Monday, August 19, 2019

The Unmasking of BDS; Congress will need to do much more.


American Spectator  "After fourteen years of being lulled by propagandists into believing that their boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign (BDS) is a human rights movement, we’re finally waking up to the deception.
Tony Branco
"The U.S. House last month overwhelmingly passed a bill opposing BDS efforts to target and delegitimize the State of Israel. Last February, the Senate passed a bill, never taken up by the House, legalizing the right of state governments and employee benefit plans to refuse to do business with companies boycotting Israel, thereby protecting the 27 states with anti-BDS legislation. Concerned about BDS similarity to Nazi boycotts and incitement of anti-Semitism becoming “the breeding ground for escalations to violence,” the German parliament recently passed a resolution declaring BDS anti-Semitic.
"The Western world is acting, albeit slowly, to unmask BDS for what it is — a dangerous 21st century iteration of the age-old scourge of Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism is a mutating cancer, evolving and adapting, intent on destroying Jews in their host communities. Our State Department definition of modern-day anti-Semitism identifies expressions of hatred, including when disguised as Israel-bashing and anti-Zionism, the hallmarks of BDS.
"The BDS movement was founded by left-wing socialists and Marxists in 2001 explicitly to undermine Israel’s sovereignty, skillfully exploiting the language of peace, justice, and human rights to appeal to Western audiences. Adopted by Palestinian extremists in 2005, BDS misleads civic and cultural organizations, governments, and individuals into believing that its goal is merely to establish a Palestinian state living peacefully beside a Jewish state. Using sophisticated subterfuge to hide its linkage to Palestinian terror groups, it obscures its extremist endgame — the destruction of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and the creation of yet another Arab-majority state." . . .



Report: Obama Tried to Talk Biden out of Running for President


PJ Media   "In the most recent Democratic debate, Senator Cory Booker called Joe Biden to task for his constant name-dropping of Barack Obama. “You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not,” he said in what was one of my favorite moments ever in any of the debates.
"According to the New York Times, while Joe Biden was seeking counsel on whether to run for president, Barack Obama tried to talk his former vice president out of running.
The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.Mr. Biden — who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago — responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.
Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.  
"What is so interesting about this story is how it conflicts with Biden’s prior claim that he specifically asked Obama not to endorse him. "I asked President Obama not to endorse me. He doesn't want to. Whoever wins this nomination should win it on their own merits.” If Obama was trying to persuade Joe not to run, it’s highly unlikely that Biden would have had to ask for him not to endorse him. Not that anyone really believed Joe’s story anyway.

"Another fun nugget in this story is what is revealed about Obama’s search for a running mate. " . . .

Newsrooms actually call out Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren for lying about Michael Brown’s death

One of these two candidates may be our next president. Neither should relish having to govern in a racial environment as toxic as the one they are promoting through false statements like the one about Michael Brown’s case. Americans should fear being governed in that environment.
Michael Brown: “A Poor Candidate For Martyrdom”
Power Line Blog  "Glenn Kessler writes a “fact check” column for the Washington Post. I find the column helpful because Kessler usually does a good job of stating what’s correct and what’s incorrect about the statements he’s checking.
"On the other hand, I think Kessler’s liberal bias comes into play when he applies his “Pinocchio Test.” It seems to me that he’s more inclined to award lots of Pinocchios to conservatives who have misstated things than to liberals who have done so to a comparable degree. (But then, this view may reflect conservative bias on my part).
"Kessler’s column would be better if he simply struck to the facts and ditched the Pinocchio bit. But I suppose he needs a gimmick and, perhaps, an outlet for his liberal bias.
"Kessler’s latest fact check concerns statements by Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren about the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Harris tweeted:
5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. . . We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.
"Not be outdone, Warren tweeted this, half an hour later:
Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. . . .
"Hard though it is for liberals to earn four Pinocchi[o]s from Kessler, the maximum number he awards, Harris and Warren accomplished this feat with their claim that Brown was murdered." . . .

Ignorant Liberals Need To Go Visit America


Kurt Schlichter  "It’s always good to occasionally leave deep blue west Los Angeles and visit the United States. When your congressjerk is Ted Lieu, you get a skewed perspective on the country as well as suffer continuous embarrassment. My recent travels through parts of the country that aren’t populated and controlled almost exclusively by liberal nimrods gave me some hope for the future. America as a whole does not appear eager to become Scat Francisco. The problem is the people who want to transform our entire country into a socialist open sewer know nothing of this country outside their reeking pinko enclaves."
. . . 
"At Little Round Top and the Angle, you stand on patches of ground where bodies piled up because Americans could not resolve their differences in any other way than with bayonets and MiniĆ© balls. That’s true American history, not the garbage propaganda the elite tries to feed us to undermine the moral basis of our country and thereby justify their fundamental transformation of it into a socialist dictatorship with them in charge, of course."
. . . 
"Americans are thirsty for their heritage. They flock to it. And liberals, at best, ignore it and its lessons when they are not actively trying to erase it. The New York Times has promised a series of essays dedicated to show that slavery was the entirety of America’s foundation, but that’s a lie designed to create a kind of original sin they can exploit for their own advantage today. It’s weaponized history." . . .

Here the leftist Senator gets refuted by Candice Owens:

The Bogus Story That Launched a ‘Collusion’ Probe

Andrew C. McCarthy
A minor functionary’s farcical encounter with a self-promoting schemer provided the excuse for an investigation.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a PresidencyThis is the fourth in a series of excerpts; the first can be read here, the second here, and the third here

"The George Papadopoulos Origin Story has never added up. It has been portrayed as the Big Bang, the Magic Moment that started the FBI’s investigation of “collusion” — a suspected election-theft conspiracy between Donald Trump’s campaign and Vladimir Putin’s regime. But if the young energy-sector analyst had actually emerged in early 2016 as the key to proving Trump–Russia espionage, you would think the FBI might have gotten around to interviewing him before January 27, 2017 — i.e., a week after President Trump had been inaugurated, and six months after the Bureau formally opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” probe.

"You would probably also think Papadopoulos, Suspect One in The Great Cyber Espionage Attack on Our Democracy, might have rated a tad more than the whopping 14-day jail sentence a federal judge eventually imposed on him. You might even suppose that he’d have been charged with some seditious felony involving clandestine operations against his own country, instead of . . . yes . . . fibbing to the FBI about the date of a meeting.

"That, however, does not scratch the surface. We are to believe that what led to the opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, and what therefore is the plinth of the collusion narrative, is a breakfast meeting at a London hotel on April 26, 2016, between Papadopoulos and Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic we are supposed to take for a clandestine Russian agent. We are to take Papadopoulos’s word for it that Mifsud claimed Russia possessed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton.” We are further to believe that “the professor” elaborated that, in order to help Donald Trump’s candidacy, the Kremlin would release these “emails of Clinton” at a time chosen to do maximum damage to the Democratic nominee’s campaign.

"The story is based on no credible evidence. If it were ever presented to a jury, it would be laughed out of court." . . .

Hong Kong is a huuuuuuuge embarrassment for Democrats

Monica Showalter  "The turmoil in Hong Kong is a huuuuuuge embarrassment for Democrats. Hong Kongers are waving the stars and stripes, singing the national anthem, and issuing a global cry for freedom. For a Democratic Party that loudly supports bend-a-knee leftists who hate the U.S. flag, such as Colin Kaepernick, that's a problem. And for a party that is trying to sell socialism to the U.S. public, well, oppressive China's got socialism in spades.


"President Trump has taken flak for his response to the crisis, arguably so, but the real clown show is in what's coming from the Democrats.
"Axios did some homework and here's what it found when it tried to get answers from Democratic presidential candidates about what to do, particularly if the Chicoms get violent with the Hongkongers:" . . .
This is what the Democrats are offering as one of the world's greatest beacons of freedom stands to fall into the jaws of communism. Trump's response is still developing, so I'm not going to criticize him entirely for weakness, though I hope he moves things along.