Friday, September 25, 2020
The Rising Islamic Terrorist Threat in Austria Strikes a Synagogue
-
September 23, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog
On a summer Sabbath day, Elie Rosen, President of the Jewish Community of Graz, spotted
a suspicious man hanging around the synagogue. The synagogue had
recently been vandalized and the man had a backpack full of rocks that
he was about to start throwing at the synagogue.
After the synagogue had been vandalized a few days earlier, Rosen had warned that in the Austrian city, “we are dealing with a stronger left wing and anti-Israel antisemitism,”
Rosen's concern was understandable since some of the graffiti smeared on the wall around the synagogue read, “Free Palestine” and "Our language and our country is Palestine". A second attack by the same perpetrator on the Sabbath Eve had smashed the synagogue’s windows.
The wall that the Islamic attacker had vandalized was made out of bricks from the ruins of the original Graz synagogue that had been destroyed by the National Socialists. The synagogue, which had been rebuilt only two decades ago, serves Graz’s tiny surviving Jewish community.
Austrian Jews know better than to take such slogans lightly. One of the worst episodes of antisemitic violence after the National Socialist period had been an assault by two PLO Islamic terrorists on a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah was taking place. The terrorists had opened fire with machine guns and thrown hand grenades into the synagogue. A woman who had rolled on a hand grenade to protect the children died. A number of other congregants were wounded.
When Rosen asked the bearded man what he was doing, the vandal attacked him with a chair leg, and fled on a mountain bike. When the police caught him, he expressed no remorse.
The Syrian Muslim refugee justified his actions by citing his religion: Islam, and Islamic law.
The Syrian refugee had come to Austria in 2013 during the height of the so-called refugee crisis by traveling through Turkey. The Islamic tyranny which had once besieged the Gates of Vienna with an army has dispatched a different kind of army against Vienna. And that army, sent by Erdogan, has often been welcomed with open arms by European countries like Austria.
When the migrant who attacked the synagogue came to Austria, he was granted asylum.
His capture didn't just solve the mystery of the attack on the synagogue, but also an attack on a church and a gay club.
There were a total of 7 attacks committed by this one single refugee.
This has become the new normal in Graz, an Austrian city the size of Pittsburgh, which has seen a surge in violence.
There had been an arson attempt at a church in July when a nameless perpetrator threw burning newspapers into the building after smashing a window with a rock.
Last year, an Iraqi migrant had started multiple fires in government buildings in Graz.
In 2015, a Muslim refugee had killed 3 people and injured 36 others when he ran his car into a crowd and then got out and began stabbing the survivors. The dead included a 7-year-old boy.
The mosques of Graz have been used to recruit ISIS terrorists. Some of the Islamic State's killers died in its wars against its enemies, but others came back and are living in Graz.
After multiple police raids and arrests that involved as many as 800 officers, part of the network of ISIS and Al Qaeda recruiters was broken up, only to be reunited in prison.
A Muslim Brotherhood prison Imam from Graz who was brought in to help deradicalize some of the prisoners, instead plotted a jailbreak by the terrorists.The Brotherhood Imam had planned to have the terrorists pray in the yard as a distraction, and then attack the guards with shivs.
The arrested Syrian refugee adds to the growing Islamic population in Austria’s prisons.
Three years ago, it was estimated that a quarter of Austria's prison population is Muslim. That’s a startling number in a country of almost 9 million with a Muslim population of around 700,000.
While Muslims make up less than 10% of Austria’s population, they’re filling up its prisons.
The situation is so bad that Austria's top prison Imam wrote a book warning that the prison system was a breeding ground for terrorists and urged putting Islamists in solitary confinement.
One of those prisoners, an Albanian Muslim from Graz, has been accused of continuing to recruit for ISIS from prison using a smuggled smartphone and his Instagram account.
The terrorist, who is already serving a 9 year prison sentence for encouraging a 12-year-old boy to plant a nail bomb in a Christmas market in Germany, allegedly had links to Abu Tejma, the Islamist preacher in Vienna, whose large family had been living on welfare, while he drove a sports car and recruited some 160 Muslims,including teenage girls, to join ISIS,
"The blonde mouse, the Austrian, should be torn apart like a bag of crisps," Tejma had bragged.
The Albanian Muslim from Graz had plotted his own attack on an American military base.
In prison, DERAD, a Confederation of European Probation project to deradicalize Jihadists, claimed that he was being successfully deradicalized, while he continued recruiting for ISIS.
All of this makes Austria in general and Graz in particular into ticking time bombs for terror.
A survey of Muslim refugees in Graz conducted by a professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna found that about half of them had strongly antisemitic views.
“It was noticeable that more than half had internalized antisemitism as part of their religiosity,” Professor Aslan observed.
He also noted that a number of Graz mosques were controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Austrian authorities are trying to belatedly withdraw their asylum to the Syrian refugee who attacked the Graz Synagogue.
Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned that, “Muslim anti-Semitism is a serious threat”. He also pointed out that the Jewish community spends three million euros a year on security for synagogues and schools.
Antisemitic incidents in Austria doubled in the last five years, and while many of the perpetrators have National Socialist motives, the Jewish community's report noted that, "Muslim anti-Semitism is conspicuous when it comes to incidents with a high threat potential."
The Austrian government has announced that it's dispatching uniformed and undercover police officers to protect the country's handful of Jewish synagogues. But the antisemitic violence is part of a larger trend of Islamist attacks against both churches and synagogues. And against the symbols of non-Islamic values and political life.
The Syrian refugee believed his religion gave him the right to attack anything un-Islamic.
Susanne Raab, the Minister of Culture and Integration, urged a campaign to stop the overlap of "political Islam" and antisemitism. But that overlap is innate to Islam.
"The act shows that you have to take Muslim anti-Semitism seriously," Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned.
But truly taking it seriously would mean hitting the brakes on Islamic migration into Austria.
The attack on the Graz Synagogue is grimly symbolic. The synagogue had been destroyed in the year of the Anschluss by the country’s new National Socialist masters. It is ominously fitting for the country’s new invading theocratic Herrenvolk to once again target the synagogue.
A new Islamic fascism is rising in Austria. When the National Socialists marched into Austria, they were often met with cheering crowds of supporters. The cheering crowds who met the migrants marching into Austria are allowing a dark history to repeat itself one more time.
After the synagogue had been vandalized a few days earlier, Rosen had warned that in the Austrian city, “we are dealing with a stronger left wing and anti-Israel antisemitism,”
Rosen's concern was understandable since some of the graffiti smeared on the wall around the synagogue read, “Free Palestine” and "Our language and our country is Palestine". A second attack by the same perpetrator on the Sabbath Eve had smashed the synagogue’s windows.
The wall that the Islamic attacker had vandalized was made out of bricks from the ruins of the original Graz synagogue that had been destroyed by the National Socialists. The synagogue, which had been rebuilt only two decades ago, serves Graz’s tiny surviving Jewish community.
Austrian Jews know better than to take such slogans lightly. One of the worst episodes of antisemitic violence after the National Socialist period had been an assault by two PLO Islamic terrorists on a synagogue where a Bar Mitzvah was taking place. The terrorists had opened fire with machine guns and thrown hand grenades into the synagogue. A woman who had rolled on a hand grenade to protect the children died. A number of other congregants were wounded.
When Rosen asked the bearded man what he was doing, the vandal attacked him with a chair leg, and fled on a mountain bike. When the police caught him, he expressed no remorse.
The Syrian Muslim refugee justified his actions by citing his religion: Islam, and Islamic law.
The Syrian refugee had come to Austria in 2013 during the height of the so-called refugee crisis by traveling through Turkey. The Islamic tyranny which had once besieged the Gates of Vienna with an army has dispatched a different kind of army against Vienna. And that army, sent by Erdogan, has often been welcomed with open arms by European countries like Austria.
When the migrant who attacked the synagogue came to Austria, he was granted asylum.
His capture didn't just solve the mystery of the attack on the synagogue, but also an attack on a church and a gay club.
There were a total of 7 attacks committed by this one single refugee.
This has become the new normal in Graz, an Austrian city the size of Pittsburgh, which has seen a surge in violence.
There had been an arson attempt at a church in July when a nameless perpetrator threw burning newspapers into the building after smashing a window with a rock.
Last year, an Iraqi migrant had started multiple fires in government buildings in Graz.
In 2015, a Muslim refugee had killed 3 people and injured 36 others when he ran his car into a crowd and then got out and began stabbing the survivors. The dead included a 7-year-old boy.
The mosques of Graz have been used to recruit ISIS terrorists. Some of the Islamic State's killers died in its wars against its enemies, but others came back and are living in Graz.
After multiple police raids and arrests that involved as many as 800 officers, part of the network of ISIS and Al Qaeda recruiters was broken up, only to be reunited in prison.
A Muslim Brotherhood prison Imam from Graz who was brought in to help deradicalize some of the prisoners, instead plotted a jailbreak by the terrorists.The Brotherhood Imam had planned to have the terrorists pray in the yard as a distraction, and then attack the guards with shivs.
The arrested Syrian refugee adds to the growing Islamic population in Austria’s prisons.
Three years ago, it was estimated that a quarter of Austria's prison population is Muslim. That’s a startling number in a country of almost 9 million with a Muslim population of around 700,000.
While Muslims make up less than 10% of Austria’s population, they’re filling up its prisons.
The situation is so bad that Austria's top prison Imam wrote a book warning that the prison system was a breeding ground for terrorists and urged putting Islamists in solitary confinement.
One of those prisoners, an Albanian Muslim from Graz, has been accused of continuing to recruit for ISIS from prison using a smuggled smartphone and his Instagram account.
The terrorist, who is already serving a 9 year prison sentence for encouraging a 12-year-old boy to plant a nail bomb in a Christmas market in Germany, allegedly had links to Abu Tejma, the Islamist preacher in Vienna, whose large family had been living on welfare, while he drove a sports car and recruited some 160 Muslims,including teenage girls, to join ISIS,
"The blonde mouse, the Austrian, should be torn apart like a bag of crisps," Tejma had bragged.
The Albanian Muslim from Graz had plotted his own attack on an American military base.
In prison, DERAD, a Confederation of European Probation project to deradicalize Jihadists, claimed that he was being successfully deradicalized, while he continued recruiting for ISIS.
All of this makes Austria in general and Graz in particular into ticking time bombs for terror.
A survey of Muslim refugees in Graz conducted by a professor of Islamic Religious Education at the University of Vienna found that about half of them had strongly antisemitic views.
“It was noticeable that more than half had internalized antisemitism as part of their religiosity,” Professor Aslan observed.
He also noted that a number of Graz mosques were controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Austrian authorities are trying to belatedly withdraw their asylum to the Syrian refugee who attacked the Graz Synagogue.
Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned that, “Muslim anti-Semitism is a serious threat”. He also pointed out that the Jewish community spends three million euros a year on security for synagogues and schools.
Antisemitic incidents in Austria doubled in the last five years, and while many of the perpetrators have National Socialist motives, the Jewish community's report noted that, "Muslim anti-Semitism is conspicuous when it comes to incidents with a high threat potential."
The Austrian government has announced that it's dispatching uniformed and undercover police officers to protect the country's handful of Jewish synagogues. But the antisemitic violence is part of a larger trend of Islamist attacks against both churches and synagogues. And against the symbols of non-Islamic values and political life.
The Syrian refugee believed his religion gave him the right to attack anything un-Islamic.
Susanne Raab, the Minister of Culture and Integration, urged a campaign to stop the overlap of "political Islam" and antisemitism. But that overlap is innate to Islam.
"The act shows that you have to take Muslim anti-Semitism seriously," Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, warned.
But truly taking it seriously would mean hitting the brakes on Islamic migration into Austria.
The attack on the Graz Synagogue is grimly symbolic. The synagogue had been destroyed in the year of the Anschluss by the country’s new National Socialist masters. It is ominously fitting for the country’s new invading theocratic Herrenvolk to once again target the synagogue.
A new Islamic fascism is rising in Austria. When the National Socialists marched into Austria, they were often met with cheering crowds of supporters. The cheering crowds who met the migrants marching into Austria are allowing a dark history to repeat itself one more time.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Thursday, September 24, 2020
The World As I See It: Breonna Taylor
By Rich Kozlovich
In my eclectic e-mail group, which I now call, Our Group, every issue that’s in the news is discussed daily. Here is "My Take" on one of those issues.
First and foremost, we should never be surprised when the media gets things wrong. Especially when it comes to the issues of race, crime and the cops. Andrea Widburg posted this piece on American Thinker today, The truth finally emerges about Breonna Taylor’s death, saying:
The truth has finally emerged about Breonna Taylor’s death this past March. It turns out (surprise!) that the Democrat party – in Congress, in the media, and on the streets – has been lying………..The case begins with Breonna’s ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover. The Louisville Courier-Journal delved deeply into that relationship, while the following is a summary. Glover is an accused drug trafficker who is believed to be part of a large drug and weapons trafficking ring in Louisville. According to an affidavit, Glover went to Taylor’s apartment in January, left the apartment holding a package, and went straight to a “known drug house.”……….Taylor also seemed familiar with Glover’s world of drugs. …….. “If you choose bad companions, no one will believe that you are anything but bad yourself.”
Initially
I was left with the impression from reports the police never knocked, nor identified themselves
as they busted unannounced into the house giving reason for Jamarcus reason to "defend" is home, and, Breonna was laying in bed when
police shot her.
This piece says otherwise:
"Evidence shows that officers both knocked and announced their presence at the apartmen"t……… "corroborated by an independent witness who was near in a proximity"… and Breonna Taylor wasn’t in her bed, in point of fact, “Taylor was standing at Walker’s side, and she knew or should have known that Walker was armed.””.
But either way, the police were entering a house with a known drug dealer who was armed and started shooting, and shot one of the officers. Are we to expect officers enforcing the law to be shot at and not respond in kind?
Did he believe he was defending himself against other drug dealing criminals? I have no idea, but neither Jamarcus Glover or Breonna Taylor were as innocent as presented by the media, if anything, the evidence seems to show the police actions were appropriate.
Widburg follows up with this piece, The lack of Breonna Taylor indictments triggered riots all over the place, saying:
In June and July, it was still news (kind of) whenever we read that leftist mobs, inspired by anti-white racism and anti-American hatred, ran riot in the streets, screaming, destroying people’s businesses, and attacking anyone who got in their way, especially police officers……….Note, please, that this was no random mob. This was a carefully organized and well-financed mob:……..A parked U-Haul was waiting for the crowd up the street. It contains supplies such as signs, shields, water etc………Black Lives Matter protester succeeded in shooting two police officers, both of whom (thankfully) will survive. Louisville will likely survive, too, thanks to its proactive policies. It will not burn like Kenosha.
Meanwhile, the usual protests are taking place in other U.S. cities because that’s what the Democrat party’s paramilitary mob does: Hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Chicago and various neighborhoods around the city to protest the lack of charges directly connected to Breonna Taylor’s shooting death.
And what about Biden and Harris, who want to lead America starting in 2020? They’re all in . . . for the mob. Even though the police did nothing wrong, these two panderers “are calling for policing reform.”
Here’s reality. Police practices aren’t the issue. The cultural practices in black America are. Illegitimacy, crime, failure to take advantage of education, and the failure to take responsibility for their own actions are the real issues. All of which are promoted by the race-industrial-complex of Democrats, Marxists and race baiting blacks, and a corrupt media.
Definition leads to clarity.
The police killings that have triggered riots were thugs with criminal histories. Why are they rioting in support of them? Because it's rare that honest, hard working, law abiding citizens, whether they're black, white, Asian, Latino, etc, are being shot by the police. That leaves thugs and criminals whose history and actions they attempt to whitewash to justify their claims of systematic police racism. Furthermore, what's absolutely clear is these misfits are deliberately promoting, planning and implementing insurrection. And that's defined as treason.
Why is that so hard to grasp?
(Update: It appears two of the officers were shot. Based of the false reporting one has to wonder if the media wouldn't have preferred for all the officers to be shot, and then reported it as an act of "justice". RK)
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Climate Hustle 2 premieres this Thursday
Ignore the Climate Alarm, Clean Energy and Cancel Culture Industry con artists. See the movie.
Paul Driessen
Weekly, daily, even hourly, we are told that global temperatures are rising, ice caps are melting, and hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods and droughts are all getting more frequent, intense and destructive because of climate change. Not just climate change, of course, but manmade climate change, due to humanity’s use of fossil fuels – which provide 80% of all the energy that powers America and the world.
The claims assume Earth’s climate and weather were unchanged and unchanging until recent decades. That presumption is belied of course by multiple glacial and interglacial periods; the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods; the Little Ice Age; the Dust Bowl, Anasazi and Mayan droughts; the Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900 and Great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935; the 1925 Tri-State Tornado; and countless other climate eras and extreme weather events throughout history.
But all would be vastly better, we are further misinformed, if the world simply stopped using those fuels, and switched to “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” wind, solar, biofuel and battery technologies.
Climate alarm messages are conveyed repeatedly in classrooms, newspapers, television and radio news programs, social media, movies and other media – while contrarian voices and evidence are routinely and vigorously suppressed by an increasingly powerful Big Tech, political and academic Cancel Culture.
These messages, and green energy agendas justified by them, are likely to gain far more influence under a Harris-Biden Administration, especially one pushed further and further to the left by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her vocal, often violent “progressive” allies.
In 2016, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) released its documentary film Climate Hustle. The factual, often hilarious movie featured scientists, weather forecasters and other experts who challenged claims that our cars, factories and farms are causing catastrophic climate. It was featured in 400 U.S. movie theaters, where it made a persuasive case that the climate apocalypse is “an overheated environmental con job.”
Now, this Thursday, September 24, CFACT is releasing Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy. The worldwide streaming event will go live at 8:00 pm local time, in every time zone on Earth, wherever you live.
You can get your tickets here to watch the online world premiere – with unlimited replay viewing through September 27, in case you miss the opening.
For those who missed it or want a refresher, CFACT is also offering a re-broadcast of Climate Hustle 1 for instant viewing. You can get combined tickets for both events here.
Climate Hustle 2 is masterfully hosted and narrated by Hollywood’s Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules in the television movie. Like CH1, it features a superb lineup of experts who challenge claims of “climate tipping points” and “extreme weather cataclysms.” Equally important, they also expose, debunk and demolish the tricks, lies and hidden agendas of global warming and green energy campaigners.
CH2 exposes the campaigners’ and politicians’ real agendas. Not surprisingly, as Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs demonstrate in their Planet of the Humans documentary, those real agendas are money, power, ideology and control. Especially, control over our energy, economy, industries, living standards and personal choices. The campaigners and politicians also have little regard for the ecological, health and human rights consequences that inevitably accompany the ever-widening adoption of wind, solar, biofuel and battery technologies.
Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy hits hard. As CFACT says, “Lies will be smashed. Names will be named. Hypocrites unmasked. Grifters defrocked. Would-be tyrants brought low.”
Accompanying Sorbo is CFACT and Climate Depot’s Marc Morano, who hosted Climate Hustle 1. The journal Nature Communications has called Morano the world's most effective climate communicator. He is also the person climate alarmists most want blacklisted and banned from public discourse.
Meteorologist and WattsUpWithThat.com host Anthony Watts says CH2 highlights numerous instances of “hypocrisy, financial corruption, media bias, classroom indoctrination, political correctness and other troubling matters surrounding the global warming issue.” It offers a true perspective of just how hard the media and climate alarmists are pushing an agenda, and how equally hard climate skeptics are pushing back.” Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presents rhetoric, doom and misinformation. But “if you want a practical and sensible view of what is really happening with climate, watch Climate Hustle 2.”
The Wall Street Journal cites scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., who points out that hurricanes hitting the U.S. have not increased in frequency or intensity since 1900. The Journal also notes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said “it is premature to conclude that human activities – and particularly greenhouse gas emissions ... have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” And let’s not forget the record twelve-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall in the United States. (Was that due to more atmospheric carbon dioxide?)
As to tornadoes, a Washington Post article clearly shows that many more violent F4 and F5 tornadoes hit the United States between 1950 and 1985, than during the next 35 years, 1986-2020. Even more amazing, in 2018, for the first year in recorded history, not one violent tornado struck the U.S.
Canada’s Friends of Science says, once you see Climate Hustle 2, “you can’t unsee the damage the climate monarchy is doing to every aspect of scientific inquiry, to freedom and to democratic society.”
CFACT president Craig Rucker says “Politicians have abandoned any semblance of scientific reality and are instead regurgitating talking points from radical pressure groups to a media that has little interest in vetting their credibility.” In fact, the Cancel Culture is actively suppressing any climate skeptic views.
Twitter actively banned Climate Hustle 2 and froze CFACT’s Twitter account. On appeal the account was unfrozen, but the ban adversely affected thousands of CFACT Twitter followers.
Amazon Prime Video has removed Climate Hustle 1 from its website. CFACT tried to appeal, but Amazon didn’t respond. You can watch the trailer, but the actual film is now “unavailable in your area.” Amazon only lets people buy new DVDs through the film’s producer, CDR Communications ($19.95) – while also processing fulfillment for third party vendors who sell used DVDs (for over $45).
Wikipedia claims Climate Hustle is “a 2016 film rejecting the existence and cause of climate change, narrated by climate change denialist Marc Morano ... and funded by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a free market pressure group funded by the fossil fuel lobby.” (CFACT has received no fossil fuel money for over a decade, and got only small amounts before that.)
Newspapers, TV and radio news programs, social media sites, schools and other arenas should present all the news and foster open discussion and debate. But many refuse to do so. Instead, they function as thought police, actively and constantly finding and suppressing what you can see, read, hear and say, because it goes against their narratives and the agendas they support.
Climate and energy are high on that list. That makes Climate Hustle 1 and 2 especially important this year – and makes it essential that every concerned voter and energy user watch and promote this film.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
America Can’t Breathe
Daniel Greenfield - September 21, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog
A Soviet citizen goes to the dentist. He lies back in the chair. The dentist tells him to open wide.
“But I’m afraid to open my mouth,” he replies.
The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.
Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand them all too well.
Mobs stalk the streets of American cities loudly bellowing, “We can’t breathe!” Sometimes they shoot or stab someone who then actually can’t breathe. Or they set a building on fire and anyone breathing in the smoke quickly discovers what it’s like to really be unable to breathe.
When you actually can’t breathe, you can’t shout and you can’t tell anyone. The people who actually can’t breathe or speak are the victims of the ones shouting that they can’t breathe.
There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.
2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.
Speech is violence and violence is speech. Throwing firebombs is in the First Amendment, but saying All Lives Matter is literally killing people. The only people who don’t have privilege are the ones who have special privileges. Criminals have a right to be safe from the police, but people don’t have a right to be safe from criminals. Public safety is now about keeping criminals safe from the police by defunding the police so that no one except the criminals can be safe.
Everyone has to wear masks, except the government officials telling them to do it. The only people who don’t have to worry about being able to breathe are the ones mandating the masks. Democrat governors like Cuomo and Murphy who killed tens of thousands are the heroes of the pandemic, while the villains are the Republican governors whose red states have few deaths.
The Communists called the newspaper in which they printed all their lies, Pravda or Truth. Soviet anecdotes hinged on the central irony that everything was a lie, everyone knew it, and no one could say it. The joke wasn’t in what was said, but in the mutual recognition of the unsaid.
Or, “I’m afraid to open my mouth.”
We live in the world of the unsaid, of the human shadowlands where people who go around with their mouths closed and faces covered, and in that world we know what is said is meaningless.
That which can be said is, by definition, a lie, and that which can’t be said, becomes the truth.
The real news is what’s read between the lines of the lies. What people say is the opposite of the truth. At struggle sessions, academics and executives confess that they’re racist to prove that they’re not racist. The only people who can safely claim not to have privilege, have that privilege. No one at work will admit to voting for President Trump, but someone must have.
The more speech is banned, the more worthless is the speech that is still allowed.
Polls become useless when people are too afraid to tell partisan pollsters the truth. Democrats and their media demand censorship of social media to protect the integrity of democracy from the speech of the demos, and then are caught by surprise when they suddenly lose elections.
Censorship creates a culture of lies. The more restrictive the censorship, the worse the lies. In a totalitarian system, no one believes anything, and no one trusts anything that they hear. And that culture of mistrust leads to a deep rot that corrupts everything and everyone it touches.
People retreat behind masks, literal and figurative, to protect themselves against a masked system which lies to them and spies on them. And the system thinks that it’s in control because it hears its own lies repeated back to it, not realizing that it’s the one now being lied to.
The irony of the Soviet anecdote was that it was a joke that could only be told by not telling it.
To breathe, to open your mouth and fill your lungs with air, requires a sense of freedom. American tourists visiting the USSR noticed the tension, the invisible weight, the closed faces of the people they met. To the Russians, Americans seemed an open and free people. Freedom was not just a legal condition, a matter of elections and constitutions which on paper the Russians had. Being truly free meant not even being able to imagine the loss of freedom.
Now it’s Americans who walk the streets, when they dare, their faces closed off, invisible weights bowing them down, wary that anything they say might end their careers and lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been cut off from their families and thrust into a national conversation mediated by giant monopolies set up to enable the informants of cancel culture.
The perfect panopticon that the KGB could have only dreamed of is here and we’re living in it. There is no telling when someone might be watching you, taping you, provoking a confrontation that will be posted on social media, made to go viral, and lead to permanent unemployment.
Not to mention possible arrest and prosecution, or even violent assault and murder.
It’s safer for millions to put on their masks and not say things. And if there seem to be few Biden yard signs and little enthusiasm for the political program of the ruling class, that’s also unsaid.
And it is in the realms of the unsaid where the movements that really matter take place.
Everyone, from top athletes to corporate executives, knows that they have to kneel and mouth the words. And the little people holding down jobs at some Fortune 500 company that assigns Robin DeAngelo as mandatory reading know it better than anyone else. They wear their masks.
Free people breathe. Unfree people hold their breaths. They put on masks and close their mouths. They push the fear and the anger behind their eyes. They repeat the lies until the entire world around them seems made of lies that they believe and don’t believe at the same time.
A nation has put on its masks. And it’s waiting for November to find out if it can take a breath.
The old joke has a new resonance in the age of lockdowns and masked pedestrians, cancel culture and self-criticism sessions when Americans are the ones fearful of opening their mouths. Fear is the common denominator. A nation has spent the year holding its breath. And waiting.
Americans used to laugh at Soviet anecdotes without really understanding them. Now Americans are too afraid to laugh because they are coming to understand them all too well.
Mobs stalk the streets of American cities loudly bellowing, “We can’t breathe!” Sometimes they shoot or stab someone who then actually can’t breathe. Or they set a building on fire and anyone breathing in the smoke quickly discovers what it’s like to really be unable to breathe.
When you actually can’t breathe, you can’t shout and you can’t tell anyone. The people who actually can’t breathe or speak are the victims of the ones shouting that they can’t breathe.
There are two reasons why people can’t open their mouths or breathe, as in the joke with the Soviet dentist, literal and figurative. In a year when mouths are being shut with masks and censorship, the literal and the figurative things that people are afraid of have come together.
2020 is one long Soviet anecdote in which the only people allowed to disregard social distancing by gathering to protest in the thousands and tens of thousands do so to complain about their oppression. It’s a mock dystopia in which corporate CEOs berate their employees about their privilege and fire anyone who won’t confess their privilege, and government officials and agencies lecture the people they rule at length about the terrible evils of systemic racism.
Speech is violence and violence is speech. Throwing firebombs is in the First Amendment, but saying All Lives Matter is literally killing people. The only people who don’t have privilege are the ones who have special privileges. Criminals have a right to be safe from the police, but people don’t have a right to be safe from criminals. Public safety is now about keeping criminals safe from the police by defunding the police so that no one except the criminals can be safe.
Everyone has to wear masks, except the government officials telling them to do it. The only people who don’t have to worry about being able to breathe are the ones mandating the masks. Democrat governors like Cuomo and Murphy who killed tens of thousands are the heroes of the pandemic, while the villains are the Republican governors whose red states have few deaths.
The Communists called the newspaper in which they printed all their lies, Pravda or Truth. Soviet anecdotes hinged on the central irony that everything was a lie, everyone knew it, and no one could say it. The joke wasn’t in what was said, but in the mutual recognition of the unsaid.
Or, “I’m afraid to open my mouth.”
We live in the world of the unsaid, of the human shadowlands where people who go around with their mouths closed and faces covered, and in that world we know what is said is meaningless.
That which can be said is, by definition, a lie, and that which can’t be said, becomes the truth.
The real news is what’s read between the lines of the lies. What people say is the opposite of the truth. At struggle sessions, academics and executives confess that they’re racist to prove that they’re not racist. The only people who can safely claim not to have privilege, have that privilege. No one at work will admit to voting for President Trump, but someone must have.
The more speech is banned, the more worthless is the speech that is still allowed.
Polls become useless when people are too afraid to tell partisan pollsters the truth. Democrats and their media demand censorship of social media to protect the integrity of democracy from the speech of the demos, and then are caught by surprise when they suddenly lose elections.
Censorship creates a culture of lies. The more restrictive the censorship, the worse the lies. In a totalitarian system, no one believes anything, and no one trusts anything that they hear. And that culture of mistrust leads to a deep rot that corrupts everything and everyone it touches.
People retreat behind masks, literal and figurative, to protect themselves against a masked system which lies to them and spies on them. And the system thinks that it’s in control because it hears its own lies repeated back to it, not realizing that it’s the one now being lied to.
The irony of the Soviet anecdote was that it was a joke that could only be told by not telling it.
To breathe, to open your mouth and fill your lungs with air, requires a sense of freedom. American tourists visiting the USSR noticed the tension, the invisible weight, the closed faces of the people they met. To the Russians, Americans seemed an open and free people. Freedom was not just a legal condition, a matter of elections and constitutions which on paper the Russians had. Being truly free meant not even being able to imagine the loss of freedom.
Now it’s Americans who walk the streets, when they dare, their faces closed off, invisible weights bowing them down, wary that anything they say might end their careers and lives. Hundreds of millions of people have been cut off from their families and thrust into a national conversation mediated by giant monopolies set up to enable the informants of cancel culture.
The perfect panopticon that the KGB could have only dreamed of is here and we’re living in it. There is no telling when someone might be watching you, taping you, provoking a confrontation that will be posted on social media, made to go viral, and lead to permanent unemployment.
Not to mention possible arrest and prosecution, or even violent assault and murder.
It’s safer for millions to put on their masks and not say things. And if there seem to be few Biden yard signs and little enthusiasm for the political program of the ruling class, that’s also unsaid.
And it is in the realms of the unsaid where the movements that really matter take place.
Everyone, from top athletes to corporate executives, knows that they have to kneel and mouth the words. And the little people holding down jobs at some Fortune 500 company that assigns Robin DeAngelo as mandatory reading know it better than anyone else. They wear their masks.
Free people breathe. Unfree people hold their breaths. They put on masks and close their mouths. They push the fear and the anger behind their eyes. They repeat the lies until the entire world around them seems made of lies that they believe and don’t believe at the same time.
A nation has put on its masks. And it’s waiting for November to find out if it can take a breath.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
Tags:
The Disappeared
China’s global kidnapping campaign has gone on for years and may be reaching inside U.S. borders.
Zach Dorfman Source
Before he disappeared from his luxury apartment at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong on Jan. 27, 2017, Xiao Jianhua, a Chinese-Canadian billionaire, favored female bodyguards. Why, exactly, was unclear: Perhaps he simply liked being surrounded by women; perhaps he trusted them more than men.
Whatever the reason, those guards weren’t much help when a group of mysterious men showed up at his apartment that January day and took him away. According to anonymous sources who viewed the hotel’s internal video feed and later spoke to the New York Times, Xiao, who may have been sedated, was rolled through the Four Seasons lobby in a wheelchair, a sheet covering his head. He was then reportedly loaded onto a boat and ferried to the Chinese mainland.
In what has become a familiar script for such disappearances, an initial police report filed by a family member was quickly withdrawn, and Xiao later issued a statement denying that he had been kidnapped. More than one year later, he remains in mainland China, and though he has not yet been charged with any crime, his businesses, under government direction, are expected to sell almost $24 billion in investments, which will reportedly be used to repay state banks.
Such stories are not unique. In October 2015, Chinese government operatives kidnapped Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-based book publisher and bookstore owner, from his apartment in Thailand. Months later, Gui, a Swedish citizen, resurfaced in China, declaring on state television that he had turned himself in to face decade-old drunk driving charges. Gui’s colleague, Lee Bo, a dual Chinese-British national, also appears to have been kidnapped in Hong Kong in December 2015 by Chinese security forces and brought back to the Chinese mainland.
Over the years, the cases have started to pile up. In 2002, Wang Bingzhang, a prominent pro-democracy activist, was seized in Vietnam by Chinese operatives and thrown into prison on the mainland, where he remains to this day. Two years later, another well-known dissident, Peng Ming, was kidnapped in Myanmar and jailed in China; in late 2016, he died under suspicious circumstances in prison.
Now, however, Beijing’s policy of forcibly repatriating people it considers Chinese nationals — some of whom are in fact citizens of other countries — appears to be accelerating. Powerful businessmen, ex-Chinese Communist Party officials, dissidents, and activists have all been targeted as part of what Western intelligence officials say appears to be a large-scale campaign.
These abductions have become prevalent enough that officials at the U.S. State Department are growing concerned — though they have yet to raise the subject formally with Beijing. The issue “is being talked constantly about at the top,” says one current State official, who has asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. The official notes a recent cable focusing specifically on Chinese renditions in Southeast Asia.
China is not alone in such policies. After 9/11, in what came to be known as “extraordinary rendition,” the United States apprehended scores of foreign nationals accused of terrorism, many of whom it then sent to third countries for harsh treatment, including torture — a policy that soon ignited ferocious domestic and international criticism. But China’s kidnappings appear to be almost exclusively focused on current or former Chinese citizens living abroad who are suspected of corruption-related offenses or more nebulous political crimes.
Yet these cases of forced repatriation appear to show just how seriously the Communist Party takes its assertion that anyone it regards as a national — no matter where they live, work, or study — is subject to its authority.
Apart from the scope, what worries Western intelligence officials is that the kidnappings have begun to occur in the territory of core U.S. allies, including some of the Five Eyes intelligence partners (the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom). U.S. officials fear that China will soon attempt a kidnapping on American soil. In fact, it may have already done so.
When exactly China launched this renditions program is difficult to pinpoint, in large part because the victims and their families have kept the cases quiet. One of the first cases to spark debate dates to 2005, when Chen Yonglin, a Chinese diplomat who had defected to Australia, accused security forces of having drugged and kidnapped Lan Meng, the son of a former deputy mayor of Xiamen, five years earlier. Lan was allegedly drugged by Chinese security forces and transported from Australia back to China on a state-owned shipping vessel.
Chen, who was assigned to China’s consulate in Sydney at the time of his defection, claimed that Chinese officials abducted Lan in order to force his father, Lan Fu, to return to China from Australia to face criminal corruption charges. (Lan Fu returned to China in 2000 and is now serving a lifelong prison sentence.) Australian officials have contested Chen’s claims, and the alleged victim, like numerous others, apparently denied the story to Australian federal police.
But Chen remains adamant. Reached by phone in Australia, he confirms his account of Lan Meng’s rendition, citing numerous conversations about such abductions with Chinese military, intelligence, and diplomatic officials during his tenure at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He says while in office, he heard of at least one other Chinese-sponsored seizure in Australia, as well as one in New Zealand. Chinese operatives also performed similar kidnappings in Vanuatu and Fiji during this period, he says. (Chen says the New Zealand case involved a woman named Xie Li, who was kidnapped in Auckland in 2004 and returned to China via a state-owned shipping vessel.)
Though Australian officials doubted Chen’s claims when he made them more than 10 years ago, China’s increasingly aggressive and sometimes public repatriations have since made them much more credible. In 2014, Beijing formally announced that it was expanding its anti-corruption campaign, known as Skynet or Fox Hunt, to target officials living broad. As part of this and other efforts, China claims to have repatriated more than 3,000 individuals since late 2012.
Critics dispute Chinese government claims that some of these individuals returned of their own free will. “No fugitive volunteers to come back,” says Huang Ciping, a prominent dissident and the director of the U.S.-based Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a Chinese pro-democracy and human rights nonprofit.
In mainland China, the use of kidnapping and illegal detention has become such a standard part of the Communist Party’s disciplinary procedures that it even has a name, shuanggui. In order to isolate suspects in corruption cases — which are often intertwined with fights among party factions — security officials seize them, hold them in undisclosed locations, and torture them to extract quick confessions. The use of shuanggui has increased sharply since Chinese President Xi Jinping launched his anti-corruption drive.
These techniques are now being applied abroad, and among U.S. allies, Australia seems to have borne the brunt of China’s efforts. The number of suspected kidnappings in that country is approaching double digits and includes multiple cases where individuals were beaten or drugged and then dragged onto a boat destined for China, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials.
In other instances, Chinese operatives detained individuals in Australia and used threats to coerce them into leaving the country voluntarily, says one former Australian intelligence official. That official places the number of people coerced into returning to China at “significantly” higher than 10.
The Chinese rendition program has also extended to other Western countries. According to a former senior Canadian intelligence official, there have been two known “extreme coercion” cases in the Vancouver area. “If these were not actual kidnappings, they came very, very close to it,” the former official says. Chinese intelligence or security operatives appeared in person and threatened to harm the victim’s family and friends if he or she failed to cooperate. “They grab somebody and walk them onto a plane,” the former official adds.
The former Canadian official describes Chinese operatives using a “carrot and stick” approach: Individuals were promised leniency if they agreed to cooperate and return to China, while those who resisted were subjected to escalating threats. The former official estimates that such cases in Canada have totaled fewer than two dozen, with many focused in the Vancouver area.
The identities and alleged transgressions of the victims remain somewhat opaque. According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official, those kidnapped in Australia had been accused of graft or corruption. But other former U.S. intelligence officials point out that China often employs such accusations as a means to target dissenters or other suspected enemies of the state. And in some cases, at least, the political motivation has been clear. In early 2016, for example, Li Xin, a pro-democracy journalist, was kidnapped in Thailand and returned to China for an unspecified investigation.
The Chinese government will use “every mean” to bring individuals wanted on graft or corruption charges back, says Chen, the former Chinese diplomat. “They will threaten or terrorize people to do it. They might try kidnapping.”
The question that most concerns U.S. intelligence officials, however, is how far the Chinese government would go to repatriate individuals from the United States, where a kidnapping could provoke a serious international incident. According to some former officials, it has already happened.
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence officials began to notice a pattern: Chinese nationals living in the United States were also disappearing. The number of suspicious disappearances at the time was small — fewer than six, one former senior intelligence official says.
China has formal legal channels to retrieve “economic fugitives.” According to a former senior U.S. law enforcement official, Chinese officials about three years ago gave their American counterparts a list of U.S.-based individuals they wanted deported to China. The list, which numbered nearly 200 people and included 15 to 20 individuals in the Los Angeles area alone, tended to “trump up” charges in many cases, says the law enforcement official. China and the United States do not have an extradition treaty, but in 2015, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to enhance cooperation with China on deportation of U.S.-based fugitives.
Yet at least some of the suspected victims in the United States didn’t seem to fit the bill for Skynet or Fox Hunt targets, who are typically wealthy and well-connected economic fugitives. “They were not high-profile folks,” one former senior intelligence official says.
Evidence emerged that the disappeared people had been coerced into leaving the United States under duress, says one of the former U.S. intelligence officials. “There were multiple reports of people observing Chinese intelligence operatives materializing around the schools or residences of the missing people,” the former official says. “One theory was that they were strong-arming them in person, saying, ‘We’re here. Your flight back to China is tomorrow.’”
Suspected kidnapping cases within the United States were never as clear-cut as those alleged to have happened in Australia. Inside the U.S. government, officials argued about the extent of China’s activities within the country and even whether they should be defined as “extraordinary renditions” at all. The cases set off what one former intelligence official calls a “heated” debate among senior U.S. counterintelligence officials about half a decade ago, going all the way up to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment, and neither did many of the governments whose countries have allegedly been staging grounds for Chinese renditions. A spokesperson for the Australian Federal Police did not respond to questions about renditions but pointed to a prior investigation into the 2000 case, which concluded that the allegations could not be substantiated.
The CIA and the State Department referred questions about alleged cases of forced repatriation to the Justice Department. A spokesperson for the department declined to answer specific questions but provided a general statement appearing to acknowledge the concerns.
“The U.S. Department of Justice will not allow the United States to become a safe haven for criminals,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Foreign Policy. “The Department will assist other countries if evidence of criminality is presented, but will not accept unilateral law enforcement activity by another country on our territory.”
One former senior U.S. intelligence official believes that the evidence is “clear and convincing” that these U.S.-based individuals were subject to acute pressure, which included physical threats to their family members within China and was tantamount to rendering them. “Some cases were semivoluntary, other involuntary,” the official says.
The debate touches on the thorny question of what constitutes a kidnapping. Is it drugging someone and assaulting them, or can it include the mere threat of physical violence against a person or his or her family members? “There are instances where you have clear examples of it being more rendition-flavored behavior in the U.S.,” another former intelligence official says.
But one of the senior former U.S. intelligence officials argues that these cases are not “true” renditions — that these only encompass actual kidnappings, such as the Australia cases. “There’s a big difference between kidnapping and pressure,” says the former official, between “kicking in a door and taking a guy forcefully away and saying, ‘Come with us or we’ll kill your family in Inner Mongolia.’”
This same former intelligence official is “adamant” that evidence of such extraordinary renditions within the United States does not exist. It would be a “huge leap” for Chinese intelligence to shift from employing extreme pressure tactics to performing actual hands-on kidnappings in the United States, the former official says. “You want to come to this country and start kidnapping and killing people? Game on.”
There is greater consensus among U.S. intelligence officials, however, that China has engaged in these extreme pressure campaigns, which include outright threats to individuals or their families, in order to compel U.S.-based Chinese nationals to return. One such case, according to the former intelligence officials, involved a Chinese graduate student enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley at the time of their disappearance about five years ago. There was “evidence of this person being taken against their will,” says one of the former intelligence community officials. (Another victim was based in the Pacific Northwest, former officials say, and a third case involved an individual in the Boston area, says one source.)
“We believed that maybe some family member of this person was being held hostage — that was our theory,” another former U.S. intelligence official says of the Berkeley student. “We hadn’t even confirmed that. There was tremendous silence by the Chinese community on this question.”
Another Chinese-born foreign national, speaking to FP about their experience and that of others, was coerced into returning to China from the United States in 2013. This person, who was then based in the Bay Area, agreed to return in part because of threats to their family, including a relative who was tortured in China. After returning to China, the person was held under house arrest for two years.
Their experience was not unique, the person says. Since the anti-corruption purges started in China, the authorities have been after the wives and children of targets who are residing abroad. “They triangulate between the mother, the father, and the child,” says this person, who holds citizenship in a Western nation. “Most of the time you can’t reach your parents, so you’re on your own, completely isolated.”
The Chinese government alternates between vague threats and appeals to consider family. “The phrasing they use — either to force you back or to get you to give information when you're back — is, ‘It would be best for your father if you did this,’ or ‘Don't you want the best thing for your father?’” the person says. Often, the Chinese government operatives will also try to appeal to the person’s patriotism. “They’ll say, ‘You’re Chinese, don’t you want to help the motherland?’ And when they want to intimidate or bully you, they say, ‘You're too American, you don't understand how things work in China.’”
If that doesn’t work, however, the government will switch to tougher tactics. “With most people, threats and imprisonment were enough,” the person says, “but with the really hard men, they tortured, or threatened to torture, the wives and relatives.”
China’s use of kidnappings has intensified over the past decade, according to Huang, the U.S.-based dissident. “They have been very aggressive,” she says. Fear is widespread within dissident circles, says Huang, describing one of her U.S.-based contacts who has been subjected to a coercion campaign. This person, whose husband has already been jailed in China, declined to speak with FP, even under the condition of anonymity.
Religious and ethnic minorities have also been targeted. According to Ilshat Hassan, a Virginia-based Uighur activist who fled China in 2003, a police officer in China called him in the United States multiple times in 2009 and 2010, offering blandishments — and thinly veiled threats — in exchange for Hassan’s return to China. He refused, threatening to call the FBI. (In another, non-U.S. case, a Uighur man studying Islamic theology in Egypt was coerced by officials at the end of 2016 to return to China with his wife, says a close relative of this individual, who currently lives in Europe. When he and his wife returned to China, they were both arrested and imprisoned.)
How to define these cases — as instances of extralegal repatriations, extreme coercion, or even sometimes as extraordinary renditions — is open to debate, but intelligence officials watching the issue say these actions signal a future where China is emboldened to unleash its security apparatus abroad, even on U.S. soil.
In January 2018, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA officer with extensive experience in Beijing, was arrested after landing in New York. Lee, who left the agency in 2007, was charged with mishandling classified information. Though he hasn’t been charged with any espionage-related crimes, Lee is suspected of providing the government in Beijing with information about the CIA’s constellation of China-based assets, one of the worst breaches for U.S. intelligence in decades.
But Lee’s alleged recruitment may have also led Beijing’s operatives to U.S.-based Chinese nationals. According to three former officials, the intelligence community is looking at whether Lee’s disclosures led to the arrest, and possible execution, of a U.S. intelligence asset who voluntarily returned to China from the San Francisco area. And, in another case, a U.S.-based individual who had been in contact with the CIA while still living in China was coerced into returning there, one former senior official says.
China’s pursuit of its nationals in Western countries points to a larger policy that isn’t likely to stop at U.S. borders. In a recent address to the National Party Congress, Xi emphasized the government’s global reach over the Chinese diaspora. “We will maintain extensive contacts with overseas Chinese nationals, returned Chinese, and their relatives and unite them so that they can join our endeavors to revitalize the Chinese nation,” he said.
If true, these renditions or forced repatriations are “precisely the kind of behavior that observers said would generate pushback against China's actions,” says Peter Mattis, a fellow in the China program at the Jamestown Foundation. “It hasn't. And Western governments have looked the other way.”
The real question may be what happens when China’s assertion of extraterritorial jurisdiction collides more acutely with U.S. notions of territorial sovereignty. One former senior intelligence official, who is “skeptical” that the U.S. cases rise to the level of extraordinary renditions, is unsettled nevertheless. Just because Chinese security operatives haven’t attempted kidnappings within the United States “doesn’t mean they won’t eventually,” the official says.
For Chen, the former Chinese diplomat in Australia, the issue comes down to Beijing’s willingness to flout international convention when it suits its purpose.
“That’s the regime,” he says. “You don’t know what else will happen.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, eugenicist
September 21, 2020 By Monica Showalter
Anyone notice an absence of black faces at the recent Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorials? She's being lionized, though, and several prominent supposed black leaders such as Rep.James Clyburn (the man who brought us Joe Biden) and the Rev. Al Sharpton have sung her praises.
Like the Black Lives Matter protests, though, it's mostly an all-white show with some black people out front. One reason may be that Ginsburg was Jewish, and anti-Semitism in the U.S. is the strongest in the black community. But there's also Ginsburg herself, who had some pretty questionable views about abortion and race.
Here's an actual quote from the New York Times magazine, dating from 2009:
Yes,
the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the
court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for
abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided,
there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in
populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was
going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.
It's so bad that I thought it had to be fake when I first saw it I had to look it up to confirm its authenticity.
Who talks like that in
2009? Heck, who talks like that in 1973?
Ginsburg herself confirmed to her fawning reporter that it was an accurate quote...............To Read More....
Monday, September 21, 2020
P&D: Last Five Days
Dear Readers,
Blogger has imposed an entirely new system that I'm finding difficult to navigate. I have a cartoon in today's edition that took over five minutes to download, and one cartoon that I wanted to use stopped downloading at 10%, so I had to abandon the idea of using it.
It's taking me three times as long to post my links, pictures and cartoons and articles, and the HTML is now so complicated, with so much unnecessary crap to fester through, it's far too time consuming and difficult to get the presentations I desire. This P&D post is an example. It's different than I used in the past because it takes far too long to get that presentation, and in some cases I can't get it at all.
I've been posting on Blogger for 13 years with over 26,000 posts, but I didn't add links for 11 of those years. I really didn't expect to be doing this as long as I have, or as extensively as I have, and didn't realize how I would need to easily find information I already had, including so many of my own commentaries. I'm now going back and adding links to all my posts, and because Blogger is now so difficult, from this point on I will only be posting old articles and my own new commentaries. Then this winter I intend to abandon Blogger for WordPress or some other platform
Please enjoy these offerings from the last five days, and the Blasts From the Past I will be offering.
Rich
The Certifiables! Cartoon of the Day
Ginsburg and the Democrat Party
It's the Basics! My Commentary
Hello America, Joe Here! My Commentary
Word of the Day My Commentary
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is A Disgrace My Commentary 2019
Woah: Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to Possibly Face Federal Charges Over CHOP/CHAZ
The Case Against Government Schools
Achieving Peace Of Mind During The Pandemic
Solar panels generate mountains of waste — and heat the planet
Democrats Descend To Appalling State Of Incivility Conrad Black
Blasts From the Past: Showing how the more things change the more they are the same!
2013
Violence is Very Human 2013 Alan Caruba
From Prohibition to Obamacare 2013 Alan Caruba
Obama's Deliberate Destruction of the Economy 2013 Alan Caruba
Living on the Edge of a Volcano 2013 Alan Caruba
You Want Fries With That? 2013 Alan Caruba
Gasman's The Scientific Origins of National Socialism 2013 William Walter Kay
Who Needs the Debt Ceiling? 2013 Dan Mitchell
If America is so bad, blacks – why stay? 2013 Mychal Massie
The Conservative Fairy Tale That Won’t Go Away 2013
Federal judge was right to reject Obama's 'secret law' claim 2013
The Left Against Zion 2013 Daniel Greenfield
Green Nightmare: War On Coal Can’t Stop Fuel’s Enduring Demand 2016
2016
No Flies on Hillary 2016
The "Muslim Hate Crimes Increase" Hoax 2016
Proposed Spending Cap in Brazil Could Be a Key for Economic Recovery and Renaissance 2016 Dan Mitchell
It’s not Just Campaign Rhetoric, Hillary Clinton Actually Believes Keynesian Economics 2016 Dan Mitchell
The End of Columbus Day is the End of America 2016 Daniel Greenfield
So what does Weiner have on Huma and Hillary? 2016 Monica Showalter
Hello America, Joe Here!
By Rich Kozlovich
Hello America, Joe here. Here's what Kamala and I will to for America, if we're elected.
Save Obamacare. It was a disaster sure, but it will give the government needed control over Americans.
Rescue USPS - We'll raise taxes, and give the unions more control to raise salaries and reduce service.
Defend Civil Rights - We absolutely want more rights for special groups, but only those who vote for us. The NRA will be purged, Christians and Jews will be forced to accept values that are antithetical to their belief systems and Muslims will oversee that it's done. Force more diversity, especially on the Boards of Director to major corporations, even if they're illiterate and speak no English. no matter how unqualified the people might be, even if they don't speak English.
Support Unions -
It will be important to re-establish the full force and power of the
Wagner Act to force companies to accept unions and giving unlimited
power to the NLRB, If necessary nationalize the companies, and whole
industries if necessary. Total support unless they stand against
destroying jobs in the name of the environment. Kamala and I won't stand
for that.
Repair Environmental Protections - If necessary, we will overturn the Constitution and eliminate property rights in the name of environmental scare mongering and junk science and give misfit environmental organizations veto power over every form of progress, including manufacturing, mining, agriculture, lumber, building, and all forms of water use, land use, and air standards. Sign the Law of the Sea Treaty that gives total control over the world's oceans to the United Nations, including the quality of the water that comes out of our rivers into the sea.
Raise Minimum Wage - Sure, that will put a lot of people out of work, but since everything we represent will destroy the economy anyway, it won't matter.
Restore Norms of Decency - Destroy the Judaic/Christian values the made America great, and eliminate conservatives, Republicans, and further follow our Civil Rights agenda to its fullest. Make government the supreme arbiter of morality.
Rebuild International Relations - It's time America surrendered to China, Russia, the EU and the UN, and we're going to make it happen. Protect Voting Access - We will absolutely make sure illegal aliens and the dead have the right to vote Democrat.
Establish Financial Safeguards - We must make it clear all the money belongs to the government so we must prevent anyone from keeping Congress form taxing, borrowing and spending without limit. Furthermore, we will make sure the banks will give loans to those who are totally unqualified to pay them back, provided they have privileged group status.
Advance Green Energy - With enough black outs and brown outs, we'll can turn America into Venezuela!
Thank you America for Voting Biden/Harris, and signing on to the the Democrat Party Policy Platform. And we'll make sure Hillary Clinton takes Ruth Bader Ginsburg's place to guarantee the unrestricted right to continue murdering the unborn.
In fact, there's a rumor
Hillary called President Trump and told him she really wanted to take
RBG's place. It's also rumored he thought about it for a while and then
said: If it's okay with the funeral home, it's okay with me.
Sunday, September 20, 2020
The Case Against Government Schools
September 19, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
I’ve been writing about the benefits of school choice for a long time, largely because government schools are becoming ever-more expensive while produced ever-more dismal outcomes. But even I was surprised to see this tweet, which shows how so many parents in New York City seek alternative educational opportunities for their children.
What makes these numbers so shocking is that parents are forced to pay for government schools. So when they opt for alternatives such as private schools, they’re paying twice.
But they decide the extra cost is justified because they know government-run schools don’t do a good job (and those failures have become even more apparent because of coronavirus). For instance, David Harsanyi indicts government schooling in an article for National Review.
“Public” schools have been a catastrophe for the United States. …State-run schools have undercut two fundamental conditions of a healthy tolerant society. First, they’ve created millions of civic illiterates who are disconnected from long-held communal values and national identity. Second, they’ve exacerbated the very inequalities that trigger the tearing apart of fissures. …No institution has fought harder to preserve segregated communities than the average teachers’ union. …Prosperous Americans already enjoy school choice — and not merely because they can afford private schools. …This entire dynamic is driven by the antiquated notion that the best way to educate kids is to throw them into the nearest government building. It’s the teachers’ unions that safeguard these fiefdoms through racketeering schemes: First they funnel taxpayer dollars to the political campaigns of allies who, when elected, return the favor by protecting union monopolies and supporting higher taxes that fund unions and ultimately political campaigns. …most poor parents, typically black or Hispanic, are compelled to send their kids to inferior schools… Joe Biden says he’ll create not a child-oriented Department of Education but a “teacher-oriented Department of Education.” By teachers, Biden means unions. …It’s likely that left-wing ideologues run your school district. They decide what your children learn. …The embedded left-wing nature of big school districts is so normalized that parents rarely say a word. …a voucher system creates opportunities for all kinds of students, not just wealthy ones.
I suppose it should explicitly stated that those opportunities would produce better results, both for taxpayers and for kids.
In an article for the American Institute for Economic Research, Gregory van Kipnis compares government schools and private schools.
Only when there is a monopoly are we denied choice. The negative consequences of that are well known… Monopolies produce goods and services at a higher price and a lower quality than would be obtained in a competitive market. That is certainly the case with public education. …society should be interested in data about the costs and outcomes of different approaches to education, namely public versus private schools, and how this data should affect our choices and behavior.
And what does the data tell us?
…currently (as of 2018), a public school education in the US costs 89% more than private education; that is, $14,653 for a public school and $7,736 for a private education. The high relative cost of public school education has persisted since the earliest period for which the data has been collected – 1965 (Chart 1a). …Private education is significantly less expensive.
Here’s the chart showing that government schools are far more expensive.
This raises a separate question: Are government schools more expensive because they’re producing better results? Nope.
While the generally accepted knowledge is that private education produces better results than public school education, …Chart 4…shows the trends and levels in the composite ACT test results (meaning for math and reading combined) for the period 2001-2014, for private, public and homeschooled children. …The results speak for themselves – private schools test at a significantly higher level than public schools, and the gap is widening.
Here’s a chart showing the difference.
So what’s the bottom line?
Consumers of any product know they get better outcomes, as measured by quality and price, if the product is offered in competitive markets. This is true even in markets that have only limited competition. Any competition is better than none. Just as that principle is true in the markets for cars and cafes, so it is true in the market for educational services. …It is manifestly cheaper to get a private education and get a far better education in a private school. The problem holding back the growth in private education is that you have to pay twice to get it. The economics and facts support the logic of freeing parents to obtain private education and alternative public education for their children. To further facilitate this decision, parents should be given vouchers and credits equal to the cost of public school in their area, which they can freely use to fund their choice of better education in the private sector.
Amen. School choices produces better educational outcomes and saves money for taxpayers.
Hard to argue with the data (unless, of course, your motive is to appease teacher unions).
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