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Monday, May 31, 2021

The Warrior's Tale

By On May 31, 2021

The warrior's tale is a simple enough thing. Strong as steel, but fragile as chance. It is the wind in his soul and the wall we build around ourselves to tell us who we are.

Before there were cities or nations, and railways and airports, computers and telephones-- the tale was told around campfires. Acted out in pantomime, dressed up in animal furs and cave paintings. But the tale was the same. The people were confronted with a threat and they called upon the best and strongest of their men to go out and fight it. These were their warriors. What they did in the face of that threat is the tale.

The tale has many variations. Sometimes there are many warriors, sometimes only a handful. They march into the village of the enemy in triumph, or they make a last stand on a rocky outcropping, spending the last of their heart's blood to buy time they will never know. There is the weak man who becomes strong, the strong man who becomes weak, the woman who mourns the man who will never return, and the man who goes off to battle with nothing to lose. These tales have been told countless times in the ages of men, and they will be told again for as long as men endure.

It is not only the warriors who need the tale, or those left behind. Future generation learn who they are from this tale. "We are the people who died for this land," is the unseen moral of each tale. "We bled for it. We died for it. Now it is yours to bleed and die for."

The warrior's tale tells each generation that they stand on the wall against a hostile world. And that the wall is made not of stones, but of their virtues. Their courage, their integrity and their craft.  Theirs is the wall and they are the wall-- and if they should fail, then it will fail. And the land and the people will be swept away.

What happens to a people who forget the warrior's tale and stop telling it around their campfires? Worse , what of a people who are taught to despise the figure of the warrior and what he represents? They will not lose their courage, not all of it. But they will lose the direction of that courage. It will become a sudden unexplained virtue that rises to them out of the depths of danger. And their wall will fail.

It is the warrior's tale that makes walls. That says this is the land that we have fought for, and we will go on fighting for it. It is sacrifice that makes mere possession sacrosanct. It is blood that turns right to duty. It is the seal that is above law, deeper still to heritage. Anyone can hold a thing, but it is sacrifice that elevates it beyond possessiveness. And it is that tale which elevates a people from possessors of a land, to the people of the land.

Universalism discards the warrior's tale as abomination. A division in the family of man. Their tale is of an unselfish world where there are no more divisions or distinctions. Where everyone is the same in their own way. But this tale is a myth, a religious idea perverted into totalitarian politics. It is a promise that cannot be kept and a poison disguised with dollops of sugar. It lures the people into tearing down their wall and driving out their warriors.  And what follows is what always does when there is no wall. The invaders come, the women scream, the children are taken captive and the men sit with folded hands and drugged smiles dreaming of a better world.

The warrior's tale explains why we fight in terms of our own history. The Great Swamp Fight. The Shot Heard Round the World. The Battle of New Orleans. Gettysburg, San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Pearl Harbor, Heartbreak Ridge, the Tet Offensive, Kandahar, and Fallujah. Generations of sacrifices must be defended. And those who wage war on us must be made to pay.

Universalism demands that war must answer to universal aims and objectives. That there is a universal law higher than war. But this is a children's story. The laws of men derive from their own interests. Those who can rule by force or coalition make their laws to serve their own ends. This is the way of the world.

Those who pretend to live by universalism will still fall to the law of steel. Rhetoric is no defense against fire and lead, and international codes have no defense against those who will break them. The talk may go on, but it is the warriors who will end it. It is still the warrior's tale to tell, even if all others have forgotten it.

The warrior's tale is no happy thing. It is bitter as bile and dark as death. But it is also a grand and glorious thing. For even in its full naked truth, it is the story of perseverance in the face of every agony and betrayal. It is the tale of how we live and why we die.

Even when all others forget their tale, the warriors remember. Even when they are called peacekeepers and turned into an army of clowns for the satisfaction of their political masters. The armies may decay, but warriors still remain in their cracks, on their edges-- men who are not wanted, but are needed because they are the only ones who can do the grim work and do it well. They may only be a hundredth of an army, or a thousandth. A fraction of a fraction. But without them there is no army, only empty uniforms.

When the warrior's tale is forgotten, then they become shadows. Dangerous men despised and feared. Thought of as killers, dismissed as monsters and stared at like beasts in a cage. But the society cannot deny them. It cannot deny that part of them. When the warrior diminishes, the energy is directed elsewhere. Sport becomes an obsession and matches end in bloody violence. Crime increases. Prisons fill up. So do police forces.

As the external war fades, the internal one begins. Barbarians come from without. Buildings burn, mobs rage and there is a savagery in the air.

No law can protect a society that has forgotten the warrior's tale. It will turn outward, and adopt the warriors tales of outsiders. The samurai will replace the cowboy. The sports star will be an outsider. Its heroes will become foreigners. Men who will do understand the virtue of violence and will do what their own have been forbidden. Who have the vital energy that a society without a warrior's tale lacks.

When a people give up their own warrior's tale for that of others, they lose the ability to resist them. For each people's warrior's tale says that we are people, and they are enemies. We are warriors and they are murderers. When a people have no other warrior's tale but that of their enemies, they will come to believe that they are monsters. And that their enemies are brave warriors.

The day will come when they are asked who they are, and they will not know. They will point to their possessions and the names of their streets and cities. They will speak of higher ideals and cringe for not living up to them. They will be asked why they fight, and they will say that they do not want to fight. That all they want is peace at any price.

Even the most powerful of civilizations with the mightiest of cities becomes prey when it forgets the warrior's tale. It takes more than weapons to defend a city, it demands the knowledge of the rightness of their use. It is no use dressing men in uniforms and arming them, if they are not taught the warrior's tale. And it is nearly as little use, sending them off to watch and keep, if the men above them discard the warrior's tale as violent and primitive gibberish.

An army of millions is worth little, without the warrior's tale. Strategy is technique, firepower is capacity, both begin and end with the human mind. "Why do we fight," is the question that the warrior's tale answers far better than any politician could. "We fight because this is ours. It is our honor, our duty and our war. We have been fighting for hundreds and thousands of years. This is what makes us who we are."

We are the people, says the warrior's tale. But we are every people, says the universalist's tale. All is one. There is no difference between us and them. And we will prove it by bringing them here. Then the walls fall and it falls to the warriors to make their last stand. To tell another warrior's tale with their lives.

This is the quiet war between the philosopher merchants who want trade and empire, and the warriors who know that they will be called upon to secure the empire, and then die fighting the enemy at home. It is how the long tale that begins with campfires and ends with burning cities goes. The story that begins with cave paintings and ends with YouTube videos. Whose pen is iron, lead and steel. And whose ink is always blood.

We have been here before. Told and retold the old stories. The forest, the swamp, the hill and the valley. And behind them the lie, the maneuver and the betrayal. The war that becomes unreasoning and the people who forget why they fight. And one by one the warriors slip away. Some to the long sleep in the desert. Others to secluded green places. And still others into the forgetfulness of a people's memory. The hole in the heart of a people who forget themselves and become nothing.

Sunday, May 30, 2021

Biden Frees Al Qaeda Ally Who Plotted to Smuggle Nukes Into US

By On May 30, 2021
With inflation rising almost as fast as gas prices and the cost of a home, Joe Biden ain’t doing much for most Americans. But if you’re an Al Qaeda terrorist, he’s got your back.

Just ask three of Gitmo’s finest who are benefiting from Biden’s generosity.

Saifullah Paracha was a Pakistani businessman and New York travel agent with some big plans. The Gitmo inmate now being set loose by Biden wanted to “do something big against the US.”

9/11 was in Al Qaeda's rearview mirror and its mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was plotting a sequel. The Gitmo dossier for Paracha first details a plan to use his “textile business to smuggle explosives into the US” and these "ready-made explosives, specifically C4" would go into shipping containers full of "women and children's clothing".

Shipping Al Qaeda’s C4 to America would be more lucrative than dumping sweatshop labor sweatpants because “if al-Qaida used detainee’s textile company for shipping explosives to the US, he would likely be paid additional money beyond the standard shipping fees”. No word on whether there would have been a bonus for every American blown up.

And then things escalated from there with testimony that Paracha allegedly claimed that he, “believed he could obtain unspecified chemicals from Chinese sources”. The fellow he was talking to about the unspecified chemicals, Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the few Gitmo Jihadis whom neither Obama nor Biden had managed to release yet, had helped out the 9/11 hijackers with flight simulators, and manuals, and allegedly chatted with Mohammed Atta.

After 9/11, Al-Baluchi was looking at all sorts of plans for crashing planes into things, like the American consulate in Karachi or London’s Heathrow airport, but there were other options on the table. The nature of the chemicals out of China was never specified, but the KSM lieutenant believed they were” chemical or biological agents” that could be used “as a weapon”.

Paracha reportedly advised Al Qaeda that “one should look for a similar looking chemical and put it in between the good chemicals and it would be very easy to get [through] customs.” With his business experience, he could offer Al Qaeda tips on smuggling such as warning them about the “radiological sensors at ports or places of entry into the US” that would make it difficult to smuggle radioactive materials into the country”.

But Biden’s newest charity case wanted something bigger. The dossier describes the 9/11 mastermind's associate and Paracha chatting about Al Qaeda getting some "radiological or nuclear items several times" because Paracha wanted "to help al-Qaida 'do something big against the US.'”

Paracha "also discussed nuclear attacks and attacks against nuclear power plants" and had an idea for “al-Qaida to attack a nuclear power plant”.

So you can see why Joe Biden is letting him go.

Why settle for helping Iran nuke America, when you can also help Al Qaeda nuke America?

The Pakistani graduate of the New York Institute of Technology “expressed strong anti-US sentiment” and allegedly “stated that nuclear weapons should be used against US troops, as thousands of the troops would be killed at once”.

The pro-terror lobby has spent all these years claiming that Paracha was an innocent victim of American imperialism who was never charged with anything and was smeared with confessions obtained by acts of horrifying torture like Barney songs played on a non-stop loop.

Curiously the dossier mentions that Paracha's diary had "references to military chemical warfare agents, and their effects on humans" including Sarin nerve gas.

But what New York travel agent hasn't filled his diary with entries about the effects of nerve gas on humans along with the contact information for an alleged Al Qaeda anthrax operative?

You’d have to be an Islamophobe to find anything suspicious about that.

Sadly, none of these plans worked out. Instead the agents of the Great Satan told Palacha that they wanted him to come to Thailand to discuss a deal with Kmart. When Palacha showed up to pitch Kmart reps on a blue light special that might or might not glow in the dark, they weren’t there to get a deal on some Pakistani underwear, but offering a place off Cuba with a view.

Even Obama didn’t set Paracha loose, but Biden is determined to out-Obama him.

The media understandably doesn’t want to trouble Americans with any uncomfortable mentions of nuclear weapons and Chinese chemicals when explaining Biden’s latest gift to Al Qaeda.

The New York Times only mentions that Paracha is "a former businessman and longtime legal resident of New York" and that he has "heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure".

Also some years ago a spiritual leader with a Buddhist symbol made famous by an Austrian house painter carved into his forehead died of colon cancer while one of California's oldest inmates. It’s almost as awful as when that elderly former house painter commited suicide after a long struggle with syphillis along with his new bride in a bunker that Biden would have envied.

The Hill plaintively whines that, “Paracha was the oldest and reportedly among the sickest detainees held at Guantánamo Bay. He suffered from heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure.” Since Paracha is still alive and the description is in the past tense, we can only assume that being freed by Biden is a cure for heart disease, diabetes, and blood pressure.

If Biden really wants to cure cancer, he can drop all of that moonshot nonsense, all he needs to do is give all of Al Qaeda cancer, and then release them. If it doesn’t cure them, it’ll kill them.

Releasing Paracha might also be a concern for the Brits as the dossier also states that he had discussed with Al-Baluchi “how to smuggle explosives and chemicals into England”.

When Paracha wasn't exploring the exciting possibilities of nuclear weapons, he met Osama bin Laden on a trip to Afghanistan and "offered to let UBL and al-Qaida use his media broadcasting business to film and distribute propaganda and training films'' that would include "depicting UBL quoting Koranic verses". While a lot of Paracha's other plots were theoretical, the dossier indicates that Al Qaeda used Paracha's "video broadcasting facility" to make a movie featuring "a senior Saudi al-Qaida facilitator associated with a cell targeting Americans in Saudi Arabia."

But no doubt after all that time having to listen to Barney sing, “I Love You, You Love Me” on repeat at Gitmo, with nothing to read except the Koran and Harry Potter novels, Paracha has come around and now loves America. And from now on will commit to only shipping women’s and children’s clothing to Kmart without C4, Chinese chemicals, or nukes.

The other beneficiaries of Biden’s generosity are Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, an alleged bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, and Abdul Rabbani, allegedly a member of an Al Qaeda cell plotting car bomb attacks against Americans.

Biden intends to continue Obama’s work of freeing all the Islamic terrorists of Gitmo.

Paracha had apparently told American investigators that "he did not think meeting with al-Qaida was a crime, just business".

Biden clearly doesn’t think aiding Islamic terrorists is a crime either. That’s why he’s doing it.





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Thursday, May 27, 2021

The PLO Antisemitic Riots and Jihadization of American Cities are an Immigration Issue

By On May 27, 2021


In 2015, The Atlantic ran a cover story titled, "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?"

In 2021, the question is whether it’s time for the Jews to leave New York and Los Angeles.

The magazine cover story mentioned Malmo. Most stories about antisemitism in Europe reference the Swedish city whose Jewish population dropped from 3,000 to barely 800. Current estimates are that Malmo will have no Jews left by the end of the decade as its population flees Muslim mob violence, firebombings, and random assaults: including 100 aimed at its sole rabbi.

“I hear students shouting in the hallway about killing Jews,” a public school teacher described. Firebombs are routinely thrown at Jewish institutions. Mobs have torn down gates to try to smash their way inside. A Swedish journalist who conducted a hidden camera investigation of what happens to anyone visibly Jewish was harassed within moments of sitting down to eat.

Americans who wondered how this could happen in Europe are now seeing it at home.

There’s nothing confusing about ‘how’ or ‘why’. Or as a CBC article about Malmo gingerly put it, “Anti-Semitism in Malmö reveals flaws in Swedish immigration system”. There are equally big flaws in our immigration system and too many Jewish groups have wasted time on outreach instead of working toward immigration reform to stop the ‘Malmoization’ of New York and LA.

Estimates of the size of the Muslim population in the United States doubled since 9/11.

Islamists claim that there are over 750,000 Muslim settlers in New York City, making up around 9% of the population, and operating hundreds of mosques across the five boroughs. Those numbers may be overstated, but there’s no denying that there are far more Muslims now. And much of the growth has happened at the lower end leading to a large young male population.

The viral videos of antisemitic attacks by mobs of young Muslim men are the outcome.

Like many European cities, New York City now has a large, angry population of young Muslim men who are looking to lash out. And Jews are an easy target. When Waseem Awawdeh was arrested over a vicious assault on a Jewish accountant, he declared, “If I could do it again, I would do it again,” and then received a hero's welcome on his release.

New York City now hosts the largest Muslim population in the country. Los Angeles, the scene of more antisemitic mob attacks, hosts another of the country’s largest Muslim populations. Before 9/11, there were less than 100,000 Muslims in Los Angeles County. Even accounting for Islamist overestimates, the number has grown significantly.

Like NYC, LA is becoming ‘Malmoized’.

There are still enough Jews in both cities that the Democrat politicians offer token condemnations and ask the local police to make a few arrests. As the demographics continue to shift away from Jews and toward Muslims, they’ll react the way that Ilmar Reepalu, Malmo's former mayor did, when he blamed Israel for the antisemitic attacks on Jews by Muslims.

The AOC crowd already echoes this type of rhetoric on social media. And George Soros, who funds much of the American Left, had made this exact argument two decades ago. “Attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views,” the former Nazi collaborator had argued.

But that’s only to be expected of an antisemitic movement. American Jews however spent a generation watching European Jews being driven out and did little with that time. After all these years of consuming articles about the fate of the Jews of Paris, Berlin, and Malmo, they went on supporting mass Muslim migration because they were told it was the right thing to do.

When President Trump tried to implement a ban on travel from Muslim terror states, the ZOA became the only Jewish organization to file a Supreme Court brief in defense of the move.

The ADL signed on to every HIAS push against the move to protect Americans from Islamic terror, alongside anti-Israel groups like J Street, Soros' Bend the Arc, and T'ruah. HIAS, T’ruah, and Avodah, a feeder group for the anti-Israel movement funded by Steven Spielberg, showed up to a Linda Sarsour protest. Rallying for Muslim migration mattered more than antisemitism.

While Orthodox Jews stayed out of the protests, not counting Uri L’Tzedek, a component of the heretical leftist Yeshivat Chovevei Torah crowd, the Orthodox Union’s Nathan Diament put out a shameful statement comparing Syrian migrants to Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust.

Fortunately, the National Council of Young Israel took a stand, calling the obscene analogy “highly offensive to those Jews who survived Nazi persecution.”

As I wrote at the time, “when one of Diament’s migrants attacks Jews, they will not be able to say, ‘Our hands did not shed this blood and our eyes did not see it.’” Now the blood is being shed and the OU is co-signing letters calling for an antisemitism monitor as if the problem lies in a lack of monitoring rather than the inevitable crisis of Islamist immigration and demographics.

American Jews have followed the same failed strategy as European Jews.

"After two Muslim teenagers attempted to set fire to Malmo’s synagogue last March, HaCohen and Barakat telephoned their school principal, then visited the class the next day to discuss the incident. 'We did not point out the kids,' Barakat says, explaining they used the time to give a lesson about anti-Semitism, rather than punish them,” a Time Magazine article cheerfully notes.

The suicidal hobby of handing out lessons about antisemitism to synagogue burners continues.

Integrating the fight against antisemitism into broader leftist movements against bigotry has failed miserably because the central premise of intersectionality and anti-racism is that some people, privileged white people in general and Jews in particular, deserve to be hated.

The collapse of a liberal middle class into dueling Marxist and Fascist youth mobs is mainstreaming antisemitism in America the way that it already has in Europe. But the heavy lifting will still be done by young men whose parents came here from Iraq, Pakistan, or Gaza that we’ve seen assaulting random Jewish people in New York and Los Angeles.

The cries of “Kill Jews, Free Palestine” are not a horrid aberration: they’re the new normal.

The one thing that could have stopped this and perhaps still might would be for American Jews to be willing to say the unspeakable: that some people belong in this country and others don’t.

The idea that immigration should be a mutual social contract instead of a suicide pact is profoundly alien to everything that millions of Americans, Jews and Christians, have absorbed over the years. Beyond the Christian churches and HIAS which lobby to resettle more Islamists in America, much of the country is wedded to the idea that we must take anyone who comes.

But when we take anyone who comes, then we’re the ones who get taken for a ride.

While our streets are filled with the homeless and unemployed Americans are dying of drug overdoses at record rates, churches and temples lecture their parishioners on their moral duty to bring more Iraqis, Syrians, and Pakistanis to America. But 9/11 and the occasional terror attack in a major city are just the appetizers of Islamist demographic colonization.

The next stage, mob violence by what the European press carefully calls “angry youths”, is now underway in New York and Los Angeles. It won’t stop there. The era of the “lone wolf” Jihadi hasn’t ended yet, but the future of Islamic terror in America will be group attacks, like those in Bataclan in Paris, and more routine riots and mass assaults abetted by their leftist allies.

Jews in New York City are the easiest targets, but as the Swedes or the French could tell you, or the Poles and the Czechs, it rarely ends there.

Muslim violence isn’t a response to oppression or persecution. It’s a supremacist theological mission to colonize and subjugate non-Muslims as numerous Jihadis have told us at their trials.

We chose not to take them at their word.

Israel is not the issue. Just as Mohammed cartoons, a teddy bear with the wrong name, or false reports of a desecrated Koran were not the real issues at the heart of other Muslim rampages.

When thugs and terrorists want to beat and kill people, they can always find an excuse.

Listening to their excuses and taking them seriously is almost as dumb as visiting their countries or letting them inside your country long enough for them to kill you. If we want to survive, we’re going to have to stop being dumb. Otherwise we’ll learn to live and die like they do in Malmo.

It happened in Europe. Now it’s happening here.

If American Jews want to stop antisemitism, they need to stop importing it from the antisemitic capitals of the world. Really fighting antisemitism means fighting antisemitic immigration.

Or investing in bulletproof windows while educating synagogue burners about antisemitism.






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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Biden Brings in Islamic Activists to Investigate U.S. Military for 'Extremism'

By On May 25, 2021
A decade ago, Hina Shamsi was fighting on behalf of the Holy Land Foundation whose leaders had been convicted of providing material support to Hamas.

As the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, Shamsi, a Pakistani citizen, had fought fiercely for the Islamic terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. “We all must pledge — not one person more in Guantanamo, not in our names,” she recently declared.

But now the Pakistani advocate for Islamic terrorists has a new job: going after our soldiers.

Shamsi is one of the terror lawyers who appears on a list of partners for the Biden administration's crackdown on "extremism" in the military. The only kind of extremism that Shamsi appears to be an expert on is the Islamic kind and her expertise has been in denying it.

Furthermore, at least as of 2017, Shamsi had described herself as a Pakistan citizen with permanent legal residency in America.

She’s not the only apparent Pakistani citizen tasked by Biden to go after our troops.

Take Faiza Patel, another Pakistani immigrant, who co-wrote an article arguing against designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization. The article claimed that "the Muslim Brotherhood is a religious organization, a political party, and a social service provider" and that it had "disavowed violence decades ago."

That would come as news to Hamas and its other active Jihadist network members.

In another co-written article, Faiza Patel claimed that laws against Sharia were Islamophobic.

Patel has worked for international organizations in Europe, including the International Criminal Tribunal, and was a member of a UN Human Rights Council working group which listed her as a member from Pakistan, not the United States, raising questions about her citizenship.

And yet Shamsi and Patel aren’t the worst of the list of partners for the Biden administration’s Countering Extremism Working Group (CEWG) published by OANN correspondent Jack Posobiec

While Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had announced the CEWG group to counter supposed "extremism" in the military, the list of CEWG partners contains a lot of Muslim lawyers and activists. In addition to Shamsi, there’s fellow Pakistani ACLU activist: Manar Waheed.

The list includes Wael Alzayat in his role as the CEO of Emgage. The national co-chair and founding member of the Islamic group is Khurrum Wahid who has been described as one of the country’s most prominent terror lawyers and whose clients include an Al Qaeda operative who plotted to kill President George W. Bush and Sami al-Arian who was linked to Islamic Jihad.

Wahid had been placed on a terrorist watch list and Emgage, as counterterrorism researcher Joe Kaufman noted, "holds events at terror-linked mosques”: including one founded by al-Arian.

Emgage's board includes Dhabah ‘Debbie’ Almontaser who was forced out of her old job over t-shirts reading “Intifada NYC”. Nada al Hanooti, Emgage's Executive Director for Michigan, is the daughter of Muthanna al Hanooti, a former CAIR leader who was accused of working for Saddam Hussein and Iraq's intelligence agency.

Is that the kind of extremism expertise that the Department of Defense really needs?

Also on the list of Biden's CEWG partners is Iman Boukadou:, the staff attorney for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

The ADC has a long history of defending and excusing Islamic terrorism. "I know many people in Hamas. They are very respectable," its former president Hamzi Moghrabi had said. Former ADC president Hussein Ibish called Hezbollah “a disciplined and responsible liberation force” whose members “conducted themselves in an exemplary manner.”

Boukadoum was most recently hard at work fighting for Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who had been convicted of obstruction of justice in a case involving the flow of money to Hamas.

Ashqar ran for president of the Palestinian Authority while awaiting trial in the United States. He had argued that the evidence against him had come from a time when “Hamas was not designated as a terrorist organisation” and boasted that, “they wanted me to testify against my people. I said I'd rather die than betray my commitment to freedom and justice for Palestine."

American military personnel are being put at the mercy of advocates for their worst enemies.

Biden’s DOD radicals have assembled a list of activists who have absolutely no credibility when it comes to extremism. Multiple “partners” for Biden’s Countering Extremism Working Group have appeared at events for CAIR, ICNA, and other terror-linked organizations. Some have appeared at events featuring advocates for Islamic terrorism, sharia, and violence against non-Muslims. They’re the extremists that Americans should be concerned about.

It was not surprising that Biden's CEWG partner list would include multiple personnel from the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center including Heidi Beirich, formerly of the SPLC, currently running her own organization, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which barely has a website.

Or that the only conservative on the list is the First Liberty Institute. FLI's Michael Berry also appears to be the only person on Biden’s list who is qualified for this role as a Lt. Colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who works as FLI's Director of Military Affairs.

But to Biden, defending Al Qaeda and Hamas terrorists, is the only qualification needed for going after American soldiers. That tells us everything we need to know about Biden’s goals.

Biden's Secretary of Defense Austin falsely claimed that, "this is not about politics or political views." His list of partners makes it abundantly clear that this is entirely about politics.

The list consists almost entirely of organizations and individuals who supported Biden.

And that makes this look even more like a political purge of the military by a radical administration that began its time in office by abusing the military for political purposes, and has made it clear that it intends to eliminate any opposition within the military to its political views.

But it’s striking that a third of Biden’s CEWG partners are Muslim. Especially since the Biden administration isn’t looking for another Nidal Hasan in the hopes of averting another Fort Hood Massacre, but is instead trying to rewrite history to pretend that the greatest threat to our national security comes from Biden’s political opponents rather than from his Islamist backers.

The Obama administration infamously dismantled our counterterrorism programs and replaced them with Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Biden is dismantling CVE and siccing Islamist activists and their lawyers on the military to implement a ruthless purge of American soldiers.

Witnessing Gitmo lawyers licking their lips at the prospect of bringing the Jihad into the heart of the military against soldiers who bravely served our country but have no defense against being betrayed by their own government is as disheartening to us as it must be to them.

“Did we lose a war?” the ordinary American confronted with this reversal of terror may wonder.

And the answer is, “Yes, we did.”





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

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Sunday, May 23, 2021

How the UN Stole Jewish Homes in Occupied Jerusalem and Set Off the Latest Conflict

By On May 23, 2021
In 1948, the armies of seven Arab nations invaded Israel. They failed to wipe out the newly reborn nation, but Jordan occupied part of Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed its Jews.

Among the former Jewish neighborhoods was a small area named Shimon HaTzadik or Simon the Righteous after a high priest who became famous for talking Alexander the Great out of putting up an idol in the Temple. The Arab Muslim colonists who had occupied the area however called it Sheikh Jarrah after an associate of the Iraqi invader Saladin.

Saladin had invaded Israel some 1500 years after Shimon HaTzadik’s death. His associate settled in Jerusalem and died there. A mosque was built over the house of the invader, Jarrah, which later gave its name to the neighborhood when the Husseini family set up shop there in the 19th century. Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, grew up in the first house in the neighborhood.

Seven years after he got a pledge from Hitler to invade and kill all the Jews, the Islamic leader tried to finish the job with the Army of the Sacred Jihad backed by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood Jihadis. Aside from blowing up the newspaper that would later be known as the Jerusalem Post, the Jihadis performed poorly in battle and fell apart when their commander, another Husseini, was killed trying to cut off Israeli supply convoys to the siege of Jerusalem.

The Jordanians desecrated the synagogues of East Jerusalem, used Jewish tombstones to pave roads, and seized Jewish property through their Custodian of Enemy Property.

In 1956, UNRWA worked with the Jordanian occupiers to settle “Palestinian refugees” in this Jewish neighborhood. The UN agency had been entirely dedicated to caring for the Arab Muslim settlers who had failed in their invasion of Israel and was settling them in violation of international law in the homes of the Jewish residents who had fled the illegal occupation.

Once the UNRWA had “resettled” its “refugees” in homes stolen from their Jewish owners through ethnic cleansing, it deemed them to no longer be refugees. The actual refugees however were the Jewish residents who had their homes stolen by the UNRWA.

The only thing more disturbing than a UN agency collaborating in ethnic cleansing was that after Israel liberated and unified Jerusalem, the illegal Arab Muslim occupiers of the homes not only refused to leave, but their right to remain in homes stolen from their Jewish inhabitants was taken up by the UN and the international community. Not to mention a lot of lawyers.

It took the original Jewish owners five years to even win legal rights to the homes in court. But they didn't actually get the property back. In an attempt to avoid just the kind of international incident going on now, the Israeli authorities brokered a deal in which the Muslim squatters would pay rent and accept the legal rights of the Jewish owners of the trusts.

The rent on the homes was a fraction of what they would go for on the open market. But even that money was never actually paid. The next three decades were spent trying to evict the illegal Muslim settlers who wouldn't pay rent or leave.

The recent court decision on evictions, which was used by Hamas and the PLO as a pretext for the war that they had been planning on starting anyway, is the latest in a string of legal decisions over these homes going back 50 years.

These decisions came from independent courts, not the Netanyahu government, in a legal battle that began when he was a college student studying at MIT. There isn’t a single argument for why the Jewish trusts that owned the homes should have lost the right to them when Jordan invaded and seized those homes, or why the UNRWA’s decision to illegally collaborate in ethnic cleansing by settling members of an occupying nation in those homes was legal.

All their arguments come down to shouting, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” when the only time there was apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem was under Arab Muslim occupation.

Every anti-Israel radical in public office from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the rest of the gang have denounced evictions from ‘Sheikh Jarrah’.

"We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces are forcing families from their homes," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted.

"The evictions of Palestinian families must not go forward,” Bernie Sanders ranted.

“The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately,” Senator Elizabeth Warren declared. Despite being a lawyer, she declined to identify how the Israeli court ruling was "illegal".

The Biden administration also got into the act.

“We are deeply concerned about the potential eviction of Palestinian families in the Silwan neighborhood and in Sheikh Jarrah, many of whom have lived in their homes for generations," State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter, a former cheerleader who had falsely accused America of genocide, claimed.

The only way to argue that the homes were “theirs” is by recognizing the legitimacy of occupation and ethnic cleansing, at least when it’s practiced by Muslim invading armies.

The moral principle for which AOC, Sanders, Warren, and the State Department are fighting is that when Arab Muslims drive out the Jews and seize their homes, it’s their property now.

The entire legal basis for the court case by the squatters is their claim that the property had been given to them by Jordan’s Custodian of Enemy Property office. This claim has standing in Israeli courts which chose to wrongly recognize those seizures. And so the court cases have revolved around whether the squatters could ever prove that an illegal occupying power had transferred title to them during its ethnic cleansing campaign. The squatters couldn’t even meet this low bar because they were never given title to the homes, but the vicissitudes of local real estate law aside, there’s still the invasion, the illegal occupation and the ethnic cleansing.

When AOC, Warren, Sanders, Tlaib, Omar, the UN, and the Biden administration treat the occupiers of Sheikh Jarrah as the rightful owners, they’re defending ethnic cleansing.

And it should be called what it is.

The fundamental issue at stake in Shimon HaTzadik and Sheikh Jarrah are crystal clear. Unlike some parts of Israel where territory changed hands in more complex ways, we know exactly what happened and why it happened. And those simple facts tell a story of the UNRWA’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Jews, not just today when it serves as a storehouse for Hamas missiles and an employment agency for Hamas propagandists, but back in the 50s.

Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem after an invasion and occupation. The United Nations, through UNRWA, violated international law by taking part in population transfer by an occupying power which had expelled the indigenous population. This is the charge that the UN and the anti-Israel politicians and media have repeatedly lobbed at Israel.

And they’re the ones guilty of it.

Their Sheikh Jarrah argument is that ethnic cleansing and occupation are moral and legal when Arab Muslim armies do it. It’s that Arab Muslim squatters who moved into Jewish homes in 1956 had gained an immutable moral right to live in them by 1967 that outweighed those of the Jewish trusts which had owned them since the 19th century.

There’s no better way to show the hypocritical double standards of an anti-Israel movement that cries about occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid while practicing those very things.

AOC, Sanders, Warren, the UN, the Quarter, the EU, and the Biden administration are demanding that the Arab Muslim occupation of Jerusalem continue. They are ordering a free country to overturn the legal ruling of a court in case that goes back to the 1970s because they believe that Arab Muslim occupiers have a right to live in Jerusalem… and Jews don’t.

That’s what this was about in 1948. That’s still what it’s about in 2021.

The occupiers cry about the “occupation” and the ethnic cleansers cry about “ethnic cleansing” as they fight to bring back the state of apartheid that drove the Jews out of Jerusalem.






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.

Thursday, May 20, 2021

Why Biden Wants a War in Israel

By On May 20, 2021
Terrorists have only one thing to offer. It’s right there in the name.

The business model of terrorism is killing people and then demanding a payoff. The game always works the same way. The terrorists attack, their targets fight back, and a third party sends in the diplomats to negotiate on behalf of the terrorists before they get hit too hard.

The Islamic terrorist war against Israel has worked exactly this way for generations.

Like a radio pop song that plays every time you go into a supermarket, you know the next verse and can feel the next beat before it even kicks in no matter how much you hate the music.

It’s the same way with the regular mini wars that begin with a manufactured political provocation that can be blamed on Israel, (this time a court ruling evicting illegal Muslim colonists occupying homes that were seized during the ‘48 ethnic cleansing of Jews from Jerusalem), followed by terrorist violence with the usual pattern of attack and escalation.

Hamas and a few of its allies shell Israeli towns and cities using the latest Iranian technology and some of their own cruder models. Israel responds by calculatedly taking out terrorist compounds which Hamas has, with equal calculation, filled with civilian human shields.

Especially children.

Politicians, the media, and social media (three distinctions without a difference) rush to attack Israel, vastly inflating the already inflated casualty figures put out by the terrorists, lying about the nature of the conflict, and doing their best to mainstream antisemitism a little more.

The Biden administration makes a few public statements vaguely supporting Israel’s right to defend itself, an absurd point, and sends in mediators to negotiate the payoff for the terrorists.

Israel had a brief break from America acting as the paymaster and bagman for the terrorists.

It was a refreshing pause especially for all the children who didn’t get bombed, the homes that didn’t have rockets smash through their roofs, and the soldiers who didn’t get shot just so that State Department negotiators could tell Israel the current going rate for ending the attacks.

Islamic terrorists aren’t crazy or irrational. The average suicide bomber might be, but their leadership doesn’t do anything without a profit motive.

The profits for Islamic terrorism against Israel come in two ways.

First, the terrorists are backed by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the rest of the Islamist gang to carry out attacks on Israel. Second, the terrorists are rewarded by the United States, Europe, and Israel for ending the attacks.

This never leads to peace because if you keep rewarding terrorists for ending the violence, you’re also telling them that if they do it all over again, they’ll profit from the violence.

Paying the terrorists not to attack you is really the same thing as paying them to attack you.

But the essence of the peace game is obliviousness. That means believing that there are root causes that can resolve the underlying grievances. The root cause is the existence of Israel.

The terrorists want to destroy Israel: Israel doesn’t want to be destroyed.

And the negotiators came up with a compromise which satisfies no one: a two state solution that will only destroy a part of Israel. The solution, which has solved nothing and will solve nothing, incrementally destroys parts of Israel by handing them over to the terrorists.

The amount of Israel being destroyed through this process has kept on increasing ever since the original fake peace deal was celebrated by Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Yitzchak Rabin at the White House. Every exchange of fire leads to a push for a new peace “compromise” that will destroy even more of Israel by handing more territory over to the terrorists.

Since this process provides the terrorists with zero incentive to stop the violence, it failed.

The Trump administration overturned conventional wisdom by recognizing that the terrorists, who had repeatedly rejected and sabotaged peace negotiations for two generations, not the Israelis, who had shown up for every bad faith attempt at negotiations, were the problem.

Instead of taking away territory from Israel and giving it to the terrorists, President Trump began recognizing Israeli claims to parts of Israel, while cutting off money and political support from the terrorists. The terrorists didn’t turn pacifist, but they turned down the violence because they understood that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, unlike Kerry, wouldn’t be bailing them out.

They just waited, while Kerry privately assured the terrorists Trump would soon be gone.

The Biden administration is going back to the same old policies of propping up the terrorists. And the first thing you need to do when propping up the terrorists is giving them some leverage.

The leverage of terrorists is terrorism.

Rebooting the old negotiating process requires a war. And so the Biden administration turned on the money tap to the terrorists and their Iranian sponsors. It made it clear that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the anti-Iran coalition linked to the Abraham Accords were out of style in D.C.

Biden also appointed Hady Amr, a veteran of Qatar’s Brookings operation, a state backer of Hamas, as his “point man” on the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” which had been low on conflict.

At least the conflict had been low until Biden got started.

Amr, a Lebanese anti-Israel activist, had made no secret of his raving hatred for Israel and support for the terrorists.

“I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada,” Hady Amr had declared during his time as an anti-Israel activist.

"I have news for every Israeli," Amr ranted in one column written after Sheikh Salah Shahada, the head of Hamas' Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was taken out by an Israeli air strike.

Arabs "now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents."

These days, Amr is the one doing the avenging for Israel’s attacks on Hamas.

Amr has repeatedly argued for a deal with Hamas. In 2019, he co-wrote an article arguing that Hamas should offer Israel a cease-fire with the PLO acting as a broker for the deal in exchange for Israel “offering a significant move on Israeli-Palestinian peace.” That’s diplo-mafia speak for appeasing the terrorists with more territory that they can use to launch attacks on Israel.

But you can’t have a cease-fire until you first have a war. That’s the war now raging.

It’s the familiar model already embraced by terrorist organizations who pretend that their political and military wings are separate organizations.

The Biden administration policy is for the PLO to play the political wing to Hamas’ military wing. Hamas starts wars, and the PLO collects territory and concessions to stop the fighting, while disclaiming any responsibility for the violence. And the Biden administration oversees this terrorist shakedown by insisting that Israel make more concessions for ‘peace’. Diplomats and experts go around making the same false promises that Israeli appeasement of the PLO will discredit Hamas and make it possible for Israelis and the terrorists killing them to live in peace.

The purpose of this political strategy is to isolate Israel, creating a system that profits from terrorism while maintaining enough plausible deniability to keep a fake peace process going.

Generations of this horror show have not been enough to discredit it. Not to the diplomats who keep pushing this big lie, and not to American Jews who when faced with a choice between blaming Israel and the politicians they support, always choose to blame Israel.

Biden is rebooting the same old scam after stocking his administration with appointees like Amr who have made no secret of their hatred for the Jewish State.

Biden’s Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council, Maher Bitar, was pictured dancing in a keffiyah in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid”.

Reema Dodin, Biden's Deputy White House Legislative Director, had argued that, “suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people.”

Sarah Margon, Biden's Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, had advocated for boycotts of Israel and cheered a proposal to destroy the Jewish State.

The Obama administration stocked its foreign policy team with Iran Firsters, while the Biden administration has gone even further with a roster of Hamas Firsters.

The Biden administration seeks to blame Israel for a conflict for which it provided a profit motive.

The fighting in Israel commenced after the Biden administration sent the signal that it was resuming its support for the terrorists. The violence is a prelude to the negotiations. And Biden’s people have already laid out their plans for getting Israel to pay off the terrorists. All the terrorists had to do was attack Israel and wait for Biden’s team to do their dirty work for them.

The Biden administration wanted a war in Israel. It needed to blame Israel for that war. And now it got everything it wanted. The next stage is the pressure campaign against Israel tying together domestic anti-Israel lobbies like J Street, and the radical Left like AOC and Warren, to pressure American Jewish organizations to drop their already weak support for the Jewish State. And then, having isolated Israel, they’ll move in for the kill with their big pitch for a terror state.

All of this is bad for Israel, but it’s also terrible for America.

Everything that the Biden administration’s team of terrorist sympathizers is doing to Israel, they also intend to do to America. If you think gas prices are bad now, wait until Iran really starts throwing its weight around. And while Biden’s people are insisting that the only real terrorist threat is domestic while dismantling our counterterrorism system, the Jihad will come.

Al Qaeda built up its networks into a massive international killing machine on Clinton’s watch, and ISIS grew into a state power while Obama was building up the Arab Spring. We don’t know what terrorist nightmares Biden will breed, but they are likely to be worse than either one.

Israelis are in bomb shelters now, but after a few years of Biden, Americans might be there too.





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.

Wednesday, May 19, 2021

California Leaving

By On May 19, 2021
For the first time in its history, California lost a House seat. California Democrats are resorting to conspiracy theories about President Trump and the census, but these are the numbers they got after spending $187 million on outreach and after rigging the census to make sure illegal aliens would continue to participate. And those are far better numbers than California deserves.

The decline and fall is not a surprising development out here where moving trucks are a frequent sight and everyone knows a family that is moving.

I know three of them in under two years.

The population numbers only tell part of the story of a big state that is rapidly losing its future.

California’s fastest growing population is senior citizens. By 2030, every 1 in 3 Californians will be over the age of 50. The over 60 population will increase by 166 percent by 2060 going from 5.5 million to 13.5 million. Hotel California is rapidly becoming a retirement community.

By 2030, California will have a higher percentage elderly population than Florida.

In 1970, the median age of Californians was 27 years old. Jerry Brown became the state's youngest governor of the century. When he next ran for office, he became its oldest governor at the age of 72. California’s median age is now 38. And it’s only headed north from there.

By 2050, a third of LA will be over 65 and by 2060, the median age in LA will be 48.

California’s elderly population is increasing faster than any other age group. While the young population will remain flat, the middle aged population will only increase by a fifth, even as the elderly population more than doubles. These numbers paint a portrait of a state with no growth.

The state’s birth rate fell 10% just last year. A one month comparison actually showed a drop of 23%. While the pandemic suppressed birth rates, the numbers had been dropping in California long before anyone had ever heard of Wuhan. Two years ago it hit the lowest level in a century down to half of the state’s 1990 birth rate. In the last decade, California’s birth rate dropped twice as much as the national average defying its own demographic destiny.

The news is much worse than these numbers make it look.

States with a large older population are often more conservative, but that’s less likely to happen to California. The fastest growth among its older population isn’t among white people, but the large Hispanic population that fundamentally altered the state’s demographics and politics.

A generation of cheap labor is coming of age. Its members are a lot less likely to leave the state than white seniors. As a Calmatters fellow noted, “older Californians are actually more likely to be immigrants than younger Californians”. They’re also more likely to be lower income.

These estimates are just projections of the future. They show trend lines rather than the escalating consequences of a state that is becoming increasingly unlivable.

California’s golden years were fueled by new industries and cheap land. The land isn’t cheap and the industries are pricing themselves out of the youth population they used to attract. Millennials have been moving out of New York and California in large numbers, and heading to Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. Industries will be forced to follow their potential workforce.

Big Tech monopolies will still maintain their Bay Area enclaves for now, but older and more traditional tech firms are heading to Texas. Sleeping six to a room in a decrepit building converted into a dorm may be part of the price of admission in start-up culture, but even much of the tech industry is opting out of the hellscape of the talent rat race.

This exodus probably won’t have good political consequences for either California or Texas.

The middle class provides political and economic stability and it’s vanishing from the state at rapid rates. What’s replacing it is an itinerant hipster class drawn to Big Tech and the entertainment industry, driven by radical politics, but with no commitment to the state.

This same hipster class wrecked New York City, before abandoning it in droves, and is busy wrecking its hubs in Portland and Seattle. Not to mention any other cities where it got a foothold.

It’s why California’s birth rate has declined twice as fast as the rest of the country.

California swapped a settled and more conservative population for a more itinerant population of millennial hipsters and immigrant laborers. The state lost its future even as the gross population numbers still looked good because there were still people even if they were becoming less likely to have children, buy homes, or do any of the things that a settled population actually does.

The short term fix looked good on the census, it looked good economically, but it had no future, and the state is slowly coming off the high and coming face to face with a bleak future.

California’s doom loop of radicals wrecking its cities and the state, enabled by the cheap labor imported to cater to their whims, is just getting started. As conservatives and the middle class flee the state, it becomes even more of a playground for urban elites, trashing rural counties, enabling crime, social dysfunction, and economic ruin that they expect to be immune from either because they’re walled off, expect to move on, or not to be alive when the social bill comes due.

Jerry Brown’s old California could outgrow and survive its worst follies, but the new California isn’t actually growing and is running out of the future it’s burning through at a rapid rate.

California Democrats are complaining that population growth has slowed because of President Trump’s immigration enforcement. But that hasn’t stopped immigrants from heading to other states. Their real problem is that younger immigrants and migrants are less interested in California because its economic potential and opportunities are running out like everything else.

The cost of living relative to the economic rewards are unappealing even to many illegal aliens. Those who do come are more likely to have plans for more profitable work in organized crime.

Meanwhile, poll numbers show that California Latinos have been turning on Governor Newsom over the lockdowns. The state’s new working class is on a collision course with the Democrats, and the Democrats are getting nervous because without constant migrant churn, new immigrants supplementing and displacing the old, their political hegemony might come apart.

The coalition between cheap labor and radical Democrats worked as long as there was work to go around. As California’s social stability collapses, its economic growth will go with it.

A reckoning is coming and a lost House seat is the least of it.

A scam works as long as everyone involved thinks they have something to gain. It falls apart when they wake up and realize that the Nigerian prince will never write them that check.

California Democrats have been writing checks post dated to the future. But there’s no future and the demographic checks are starting to bounce.

"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams,” a younger Jerry Brown would rhapsodize. But it turns out that California is not such a unique place after all. It’s a land of dreams, and dreams are not a good basis for policy. When leftists turn their dreams into reality, they wake up to discover they’re living a nightmare.




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.

Sunday, May 16, 2021

Biden Put Past Life Healer in Charge of School Reopenings

By On May 16, 2021
In November, the American Federation of Teachers was touting Kelly Trautner's views on safe school reopenings. Earlier in the pandemic year, Trautner had promoted a webinar on a safe return to schools. By 2021, the AFT's Director of Healthcare, was offering her own lessons on "yoga and pranayama practices" and "meditation and mindfulness".

As a certified yoga teacher and "Registered Karuna Reiki Master" (meaning she had mastered Stage III of Holy Fire of the pseudoscience which includes "healing past life issues" and "clearing cellular memories from the DNA"), this was something Trautner was qualified to do.

But the AFT’s Director of Healthcare, occasional yoga teacher, executive coach, and master of the secret energy arts was telling the CDC under what conditions schools could be reopened.

And she was doing it with the backing of the Biden administration.

Biden had run for office promising to “listen to the science” and “follow the science” especially when it came to reopening schools. While desperate parents clamored to reopen schools and save their children from depression and suicide, he promised them that he would only allow it if the science said he could.

“I set an ambitious but achievable goal of opening most K-8 schools by the end of my first 100 days,” Biden declared. “It is also a goal we can meet if we follow the science.”

Then he redefined reopening most schools as being ‘open’ for at least one day a week.

Biden hasn’t achieved his goal because he didn’t really try. The American Federation of Teachers, the greedy and powerful union, and its local affiliates, had fought school reopenings. When CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that schools could reopen, the Biden administration quickly claimed that she had only spoken "in her personal capacity".

Biden promised that there would be "science-based judgment" on reopening schools coming.

Emails obtained by Americans for Public Trust showed that the CDC’s “science-based judgement” was actually being shaped by the AFT and revealed an email from its Reiki Master slash lawyer slash meditation expert laying out obstacles to reopening schools.

Not only wasn’t Biden following the science, but he was following a literal pseudoscience.

The AFT not only got access to the CDC's guidance but Trautner sent an email providing "possible ways to strengthen the document" by calling for exempting teachers who “who have documented high-risk conditions or who are at increased risk for … COVID-19”, or who have a household member at "increased risk", from having to go back to work teaching students.

Based on CDC materials, the category of increased risk could potentially cover teachers over 65 or even 45 years old, minorities, anyone with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, pregnant teachers, former smokers, alcoholics, or teachers who are overweight or obese.

A 5'2 teacher who weighed 136 pounds would qualify as overweight using the BMI index.

With categories like these, it would be hard to find teachers who weren’t potentially exempt from doing their jobs.

The CDC's guidelines told schools to offer "remote work" options to teachers with "high-risk conditions that place them at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19". A possibly narrower group, but seemingly incorporating the core proposal from Trautner and the AFT.

The CDC also apparently added Trautner's line about revisiting the guidelines, “in the event of high community-transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV-2.”

The email from Trautner to the CDC was forwarded by Carole Johnson.

Johnson is one of Biden's three pandemic response coordinators. Forwarding Trautner’s email to the CDC made it very clear that the Biden administration wanted the “science” to be governed by the demands of the AFT through its Director of Healthcare whose medical background was in “healing past life issues” and releasing “karma and deeply seated issues on the cellular level”.

Before becoming a Biden pandemic response coordinator, Johnson had been the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Human Services.Johnson's tenure in the scandal-plagued Murphy administration, which had forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients, and whose state-run veteran homes had become death factories, had been controversial in her own right. Before that, Johnson had been a senior health policy advisor in the Obama White House, and had worked for assorted lefty non-profits and legislators. What were her scientific qualifications for any of this?

As a New Jersey briefing noted, Carole Johnson "has a Master's degree in government from the University of Virginia. She also has brought on board Andrea Katz, who is her Chief of Staff. Ms. Katz is an attorney by training, and has worked in various capacities for the democratic party."

Katz is currently the chief of staff of the New Jersey Department of Human Services.

Working in various capacities for the Democrats seems to be all the science that’s needed.

That and a law degree.

Kelly Trautner, in addition to her energy healing skills, also has a BA in political science from Marshall University and a JD from Capital University. After graduating from law school, Trautner seemed to have become the deputy executive officer of the Ohio Nurses Association. When the union affiliated with the AFT, Trautner came along for the ride.

Along the way she ran the Center for Balanced Living, practiced executive coaching, was certified in yoga and energy healing, and rose to become the director of AFT Nurses and Health Professionals even though there's no sign in her bio of being a nurse or having any kind of medical degree in anything. This year, she made the leap to Senior Director on Health Issues.

Several years earlier, Trautner had been urging followers to “send Reiki” energy "alone or in a group" because "the world needs our light."

It’s not clear what scientific or medical qualification Trautner has on health issues. It’s one thing to head up a union for medical workers, and another to give the CDC medical guidance.

The AFT could have found an actual doctor to serve as Director of Healthcare, and to negotiate with the CDC, the fact that it didn’t says everything about the legitimacy of its medical concerns.

The CDC and the Biden administration certainly knew whom it was dealing with and didn’t care.

When a Reiki master with a law degree is providing the CDC with school reopening guidance, that’s not science, it’s union politics.

A few years ago, Kelly Trautner was running a center using "trauma-informed yoga programming" to treat eating disorders. And then she was telling the CDC what to do.

Biden claimed that he was going to listen to the scientists. And then he let an energy healer with a background in healing past life issues and clearing cellular memory have more influence over reopening schools than the actual parents desperately fighting for their children.

So much for the science.

The majority of white Democrats are no longer Christian. And lefties love mocking religion, claiming that they’re rationalists who believe in science, not superstition. And then, whether it’s Hillary Clinton’s seance or the Marianne Williamson presidential campaign, they prove to be willing to believe in anything and everything except God and the Bible.

43% of liberals believe that astrology is scientific, 58% of Democrats believe in UFOs, and 69% believe in ghosts. Less than half of Democrats know that the earth revolves around the sun.

70% of Republicans believe in God. Only 45% of Democrats do. 39% believe in some ‘other’ power or spiritual force.

When that’s the base of your party, why not turn to an ancient energy healing system from 1989 which planted World Peace Crystal Grids at the poles to send peace energy all over the world?

People are entitled to believe whatever they like. What they’re not entitled to do is falsely claim that they’re the party of science when what they really believe is they’re unhappy because in a past life they were Lizzie Borden whose ghost still haunts their downstairs bathroom and that the spaceship is coming to take those with the right colored auras back to their home planet.

And they can’t claim that they’re listening to the science when they’re obstructing school reopenings, when what they’re really doing is listening to energy healing union hacks.

“The science has been evolving,” AFT boss Randi Weingarten had argued. “It’s not a political calculation, it’s based on trying to make the science work.”

Evolving the science to make it work for you is what you do when you don’t like the results.

And then you can regress your DNA’s cellular memory and explain that teachers shouldn’t be expected to actually teach children until they work out their past lives as long as the American Federation of Teachers keeps funding the political ambitions of 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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Thank you for reading.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Israel's Jihad Crisis is the World's Jihad Crisis

By On May 12, 2021

Israel is a not a war zone because of geopolitics, but because it shares a common crisis with Europe, America, Russia, China and numerous other countries, most of whom are trying to buy time for their own internal Islamic insurgencies by siding with the Jihadist insurgency inside Israel.

A sizable hostile minority within your borders is always an explosive element, but Islamic migration is unique in that it emerged and still emerges from a tribal and religious manifest destiny of world conquest. 

Israel's Islamic minority is particularly hostile because unlike those of America, Europe, Russia, and China it came to the Jewish State as a conquering force and made up the 'Herrenvolk', the colonial master race, within living memory (religiously, if not ethnically under the Ottoman Empire). The hostility was fed by a succession of foreign powers, Britain before and after WW2, Germany in WW1 and WW2, by Russian during the Cold War, by Iran, Qatar, and Russia after the Cold War, but it's still innate.

Tribal hostility is bad enough as even a brief look at Rwanda and African genocides, or those in the Balkans ought to show, but combine that with Islamic manifest destiny and you have a perpetual war.

While the legal fiction that is the international community has kept on pressuring Israel to "resolve" the conflict with territorial concessions, providing the insurgency with dedicated territory has worsened it.

Nor have any of the nations or alliances pressuring Israel to resolve the conflict managed to do it.

The responses have ranged from integration and appeasement in America and Europe,  Russia's efforts to convince its Muslims that they have a common enemy in the West, and China's ruthless crackdown. What all these varying efforts have in common is trying to convince or compel a Muslim population to see itself as part of the local nation or empire, to bind its destiny to European liberalism, to the Han Chinese, to Greater Russia, or to American democracy, and not to a global Ummah of which it is a fragmented piece.

Israel's strategy of integrating the Arab Muslim population within randomly defined borders, convincing them to see themselves as part of the Jewish State, while treating those outside those borders as autonomous is even more paradoxical and contradictory than these same failed strategies.

The fragmented Muslim populations of the world are the remnants of an aspiring empire created by centuries of conquests and invasions. Islam convinces them to see themselves as part of that Ummah, a civilizational empire that is meant to encompass the world. Tribalism sharpens the edge of that religious hostility by giving it a personal edge and a familial aspiration. 

Critics say that Muslim terrorism kills more Muslims than non-Muslims. That's true, but not much of a defense. 

Islamic manifest destiny has traditionally destroyed Muslim societies comprehensively, but then again Roman imperialism and European colonialism destroyed their own societies quite thoroughly. Globalism usually destroys any society arrogant enough to be infected by the fever which is one reason why America is so endangered. It's also why China has survived for thousands of years by xenophobically turning inwards at key moments in its history. That's why China is likely to leave the scene within the next generation, taking its 'prizes' and going home, or will destroy its own society. 

Israel doesn't have that option.

The Jewish State isn't suffering from an Islamic insurgency because it wanted to operate on a global scale, but because foreign invading powers, most notably the Syrian-Greeks and the Romans, imposed their dominion using Arab mercenaries. When Byzantium declined and fell, the barbarians they had been using to keep the peace turned on the Eastern Roman Empire, just as the barbarians Goths had turned on the Western Roman Empire, and assembled together a religion from the scraps of Judaism, Christianity, and assorted local pagan faiths based on their imperatives of conquest and domination.

The Islamic conquests failed to assemble any kind of global utopian empire. But then they never had a chance of doing that. They did however destroy countless peoples, eliminate many cultures, and create broken mirror images of the original Mohammedan Jihad with little emirates ruled by little Mohammeds. And they killed countless millions and ushered in a thousand years of tyranny and terror. 

The fall of the Ottoman Empire revived Jewish hopes for reclaiming their homeland, but the Zionists had not counted on the endurance of that original war imperative or on the weakness of civilization. 

And so the conflict continues.

It continues in Israel, in Europe, and in America, in Russia, and in China, and around the world.

The conflict has been particularly sharp in Israel because where Muslims are a minority in America, China, and (for a limited time before they become a majority) in Europe and Russia, they are a regional majority. And because of the strategic importance of the region, half the world has made it its business to intervene.

Israel's current two major factional antagonists, Fatah and Hamas, are products of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

The Nazis shaped the Muslim Brotherhood and the Soviet Union shaped the PLO with their strategies, tactics, and organizations, so that Israel is fighting both the Communists and the Nazis in its own territory. 

But underneath the overlay of Third World liberationism and genocidal nationalist antisemitism familiar from the Soviet and Nazi projects is the old Jihadist manifest destiny and its much older antisemitism.

And while National Socialism has yet to control a major government or play more than a marginal role in America or Europe (though not for a lack of effort by the new generation of 'Hipster Nazis' more familiarly known as the alt-right), Marxism is a major player in American and European politics. 

So the campaign against Israel gets plenty of support from the Left. As does Islamic terror in general.

Israel faces a sharper version of the dual crisis of Jihad that the world does. 

The first part of the crisis is an internal insurgency while the second part of it is the development of nuclear weapons by Islamic powers like Iran and Pakistan that can destroy civilization (aided and abetted by the familiar Russian, Chinese, and North Korean pipeline for Third World insurgencies).

The Jewish State has adroitly managed to form a temporary alliance through the Abraham Accords with some regional traditional Sunni powers that have become alarmed at the threat of both of Shiite Iran and Islamist transnational ideological groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, but Iran and the Brotherhood have a direct insurgency operating on its soil. 

Combine that with the fall of the Trump administration and the rise of a pro-Iran and a pro-Brotherhood Biden regime in Washington D.C. and the current conflict was inevitable. 

But it was inevitable anyway.

Iran, Qatar, and various other players have not been investing a fortune in Hamas and other terrorist groups just to have them sit on the money. After a certain number of years they start a war to test Israel's defenses, military and diplomatic, leading to chaos, carnage, and a pressure for more concessions.

This time is no different.

The roots of the crisis are ancient, but they're also more recent. When confronting a civilizational Jihad, it takes only mistake. And a bad Israeli government mad that mistake in the 90s by agreeing to create an autonomous territory for the insurgents. Another bad government made another one a decade ago by withdrawing from Gaza and leaving it as a truly autonomous territory governed by Hamas.

Both moves were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the resulting consequences.

Modern Islamic governments pursue utopian socialist schemes using a corrupt ruling class, much like the Communists and the Nazis, resulting in corruption, economic disaster, and external conflict.

Hamas and the PLO/Fatah, like ISIS, is no more capable of running a functional government. 

Instead humanitarian NGOs, in this case UNRWA, provide some basic services for the population while the Jihad forges onward to kill and kidnap its enemies operating much like organized crime.

(A lot of Democrat inner cities run on the same gang warfare slash welfare state principle.) 

Autonomy never does anything other than expand and spread the crisis. Treaties just define the starting point for the next phase of the conflict. Negotiations are a theater for extracting the maximum amount of concessions as a starting point for the next war whether it's with Iran, the PLO, or any Jihadists.

Israel hasn't figured out how to resolve the problem. But neither has anyone else in the world.

And there may be no answer.

The world is facing a 7th century crisis and trying to deal with it through 21st century means. 

To be modern means believing that all problems have answers whereas to be postmodern is to believe that the answer is to repent of our past. The modern approach has led to ceaseless negotiations while the postmodern approach has meant endless appeasement and apologies for our past misdeeds. 

Neither the modern nor postmodern way has done anything other than play into the hands of the Jihad.

Netanyahu, like other conservative Likud leaders, has appeared modern while eschewing modernity's preference for pat solutions and postmodernity's apologies and appeasement. And so Israel has been living in a premodern moment, adapting rapidly to circumstances as it has in some ways throughout its modern existence. But that's a survival strategy and not a healthy one either.

Israelis tend to take each day as it comes. 

Flying El-Al is very different than flying normal airlines. Everything appears unready even minutes before boarding. The orderly process of boarding by class and status in most airlines is present only in theory as everyone rushes to get on board. It seems impossible that this whole thing should work or that the plane should take off in time. And yet it does, more reliably than most airlines, and works out.

That's Israel in a nutshell. And it's a familiar observation for Americans in Israel.

Israelis are always in crisis mode and they take one crisis at a time, and what ought to be a shambles somehow turns around. It's frustrating to the modern mind and many Americans can't take it.

Yet Israel persists.


But that perpetual crisis mode, a legacy of thousands of years of Jewish history, may offer few lessons to the world. Crisis mode works until it doesn't. And then the failure can be catastrophic.

Israel has fought an almost impossible war bravely, gallantly, and dashingly, jumping from one innovation to another, and then being miraculously rescued with that familiar certainty that neither it nor the Jewish people could exist without a G-d who intervenes invisibly at crucial moments so that the survivors of the ashes of the death camps went on to defeat enemy armies and found a nation.

But the world needs a better answer.

The answer may not be simple, but it begins with countries recognizing that they share a common problem and after generations of 'bargaining' with the Jihad, recognizing that we're all facing the same war, and that across cultures and even political affiliations, the West and the East, Right and Left, we may be enemies, but we also share a common enemy. One whose assault civilization may not survive. 

We can either unite against the Ummah, that embryonic empire of Sharia and Jihad, whose boundaries are those of the world, or we can cut our separate deals with its separate parts, which will all fail.

And then we will fail and fall with them.

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