters”, many did not even speak English, and the vast majority had not received visas to come to the United States, When the Biden administration surrendered Kabul to the Taliban, it allowed the terrorist group to man the checkpoints and pick which Afghans (and Americans) were allowed to make it to the airport.

The Afghans who had legitimate visas based on their time working for the United States were not allowed through. Some may have been abducted and killed after the Biden administration turned over lists of visa recipients to the Taliban. Only 1,800 SIV visa holders made it here. Another 50,000 were Afghans who had no legal right to be here and once in this country began committing crimes and disappearing from the bases that were hosting them.

Many in Sparta are worried about what this influx of Afghan migrants means for them.

When Cuban refugees were housed at Fort McCoy, some stayed on in the area. Locals are concerned that history may repeat itself with the large number of Afghans. Even if only a few hundred are left behind, they could significantly change the character of the area.

To some locals, the sight of Americans being displaced by Afghans may be their future.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Kamala Goes Back to Calling Biden a Racist

Kamala Devi Harris doesn’t know a whole lot, but she knows how to play a race card that the child of wealthy foreign students, the Montreal educated daughter raised by a Brahmin Indian mother, the San Francisco socialite, and Brentwood resident married to a Jewish entertainment industry lawyer, is even less entitled to than its previous career abuser, Barack Hussein Obama.

When Kamala tried to force Biden out of the race and take his black supporters, she accused him of racism for opposing busing. This false claim was backed by her even more preposterous contention that being bused through the segregated Mason-Dixon line of Berkeley was the only reason she ever achieved her current career. Willie Brown could not be reached for comment.

Did Kamala believe her own accusation? When she was being interviewed by Biden’s vice presidential search committee, “She laughed and said, ‘that’s politics.’ She had no remorse.”

Kamala’s cynical race gambit or, more accurately, Biden’s weak and inept reaction to it, temporarily shook up the race, but black voters proved to be more loyal to the Democrat establishment and returned to Biden leaving Kamala with nothing except wasted millions.

As voters turned on her, Kamala responded by accusing them of being sexists and racists.

"Is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?" she whined.

They certainly weren't ready for Kamala who polled at 2% among women and 4% among black voters. Black voters backed Biden and torpedoed her presidential path to the White House.

After raising $36 million and dropping out without facing a single primary, Kamala was picked as the number two for a confused old white man. So what were the odds that she would go back to calling him a racist at the first sign of trouble? Much like the story of the scorpion and the frog, or the farmer and the viper, Kamala is a poisonous creature with only one brand of venom.

Kamala’s poll numbers are terrible. They’re so terrible that they’re even worse than Biden’s. And so with tedious predictability, Kamala, who only has her current job because Biden promised to pick a black woman and the other leading alternatives were a Castro supporter and Stacey Abrams, is dragging out the race card for another shopping spree at the victimhood store.

After the Biden administration came to the defense of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg for going on vacation while the supply chain imploded, Kamala’s people are implying that the administration isn’t defending her the same way because she’s not a white man.

"It's hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn't want to take themselves," one of her former aides was quoted as telling CNN.

If the Biden administration is so racist, why did it pick Kamala over Buttigieg?

But since accusations of racism trigger the equivalent of Defcon 3 among Democrats, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was rushed out to tweet that Kamala was a “bold leader”.

No one can think of anything that Kamala has led on, boldly or otherwise, except calling other people racists to get her way, and like everything else about her, it’s not remotely original.

But how else is the Biden administration supposed to defend its least popular figure? And in an administration that includes a president who gropes small children, a defense secretary who focused on critical race theory while Afghanistan fell, a transportation secretary who took a two month vacation during a transportation crisis, a windsurfing traitor, a mass murdering version of Klinger, and a health secretary whose only health experience is persecuting journalists who exposed the baby parts ring of his abortion allies, being the most unpopular is an achievement.

Unfortunately it’s also Kamala’s only achievement aside from “making history” by showing up.

Buttigieg was being criticised for not doing his job, but Kamala’s only real job is waiting for Biden to die, become incapacitated, or even less popular than her. Two of those things might happen, but considering that she’s polling at 28%, the third is almost certainly never going to take place.

Every attempt at expanding Kamala’s portfolio and giving her more imaginary jobs, flying her to Asia and France, is a poor attempt to disguise the fact that she’s the equivalent of the greedy niece waiting around for her rich uncle to die and leave her his fortune. And for three years the polls have consistently shown that most Americans don’t want Kamala to be POTUS. Ever.

So Kamala’s political allies are back to blaming sexism and racism for her unpopularity.

But a recent Economist poll showed that 35% of women had a very unfavorable impression of her compared to only 22% with a very favorable view of Kamala. Even black voters, generally lockstep loyal to the Biden administration, rate the old white man at the top better than her.

Kamala’s problem isn’t racism or sexism, her race or gender, it’s herself.

Crying racism and sexism works but only on a very temporary basis. And Kamala and her allies have spent so much time crying wolf that the latest abuse of the race card has gone unnoticed.

Earlier this year, Kamala's fan club or the KHive, was howling that an insufficiently flattering Vogue cover was racist. That nonsense generated media headlines like, "A Tale of Two Covers" (MSNBC), "Kamala Harris Cover Shows Diminishing Powerful Black Women is Still in Fashion" (Washington Post), and "Kamala Harris's 'Vogue' Cover Is The Epitome Of A Racial Microaggression" (Gilbert and Sullivan). But you can only keep on playing the victim for so long.

Kamala's staffers are complaining that they don't have enough resources and need more money even though the FY 2021 budget for the veep's office is $5 million and funds a massive full-time staff of 25 people. How much does Kamala really need to sit around and do nothing?

The revival of the racism accusations are a shot across the bow of the Biden administration.

Al Sharpton publicly announced that he was going to complain to Biden that Kamala was being mistreated, and his hate group would "continue to fight for her to be in a position of power because we want to see her thrive, and I will communicate that to the President."

Does Kamala imagine that’s going to help her? Every time the administration gave her even the smallest degree of responsibility, she managed to blow it. A politician who can mess up a student Q&A and a NASA promotional video has a gift for putting her pumps in her mouth. And, just like during her primary race, instead of admitting that she made a mistake, Kamala and her people start blaming sexism and racism for their last scandal to distract from the next one.

Kamala managed to temporarily reinvent her privileged childhood as a California Jim Crow, now she’s trying to even more implausibly pull off the same pathetic trick inside the White House.

The Biden administration picked her even though she had accused its leading man of racism. Now that Kamala is struggling, she’s gone back to her old bag of tricks and is leaking accusations of racism aimed at the Biden administration. They should have seen it coming.

As the scorpion said to the frog just after it bit him and before they both drowned, "I couldn't help it. It's in my nature."

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Worker Unions Endorsed Biden, Members Got Screwed

When Joe Biden ran for office, he told the members of the United Steelworkers that he would keep President Trump's steel tariffs on Europe in place. The tariffs, which protect the jobs of American steelworkers, were one of the few Trump policies that Biden kept after taking office.

Even most government insiders thought the tariffs would stay in place because they created American jobs in key battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Abandoning them would risk not just the White House, but Democrat House and Senate losses in 2022 and 2024.

United Steelworkers endorsed Biden and he promised them that he would keep the tariffs in place right until he jetted off to Europe in Air Force One, with its presidential suite and gym, and then toured Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade to discuss the "environmental crisis".

Biden’s foreign policy priorities haven’t been focused on American security or jobs. After turning over Afghanistan to Al Qaeda for September 11, he decided to do to American steel jobs what he had done to Afghanistan by cutting a deal to partially lift President Trump’s steel tariffs.

The Biden administration’s environmentalist and tax hike priorities required making some concessions to the Europeans in exchange for agreeing to a minimum corporate tax of 15% (which Biden believes will make it easier to hike America’s corporate tax rates) and massive reductions in functional energy like coal and oil in exchange for non-functional green energy.

The steelworkers of Ohio and Pennsylvania, already on the hit list of Biden’s Big Green donors, were the sacrifice that “Middle Class Joe” made so his San Francisco donors can get even richer trading in carbon credits while salivating at the prospect of turning the entire American economy into a corrupt scheme for taxing and trading the imaginary “carbon” commodity.

To save the planet. Before flying off to their seaside coastal mansions.

United Steelworkers is now stuck trying to sell the latest Biden betrayal to its members as a very good thing by repeating the White House talking points of an alliance with Europe against Chinese steel. That promise, like the tariff promise, will turn out to be just as much of a sham.

Steelworkers could have taken a cue from the miners who have been lied to by Democrats.

The United Mine Workers of America had actually endorsed John Kerry, who went on to wage an environmentalist war on coal, because he had promised to protect coal jobs.

Kerry, now Biden's Climate Czar, tried to recently gaslight coal miners by falsely claiming that, "Workers have been fed a false narrative, no surprise, over the last few years they’ve been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense, no it’s not."

Then he suggested that coal miners get jobs installing solar panels.

“Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state," Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia pointed out.

Kerry’s current priority is trying to convince the Biden administration to surrender everything to China in exchange for asking the Commies to use less coal. Which they’re buying from us.

China is now the second largest market for American coal. Biden and Kerry are bribing the Chinese to stop buying our coal. Has any other government hated its own country this much?

The United Mine Workers of America didn’t even bother with a presidential endorsement. After Hillary Clinton announced that she would kill coal miner jobs, the UMWA threw in the towel. In the last election, most UMWA members voted Trump. The same was true of the steelworkers.

Biden not only lied to the steelworkers, and waged war on coal miners, he lied and betrayed those American miners who were hoping that there would be some future for mining jobs.

During the campaign, miners were "privately" told by the Biden campaign that his administration would encourage domestic mining of rare earth metals.

The Biden pitch was that his environmental strategy would require lots of rare earth metals for solar panels and electric cars, and that would actually boost rare earth mining in America.

It was a familiar twist on the scam that was sold to the steelworkers.

Big Green lobbies have repeatedly sold the same lie that "investing" in their energy scams would create jobs. The only place it ever creates jobs is in China and among the venture capitalists of San Francisco. Not to mention the EPA bureaucrats tasked with dragging out environmental reviews for years so nothing gets built who then turn around and get six figure jobs as environmental consultants to "help" businesses get things built.

There's no room for American workers in this dirty green racket.

After the worthless "private" assurances, once in office the Biden administration announced that it would be relying on foreign rare earth metals. Middle Class Joe’s betrayal of miners and the country had devastating consequences as China used the Taliban to secure Afghanistan’s rare earth mines even as a chip shortage wreaked havoc on the global supply chain.

Biden’s betrayal of miners also increased the prices of cars, laptops, and smartphones. Printer prices shot up 20%. And yet very few Biden voters understand that their own politician decisions are why they have to pay more for consumer electronics.

But the one thing you can count on from Democrat unions is that they will put the party first and their members last. And no matter how much their Democrat bosses humiliate them and spit in their faces, they’ll line up to ask for more while selling out their members one more time.

Democrats used to spout their love for the working class, now they have nothing but contempt for them. The dying breed of politicians who still know how to talk to working unions like Biden are nothing but puppets dancing for the amusement of their New York and SF donor bosses.

Biden betrayed steelworkers and miners. He’ll betray all workers and unions the same way. Even municipal unions, usually the pets of the Dems because of their role in taking the money from the contracts negotiated with their politicians and funneling it right back to them, were forced to swallow vaccine mandates and the firing of their members. And even the most combative radical unions like SEIU, usually willing to shut down everything, swallowed, and told their members to shut up and thank the union for its representation.

Over the spring, the United Mine Workers of America held a press conference cheering on Biden's plan to kill coal jobs and asking for money to "retrain" its members for new jobs.

Like shining Biden's shoes with green shoe polish.

“It’s not fair to take somebody’s job away from them and push them into another career,” a union member complained. “I love my job. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in this world. And I hope coal is continued to be mined for years after I’m gone.”

UMWA members are mad as hell about it. If only they had a union to represent them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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The British Muslim, CIA Operative, and Author of 'I Posed as a Man Online for Sex' Behind the Center for Countering Digital Hate

After campaigns to censor “election misinformation”, and “medical misinformation”, the latest wave of the censorship campaign calls for banning “climate misinformation” from the internet.

A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate warns of the free speech threat from, "climate disinformation, including articles that undermine the existence or impacts of climate change or misrepresent data in ways that might erode trust in climate science experts."

And nothing builds trust like eliminating dissent.

Big Tech monopolies like Google and Facebook are already preparing censorship measures, but CCDH provided them with a list of censorship targets that covers much of the conservative media including the Washington Times, Breitbart, PJ Media, Town Hall, Western Journal, and many others. The CCDH’s censorship pitch was then swiftly picked up by the Washington Post.

If the past pattern of CCDH reports holds, Senate Democrats will use it as a prop in their latest demand that Big Tech companies censor conservatives and won’t trouble to examine who is behind the unsigned report and the suddenly influential shadowy organization that produced it.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is a British leftist group run by Imran Ahmed, a former adviser to future London Mayor Sadiq Khan, now operating out of Washington D.C. Ahmed and his media allies claim that they have researchers on staff, but their site names only Ahmed.

The lack of transparency at CCDH extends to even basic staff information which requires digging in ways usually reserved for tracking terrorist cells. And it’s not hard to see why.

CCDH Senior researcher Sophie Wilkinson used to write pieces for Vice and The Guardian. Samples include "I Posed as a Man Online for Sex", "Slutdropping: the Dancefloor Move That's Bringing Women Together", and, “I Got My Faeces Tested to See If It's 'Super-Poo'”.

That’s more than any of the media outlets taking the CCDH seriously have done.

The media treated CCDH’s censorship “reports” as the work of serious experts when it was apparently actually the work of the author of “Talk Dirty To Me: How Audio Porn Is Awakening Our Sexual Fantasies” and “Are Zit-Squeezing Videos the New Porn?”

Every time a CCDH report drops, the media treats it as gospel while demanding that tech companies account for its accusations and then refusing to listen to contrary evidence. Not since the Steele dossier has the media been this willing to push dubious Brit material without even asking the most basic questions about where it’s coming from and who’s funding it.

And what the hell Imran Ahmed and CCDH are doing lobbying Congress for censorship.

Sit in an airport long enough while a cable news feed blares in the background and sooner or later, Imran Ahmed’s disembodied head will appear warning about the dangers of free speech.

Americans are suckers for British accents and Ahmed, despite being the son of unemployed Pakistani Muslims from Manchester, makes Washington D.C. elites swoon with his pitch for censorship in the same tones they might expect to be sold on gourmet meals or champagne.

Ahmed boasts of advising “politicians in the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere” and his advice is always the same: censor, deplatform, and suppress. None of the politicians or media stop to ask where he came from, why a British Labour adviser suddenly has a home in Washington D.C., let alone who pays his salary and who decided to put him in charge of censoring the internet.

He usually claims to be fighting “disinformation” or “misinformation” when he’s actually a one-man misinformation machine. “There are people gurgling for their breath in ICUs right now who are saying to their doctors, ‘Biden was right the first time,’” he tells The London Times.

The failed political adviser claims to have the solution for internet speech, yet he knows virtually nothing about the internet. "I don't fully understand the dark web," he rambled idiotically on a GB News UK segment. "I don't really know how to access it very well. My researchers, I'm sure do. But that's the point, the dark web is really difficult to access."

If you listen to a few minutes of an Imran Ahmed cable news hit, you’ll know less about the internet than you did going in, but you’ll be convinced that it’s a scary and dangerous place.

Fortunately, Ahmed’s audience of D.C. politicos and media babblers know less than he does. And they never ask the awkward question of what qualifies a former Merrill Lynch employee and British Labour Party adviser to weigh in on free speech in the United States of America.

The CCDH, as its name indicates, got started advocating censorship under the guise of fighting bigotry. Since then it’s moved on to pushing censorship of “medical misinformation” over coronavirus debates and now in its latest report calls for banning “climate denial”. The censorship targets this time include virtually the entire conservative media landscape.

Ahmed and CCDH aren’t just pushing censorship to the media though, but to Congress.

Ahmed admits that CCDH sets out to influence "decision-makers" by using lobbyists and appears to be paying Lot Sixteen LLC, a lobbying firm with lots of green energy clients.

CCDH’s “Toxic Ten” censorship report implies that conservative media oppose an environmental takeover of our economy because they are funded by oil companies, but are there links between Lot Sixteen’s environmentalist clients and the CCDH’s push to suppress conservative criticism of the massive subsidies being funneled to green energy companies?

Who’s funding CCDH to pay the lobbyists to influence American elected officials?

Are there domestic special interests funding the CCDH censorship effort for economic reasons or are foreign interests paying to lobby Congress to end free speech in America?

The CCDH doesn’t disclose its funders aside from mentioning that it gets some of its money from“philanthropic trusts”. It doesn’t specify which country these “trusts” are located in and whether their funds are used to pay U.S. lobbyists. Its D.C. address is a virtual office that forwards mail and its main British address in London appears to be more of the same.

Ahmed and his Center for Countering Digital Hate claim to be fighting “disinformation”, yet they provide no information about their funders, their staff, or even their actual offices. And what little information can be found through digging raises serious doubts and more troubling questions.

Lindsay Moran, the communications head at CCDH, and one of its few American staffers, boasts of being a "former CIA operative" who had also worked as head of communications at the EPA and a contributor for Al Jazeera. A former CIA case officer wrote of her biography,“It may well serve our many enemies to read this book.” That’s quite a recommendation.

The CCDH consists of British Labour Party operatives like Ahmed and Tom Lavelle, its head of digital operations, and the former head of digital campaigns for the British Labour Party and then the head of digital for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, along with trashy bloggers and shadier types. The funding sources for the entire operation and even its offices remain a secret.

And yet the media shows as little interest in this latest Orwellian Ministry of Information operation transplanted to American soil as it did in the backers of the Steele dossier.

It is curious that the debate about free speech in America has been hijacked by British lefties like former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, now VP of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook, and Imran Ahmed, the adviser to assorted shadow Labour ministers, who are not debating whether to censor American conservatives, but how quickly and thoroughly to do it.

Censorship advocates describe the internet as a dangerous shadowy world rife with misinformation, yet they are the ones who operate in the shadows, setting up front groups, building echo chambers, conducting secret negotiations, and planting narratives.

And the censorship of free speech that results is far more dangerous than their alarmism.

Threats can be dealt with by law enforcement and the authorities. Lies can be challenged, debated, and debunked. But rolling back government authoritarianism is an enterprise that has historically involved mass protests, civil wars, revolutions, and political prisoners in gulags.

The pro-censorship lobby doesn’t like language like that. It would even like to ban it. The censors claim that they’re confronting a series of “speech emergencies” by pressuring Big Tech monopolies and governments to form speech cartels that would wipe out bad speech. And they’re always discovering new forms of dangerous speech in urgent need of silencing.

But don’t call them censors.

Ahmed has argued, “We can’t suppress anyone’s opinion or their ability to express their opinion, but what we can do is create costs for their speech." Ahmed’s cost is what would suppress the ability to express opinions and ultimately the opinions themselves. Americans fought a revolution to end the “cost” of speech exacted on them by a British king. Speech in America is free. But how long will it remain free when the likes of CCDH conspire against it in D.C.?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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The ADL Convened a Summit of Anti-Semites to Fight Anti-Semitism

When three Jewish teens were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, Israel fought back, Jews mourned, and Sheera Frenkel rushed to claim that Hamas wasn’t responsible.

“There is a Hamas official in the story saying they are not Hamas,” she insisted on Twitter.

It was a low point in her career of smearing Israel with lies and hate, but not unusual.

Frenkel had accused Israel of using white phosphorus, falsely claimed that there had been a blast at an Iranian nuclear facility, wrongly described an Israeli ban on construction materials, and concluded her coverage of the brutal murder of a Rabbi and his family in India with a quote suggesting that “the attitudes of the Chabad, which gives the sense of an elite club for Jews alone, is part of what provoked the terrorists to target them for the attack.”

This is the sort of ugly hateful behavior the ADL should be condemning, not celebrating.

After a career of spreading disinformation against the Jewish State, Sheera Frenkel got a job covering “disinformation” for the New York Times. And she’ll be taking part in a conversation on the spread of “disinformation” at the opening session of the ADL’s Never Is Now summit.

At the ADL virtual event longside the notorious anti-Israel bigot will be fellow New York Times activist Kara Swisher who has her own history of anti-Israel tweets including a link to a column in the paper defending BDS, Rep. Rashida Tlaib along with the rest of the antisemitic “Squad”, and arguing that it’s possible to “oppose Jewish ethno-nationalism without being a bigot”.

This is how the ADL is promoting antisemitism while claiming to be fighting antisemitism.

When the ADL convenes its latest Never Is Now summit, Kamala Harris and Lost actor Daniel Dae Kim will be speaking, so will activists associated with anti-Israel hate groups like J Street and the Israel Policy Forum, but not a single pro-Israel group will be represented at the event.

While the ADL has not seen fit to invite any pro-Israel activists, it did find a place for Amy Spitalnick, the former press secretary for J Street, who had worked on Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign and then went on to serve as a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Earlier this year, Spitalnick appeared at a virtual J Street event alongside Peter Beinart, who supports BDS and recently wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State”. Spitalnick, who currently claims to be fighting Nazis, had defended the antisemitic play Seven Jewish Children which even The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg described as "anti-Jewish agitprop" and a Guardian op-ed compared to a medieval blood libel.

The ADL, which claims to fight antisemitism, is now literally allying with blood libelers.

Before Spitalnick had reinvented herself as combating Nazis, she was defending material that has been compared to Nazi propaganda and depicts Jews as the new Nazis.

And that’s the sort of thing that the ADL decided is a good fit for Never is Now.

In addition to Spitalnick, Oren Jacobson, the head of a pro-abortion group, is affiliated with the Israel Policy Forum, and will also be speaking at the ADL’s event. The ADL however chose not to extend invitations to anyone affiliated with pro-Israel groups to defend the Jewish State.

It did however invite Sara Yael Hirschhorn who, as Moshe Philips at Israel National News pointed out, had accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing". "The Palestinian case shares some common features with South Africa—population transfer/ethnic cleansing," Hirschhorn had tweeted, and falsely claimed that Israel is guilty of “daily violations of human rights."

Hirschhorn has cultivated a storied career of bashing Israel with New York Times op-eds like, “Israeli Terrorists, Born in the U.S.A.” Her book, City on a Hilltop, attacking Jews living in their historical homeland in Judea and Samaria, was featured, along with the author, at a Foundation for Middle East Peace event. FMEP, a part of the Arab Lobby, accuses Israel of "apartheid".

Past Never is Now conferences had at least tried for the pretense of balance by inviting a liberal pro-Israel activist or two. But now the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt is taking off the mask.

Along with Israel, the ADL is putting Jews and anti-semitism on the back burner. The opening session of Never is Now features Daniel Dae Kim talking about anti-Asian hate. The third session is titled, "Confronting Anti-Black Racism to Fight Antisemitism" and falsely claims that "Anti-black racism is... an issue in our synagogues, schools and Jewish Institutions."

The ADL was never a good organization, but I can remember when it used to condemn Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan instead of echoing them. 

Now the ADL’s idea of fighting antisemitism is telling Jews that they’re a bunch of racists.

"Without addressing the impact of racism," the ADL falsely claims, "we cannot move forward in the fight against antisemitism" and touts a panel that will "explore how critical it is to fight anti-black racism in order to build a stronger and more effective movement across communities to dismantle antisemitism." Making fighting antisemitism secondary to fighting racism is the most obvious symptom of a sellout organization that puts wokeness ahead of its core mission.

The NAACP does not tell its members that fighting racism should be secondary to fighting antisemitism. Nor does it create the artificial linkage that the ADL proposes which not only makes antisemitism a secondary issue, but demands that Jews admit to being racist.

After the past few years in which there were two domestic terrorist attacks against Jews by members of the the Black Hebrew Israelite hate group, in which major leftist movement leaders have praised Louis Farrakhan, and in which there have been repeated antisemitic hate crimes in the New York area carried out by black attackers, the ADL should be addressing black antisemitism, instead of accusing Jews of racism. But the ADL doesn’t care about antisemitism.

Only the final sessions, “Combating Anti-Zionist and Antisemitic Activism in Progressive Spaces” and “Confronting Antisemitism on Campus” actually address commonplace everyday antisemitism. Instead of putting the fight against antisemitism first, the ADL puts it last.

The careful tenor with which it addresses leftist antisemitism on campus and in organizational life is very different from its willingness to denounce every other form of bigotry. When it comes to its condemnation of racism against "Black, Latinx, AAPI, Muslim, LGBTQ+", the ADL doesn't engage in nuance or seek to distinguish between legitimate opinions and racist ones. Yet when it comes to leftist antisemitism, the ADL is careful to cultivate an imaginary distinction between good leftist hatred of Israel and bad leftist hatred of Jews so as not to offend its political allies.

Antisemitism is the only bigotry that the ADL believes requires nuance toward the bigots.

The ADL leadership is deferential toward leftist antisemitism because, unlike far right antisemitism or any kind of racism or prejudice, it concedes that leftist antisemitism has a point.

The roster of anti-Israel bigots it invited to present at Never is Now signals as much.

Instead of opposing leftist antisemitism, the ADL would like leftists to moderate it, to draw lines between appropriate and inappropriate hate, but as the history of its own collaborators in leftist antisemitism show, that line is as imaginary as the ADL’s Jewish commitments.

The ADL’s decision to not only stock its virtual conference with radical leftists who wage a disinformation war against Jews, but to invite high school students to attend shows just how destructive to Jewish life the organization’s wokeness under Greenblatt has become.

Instead of calling its conferences Never is Now, maybe the ADL should call them Now Again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Dynasties, Witchcraft, and Midnight Burials in the Sandinista Socialist Utopia

In the 80s, the Sandinista Marxist terrorists were hotter than pastel suits and shoulder pads.

Sandinista! by The Clash was eating up the music charts and Hollywood celebrities like Ed Asner and Mike Farrell bypassed Cuba for the exciting new socialist nightmare in Nicaragua.

When Marxist butcher Daniel Ortega appeared at a New York Athletic Club reception in 1984, CBS' Mike Wallace, Michael Douglas, and the entire media showed up to give the terrorist and his accomplices a tongue bath.

"To try to get the guy to bed, and then kill him! Fantastic," the wife of the MTV president at the reception gushed over a female Sandinista terrorist who had laid a honey trap for a Nicaraguan official. "That's my dream, to do that to Reagan, George Bush, go right down the line.”

But no one fell in love with the Sandinistas quite as hard as John Kerry who, along with other Democrats, wrote love letters addressing the Marxist terror leader as Dear Commandante.

Shortly after taking office, John Kerry flew to Nicaragua to meet with Ortega and returned bearing Sandinista propaganda.

“These are just poor people, no money, no food, just like Vietnam, and they are just trying to stay alive. They just want peace," Kerry whined.

Hollywood is much less interested in Ortega and the Sandinistas these days though the glorification of the Marxist terror group hasn’t entirely halted with the ¡Las Sandinistas! documentary making the rounds of film festivals. And Kerry no longer writes to Ortega.

Every leftist revolution begins with terrorism, passes through a giddy phase of utopian socialism, and ends in evil misery. With a 40% poverty rate, the socialist revolution in Nicaragua is nearly complete. The number of people starving has quadrupled in the past few years, and the regime is conducting “express burials” at night to cover up the death toll from the coronavirus.

Family members are given a few hours at night to bury a body in a black bag under police supervision and the dying in this mostly Catholic country are being denied last rites.

Ortega, once heralded as a revolutionary leader, has grown old in power. The 75-year-old Marxist dictator appointed his wife as his vice president and is planning a dynasty to take his place. That won’t include his stepdaughter who had accused him of molesting her as a child.

And while Nicaraguans starve, protest, and die, Ortega’s wife erects “magical trees”.

Rosario Murillo, gaunt, gruesome, and bejeweled, has gone from a bad erotic poet to a worse tyrant. Latin American politics is no stranger to harsh rhetoric, but for the last 30 years, Nicaraguan preachers have accused her of being in league with the devil. And they meant it.

Today, anti-regime protesters chant Christian prayers to nullify her perceived powers.

It all began when “Comrade Rosario”, her preferred title, though the popular one is “La Chamuca” or female devil, joined her husband’s presidential campaign in the 90s by announcing an international conference on witchcraft. And it just got worse from there.

Murillo, who first met Ortega when she visited him in prison, became his government’s chief spokeswoman, and then occupied a variety of positions until her daughter accused him of rape. The Comrade stood by her Comandante against her daughter and he repaid her with power.

Now it’s widely assumed that she controls Nicaragua.

While much of the country lives in poverty and hunger, Murillo spent millions putting up metal trees covered in illuminated lights. The "Trees of Life", based on Klimt's Tree of Life, a mural symbolically depicting a tree "rising from the underworld through our world", were viewed by some as having occult significance. And when the latest protests broke out against the Sandinista regime, cheering protesters toppled and smashed Murillo’s towering metal trees.

“Once, I received one as a gift from a guy I had met during the protests. In a joking tone, he let me know that before giving me the lightbulb, he had asked a priest to bless it with holy water, ‘just in case’”, a journalist noted.

Latin American Marxist regimes turning to tyranny and the occult are not an unusual phenomenon. Venezuela’s brutal tyrant, Nicolas Maduro, claimed that his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, had returned to him in the form of a bird. Marxist dictators who oppose Christianity and Judaism typically resort to pagan religions to provide them with spiritual sanction.

Fidel Castro built ties to the Santeria cult which viewed him as being chosen by their pagan gods. Shortly before he was forced to step down, a Santeria priest declared that the Yoruba gods say Castro "is the one that should be there and so he is untouchable".

That did not prove to be the case.

Whether Comrade Rosario’s occult posturing is real or not, the Sandinista revolution has gone from Bianca Jagger to a haggard old witch, from hip guerrillas to yet another corrupt dynasty, even while the poverty, the hunger, and the tyranny destroying Nicaragua only deepened.

Back in the 80s, Senator Chris Dodd, then a mere House member, used to write "Dear Comandante" letters to Ortega. In 2010, Ortega joked that Dodd was a longtime "Sandinista sympathizer". These days, Dodd has been forced to rethink his sympathies, complaining that Ortega and his wife hadn't even tried to improve relations with Biden.

“This has been a flat-out rejection,” Dodd said. “It’s been terribly disappointing.”

Perhaps Dodd can also rethink his past lie, "Ortega is not Marcos or Noriega. He has a real popular base in his country", now that the Marxist dictator is dismantling free and open elections, and jailing opponents and rivals, while maintaining a ruthless grip on power.

What do the events in a tiny Marxist country matter to Americans?

“Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America," Bernie Sanders used to boast. Nicaragua has set a hell of an example, but none of its former fans, from Kerry to Bernie, are learning the lesson.

Ortega and the Sandinistas did not suddenly descend into tyranny. They were always killers, not to mention bigots, who admired the Soviet Union not because either side cared about the working class or revolutionary ideals, but because they were greedy for money and power.

The current state of Nicaragua is not a betrayal of the revolution, but its successful implementation. Or as George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

The Sandinistas were not liberators, like every leftist movement, they were dictators-in-waiting.

Had the glitterati rushing to shake Ortega’s bloodsoaked hand at the New York Athletic Club in 1984 understood the lessons of the eponymous book, they might have pulled back just a little.

Two generations later the old Sandinista fan club in America is at the apogee of its power. From John Kerry to Bill de Blasio to Bernie Sanders, the older and younger fans of the Marxist terror thugs have carved their own way to power in America and the nation is all the worse for it.

But the lessons of the old revolutions are quickly forgotten in the rush to the next revolution.

Meanwhile the Sandinista revolution that inspired so many youthful American radicals in the age of mullets and fanny packs has, much like its American fans, aged badly. The regime once touted as a socialist model now consists of a haggard witch and her puppet husband trying to hold on to power long enough to hand over the throne to one of their children. In the villages the people starve, bodies are buried at midnight, and the dictator’s wife puts up electric trees.

Hollywood, once so enthusiastic about the Sandinistas, looks elsewhere. Murder never dampened the enthusiasm of millionaire celebrities for Marxist terrorists, but Ortega and the Sandinistas committed the ultimate crime that a socialist regime can commit in their eyes.

Not tyranny or mass murder.

Like Brezhnev, Raul Castro, and Xi Jinping, Ortega and the Sandinistas have become uncool.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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