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Feminists Are Consenting to Hamas’ Rape Culture

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By Gil Troy

And they’re doing it proudly, on campuses and capitals around the world

On Oct. 7, Hamas unleashed a savage assault on southern Israel. These marauders were equal-opportunity killers, kidnappers, and abusers. Their bloody frenzy targeted everyone in their path—babies, Thai workers, Israeli Arabs, Bedouins, the elderly, special needs children, and, of course, Israeli Jews. They particularly relished targeting women—slaughtering them, raping them, cutting babies out of pregnant women’s wombs, torturing mothers and grandmothers in front of their families—and, many fear, sexually enslaving some of the hostages. The world witnessed these perversions because the villains proudly filmed them, then inspired Palestinians and pro-Palestinian progressives to spread them across social media. This secondary, digital, GoPro assault on the victims’ dignity made this orgy of misogyny one of the bloodiest and most publicized attacks on women in history.

Nevertheless, more than three weeks later, the feminist community remains silent. In May 2021, within days of Israel counterattacking in self-defense against yet another Hamas bombardment, over 120 gender studies departments denounced the Jewish state. Declaring that “justice is indivisible,” they proclaimed that our work is “committed to an inclusive feminist vision,” as per the National Women’s Studies Association’s 2015 Solidarity Statement, “that contests violations of civil rights and international human rights law.” The call was so popular, that the Palestinian Feminist Collective asked for patience. “Please note, due to the overwhelming response we are only uploading names twice a day. Please be patient as we are stretched to capacity.”

Now, despite seeing Hamas’ rape cult, not one gender studies department has defended even one victimized woman. Feminists have long taught us to believe the accuser and not blame the victim. For years, progressives insisted, in academic papers, on T-shirts, and even on coffee mugs, that when fighting oppression, “silence is consent,” or even that “silence is violence.” On Oct. 7, the violated women shouted, shrieked, cried, begged, rape after rape, cut after cut, fighting off these assaults with their voices and their bare hands as best each could. Some hostages may still be struggling. By contrast, violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women and against the victims from three dozen different countries. Some even doubt the testimonials—and the staggering, bloody, heartbreaking evidence of stripped women paraded through Gaza’s streets. Robbing someone of their story is a secondary offense—but nevertheless inexcusable.

If justice is indivisible, these women deserve justice—and empathy too—whether or not you like Israel or abhor it and its policies. If rape culture is never OK, all civilized people should repudiate so many Palestinians’ and progressives’ delight in spreading these videos and cheering these crimes. In their silence, most leading feminists became complicit, aiding and abetting this mass attempt to dehumanize women just because they’re Jews—or happened to be on the Gaza border that day.

Violating every feminist principle I’ve ever read and respected, today’s feminist movement is violently, silently, consenting to this mass crime against women.

Beyond the sheer cruelty and unfathomable scale of suffering, these crimes devastated so many people, Jews and non-Jews alike, who recognized the barbarians’ perverted pedigree. President Joe Biden connected the historical dots on Oct. 18, saying that when this “sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” it “brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by a millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people.” He added: “The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”

Indeed, these crimes echoed the mass murders and sexual assaults the Nazis perpetrated during the Holocaust, that Arabs perpetrated on their Jewish neighbors during the Hebron Massacre of 1929, that Cossacks perpetrated on so many Jews during pogroms—and so many other Jew-haters perpetrated on Jewish women, no matter how young or old over millennia.

In singling out women, those guilty of this gendered violence want to dehumanize them doubly. They seek to strip Jewish women of their dignity by abusing them in unspeakable ways. They try humiliating Jewish men, treating them as so helpless they cannot even defend their women and children.

After three weeks of hearing how this sadistic saturnalia “exhilarated” too many progressives, those justifiably appalled by these enablers of evil are now being told the worst abuses never happened. Once again, the hypocrisy is stunning. Feminists teach that denying sexual assault intensifies the trauma, erasing the victim’s personhood yet again. Nevertheless, some feminists are questioning the stories—perhaps because they don’t want to question their blind support for the Palestinian cause. They want to deny the vile photos and videos, the reports from IDF officials, pathologists, and volunteers at the overworked morgues, or testimonies from captured Hamas criminals describing “having sex with dead bodies, meaning the body of a dead young woman,” because the goal was “to dirty them, to rape them.”

The horrors of Oct. 7 were so unnerving that the characteristic gallows humor of the Israelis has been muted. The first joke I heard, however, is tragically on point: If gaslighting is denying you said what you said …. Gaza-lighting is denying you did what you did—after broadcasting it broadly to the world…..

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Continue reading this article at Tablet Mag.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Polls Showing Support For Israel Hide Some Ugly Truths

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By David Harsanyi

There were dozens of Charlottesville-type marches in the United States last week. No one in the media wants to ask why.

According to a new Harvard/Harris poll, only the police and military are more respected than Israel. It’s heartening that Americans overwhelmingly support civilization over the Islamofascists of Gaza and Iran.

Then again, “Palestinian Authority” gets 17 percent support, and Hamas has a 14 percent positive rating — which is to say, 14 percent of your neighbors have taken the side of a medieval religious cult that’s vicious enough to cut Jewish babies out of mothers before beheading them. If 14 percent of Americans supported ISIS or al Qaeda or the Nazi Party, we would probably be concerned.

Anyway, those numbers seem far too small to me. I think there’s a good reason why. For one thing, many of those who claim to be “supporters” of the Jewish State are not. The Barack Obama types, who do the perfunctory throat-clearing about Israel’s right to exist before going into the usual reasons it should not. This faction — let’s be generous and call them “both-siders” — is a growing concern in the Democratic Party and on the fringes of the right.

According to the Harvard poll crosstabs, 36 percent of “liberals” of all ages agreed that the Hamas attack on civilians was justified. 15 percent of “conservatives.” While antisemitism isn’t the exclusive domain of left or right, full-blown Hamas apologists are now deeply embedded in left-wing institutions such as universities, major newspapers, cable news, progressive politics, think tanks, and the State Department. They have the kind of disproportionate reach and institutional respect that cosplaying Nazis standing in front of Disney playing with themselves can only dream about.

Also according to the Harvard poll, a majority of 18- to 24-year-olds believe the killing of more than 1,200 Israeli and American civilians was justified. Nearly half of those 25 to 35 believe it was justified. That percentage might be a bit lower than what you find in The New York Times newsroom; nevertheless, it is only going to get worse.

How many young people working as engineers or carpenters or starting a new business or at home tending to a new family support Hamas? Very few, one imagines. What about the lit majors or those pursuing international relations degrees or Ph.D.s in one of the social pseudosciences? There is little hope for those who attend hermetically sealed ideological laboratories of higher “learning,” where identitarianism, intersectionality, and other iterations of Marxism — most contingent on some form of antisemitism — are taught.

These institutions are run by cowardly administrators who only stand up for free speech when defending terror apologists. They will continue to create credentialed moral nitwits. These are not often places for young people to learn critical thinking skills. But they are places that produce ideologues who’ll be getting those editorial jobs and professorships and teachers union presidencies and law clerkships and security clearance jobs at the Pentagon.

Who else makes up this minority? We’re not supposed to talk about it, but it’s clear. According to a Cygnal poll (the outfit gets an “A” rating from FiveThirtyEight), a majority of American Muslims agree that Hamas was “justified” in its attack on Israel as well.

Though it is indisputable that antisemitism is deeply ingrained in certain Muslim communities, to say so will likely get you smeared as “Islamophobic” — always a big topic of conversation in Washington when Jews are being murdered.

But look to Europe, where crimes against Jews have skyrocketed in places with high levels of immigration from the Middle East, to understand the potential problem. When Pew polled the Muslim world, it found nearly universal antipathy toward Jews. Not only in places like Jordan and Egypt, where governments have spent decades ginning up Jew-hatred to distract from their own failing but also in Muslim-majority nations like Indonesia, where there are around 20 Jews and the Israeli border sits thousands of miles away. Antisemites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib did not appear from the ether. They represent communities in Michigan and Minnesota.

There were dozens of Charlottesville-type marches in the United States last week, with chants of genocide ringing in the air. They were attended largely by Muslim protesters, along with the hard left (including a number of self-hating Jews.) Though Jews are by far the most targeted religious minority in the United States, we have yet to have a big national conversation about the problem. No one in major media dares even bring it up.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Investors Abandoning “green” Energy As They Realize It’s Never Going To Be Cheap

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By Joanne Nova

Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph, has compiled quite the list of failures as offshore wind projects get frozen around the world.  Decisions are being delayed, contracts abandoned, auctions left without bidders and almost no new projects started. The awful truth of inflation, the maintenance cost shocks, and cable failures is all too much. Then there was the problem of needing 100 years of copper, nickel and lithium production before Christmas.

It’s all been kept quiet. Who knew there were no offshore wind investments in the EU last year, apart from a few floating projects?

After years of subsidies, wind power was meant to get cheap enough to be profitable and competitive all by itself, instead, 25 years later, it just needs bigger subsidies. When the great oil and coal price crunch came, wind power was supposed to rise through the ashes, instead, we discovered that wind turbine and battery factories needed cheap coal and oil like the rest of the economy.

Right now Australia has no offshore wind turbines and is about to jump onto a burning ship:

The myth of affordable green energy is over

Kathryn Porter in The Telegraph,

Progress is stalled around the world as nobody wants to admit the real costs

Turbine manufacturers have been losing money hand over fist in recent years. Collectively over the past five years the top four turbine producers outside China have lost almost US$ 7 billion – and over US$ 5 billion in 2022 alone.

But the losses have also been driven by pricing structures designed to win market share, and aggressive windfarm developers who have refused to pay up, often while pocketing billions in subsidies. The market has started to look, if not like a Ponzi scheme, then like a house of cards built on the shakiest of foundations.

Offshore wind projects have been drying up around the world. During the whole of 2022, there were no offshore wind investments in the EU other than a handful of small floating schemes. Several projects had been expected to reach financial close last year, but final investment decisions were delayed due to inflation, market interventions, and uncertainty about future revenues. Overall, the EU saw only 9 gigawatts worth of new turbine orders in 2022, a 47 percent drop on 2021.

Over in the United States, despite the massive support offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, windfarm projects are also struggling. Orsted, the global leader in offshore wind, has indicated it may write off more than US$2 billion in costs tied to three US-based projects – Ocean Wind 2 off New Jersey, Revolution Wind off Connecticut and Rhode Island, and Sunrise Wind off New York – that have not yet begun construction, saying it may withdraw from all three if it can’t find a way to make them economically viable.

Meanwhile, projects off New York are asking for an average 48 percent increase in guaranteed prices that could add US$ 880 billion per year to electricity prices in the state.

Investors are starting to run

The S&P Global Clean Energy Index is down by 30% this year and most of that is in the last three months:

The S&P Global Clean Energy Index, comprised of major solar and wind power companies and other renewables-related businesses, has lost 30 percent in 2023, with nearly all of the decline since July.

By contrast, the oil and gas-heavy S&P 500 Energy Index is up slightly this year.

In the last three years, the real S&P energy sector is up 287% (white line below), but the clean energy sector (the green line) is down 32%.

Energy Sector Index growth (white) compared to the Global Clean Energy Sector (green) in the last three years.

“The energy sector has been the best-performing market segment so far this month, with oil prices surging 30% over the past three months.” — Globe and Mail

Yahoo Finance graphs the extraordinary growth of the S&P 500 Energy Index since 1994.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Weekend Read: Mass Madness at Three [Getting Covid Right] thumbnail

Weekend Read: Mass Madness at Three [Getting Covid Right]

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By Helen Andrews

As the narrative of the Covid era settles, it looks as if we are intent on forgetting what actually happened and who was responsible.

Pandemics have a way of falling out of historical memory. President George W. Bush read historian John Barry’s book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Plague in History over vacation at his Crawford ranch in 2004; when he got back to Washington, he commissioned a national pandemic preparedness plan, the first in our history, at an eventual cost of over $7 billion. The reason Bush was so affected by this book about the Spanish Flu of 1918–20 is that he never knew anything about it before. Fifty million people died in that pandemic. Up to 4 million died in the Asian flu pandemic of 1957–58, including 116,000 Americans; 4 million people and 100,000 Americans in the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. But these events don’t offer much in the way of lessons or narratives, so they become footnotes.

That is not what will happen to Covid-19. The lockdowns were a major event in world history. Nothing like it has ever happened before, and nothing will be the same after it. With most pandemics, after you have mourned the dead, there is not much more to say about them. There is a lot to say about Covid-19.

But what? Three years later, there is little consensus. When the Great Barrington Declaration was published in October 2020, its proponents predicted that its strategy of letting low-risk individuals carry on with their lives was the one everyone would endorse eventually. That seems to have been borne out. Politicians today apologize for having imposed too many restrictions, not too few. California’s Governor Gavin Newsom told a TV interviewer recently that, if he had known in 2020 what he knows now, “we would have done everything differently,” giving as an example the unnecessary closure of beaches and other outdoor spaces.

Far be it from me to interrupt my enemy when he is admitting defeat, but this is not good enough. Lots of people nowadays are willing to say they should have turned against lockdowns and school closures sooner than they did. But the right time to oppose these measures was from the very beginning.

Covid-19 will not be forgotten. The more embarrassing aspects of our reaction to it might be. Our collective understanding of the pandemic is currently so fluid that we can’t even agree on whether lockdowns were good or bad. Before a false narrative hardens into conventional wisdom, let us get a few things down in the record.

It was hard to know what was going on during the pandemic even for those of us who lived through it. All the usual sources of information we use to make sense of the world were either removed or corrupted. Casual conversations vanished. No more office, no more water cooler. Social media was censored. Usually, Twitter and Facebook are good places to check whether other people are having the same reactions to what’s going on in the world that you are. But censorship kept a lid on many discussions, including some that we now know to be perfectly valid such as the lab leak theory of Covid’s origins, the uselessness of masks, and the failure of vaccines to prevent the spread of the disease.

That left the mainstream news. Headlines gave the impression of a rolling catastrophe. The problem is that this coverage was highly selective. Young Mother, 36, Dies of Covid Hours After Giving Birth. Sad to say, pregnant women die of the flu in normal years, too, just as teenage athletes sometimes had heart problems before the vaccine came along. It may be a pattern, it may not. You can’t base your sense of reality on anecdotes.

There was a bigger problem with the news coverage. Usually, when you read a headline that’s too good to be true, you wait for all the facts to come in. It’s a common three-day news cycle: Dead lowlife’s friends say cops shot him in cold blood; the police department releases body cam footage showing the real story. Defense attorney says his client is being charged for some ridiculous non-crime; court filings show the prosecution’s side. Here is the problem: Hospitals don’t comment on internal matters. Patient privacy laws, plus general bureaucratic risk aversion, prevent it.

The result was that patients’ families could go to the press and say whatever they wanted and journalists ran their stories without checking if they were true. How could they have checked, if the hospitals wouldn’t comment? During the late 2021 surge, I read a story about an elderly man who died after being turned away from dozens of hospitals overwhelmed with Covid patients. Reading further, the source for the story turned out to be someone from my hometown whom I knew a little. A wonderful person, but not someone whose word I would take as gospel under any circumstances. Let us also say it did not surprise me that the article ended with a plea to readers to get vaccinated. In that case, the reporter did call the hospital for comment, but due to privacy laws, they could only confirm that a patient by that name had been in their care and had died.

Enough of these thinly sourced stories turned out to be false to raise questions about the whole genre. In September 2021, local news in Oklahoma reported that a rural hospital had run out of beds and was turning away gunshot victims after being swamped with patients who had overdosed on ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug used in both humans and animals that some doctors were touting as a treatment for Covid. Rolling Stone and Rachel Maddow ran with the story. The whole thing turned out to be fake. The hospital, in a public statement, clarified that the doctor who was the source for the story had not worked there in months and it had no patients currently being treated for ivermectin overdose.

A more grim example from March 2020 was the Arizona woman who claimed her husband died after the two of them decided to drink fish tank cleaner after President Donald Trump promoted a chemical with a similar name, hydroxychloroquine, as a Covid cure. “I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?” his widow told the local news. It turned out the wife was a longtime Democratic donor who had previously been arrested for domestic violence against her husband. Friends said the wife was unhappy in the marriage and doubted whether the deceased, a retired mechanical engineer, would have done something so irrational and impulsive. Nevertheless, journalist Lawrence Wright, who has a Pulitzer Prize, repeated the story uncritically in his book The Plague Year.

A viral video of a nurse claiming she was forced to work in a Covid ward without a protective mask, which was reported as news by CBS, turned out to be the work of a bipolar aspiring Instagram model. The most famous New York Post front page of the early pandemic, “TREATED LIKE TRASH,” featuring a photo of nurses wearing garbage bags, was later found to be staged (their real protective equipment was visible under their Hefty bags) and the hospital denied the alleged equipment shortage.

And these are just the ones we know about. Fortunately for the public, it was in the hospitals’ interest to protect their reputations by correcting stories about shortages and turning patients away, and they were able to correct them because no individual patients were involved. In cases where doctors might have given context to Covid deaths that seemed shocking—yes, he was only 28 but he weighed 300 pounds; yes, she tested positive for Covid but she died of an unrelated condition—they were prevented from doing so by privacy laws. That’s assuming they would have been willing to speak up in the first place, at the cost of being condemned by their peers for giving aid and comfort to pandemic denialists.

I participated in a back-and-forth exchange of open letters in a British magazine, the Catholic Herald, with French pundit Pascal-Emanuel Gobry in March and April 2020, which, looking back on it, makes an interesting time capsule. I questioned whether mortality figures were a useful metric if they did not distinguish between dying from and dying with, and Gobry wrote back: “My instinctive response is a version of Dr. Johnson’s ‘I refute it thus.’ Who knows if people are dying at a higher rate than in past years? Well, have you looked at all the overflowing morgues?” (Emphasis Gobry’s.)

Actually, on the subject of overflowing morgues, some of those stories were not as they first appeared. The most famous example in the United States was the Brooklyn Funeral Home where neighbors called the cops after smelling a foul odor and the police found U-Haul trucks full of decomposing bodies. The owner, Andrew T. Cleckley, later said only fifteen of the bodies retrieved were his. The other forty-eight belonged to other funeral directors to whom he sometimes rented his space, who kept bringing bodies “even after I said ‘Stop!’” He lost his license over this mismanagement, which was unique among funeral homes in the city.

But Gobry was right about one thing. The only way to get the truth about the pandemic was to rely on things you could see with your own eyes. I saw a jerry-rigged hospital go up in the local convention center at a cost of $31 million. When it was dismantled a year later, the mayor admitted it had never served a single patient. NPR ran a story in May 2020 titled “U.S. Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most Without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients.” The whole point of lockdowns, as they were sold to the public, was not to halt the spread of disease but to slow it down to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. These empty field hospitals, which the federal government spent over $660 million to build, made a mockery of “flatten the curve.”

Ross Douthat, himself very much a Covid hawk, admitted in a column of September 18, 2021, that he did not know anyone close to him who died in the pandemic. At that time, I didn’t either (there has since been one person). That might be a function of our social circles, although churchgoers do tend to know people across age groups and social classes. Douthat also pointed out that the invisible pandemic could have been brought home by the death of a celebrity in the prime of life, but all the celebrities felled by Covid seemed to be obscure or ancient. The two whose deaths made the most impression on me were John Prine and Herman Cain. Cain was 74. Prine was 73 and battling multiple cancers.

We know that government officials suppressed true information during the pandemic. We know they lied, probably deliberately, as Dr. Anthony Fauci did in his famous reversal on whether masks work. They did this because they had a powerful, all-purpose excuse: Even if what I’m saying isn’t true, at least it will raise awareness of the virus. It will encourage people to take it seriously. In 2009, the headmaster of the Horace Mann School in New York closed his campus prematurely over the swine flu scare before any student cases had been confirmed. “In the end, swine flu or not, we will emerge a healthier school with better health related practices,” he said. That was the mentality during Covid: No such thing as going too far.

They had another reason for lying. They wanted to get rid of Donald Trump.

Dr. Paul Elias Alexander is a Canadian epidemiologist who was brought in to the Department of Health and Human Services to help with the Covid response. Alexander is from Trinidad and has a Caribbean accent, so many people make assumptions about his political leanings and speak more freely than they would if they knew his real views. He reports in his memoir how the workings of the deep state were explained to him:

It shocked me when I was told, “And we in the bureaucracy are dedicated to making every day of his life a living hell. When Americans watch the evening news, all they’ll see will be another day of the country not working under this president. Ungovernable, unmanageable, chaotic, infections going up and up. Americans will want anyone but Trump and we are doing it, for we have all the health agencies like CDC and NIH and FDA working with us. We have Fauci with us, we have Birx with us. How could he win? Our job is to make the pandemic response appear to be a disaster, and we coordinate roughly every day across the different agencies to make it look that way and achieve the goal.”

Whether you believe the details of Alexander’s paraphrase or not, it fits reality. The challenge for the left was to give the impression that the pandemic was being mismanaged without saying exactly what they would do differently. During the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris, the moderator asked Harris exactly that: “What would a Biden administration do in January and February that a Trump administration wouldn’t do? Would you impose new lockdowns for businesses and schools in hotspots? A federal mandate to wear masks?”

Forgive a second long quotation, but the reader must see for himself that she did not answer the question.

They still don’t have a plan. Well, Joe Biden does. And our plan is about what we need to do around a national strategy for contact tracing, for testing, for administration of the vaccine and making sure that it will be free for all. That is the plan that Joe Biden has and that I have, knowing that we have to get a hold of what has been going on and we need to save our country. And Joe Biden is the best leader to do that and frankly, this administration has forfeited their right to reelection, based on this.

Overall, the Democrats gave the impression not so much of an argument as an ultimatum: elect Joe Biden and life can go back to normal.

That does not mean panic about the virus was entirely fake. Many were high on their own supply—in some cases, literally. In February 2023, the Atlantic ran a narrative feature about “Long Covid” by one of its staff writers, in which she listed the medications she needed in order to be able to meet a friend for tea: “15 milligrams of meloxicam (an anti-inflammatory), 600 milligrams of gabapentin (a pain blocker), and 0.5 milligrams of klonopin (a vestibular suppressant). Also, an industrial-strength antidepressant. Also also, two blood-pressure stabilizers.” The author did not consider the possibility that her symptoms might be related to her taking large quantities of what one online commenter called “the benzo di tutti benzos.” She later clarified on Twitter that “the klonopin is just for dizziness.”

Politicians simply did not act as if they believed what they were saying about Covid. The day before D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser reimposed a citywide indoor mask mandate on July 31, 2021, she was photographed at a birthday party for herself with Dave Chappelle and other local celebrities with not a mask in sight. The next day, she was spotted at a wedding dinner, again unmasked. Governor Gavin Newsom was famously photographed at a dinner party at the French Laundry on November 6, 2020, in defiance of his own rules about masking and large indoor gatherings. San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed partying unmasked at a Tony! Toni! Toné! concert, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unmasked at a hair salon in September 2020 when all beauty parlors in SF were supposed to be closed—over and over, Democratic leaders talked as if Covid were a deadly plague and acted in private as if it were all for show.

President Gerald Ford launched his ill-advised campaign to vaccinate “every man, woman, and child in the United States” against the swine flu on March 24, 1976, one day after his surprise loss to insurgent candidate Ronald Reagan in the North Carolina primary. That is to say, it’s not unprecedented for politicians to use pandemics for their own purposes. In that case, Ford wanted to appear strong and decisive and to rally the nation around him in the face of a crisis, which in the end never materialized. In this case, Democrats made the end of Trump’s first term seem like chaos and allowed their septuagenarian candidate to campaign from his basement.

So were lockdowns worth it? Many people who contemplate this question can’t get past the first logical hurdle: The question is not how many people died but how many would have survived if lockdown policies had been different. In May 2020, it was reported that 42 percent of all Covid deaths had taken place in nursing homes, which house 0.6 percent of the population. Does this mean we could cut the COVID death rate in half if we had focused our protective measures on nursing homes? Certainly, many deaths would have been averted if the governor of New York had not issued an executive order forcing nursing homes to accept Covid-positive residents as long as they were medically stable. But a respiratory virus disproportionately targeting the elderly would not have had a nursing home death rate of zero under any circumstances.

The Australian state of Victoria had the longest and strictest lockdowns anywhere in the world. Drones surveilled downtowns for curfew breakers, and random police stops checked the addresses of motorists to ensure they were not more than five kilometers away from home. The premier who enacted these measures, Daniel Andrews, is the same man who signed up Melbourne to participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a deal later vetoed by Canberra. He genuinely admires the Chinese way of doing things. The data at first seemed to vindicate him: Australia’s overall age-adjusted death rate for 2020 was actually lower than average, with the biggest drop seen in deaths from respiratory diseases including influenza and pneumonia. Locking down the elderly protected them not just from Covid but from everything else, too.

Imagine Australia’s shock, then, when the mortality rate in 2022 was much higher than expected. The number-crunchers at the Australian Bureau of Statistics explained it this way: “We believe some of the higher mortality we saw in 2022 has been influenced by that lower mortality rate in 2020, which was most noticeable in older age groups (85+). This concept is referred to as ‘mortality deficit’ and essentially means that deaths that were expected to happen in 2020 have instead happened in 2021 or 2022.”

The average stay in a nursing home is 24 months. The average age of Covid deaths in Australia, as of July 2021, was 87—four years above the average life expectancy. Perhaps Australia could permanently reduce its nursing home death rate by keeping its lockdown measures, preventing residents from ever having any contact with their families except on a video screen, never touching another person or seeing a human face. But how many people would agree to be admitted under those terms?

On the other side of the ledger, we must count up all the ways our Covid response made the world worse. We managed to avoid a depression despite shutting the economy down for weeks. But our economy is permanently different now. Lockdown orders shuttered small businesses but allowed big chains to remain open, and the results were predictable. In April 2020, according to the website Yelp, more than 175,000 businesses closed, most of them permanently. By contrast, Walmart’s second quarter 2020 earnings report showed a doubling of online sales; Target’s showed a profit increase of 80 percent. The biggest winner of all was Amazon, which in the first quarter of 2021 reported profits up 220 percent compared to the year before.

The federal government’s plan for averting economic disaster involved shoveling a lot of money out the door, and much of it ended up in the hands of the wrong people. We still don’t know how much was lost to fraud during the pandemic, but current estimates put it at over $300 billion (more than the U.S. military spends each year on salaries and retirement benefits). Fraud was so easy that instructions went viral on social media. The federal government made a conscious decision to catch fraud after the fact rather than try to prevent money from being wrongly disbursed in the first place. They underestimated how much there would be to catch. Pandemic fraud was “just so conspicuous,” writes federal auditor Bob Westbrooks in Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog’s Account of How Washington Failed Its Covid Test. “In 2020, it seemed like every offender was using their newfound wealth to buy a Lamborghini. … Agents and prosecutors had more than their hands full with the ‘Lamborghini cases,’ and federal law enforcement was soon overwhelmed.”

For me, the most lasting harm from lockdowns is knowing what people are capable of. As a pregnant woman, I was shooed off park benches by police when I sat down to catch my breath. A police car parked outside our church at Easter to make sure no one went inside to worship the Lord. I lived in Australia for almost a decade. The people I met there all seemed normal. Yet in September 2020, I watched a video of a 28-year-old pregnant woman in Melbourne being manhandled by arresting officers in front of her children for the crime of creating a Facebook event page for a “freedom day” anti-lockdown protest. (Victoria Police later admitted the officers’ conduct was “disproportionate.”)

Over and over, people here and in Australia yawned off things that should have triggered a political immune response in a healthy republic: arresting people for planning protests; police rummaging through shopping carts to make sure buyers didn’t have any “non-essential” items; neighbors calling the cops on a church service; pastors thrown in jail for gathering with their congregations. My sense of America as a free country was based on beliefs about what people would put up with that turned out to be erroneous. And the people who did all these things still have their jobs.

If I saw through lockdowns sooner than most people did, it wasn’t due to any exceptional powers of perception. I just happen to have experience with someone who struggles with hypochondria. She started with dietary sensitivities and ended up becoming a total shut-in. Vox published an essay in April 2020 by a woman with an anxiety disorder who said she was loving the pandemic because it felt like the rest of the world was finally on the same page: “For the first time, it seems, the rest of the world knows what it’s like to live inside my head.” She knew the same thing I knew, that lockdowns bore a striking resemblance to incipient mental illness.

Next time will be worse. Many of the emergency powers and special funding used during the pandemic were first put in place after September 11 as part of bioterrorism preparedness. When these measures were dusted off during Covid, there was an element of we’ve got it, so we might as well use it. The pandemic inspired many people to pursue a degree in public health, with some MPH programs almost doubling their enrollment. That means there will be an army of pseudo-credentialed people running around the next time a respiratory virus threatens to get out of control. That is why it is so important to get the story straight now. Those people were wrong. No one should put them in charge ever again.

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Reality Breaks Through Eventually

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By Neland Nobel

Bari Weiss is a left-leaning lesbian writer who was once was prominent at the New York Times.  She left because of their growing anti-semitism.  Since then, she has been writing interesting things on substack.

After the Hamas brutal attack on Israeli civilians, she penned this epiphany:

”As a Democrat who has been left homeless, who is now definitely in the center but probably leaning increasingly right, I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.”

“So much of the work that happened in that [Trump] administration turns out to have been right. And that’s what is so frustrating for me. The work on the border wall? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. Turned out it was right. Issuing long-term debt to refinance when rates were at zero? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message. A structural peace in the Middle East? We didn’t like the messenger, so we killed the message.”

“When are we gonna stop shooting ourselves in the foot? And when are we going to actually see and take the time to look past who is saying things and actually listen to them word for word?”

“If it’s clear that the last two weeks have been a wake-up call, the next question is: Why?” “Part of the answer is the sheer depravity of Hamas’s terrorism. That depravity has made the justification and celebration of their acts by those who police pronouns that much starker. The contradictions and moral bankruptcy of a worldview that spends years worrying about microaggressions and tone policing, but can’t decide what side it is on after the beheading of babies, aren’t exactly difficult to spot.”

“To put it another way: when Black Lives Matter organizations are lionizing Islamist terrorists by posting a paraglider logo, you’d be a fool not to reassess things.”

“The events of the last week have shattered the illusion that wokeness is about protecting victims and standing up for persecuted minorities. This ideology is and has always been about the one thing many of us have told you it is about for years: power.”

“And after the last two weeks, there can be no doubt about how these people will use any power they seize: they will seek to destroy, in any way they can, those who disagree.

She also appeared on Trigonometry and the following interview is also quite interesting.

We welcome Bari to the realization that the Left exploits race, gender, and religion, simply to advance its cause of gaining power.  Marxism has no moral compass, as in the slogan “any means necessary.

“We hope that many Jews, and others that have flirted with the Left, realize what they have been supporting reject it, and join us in trying to defeat it.

Bari, welcome aboard!

*****

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot Trigonometry

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Paying for Hate on College Campuses

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By Sarah Lee

Editors’ Note: Perhaps just as Covid lockdown revealed to parents what was going on in public education, so will the reactions of the university to Hamas’s barbarity against Israeli civilians trigger a second look out our universities. It appears the Muslim Brotherhood and Progressives have formed a union. Yet Gallup Polls consistently show that only about 25% of the population considers itself “progressive”, yet they hold about 98% of the faculty positions. This needs to change. Our sense is the Left is so entrenched on campus that the only hope is to cut off their money and build alternatives. The new university in Florida, which Ron DeSantis billed as the “Hillsdale of the South”, is an interesting concept. Also, allowing students to opt out of radical education by providing a classic educational curriculum, with existing universities, is an interesting idea. Where state funding is involved this should be used as a lever to force change. After all, for years, we have been told that our institutions should “look more like America”. Okay, if that is the case, then 75% of the faculty should be conservative to moderate in their political ideology. For private institutions, legislators have much less leverage.  However, alumni and donors can cut off the money, and bloated endowments can be taxed because they are not being used for education, but for indoctrination. Whatever the lever that is used, America needs ideological diversity in its universities. Particularly in Republican-dominated states, the state legislature and Governor should make university education reform a top priority.

If anything could shake a Western champagne socialist to the bone, surely it would be the image of a young hippie woman, fresh from a music festival, with her legs broken behind her back and a bleeding head wound, paraded by armed Hamas militants through the streets of Israel in the back of a truck.

Or perhaps news of massacres on Israel’s kibbutzim, where reporters on the ground choke back throat lumps while relaying IDF soldiers’ discoveries of babies beheaded and whole families slaughtered.

Or maybe pictures of elderly women lying dead at a bus stop. Or a video of a courageous dog shot in front of its home before Iran-backed terrorists upload themselves to social media raiding the refrigerator.

These things should arrest the senses enough to at least give activists in the land of the free pause before shouting their support for the people who could commit such atrocities.

But the modern American academic institution exists outside the laws of civilized mankind, apparently, because schools such as Harvard, Columbia, the University of Virginia, and UC Berkley, among others, could only look on weakly as campus student groups very nearly celebrated the tragedy of this weekend’s slaughter in Israel. The rest of the civilized world is left wondering – again – what kind of environment exists in the hallowed halls of American higher learning if cruel glee in the face of unspeakable horror is so near the surface. And, more to the point, why are we paying for it?

What of the other students attending these schools, who pay good money for a good education, who find themselves rubbing elbows with hate? How does a Jewish student at Harvard, who may have extended family in Israel, proudly wear the alma mater’s sweatshirt when 30+ other student groups with whom they share a campus sign a letter saying Israel was, essentially, asking for it.

“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” the Harvard letter read.

While it’s no secret academia has lurched hard to the far left, it might have been a bit of a secret to some former students. (The jury’s out on whether it should have been.)

“The silence from Harvard’s leadership, so far, coupled with a vocal and widely reported student groups’ statement blaming Israel solely, has allowed Harvard to appear at best neutral towards acts of terror against the Jewish state of Israel,” Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and longtime Washington economic policy hand, wrote on X.

Was Harvard, which took in $625 million in federal funding in FY21, and a little over $500 million in donations and $500 million in cash gifts to their endowment in FY22, initially neutral? More pointedly, should they have been? They released an official statement condemning the attacks on Tuesday – several days later and on the same day other Harvard students made their own voices heard with a letter of their own.

Free speech on college campuses is sacrosanct. But should students – who pay a mandatory student activity fee of $200/year at Harvard that helps fund the existence of student groups – be asked to support speech they disagree with? What about donors?

The First Amendment organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has an exceptional guidebook on the legality of using these fees to fund student groups, and what students can do to exercise their personal speech rights when they feel morally compelled to disassociate themselves.

And there’s a similar – although not exactly the same – problem in the nonprofit world, when a charity doesn’t protect the original donor’s intent. Capital Research Center president Scott Walter explains it succinctly:

“When (John D.) Rockefeller, a religious conservative, relinquished control of his trust in 1916, he left power in the hands of unscrupulous advisers—nearly all of whom were left of center. They quickly removed any limits to what the money could be spent on, while his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., made little effort to ensure the family stayed in control of its fortune. By the time the oil tycoon died in 1937, the foundation he built to help promote education, upward mobility, and public health was in the hands of the very radicals he deplored.”

Academic institutions have a responsibility to their donors and their students. Balancing the protection of donor intent with free speech is a tricky situation and no one should envy the position in which these institutions find themselves.

But we can as a society check them when they miss the mark using our money. Many of these campuses seem to have spent years fostering a kind of hard-core, hard-edged radicalism over open-minded, intellectual rigor that many Americans wholeheartedly reject.

There’s early evidence that the tragedy in Israel could have created a paradigm shift on American college campuses, causing some leadership to acknowledge things may have gone too far in one direction. If it has, it will move at a glacial pace.

Until we know for sure, Americans are going to have to come to terms with the fact that some of our most valued institutions – the charitable and academic sectors, specifically – may not be using our money to protect our values. And we’re going to have to get a lot smarter about how we spend.

*****

This article was published by Capital Research and is reproduced with permission.

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Election Integrity Wins in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but Trouble Brews in Pennsylvania

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By Hans von Spakovsky and Zack Smith

With many eyes focused on the 2024 presidential election, issues of election integrity are again coming to the forefront of the national conversation, as they should. Without fair, honest, and secure elections, we can’t sustain our democratic republic.

Because the Framers of our Constitution placed primary responsibility on the states to administer and set out the rules and procedures that apply in our elections, that’s where most battles over election integrity have been—and will continue to be—fought.

Fortunately, the citizens of many states, their legislators, and even judges who hear challenges to recent commonsense election reforms all are starting to understand the importance of safe and secure elections.

For instance, the citizens of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted Oct. 14, by a margin of 72.6% to 27.4%, to prohibit private or foreign funding to administer and conduct elections.

The voters’ decision bans the so-called Zuck Bucks that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated, via a pass-through nonprofit, to many local election officials during the 2020 cycle.

Of course, the entity charged with distributing these supposedly nonpartisan grants “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for [Joe] Biden” that year, according to the Washington-based Capital Research Center.

In essence, this private funding moved the get-out-the-vote campaigns of the Democrat Party into official government offices to manipulate turnout and election results.

In North Carolina, the Legislature overrode the veto of the state’s Democrat governor, Roy Cooper, a long-time enemy of election integrity, so that SB 747 could go into effect and become law.

Among other actions, the bill provides additional safeguards for the absentee voting process. It will require any absentee ballots to arrive by the close of polling places on Election Day in order to be counted. It also will provide greater access for election observers to monitor what’s happening at local polls.

Cooper apparently also didn’t like the fact that the new North Carolina law makes local election boards bipartisan, which the governor termed a “threat” to democracy because it takes away the governor’s partisan control of local election administrators.

In Georgia, a federal judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction against or halt enforcement of, a law passed by the Legislature, which enacted several election integrity measures. The judge found that those bringing the challenge were not substantially likely to succeed in showing that the new Georgia law intentionally discriminated against black voters. According to Courthouse News Service:

… the groups sought to enjoin enforcement of five provisions of the law, which govern the use and availability of drop boxes, prohibit the distribution of food, drinks, and other gifts to voters waiting in line at polling places, set a deadline for submitting applications to vote absentee, prohibit out-of-precinct provisional voting before 5 p.m., and require absentee ballots to include the voter’s drivers license or state identification card number.

Despite Biden’s arguing that laws such as these are “Jim Crow 2.0,” voter turnout during the last election doesn’t support that claim. And thankfully, the judge recognized the legal infirmities of these claims, too, which included his labeling some statistical evidence presented by the challengers as “misleading.”

A review of similar laws passed by Florida’s Legislature around the same time also found no adverse impacts on blacks or other minorities.

Finally, in Tennessee, a law prohibiting third parties from passing out the state’s official form requesting an absentee ballot can remain on the books. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit rightly rejected a challenge to this law. 

Several groups had argued that Tennessee’s prohibition on passing out the forms violated their First Amendment rights. But a majority of the panel of judges that heard the challenge noted that this wasn’t the case, since the distribution of forms qualifies only as conduct and not speech, and that the state had a legitimate interest in avoiding voter confusion.

Although all of this is good news, it’s important to remain vigilant. Last month, Pennsylvania’s governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, said he “implemented automatic voter registration [to] save taxpayers money and streamline the voter registration process,” without any apparent legal authority to do so.

But despite the assurances of Shapiro and Pennsylvania election officials, past experiences with this type of registration shows, in the words of a Heritage Foundation report, that it “could result in the registration of large numbers of ineligible voters as well as multiple or duplicate registrations of the same individuals.” It also “presents a sure formula for registration and voter fraud that could damage the integrity of elections,” the report said.

Moreover, Pennsylvania is the same place where the secretary of state, Democrat Pedro Cortés, was forced to resign some years ago after his office admitted that a glitch in the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles system allowed illegal aliens to register to vote for decades. However, the state so far has successfully refused to disclose how many aliens registered and voted.

As time ticks away and the next presidential election quickly approaches, many more election integrity fights loom on the horizon.

Again, although there’s a lot of good news for now, Pennsylvania’s efforts show that it’s important to remain vigilant.

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Critical Race Theory in Data: What the Statistics Show

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By Phillip W. Magness

The concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has sparked heated debate in recent years, particularly after conservative activists singled out this school of thought as a hotbed of applied Marxism in both higher and K-12 education. The response from CRT’s defenders has been peculiar, to put it mildly.

Just over a decade ago, leading CRT scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic boasted about how this school of thought had moved beyond its law school origins and “taken root in other academic disciplines, including sociology, social work, and education.” According to Delgado, “We didn’t set out to colonize, but found a natural affinity in education” schools and programs. “Seeing critical race theory take off in education has been a source of great satisfaction for the two of us,” he continues, noting, “Critical race theory is in some ways livelier in education right now than it is in law…”

This celebratory account of CRT’s growing influence contrasts sharply with the flurry of media depictions in recent years, almost all of which attribute a “moral panic” over CRT to a September 2020 episode of Tucker Carlson’s program on Fox News. According to the New Yorker, conservatives “invented the conflict over Critical Race Theory.” MSNBC host Joy Reid repeatedly claimed that CRT was just an obscure theory from advanced seminars in legal academia, insisting that the political right had “manufactured” a controversy by falsely claiming that its doctrines had migrated into the broader education system. NPR singled out the date of the Carlson broadcast and its guest Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute as the “origin” point of the CRT debate, as did The Atlantic, Time Magazine, and The American Institute for Economic Research. From mid-2021 to the present, the main defenders of CRT have advanced similar claims, suggesting it was just an obscure and largely innocuous academic theory until the political right made it into an issue by falsely alleging its expansion into teacher training in the very same education programs that Delgado and Stefancic bragged about.

The tension between these two competing claims is obvious. If CRT’s academic presence was indeed growing rapidly in education programs over the last decade, then Carlson was responding – albeit bombastically – to a real and observable trend that predates September 2020. If, on the other hand, Reid and other media defenders of CRT are correct, then we should see little evidence of CRT’s permeation beyond advanced law school seminars until the right made it into a “bogeyman” on the Fox News broadcast, to quote their characterization. 

Understanding CRT

So what exactly is CRT? The concept itself is notoriously fluid, with even its proponents struggling to offer a coherent and simple definition. Briefly summarized, though, CRT is an applied extension of critical theory to race. This much is openly acknowledged by Kimberle W. Crenshaw, who first proposed the name CRT at an academic workshop in the 1980s. As Crenshaw recounts, “The organizers coined the term ‘Critical Race Theory’ to make it clear that our work locates itself in the intersection of critical theory and race, racism, and the law.”

Critical theory, in turn, refers to a broader school of thought emerging from Marxist theorists Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno in the 1920s and ’30s. Positioning themselves as a breakaway branch of Marxist thought from its Leninist-Revolutionary doctrines in the Soviet Union, these early critical theorists styled themselves in opposition to what Horkheimer called “traditional theory” – i.e. that which purports to explain the world through conventional scientific and descriptive methods but which, in the eyes of critical theorists, really exists to reinforce the power relationships of a ruling class over the masses. The critical theorist, by implication, aims not to describe but to disrupt and overturn these alleged power disparities. The entire epistemic framework is accordingly a call to radical “activism” in the form of doing scholarship, pedagogy, and commentary about almost any aspect of society.

This basic framework, in turn, may be seen in the self-descriptions used by CRT practitioners, albeit with a specific focus on race. Delgado and Stefancic accordingly define the CRT movement as “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” They situate CRT as having a shared interest with conventional civil rights issues surrounding race. The commonalities end there though. “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse,” they continue “which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Crenshaw describes the founders of CRT as a “collection of neo-Marxist intellectuals, former New Left activists, ex-counter-culturalists, and other varieties of oppositionists in law schools” who set out to disrupt the liberal legalist tradition of viewing law as a neutral arbiter of rules. Exemplifying the critical vs. traditional theory dichotomy, Crenshaw charges the traditional liberal-enlightenment view of law with having an “ambivalence toward race-consciousness,” symptomized in its “continued investment in meritocratic ideology.” While she views these issues as being most pronounced in areas of race, Crenshaw makes it absolutely clear that a radical economic program undergirds her position. She accordingly lists the “lukewarm liberal defense of the Great Society programs” and the failure to adopt radical economic redistribution as further failures of more traditional paradigms.

In her more recent work, Crenshaw has extended this critical theory attack to the entirety of conventional non-Marxian economics. She contends “the emergence of economics as a discipline from its previous locus inside moral philosophy suppressed the study of socially constructed institutions” and, citing discredited work by far-left academics like Nancy MacLean, asserts that “the core logic of an entire academic subfield,” public choice, is “implicitly constituted around assumptions of white supremacy, even as it disavowed any racial intent and animus.” Such stark language establishes not only the hostility of CRT to economics as a science. It shows that CRT, at its heart, is an anti-capitalist ideology.

Measuring the Critical Theory Turn

The question of CRT’s emergence as a point of contention in national debate could be reframed as a matter of whether the September 2020 coverage sparked the current controversy by pushing an obscure specialized theory into the limelight, as CRT’s media defenders contend, or whether this show was simply responding to an already-emerging and rapidly expanding academic movement, as Delgado and Stefancic’s earlier comments suggested.

Google’s Ngram viewer helps to shed some light on this question, by tracking the use of CRT terminology over time. One of the central concepts of CRT is “intersectionality,” a term first proposed by Crenshaw in 1989 and expanded upon in a 1991 article that is considered one of the defining works of the CRT genre. Intersectionality serves as a mental model for social interactions when a person is a member of multiple overlapping groups and identities (race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and the like), illustrating differences in experience compared to each characteristic in isolation (for a detailed discussion of intersectionality theory and the problems with it, see this article that I wrote in May 2020).

As both a proprietary term to have originated in the CRT movement, and one of its best-known concepts, the term “intersectionality” presents an almost ideal metric to track CRT’s influence over time. We see the results in the figure below.

The term had only a small and limited adoption for the first decade and a half after its introduction by Crenshaw. Then, starting around 2006, it began to rapidly increase in use. The pattern accelerated further around 2013-2014, the period that even left-leaning commentators have dubbed the “Great Awokening” to signify an emerging radicalization in leftist viewpoints on campus. Intersectionality skyrocketed from 2014 to 2019, the most recent year in the Ngram database.

For perspective on the scale of this adoption, the chart below compares intersectionality with another proprietary academic term, the much-derided concept of “neoliberalism.” The popularization of “neoliberalism” as a label predates Crenshaw’s “intersectionality” by about a decade, with its modern discussion tracing to a series of lectures given by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the late 1970s. It’s therefore entirely expected that intersectionality, which wasn’t coined until 1989, would lag behind neoliberalism. The trajectories of both are nonetheless revelatory. Between 2005 and 2019, “intersectionality” gained over half the ground between it and “neoliberalism,” one of the trendiest academic buzzwords in existence.

It is likely, not coincidental that the “Great Awokening” and the popularization of intersectionality directly coincided with a historic leftward shift in university faculty affiliation. Survey data of US faculty political opinions have existed since the 1960s, having been originally collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, and later by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute (1989-present). While left-leaning faculty were always a plurality on campus, their numbers rapidly increased between the early 2000s and the present. Currently, some 60 percent of faculty identify on the political left. In many humanities and social sciences, this number tops 80 percent.

Notably, these shifts in faculty politics have accompanied an increasing prioritization of political activism in the university system. In 2008, and again in 2016, the UCLA survey asked faculty participants if they believed it was their role to “encourage students to become agents of social change.” In only 8 years, the percentage of respondents who said “yes” grew from 57.8 percent to 80.6 percent. While this indicator only captures a slice of classroom instruction, it is consistent with the expanding influence of critical theory, and particularly its “critical pedagogy” outgrowth, which strongly emphasizes using classroom instruction to cultivate political activists.

A third datapoint gives us a direct glimpse at how the CRT movement has rapidly expanded in its academic influence. While CRT may have been a niche subject as recently as the 1990s, academic journal citations of CRT scholars exploded around the time of the “Great Awokening,” as well. The chart below shows the annual Google Scholar citation counts of several prominent CRT scholars (as well as critical pedagogy theorists Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux), indexed to a common starting point for scale. A marked upturn in citations begins in the late 2000s and accelerates in the mid 2010s. At present, Delgado regularly amasses over 3,000 citations per year. Fellow CRT scholar Derek Bell tops 6,000 citations per year. And Crenshaw leads the pack, with 16,000 citations, making her one of the most frequently referenced scholars today in the humanities and social sciences.

In each of these empirical indicators, the surge of academic interest in left-leaning politics generally, and CRT in particular, happened around the same time, starting in the mid-2000s and rapidly accelerating in the mid-2010s. All of these patterns were well underway before the September 2020 Fox News broadcast on CRT. That broadcast certainly drew attention to CRT and polemicized its coverage. But far from being an “obscure legal theory,” CRT had already spread widely in academia going back a decade prior. It remains in a position of extremely high influence today, albeit with greater external scrutiny than it has ever faced. And that scrutiny has induced defensive revisions of its own academic history by CRT proponents.

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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University Students’ Support For Terrorism Isn’t Ideology, It’s Conditioning

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By Stella Morabito

In times past, there’d be universal outrage over assassins suddenly invading, taking hostage, and slaughtering more than 1,000 people, including grandmothers, children, and concertgoers. Back then we’d call such actions “crimes against humanity,” regardless of which side did the attacking. But today’s brazen support for Hamas terrorists is an indicator that rule by terror is fast replacing the rule of law throughout the Western world.

Since 9/11 we’ve seen a strange shift in attitudes about the barbarity of such attacks, particularly on college campuses. Rather than condemning such violence, today’s students are justifying it on campuses that include the University of Virginia, Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, University of California at Los Angeles, and Stanford University, to name a few.

How did this happen? Clearly, those students expressing solidarity with terrorists have been groomed to do so. But their stance is less ideological than it is the result of a conditioning process tyrants have always used.

Pundits galore have speculated at length about the weirdness of it all. Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers expressed outrage on social media when numerous student organizations at Harvard quickly came out with a statement saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” But what did Summers expect? What should anyone expect these days?

As Mike Gonzalez and J.P. Greene wrote at The Federalist, university administrators long ago handed their keys over to Marxists and other advocates of terror. Students are no longer focused on gathering hard knowledge and thinking things through. The goal now is to get credentialed by any means necessary. That means surviving — and mimicking — the radical posturing enforced by pseudo-intellectual tyrants on campuses today.

For example, check out the programmed posing on the compound of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (tuition $64,700 per year). Their masked leader apparently reads his script from his cell phone, then delivers it via his de rigueur megaphone. The masked participants obediently repeat back.

It’s cringeworthy stuff. But it’s mostly depressing to see students promote rule by terror.

So the question keeps popping up: How do such tragic absurdities happen?

Focus on Process, Not Ideology

We are missing the biggest part of the picture if we focus only on ideology. Most commentators presume ideological capture of academia got us here. Or that it’s happening through cultural forces like “wokeness” and the spread of mental illness.

Those explanations make sense, but they go only so far. They don’t account for the mechanisms, the patterns, and the psychological processes behind those cultural forces. Ideology serves more as a vehicle for a conditioning process that prods students to accept an agenda. So we must first study those thought reform methods if we are ever to overcome them.

In short, most students you see at such chant-fests have been groomed to believe they must adopt certain beliefs and behaviors to be socially accepted. This is key to understanding the shift in attitude toward terrorists.

We ought to pay a lot more attention to the dynamics of social status — and status anxiety — than to the ideology per se. After all, propagandists have always relied on emotional manipulation to create an illusion of unanimity with their narrative. This is also a central principle in advertising and fashion.

That’s because everybody, especially youth, has a hardwired need to feel connected to others, along with an intense fear of being socially isolated. That need and that fear are natural weaknesses easily manipulated by social engineers, cult leaders, and tyrants of every stripe. If people are conditioned to fear being despised and punished if they stray from the approved narrative, then most will not stray.

The result is a conformity cascade that feeds on itself. According to recent polling, more youth than ever say the government should control speech. More youth than ever say socialism is a good thing. And now we see a big increase in youth who say they have no sympathy for Israel.

Yet whenever speech is regulated so wrongthink will get you canceled, don’t expect polls to give a clear reading of what people actually believe. For example, in oppressive North Korea, Kim Jung-Un gets (surprise!) 100 percent approval. As people succumb to a cultic conditioning process, they lose their moral compass and are less likely to develop their own beliefs independently.

If They Don’t Fall in Line, They’re Ostracized

Consider what the typical college student can expect if faced with an ideological challenge. If they don’t accept the given line about transgenderism, climate alarmism, and now about Hamas’ terrorism as justifiable, they risk being canceled with demonizing labels such as “transphobe,” “climate denier,” “bigot,” and worse. And if they try to connect the dots by asking a reasonable question, they risk mockery as “conspiracy theorists.”

Furthermore, there is no logic in the context of the conditioning process. In Orwellian fashion, an object of hate can be switched back and forth without explanation. In Orwell’s 1984, Oceania was at war with Eurasia, but during Hate Week it suddenly switched to being at war with Eastasia. All were conditioned to comply in lockstep without questioning the abrupt change. (One can sense echoes of Jonestown, where the cult recruits obeyed their leader even to the point of drinking the poisoned Kool-Aid on command.)

The conditioner calls the shots, and the masses conform. That’s where most college students are today. They enter a university striving to get credentialed but are threatened at every turn with ridicule or expulsion if they don’t agree to the assigned narrative.

You’ll find an aversion to speaking openly wherever people are invested in their careers, reputations, and status. We see it with academics, CEOs, politicos, and particularly with the Hollywood celebrity or media anchor invested in preserving her public persona.

What do they all have in common? A terror of being canceled, socially rejected, and despised by others, particularly by their reference group. Consider also the affluent suburban woman, scared to death of losing status among her peers. I made the following comparison during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots:

The psychological mechanism that drives the woke white woman of 2020 into Black Lives Matter obedience is the same mechanism that would have driven her into the National Socialist Women’s League of Nazi Germany in 1941. It might sound weird, but both appeal to the same forces: craving for status, the need for belonging, obedience to overwhelming propaganda, hatred of a common perceived enemy, terror of being lumped in with the ‘unfit,’ fear of shunning…

Hence, the more conditioned we are to this weaponization of loneliness, the more easily we will accept rule by terror. The same students who might have scratched their heads decades ago asking how the German people could have possibly allowed the Holocaust to happen are now answering that question with their own Exhibit A.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot VOA

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Has Hamas’ Attack Finally Aroused Parents About Universities?

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By Bruce Bialosky

Many of us have tried somewhat in vain to alert parents about the fecklessness of supporting certain colleges and/or sending their children to them. Currently, there are 3,982 colleges and universities in the United States. Some are not only dangerous for the mind of your child or grandchild, but their body as well.

The reaction on college campuses to the mass terrorist murders in Israel has ripped open for everyone to see the demonic aspect of how these colleges operate. Open protests in favor of and cheering on the mass murder of Jews by Hamas are widely accepted. We already know that these groups are allowed to flaunt their hatred of Jews – something not allowed for any other defined minority on the campus. As stated previously in this column, the Jews are not perceived as being part of the “cool kids”; thus, they are open to any kind of attack or protest that no others must endure.

It has been pointed out these institutions would never allow protests in support of Russia against Ukraine on their campuses. But it is “free speech” to allow people to cheer on these terrorists and their murderous actions.

This time it is different. There was a mass killing. The dead could have been your child or grandchild, and these demonstrators are celebrating the murderers’ actions. Hostages are estimated to be 200. They could be your friend’s sister, brother, or child. These demonstrators are cheering torture, rape, and the murder of Jews. But are they just Jews? Many Christians regularly travel to Israel. They could have been murdered simply for being there among Jews.

This is about Israel and Israel is always treated differently. College administrators rationalize the issue. Is it free speech when 32 Americans are killed? Do college administrators hate Jews so much they are willing to allow groups to celebrate the death of 32 Americans? Have they no limits as to how much they hate Jews and America?

Harvard has received most of the focus because of the statement made by 34 student groups and the feeble response by their administration. Russell Rickford, Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, has characterized the Hamas attack on Israel as “exhilarating” and “energizing.” Next is Zareena Grewal, Yale associate professor of American studies, ethnicity, race, migration, and religious studies. “My heart is in my throat,” Grewal wrote on X Saturday. “Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” We could go on ad infinitum with other citations.

Why would you want to send your child or grandchild to a college like this? It is simply a fable that your child must go to Yale or Wharton or Wisconsin, etc., to get a fine education — where Jewish kids are threatened and the murder of Jews and Americans is celebrated – it is just that, a fable.

Presidents of over one hundred major universities received letters from Jewish organizations. Some of these organizations are Hillel, ADL, ZOA, Jewish Federations of North America, and Brandeis Center. StandWithUs had already sent a letter. The letters addressed the universities’ responses regarding the safety of Jewish students considering the protests taking place against Israel. The responses ranged from meager to nonexistent from the institutions’ leaders. These “leaders” showed they are more beholden to the forces on campus who support the actions of Hamas than protections for Jewish students and support for the continuing existence of Israel.

Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager, initiated what has become a cascade of major donors pulling their contributions from these loathsome operations. When you look at the donor list, one must wonder why they were still giving to these odious entities. Regrettably, it took a heavy price to awaken them.

Do you really want decisions about the life of your loved one made by people like Grewal or Rickford? These schools are teeming with these malcontents. Stanford has as many administrators as students. At the University of Michigan, a school with more than three times the number of students as Stanford, there are 1.2 administrators for every three students. They spend a considerable amount of time poisoning the minds of young adults.

Where do you think the campus protestors got their hatred towards Jews? It was not from original thought. As Oscar Hammerstein II wrote in the song Carefully Taught, “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, You’ve got to be taught from year to year, It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

Let me be clear, your child is going to get a fine education at almost any college. Whether they succeed in life will be based on decisions made after graduation. What is not guaranteed is that they emerge as a sane, righteous person of whom you can be a proud parent or grandparent.

Parents, particularly Jewish parents, are providing funds without asking any questions about their children being threatened and/or made to feel uncomfortable in a manner no other group would be asked to tolerate. And the parents and grandparents are writing annual checks for $30,000, $50,000 or more to support these depraved operations – not including various additional contributions.

Sending these university students and donations will encourage their behavior. They are money-grubbing Jew haters so why would you do either?

When the Jewish people went back to their homeland and formed the country of Israel they made a pledge – never again. We have lived that commitment for 75 years. We have created some mighty allies during that time. Yet some people are willing to bow their heads for the prize of a supposedly “superior education” that possibly leads to a better career. Is it worth the price of one’s soul and possibly their life?

We are the Jews. We are God’s chosen people. Don’t try to placate people who hate you. We can turn them, but from strength, not from weakness. Weakness never wins.

*****

This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Image Credit: Youtube screen shot ABC 7 at the University of Chicago

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The Demons We’ve Made

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By Zachary R. Goldsmith

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons, a story of two generations typified by Stepan, the father, and Pyotr, the son. Stepan is a composite stand-in character for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, who looked to fashionable Western theory and socialism as the needed tonic to cure an ailing Russia. Pyotr, on the other hand, represents the chickens coming home to roost—a nihilistic fanatic par excellence who, born in the moral and ideological morass prepared for him by his father and those of his father’s generation, endeavors for nothing less than the total overthrow of society—“quick resolution by means of a hundred million heads.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on Dostoevsky’s Demons this past week as I observed so many little “demons” descend on college campuses across the country, marching and chanting in pro-Palestine cum pro-Hamas rallies, praising the most sickening and depraved atrocities imaginable. Unfortunately, as we all know, these atrocities were not works of fiction, but all too real pogroms carried out by the fanatical terrorist group Hamas.

The national group Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and saw the kidnapping of more than 199 more “a historic win for the Palestinian people.” The group later called for a “Day of Resistance,” claiming “the Zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive.” Hamas butchers are featured prominently in the promotional material of this group. At my own institution, Purdue University, the local SJP chapter hailed the massacre of Israeli civilians—the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust—by celebrating “the recent uprisings in occupied Palestine” (Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005) and by encouraging the campus community to not “equate the violence of the oppressor” with that of “the oppressed.”

Purdue’s SJP decried “Western allies of the Zionist regime” for denouncing the massacre of innocents and claimed it as just deserts for “the decades of settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, forceful dispossession, military occupation, and many more atrocities happening to Palestinians on their land.” The rape of women and children before the eyes of their fathers, the decapitation of babies, the burning alive of whole families in their homes—these unspeakable acts were, in the eyes of Purdue’s SJP—nothing less than the “uprising by Palestinian freedom fighters in a direct response to the ongoing violence against innocent Palestinians.” This and other recent posts by Purdue’s SJP were “liked” on Instagram by many student groups in the Purdue community, including the Purdue Disabled Student Union, Purdue’s Latinx Student Union, the Young Democratic Socialists, and Purdue Immigrant Allies. Truly, the glories of intersectionality at work.

How is it, asks The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, that so many “flunked the Hamas Test”? That erstwhile “Students for Palestine” turned into “Students for Pogroms in Israel,” in the words of Conor Friedersdorf?

The answer, as I have already intimated, can be found in Dostoevsky’s Demons. Like Pyotr, today’s students have been fed—from birth—a steady diet of progressive ideology that has corrupted their hearts and minds. The ultimate product of this conditioning is the shocking tableau before us: these little “demons” descending on college squares and quads, brandishing their lurid placards and chanting with bone-chilling callousness, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” The genocidal intent contained within this slogan—that Israel will be wiped from the earth and Palestine instantiated from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—is clear. “This way to the gas chambers” might as well have been their refrain, such was the pure nastiness, the callow stridency, and the callousness of these children of privilege.

Ever an admirer of an elegant dialectic, Karl Marx never tired of extolling how it was capitalism itself that bore its own supposed undoing within it. The bourgeoisie brought forth its own grave-diggers and hangmen in the form of their antithesis, the proletariat. In our own time, it is truly us—parents, teachers, tastemakers, and the culturally and politically elect among us—who have brought forward a new generation that despises all that has come before them.

With the characteristic cruelty and callousness of a fanatic, they sneer at the Western values that have brought them to their privileged place of critique, their comfortable campuses, and quads made possible only by the “bourgeois virtues” and Western civilization at which they jeer. No matter that this selfsame Western liberal-democratic system and the “bourgeois virtues” it champions have brought unprecedented levels of equality, prosperity, and freedom to the world—yes, even the Third World. Still, these little “demons” among us cry “colonialism” and “imperialism” and they reject their cultural patrimony as a litany of evils perpetrated by white men.

But should this come as a surprise? This is a generation, after all, taught the 1619 Project, not the Declaration of Independence; taught that the history of the West is one solely of brutality, murder, and conquest, not the Enlightenment, democracy, and freedom. The Jewish pioneers who built the land of Israel from the ashes of the crucible of 20th-century Europe are colonizers and oppressors, not heroes and exemplars of resilience. Reared from a perverse Capitoline she-wolf pouring forth an inverted morality of evil lauded as good and good execrated as evil, is it any wonder the children of today celebrate the murder of innocents as a great good?

The parents who produced these little “demons,” like Stepan before them, have raised these children on the fashionable ideas of their own time—the “political correctness” of yesteryear, worthy then of a laugh and a dismissal, confident as we dissidents were that such silly beliefs could be ignored with little harm done. Alas, political correctness has returned with a vengeance in recent years, spawning an increasingly militant wokeness, increasingly proscribing the ever-shrinking bounds of accepted speech and belief.

Whereas, in Dostoevsky’s view, it was Western socialist utopianism that had wrought the nihilistic terrorism of the next generation of radicals in Russia, in our own day it is a noxious mix of post-modernism and post-colonialism, a fetid mélange congealed into today’s religion of Woke. The students who cheered the recent murder of more than 1,300 Jews—murders carried out with unspeakable depravity and savagery, redolent, as President Biden rightly said, of the worst atrocities of ISIS, have been raised to see a world wholly unrecognizable to those of us uninitiated into their poisonous ideology.

To these “students for pogroms in Israel,” every society—indeed, the entire world—can be understood as constellated by Power and its necessary outcome, Oppression. These are the watchwords of these little “demons.” Ignorant of the ideological craftsmen responsible for constructing such a dark worldview, they know names like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Franz Fanon only crudely, if at all. But alas, these ideas abound in popular culture and classrooms today, popularized and distorted, made even cruder by dint of their decontextualization. Rather than merely being ideas born of a particular time and place, now these are the truisms that confront us daily, the noxious bromides of fetid university offices and seminar rooms, all held up as timeless revelations and self-evident truths. As John Meynard Keynes observed, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

To these “students for pogroms in Israel,” every society—indeed, the entire world—can be understood as constellated by Power and its necessary outcome, Oppression. These are the watchwords of these little “demons.”

Although they know not its source, students of today have been raised to believe, like Michel Foucault, that there exists no “outside of power.” Everything in this world is the outcome of power. Inheritors of a generation of faculty enamored of “critical theory,” power, in the minds of students, explains every variance in outcome in human society: race, gender, class, religion, north, south, east, and west. Differences in outcomes today are the products of power alone, not individual choice, culture, or any mix of factors. Power, in the realm of race, expresses itself as “white supremacy,” a phrase on the tip of the tongue for any well-meaning do-gooder today. Indeed, according to Google’s nGram world viewer, the usage of the phrase “white supremacy” is on an almost exponential rise—used more today in our era of unprecedented racial equality than at any time in history.

As with any fanatic worth his mettle, that facts don’t seem to fit ideology is irrelevant. If examples of racism are not immediately at hand, for example, in this, perhaps the most equal society in human history, racism is said to be “structural” or “systemic,” that is, invisible but present nonetheless. No where is the blindness of the “true believer” more evident than at the recent campus bacchanalia celebrating Hamas’ pogroms.

The responsible parties are not the Hamas butchers who decapitated civilians, including babies; who raped women and girls, only later to parade their naked and bloodied bodies through the streets of Gaza as onlookers cheered and chanted “Allah u Akhbar;” who murdered whole families in front of each other, breaking down the doors to their saferooms and killing them with glee in front of each other. Rather, according to dozens of Harvard students, they hold “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence…the apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” These same Ivy League do-gooders who only months ago chanted “believe all women” and decried victim blaming in Harvard Yard now pour scorn on Jews butchered in their homes or while dancing at an open-air concert—you are life unworthy of life, their derision seems to intone.

In her recent “Letter to an Anti-Zionist Idealist,” Roya Hakakian speaks directly to these Americans taught to hate America:

What makes you an American is not only the blue passport that gets you breezing through customs at the world’s airports. It is also the blindness you have for some of the evil in the world. You have a distinct inability to see other authoritarian regimes’ atrocities as an expression of their own political or ideological agenda. You blame America, and by extension Israel, for much of the wrong those regimes commit. This I [is] the privileged defect I think of as “first-world narcissism.”

The ending of Dostoevsky’s Demons is not a happy one. There are few characters left unmarred by the effects of the fanaticism that comprise the central plot of the story. Reflecting on the American college campus of today, I fear that, given the truism that children are our future, we too are in a world where quoting the epigraph of the novel:

the tracks have vanished,
We’ve lost our way, what shall we do?
It must be a demon’s leading us
This way and that around the fields.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

Image credit: YouTube screenshot New York Post

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“Never Again”, My Tuchus

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By Charles M. Strauss

“Never again” what?  Never again will Jews allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter? Never again will Jews be surprised by depraved maniacs who want to kill them? Never again will Jews be unprepared to defend themselves, to fight for their own lives, and the lives of their children?

Well, here we go again. Israeli Jews did allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter; they were surprised, and they were unprepared to fight.

“Hold on there! How dare you blame the victims!” Sorry, but we blame victims all the time, when they deserve to share the blame. Control your outrage for a minute, and think about this fairly common scenario. You see a story in the news that says a drunk driver crossed the center line, and ran head-on into another car, killing the young woman driving, and her two-year-old child. Who is to blame? The drunk driver, of course! Not the victims! How dare you blame the victims! But then you find out that the mother was texting on her phone at the time, and never saw the wrong-way driver coming, and took no evasive action. Also, the mother was not wearing a seatbelt, and the child was neither in a child seat nor wearing a seatbelt, but was jumping around on the back seat. Now who’s to blame? Can we agree that the drunk driver is primarily to blame, but the mother shares part of the blame, for failing to mitigate the harm to herself and her child?

So, who is to blame for the terrorist attack on Israeli kibbutzim? The terrorists, of course — primarily. But the Israelis who were completely unprepared to fight back must accept some blame, for forgetting about the slogan, “Never again.”

How did that happen? How did Israel go from a nation of lions to a nation of sheep, with neither guns, skill, or will to kill people trying to kill them? One of the underlying themes of “Never Again” (which originated in 1945) was the idea that if Jews had their own country, then “never again” would they be attacked by their next-door neighbors, as they were throughout Europe. Maybe once Israel was created in 1948, complacency set in, as people thought, “OK, now that we have our own country, we are safe.” We have fences, walls, observation posts, and a strong army, so we don’t need to take individual responsibility for our own safety. Clearly (and to many of us, predictably) that did not work out so well.

In his book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism (1995), none other than Benjamin Netanyahu (of all people) wrote: “Restrict ownership of weapons. Tighten gun control, beginning with registry of weapons. Israeli law, for example, requires careful licensing of handguns and prohibits the ownership of more powerful weapons, yet gun ownership is widespread” (page 147). Maybe gun ownership was widespread in 1995, but in the ensuing years, Netanyahu’s careful licensing of handguns, and prohibition of rifles and submachine guns, effectively neutered a once-proud people. For fostering complacency and unreadiness, he must accept part of the blame. 

Note that there were a few (regrettably, very few) Israelis who were prepared, and did fight back. And they won. The most famous, Inbal Rabin-Lieberman, is a 25-year-old woman who organized the defense of Kibbutz Nir-Am. Her twelve-member security team, armed with rifles, killed 25 terrorists over a period of three or four hours until the IDF arrived. (“When minutes count, the IDF is only hours away.”) There were zero, repeat, no, li’eppes casualties among the approximately 800 residents of Nir-Am. The fight-backers won, 25-0.

Wait a minute – what’s wrong with this picture? Twelve people with rifles to protect 800? Why weren’t all of the adults armed?

Like many (most) Americans, I was under the impression that the Israeli populace was armed, with Uzi submachine guns and Galil rifles, in accordance with the spirit of “Never again.” Wrong. Over the years, the Israeli government (and people) have become more “liberal” politically (ironically, meaning “more restrictive”). Now gun ownership in Israel is rare. Something like 2% of the population have permits to own guns, but only handguns – no Uzi or Galil or AR15 ownership permitted. Furthermore, they are permitted to possess only 50 rounds of ammunition at a time! For those readers who are not shooters, 50 rounds are barely enough for a short practice session. In other words, those few Israelis who get their government’s permission to own handguns are effectively prevented from developing any proficiency with them. Brilliant.

Good news! As a result of the terrorist attack, the Israeli government has decided to relax the restrictions, and permit the potential victims of terrorism to possess – are you ready? – 100 rounds of ammunition! Whoop-ti-do. These are unserious people, who do not take the concept of “Never again” seriously.

One report said that the procedures for handgun licenses will be eased, and that 8,000 people have applied for permits. Eight thousand? Out of seven million Jews? Is that a joke? Neither the government nor (apparently) the people have recalled the spirit of “Never again.” In a country surrounded by people openly proclaiming their desire to kill every Jew (and acting on it), every Israeli adult should be demanding the right to carry a handgun at all times, everywhere; and there should be one rifle for every adult in every home. If the government were serious about “Never again,” they would be requesting four or five million rifles from the US, and seven magazines and a thousand rounds for each rifle. Every kibbutz and every town would have a shooting range where people could practice.

Here’s the catch, though: just owning a gun is not enough. As the late Jeff Cooper wrote, “You are not ‘armed’ because you own a gun, any more than you are a ‘musician’ because you own a guitar. Of course, an armed populace (i.e., “militia”) needs to be trained in marksmanship and tactics (i.e., “well-regulated”), but even more important than that is mental conditioning, what Cooper called “Combat Mindset,” or “fighting spirit,” the readiness and willingness to fight.  “Hell no, I won’t get in that railroad car.” “Hell, no, I won’t surrender.” Hell no, I won’t allow myself to be taken hostage.” The sheep person’s bleat is that if he resists, he will be killed. That excuse may have been valid for the Jews who allowed themselves to be herded into the railroad cars in Germany, thinking their lives would be spared, but now we know better. Now we know that if you don’t fight back, you certainly will be killed, but if you do fight back, you only probably will be killed. (And remember the 25-0 score of the Nir-Am kibbutzniks.) If you are going to die either way, you might as well take one or two of the terrorists with you.

Having a gun is a great morale-booster and force-multiplier, making it easier to decide to fight back, but not having a gun does not preclude Combat Mindset. If you know you are about to die, you can throw yourself at a terrorist and drive your thumbs into his eyes before he knows what is happening. You can hit him upside the head with a frying pan. You can stick a butter knife between his ribs. If your choice is to die curled up on the floor, begging “Please don’t cut my baby’s head off,” or die with your thumbs in a terrorist’s eye sockets, then for G_d’s sake, die fighting.

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Radical Islamists: They Mean What They Say

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By Neland Nobel

Editors’ Note: Winston Churchill stated that if 100,000 American citizens had read Mein Kampf in the early to mid-1930s, the Second World War may have been avoided. The Hamas Covenant, a treatise of Jew hatred, a world-dominating caliphate by a radical Islamist movement exemplified by Hamas and the savage, pre-civilizational attack on Israel on October 7th is described and presented below. Although lengthy, it is a revealing read and accurate document to understand the enemy in Iran and its surrogates – Hamas, Hezbollah and multiple other radical Islamist groups under the control of Iran. If 911 was a wake-up call for America and the West, the Hamas Covenant below is a clarion call and guide to the horrific events in Israel and elsewhere in recent weeks and what is ahead, especially if Iran achieves its goal of nuclear weapons.

After 9/11, there were a great many articles and books written to try to explain to Americans why we were attacked. We learned in books like The Looming Tower of Sayyid Qutb, his education in America, and his founding of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was always a wonder how this Egyptian could be so radicalized by rural Colorado in the 1950s. One wonders what he would think of today’s American culture.

All that reading was necessary to understand Bin Ladin and America’s fight against radical political Islam after the attack on the Twin Towers. But that was over 20 years ago when the Diamondbacks were in the World Series.

It is also necessary to understand radical Islamism to understand the folly of Obama-Biden and their pivot towards Iran.

Many young people likely either never learned in our “multicultural education” or have forgotten the religious aspects and political agenda that is Islamism. As the nation grows more secular, people seem astounded that some people take their religion so seriously they will kill for it. That is literally a fatal miscalculation.

In fact, there is now a strange alliance between the radical Left and Islamic fundamentalism. What could unite such opposite positions? It is the hatred of the West, seeing all power relationships as the division between weak third-world types and “colonial Westerners” (the oppressed and the oppressor), and post-Nazi Jew-hatred.

But as the above photo of the nice progressive lady shows, she has adopted the slogans of Hamas and may or may not understand she is calling for an end to the Jewish state and the people that live in it. She probably cares deeply about global warming and mistreated animals on farms, but is OK with extermination. Does she know what Hamas stands for?

Too much commentary today tends to argue that Middle East tensions as some sort of real estate deal that has gone bad and that if land was traded around, the problem would go away. Or it is seen as a problem of political power and how it is shared. Neither approach actually deals with the root cause of the problem: one side wants to use force to eliminate or convert others and has explicit religious permission to do so.

This founding document from Hamas is likely not so familiar to Americans but if it was, it would put many of these arguments to rest. Israel already traded “land for peace” and let Hamas administer Gaza since 2005. They were not colonizers or occupiers. In fact, we got a good test run at how a “Palestinian” state would be run and it is not pretty. Instead of turning the place into Singapore, they turned it into an Islamist military camp, including the almost complete brainwashing of their population. Remarkably, they also brainwashed secular progressives both in the UN and the US State Department. We should also include PBS, BBC, and most other US television networks, and many university students and faculty.

Upon re-taking Gaza, Hamas set about destroying all the farms, greenhouses, and infrastructure left behind by the Israelis. It was as if their success said something about fault lines in Arab culture. As Douglas Murray has pointed out, antisemitism, “…is a mirror for the failing of individuals, social structures, and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”

Below we present the complete text of the Hamas Covenant. Other than highlighting some passages for those who don’t have time to read every word, we left the document alone. We think it speaks for itself. There are many religious passages but this is a religious document, not a civil suit over real estate claims. But note that it says nothing about liberty, life, hope, or anything else. What kind of a constitution is it that only calls for the destruction of someone else? No secular institutions are described. It is only a theological diatribe combined with Jew hatred.

This is what the nice lady in this articles’s photo and many university students are endorsing.

Western politicians, most of whom are lawyers, think everything can be negotiated. Or they are multi-culturalists and see all cultures as equally valid. But if the other side wants you dead, there is not much to negotiate except the time and manner of your own murder. As for multi-culturalism, it invites those who want to kill you into your midst, a good recipe for suicide.

Regrettably, these ideas cannot be killed off but the power structure to implement them can. If it reconstitutes, it will have to be killed off again. Certainly, the US should never give Hamas any aid or funding, given their stated beliefs below.

US politicians, particularly Democrats better decide to let the Israelis do what they regrettably have to do. They have not asked for US troops and never have. Democrats also need to decide if they are buying into both the chants and beliefs of those who call for a Palestinian state “from the River to the Sea.”

That means the destruction of the Jewish people and likely the Arabs that live in Israel as well.

And Democrats need to jettison their communist sympathies for everything being equal. This suggestion of equal moral equivalence and even cultural equivalence has given birth to the notion of equal levels of military response. Hogwash. Wars are won by unequal or disproportionate responses. Do you think the firebombing of Japan, and later atomic bombs were proportionate to the 2,469 killed at Pearl Harbor? Of course not. It was necessary to achieve total victory. The history of war is not a history of proportionate response.

While we have highlighted certain passages, we call your attention, particularly to Articles 22 and 28. There we see a fusion between Islam and virulent European anti-semitism that reached its crescendo in Nazism. You might be surprised that you are a tool of the Jews who are guilty of causing all the problems of humanity.

After you read this, remember the struggle our own country had with radical Islam and have some appreciation of what Israel must deal with.

For the multicultural progressive that might read this, we would ask two questions: 1) Do you agree with this? 2) Do you really think it is a good idea to have large numbers of people who believe this in our country and our Congress?

Hamas Covenant 1988

The Covenant
of the
Islamic Resistance Movement

18 August 1988

In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah

“Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed.” (Al-Imran – verses 109-111).

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

“The Islamic world is on fire. Each of us should pour some water, no matter how little, to extinguish whatever one can without waiting for the others.” (Sheikh Amjad al-Zahawi, of blessed memory).

In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah

Introduction:
Praise be unto Allah, to whom we resort for help, and whose forgiveness, guidance and support we seek; Allah bless the Prophet and grant him salvation, his companions and supporters, and to those who carried out his message and adopted his laws – everlasting prayers and salvation as long as the earth and heaven will last. Hereafter:

O People:
Out of the midst of troubles and the sea of suffering, out of the palpitations of faithful hearts and cleansed arms; out of the sense of duty, and in response to Allah’s command, the call has gone out rallying people together and making them follow the ways of Allah, leading them to have determined will in order to fulfill their role in life, to overcome all obstacles, and surmount the difficulties on the way. Constant preparation has continued and so has the readiness to sacrifice life and all that is precious for the sake of Allah.

Thus it was that the nucleus (of the movement) was formed and started to pave its way through the tempestuous sea of hopes and expectations, of wishes and yearnings, of troubles and obstacles, of pain and challenges, both inside and outside.

When the idea was ripe, the seed grew and the plant struck root in the soil of reality, away from passing emotions, and hateful haste. The Islamic Resistance Movement emerged to carry out its role through striving for the sake of its Creator, its arms intertwined with those of all the fighters for the liberation of Palestine. The spirits of its fighters meet with the spirits of all the fighters who have sacrificed their lives on the soil of Palestine, ever since it was conquered by the companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, and until this day.

This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.

Thus we see them coming on the horizon “and you shall learn about it hereafter” “Allah hath written, Verily I will prevail, and my apostles: for Allah is strong and mighty.” (The Dispute – verse 21).

“Say to them, This is my way: I invite you to Allah, by an evident demonstration; both I and he who followeth me; and, praise be unto Allah! I am not an idolator.” (Joseph – verse 107).

Hamas (means) strength and bravery -(according to) Al-Mua’jam al-Wasit: c1.

Definition of the Movement

Ideological Starting-Points

Article One:

The Islamic Resistance Movement: The Movement’s program is Islam. From it, it draws its ideas, ways of thinking and understanding of the universe, life and man. It resorts to it for judgement in all its conduct, and it is inspired by it for guidance of its steps.

The Islamic Resistance Movement’s Relation With the Moslem Brotherhood Group:

Article Two:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine. Moslem Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times. It is characterised by its deep understanding, accurate comprehension and its complete embrace of all Islamic concepts of all aspects of life, culture, creed, politics, economics, education, society, justice and judgement, the spreading of Islam, education, art, information, science of the occult and conversion to Islam.

Structure and Formation

Article Three:

The basic structure of the Islamic Resistance Movement consists of Moslems who have given their allegiance to Allah whom they truly worship, – “I have created the jinn and humans only for the purpose of worshipping” – who know their duty towards themselves, their families and country. In all that, they fear Allah and raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors, so that they would rid the land and the people of their uncleanliness, vileness and evils.

“But we will oppose truth to vanity, and it shall confound the same; and behold, it shall vanish away.” (Prophets – verse 18).

Article Four:

The Islamic Resistance Movement welcomes every Moslem who embraces its faith, ideology, follows its programme, keeps its secrets, and wants to belong to its ranks and carry out the duty. Allah will certainly reward such one.

Time and Place Extent of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

Article Five:

Time extent of the Islamic Resistance Movement: By adopting Islam as its way of life, the Movement goes back to the time of the birth of the Islamic message, of the righteous ancestor, for Allah is its target, the Prophet is its example and the Koran is its constitution. Its extent in place is anywhere that there are Moslems who embrace Islam as their way of life everywhere in the globe. This being so, it extends to the depth of the earth and reaches out to the heaven.

“Dost thou not see how Allah putteth forth a parable; representing a good word, as a good tree, whose root is firmly fixed in the earth, and whose branches reach unto heaven; which bringeth forth its fruit in all seasons, by the will of its Lord? Allah propoundeth parables unto men, that they may be instructed.” (Abraham – verses 24-25).

Characteristics and Independence:

Article Six:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails and schisms and wars will break out.

How excellent was the Moslem poet, Mohamed Ikbal, when he wrote:

“If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion. He who accepts life without religion, has taken annihilation as his companion for life.”

The Universality of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

Article Seven:

As a result of the fact that those Moslems who adhere to the ways of the Islamic Resistance Movement spread all over the world, rally support for it and its stands, strive towards enhancing its struggle, the Movement is a universal one. It is well-equipped for that because of the clarity of its ideology, the nobility of its aim and the loftiness of its objectives.

On this basis, the Movement should be viewed and evaluated, and its role be recognised. He who denies its right, evades supporting it and turns a blind eye to facts, whether intentionally or unintentionally, would awaken to see that events have overtaken him and with no logic to justify his attitude. One should certainly learn from past examples.

The injustice of next-of-kin is harder to bear than the smite of the Indian sword.

“We have also sent down unto thee the book of the Koran with truth, confirming that scripture which was revealed before it; and preserving the same safe from corruption. Judge therefore between them according to that which Allah hath revealed; and follow not their desires, by swerving from the truth which hath come unto thee. Unto every of you have we given a law, and an open path; and if Allah had pleased, he had surely made you one people; but he hath thought it fit to give you different laws, that he might try you in that which he hath given you respectively. Therefore strive to excel each other in good works; unto Allah shall ye all return, and then will he declare unto you that concerning which ye have disagreed.” (The Table, verse 48).

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

Article Eight:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

Objectives

Incentives and Objectives:

Article Nine:

The Islamic Resistance Movement found itself at a time when Islam has disappeared from life. Thus rules shook, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it. Nothing remained in its right place. Thus, when Islam is absent from the arena, everything changes. From this state of affairs the incentives are drawn.

As for the objectives: They are the fighting against the false, defeating it and vanquishing it so that justice could prevail, homelands be retrieved and from its mosques would the voice of the mu’azen emerge declaring the establishment of the state of Islam, so that people and things would return each to their right places and Allah is our helper.

“…and if Allah had not prevented men, the one by the other, verily the earth had been corrupted: but Allah is beneficient towards his creatures.” (The Cow – verse 251).

Article Ten:

As the Islamic Resistance Movement paves its way, it will back the oppressed and support the wronged with all its might. It will spare no effort to bring about justice and defeat injustice, in word and deed, in this place and everywhere it can reach and have influence therein.

Strategies and Methods

Strategies of the Islamic Resistance Movement: Palestine Is Islamic aqf:

Article Eleven:

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

It happened like this: When the leaders of the Islamic armies conquered Syria and Iraq, they sent to the Caliph of the Moslems, Umar bin-el-Khatab, asking for his advice concerning the conquered land – whether they should divide it among the soldiers, or leave it for its owners, or what? After consultations and discussions between the Caliph of the Moslems, Omar bin-el-Khatab and companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, it was decided that the land should be left with its owners who could benefit by its fruit. As for the real ownership of the land and the land itself, it should be consecrated for Moslem generations till Judgement Day. Those who are on the land, are there only to benefit from its fruit. This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.

“Verily, this is a certain truth. Wherefore praise the name of thy Lord, the great Allah.” (The Inevitable – verse 95).

Homeland and Nationalism from the Point of View of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine:

Article Twelve:

Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land. Resisting and quelling the enemy become the individual duty of every Moslem, male or female. A woman can go out to fight the enemy without her husband’s permission, and so does the slave: without his master’s permission.

Nothing of the sort is to be found in any other regime. This is an undisputed fact. If other nationalist movements are connected with materialistic, human or regional causes, nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement has all these elements as well as the more important elements that give it soul and life. It is connected to the source of spirit and the granter of life, hoisting in the sky of the homeland the heavenly banner that joins earth and heaven with a strong bond.

If Moses comes and throws his staff, both witch and magic are annulled.

“Now is the right direction manifestly distinguished from deceit: whoever therefore shall deny Tagut, and believe in Allah, he shall surely take hold with a strong handle, which shall not be broken; Allah is he who heareth and seeth.” (The Cow – Verse 256).

Peaceful Solutions, Initiatives and International Conferences:

Article Thirteen:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abuse directed against part of religion. Nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement is part of its religion. Its members have been fed on that. For the sake of hoisting the banner of Allah over their homeland they fight. “Allah will be prominent, but most people do not know.”

Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?

“But the Jews will not be pleased with thee, neither the Christians, until thou follow their religion; say, The direction of Allah is the true direction. And verily if thou follow their desires, after the knowledge which hath been given thee, thou shalt find no patron or protector against Allah.” (The Cow – verse 120).

There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors. The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with. As in said in the honourable Hadith:

“The people of Syria are Allah’s lash in His land. He wreaks His vengeance through them against whomsoever He wishes among His slaves It is unthinkable that those who are double-faced among them should prosper over the faithful. They will certainly die out of grief and desperation.”

The Three Circles:

Article Fourteen:

The question of the liberation of Palestine is bound to three circles: the Palestinian circle, the Arab circle and the Islamic circle. Each of these circles has its role in the struggle against Zionism. Each has its duties, and it is a horrible mistake and a sign of deep ignorance to overlook any of these circles. Palestine is an Islamic land which has the first of the two kiblahs (direction to which Moslems turn in praying), the third of the holy (Islamic) sanctuaries, and the point of departure for Mohamed’s midnight journey to the seven heavens (i.e. Jerusalem).

“Praise be unto him who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to the farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs; for Allah is he who heareth, and seeth.” (The Night-Journey – verse 1).

Since this is the case, liberation of Palestine is then an individual duty for very Moslem wherever he may be. On this basis, the problem should be viewed. This should be realised by every Moslem.

The day the problem is dealt with on this basis, when the three circles mobilize their capabilities, the present state of affairs will change and the day of liberation will come nearer.

“Verily ye are stronger than they, by reason of the terror cast into their breasts from Allah. This, because they are not people of prudence.” (The Emigration – verse 13).

The Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine is an Individual Duty:

Article Fifteen:

The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised. To do this requires the diffusion of Islamic consciousness among the masses, both on the regional, Arab and Islamic levels. It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters.

It is necessary that scientists, educators and teachers, information and media people, as well as the educated masses, especially the youth and sheikhs of the Islamic movements, should take part in the operation of awakening (the masses). It is important that basic changes be made in the school curriculum, to cleanse it of the traces of ideological invasion that affected it as a result of the orientalists and missionaries who infiltrated the region following the defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Salah el-Din (Saladin). The Crusaders realised that it was impossible to defeat the Moslems without first having ideological invasion pave the way by upsetting their thoughts, disfiguring their heritage and violating their ideals. Only then could they invade with soldiers. This, in its turn, paved the way for the imperialistic invasion that made Allenby declare on entering Jerusalem: “Only now have the Crusades ended.” General Guru stood at Salah el-Din’s grave and said: “We have returned, O Salah el-Din.” Imperialism has helped towards the strengthening of ideological invasion, deepening, and still does, its roots. All this has paved the way towards the loss of Palestine.

It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis. Palestine contains Islamic holy sites. In it there is al- Aqsa Mosque which is bound to the great Mosque in Mecca in an inseparable bond as long as heaven and earth speak of Isra` (Mohammed’s midnight journey to the seven heavens) and Mi’raj (Mohammed’s ascension to the seven heavens from Jerusalem).

“The bond of one day for the sake of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it. The place of one’s whip in Paradise is far better than the world and whatever there is on it. A worshipper’s going and coming in the service of Allah is better than the world and whatever there is on it.” (As related by al-Bukhari, Moslem, al-Tarmdhi and Ibn Maja).

“I swear by the holder of Mohammed’s soul that I would like to invade and be killed for the sake of Allah, then invade and be killed, and then invade again and be killed.” (As related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

The Education of the Generations:

Article Sixteen:

It is necessary to follow Islamic orientation in educating the Islamic generations in our region by teaching the religious duties, comprehensive study of the Koran, the study of the Prophet’s Sunna (his sayings and doings), and learning about Islamic history and heritage from their authentic sources. This should be done by specialised and learned people, using a curriculum that would healthily form the thoughts and faith of the Moslem student. Side by side with this, a comprehensive study of the enemy, his human and financial capabilities, learning about his points of weakness and strength, and getting to know the forces supporting and helping him, should also be included. Also, it is important to be acquainted with the current events, to follow what is new and to study the analysis and commentaries made of these events. Planning for the present and future, studying every trend appearing, is a must so that the fighting Moslem would live knowing his aim, objective and his way in the midst of what is going on around him.

“O my son, verily every matter, whether good or bad, though it be the weight of a grain of mustard-seed, and be hidden in a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth, Allah will bring the same to light; for Allah is clear-sighted and knowing. O my son, be constant at prayer, and command that which is just, and forbid that which is evil: and be patient under the afflictions which shall befall thee; for this is a duty absolutely incumbent on all men. Distort not thy face out of contempt to men, neither walk in the earth with insolence; for Allah loveth no arrogant, vain-glorious person.” (Lokman – verses 16-18).

The Role of the Moslem Woman:

Article Seventeen:

The Moslem woman has a role no less important than that of the moslem man in the battle of liberation. She is the maker of men. Her role in guiding and educating the new generations is great. The enemies have realised the importance of her role. They consider that if they are able to direct and bring her up they way they wish, far from Islam, they would have won the battle. That is why you find them giving these attempts constant attention through information campaigns, films, and the school curriculum, using for that purpose their lackeys who are infiltrated through Zionist organizations under various names and shapes, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, espionage groups and others, which are all nothing more than cells of subversion and saboteurs. These organizations have ample resources that enable them to play their role in societies for the purpose of achieving the Zionist targets and to deepen the concepts that would serve the enemy. These organizations operate in the absence of Islam and its estrangement among its people. The Islamic peoples should perform their role in confronting the conspiracies of these saboteurs. The day Islam is in control of guiding the affairs of life, these organizations, hostile to humanity and Islam, will be obliterated.

Article Eighteen:

Woman in the home of the fighting family, whether she is a mother or a sister, plays the most important role in looking after the family, rearing the children and embuing them with moral values and thoughts derived from Islam. She has to teach them to perform the religious duties in preparation for the role of fighting awaiting them. That is why it is necessary to pay great attention to schools and the curriculum followed in educating Moslem girls, so that they would grow up to be good mothers, aware of their role in the battle of liberation.

She has to be of sufficient knowledge and understanding where the performance of housekeeping matters are concerned, because economy and avoidance of waste of the family budget, is one of the requirements for the ability to continue moving forward in the difficult conditions surrounding us. She should put before her eyes the fact that the money available to her is just like blood which should never flow except through the veins so that both children and grown-ups could continue to live.

“Verily, the Moslems of either sex, and the true believers of either sex, and the devout men, and the devout women, and the men of veracity, and the women of veracity, and the patient men, and the patient women, and the humble men, and the humble women, and the alms-givers of either sex who remember Allah frequently; for them hath Allah prepared forgiveness and a great reward.” (The Confederates – verse 25).

The Role of Islamic Art in the Battle of Liberation:

Article Nineteen:

Art has regulations and measures by which it can be determined whether it is Islamic or pre-Islamic (Jahili) art. The issues of Islamic liberation are in need of Islamic art that would take the spirit high, without raising one side of human nature above the other, but rather raise all of them harmoniously an in equilibrium.

Man is a unique and wonderful creature, made out of a handful of clay and a breath from Allah. Islamic art addresses man on this basis, while pre-Islamic art addresses the body giving preference to the clay component in it.

The book, the article, the bulletin, the sermon, the thesis, the popular poem, the poetic ode, the song, the play and others, contain the characteristics of Islamic art, then these are among the requirements of ideological mobilization, renewed food for the journey and recreation for the soul. The road is long and suffering is plenty. The soul will be bored, but Islamic art renews the energies, resurrects the movement, arousing in them lofty meanings and proper conduct. “Nothing can improve the self if it is in retreat except shifting from one mood to another.”

All this is utterly serious and no jest, for those who are fighters do not jest.

Social Mutual Responsibility:

Article Twenty:

Moslem society is a mutually responsible society. The Prophet, prayers and greetings be unto him, said: “Blessed are the generous, whether they were in town or on a journey, who have collected all that they had and shared it equally among themselves.”

The Islamic spirit is what should prevail in every Moslem society. The society that confronts a vicious enemy which acts in a way similar to Nazism, making no differentiation between man and woman, between children and old people – such a society is entitled to this Islamic spirit. Our enemy relies on the methods of collective punishment. He has deprived people of their homeland and properties, pursued them in their places of exile and gathering, breaking bones, shooting at women, children and old people, with or without a reason. The enemy has opened detention camps where thousands and thousands of people are thrown and kept under sub-human conditions. Added to this, are the demolition of houses, rendering children orphans, meting cruel sentences against thousands of young people, and causing them to spend the best years of their lives in the dungeons of prisons.

In their Nazi treatment, the Jews made no exception for women or children. Their policy of striking fear in the heart is meant for all. They attack people where their breadwinning is concerned, extorting their money and threatening their honour. They deal with people as if they were the worst war criminals. Deportation from the homeland is a kind of murder.

To counter these deeds, it is necessary that social mutual responsibility should prevail among the people. The enemy should be faced by the people as a single body which if one member of it should complain, the rest of the body would respond by feeling the same pains.

Article Twenty-One:

Mutual social responsibility means extending assistance, financial or moral, to all those who are in need and joining in the execution of some of the work. Members of the Islamic Resistance Movement should consider the interests of the masses as their own personal interests. They must spare no effort in achieving and preserving them. They must prevent any foul play with the future of the upcoming generations and anything that could cause loss to society. The masses are part of them and they are part of the masses. Their strength is theirs, and their future is theirs. Members of the Islamic Resistance Movement should share the people’s joy and grief, adopt the demands of the public and whatever means by which they could be realised. The day that such a spirit prevails, brotherliness would deepen, cooperation, sympathy and unity will be enhanced and the ranks will be solidified to confront the enemies.

Supportive Forces Behind the Enemy:

Article Twenty-Two:

For a long time, the enemies have been planning, skillfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

“So often as they shall kindle a fire for war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers.” (The Table – verse 64).

The imperialistic forces in the Capitalist West and Communist East, support the enemy with all their might, in money and in men. These forces take turns in doing that. The day Islam appears, the forces of infidelity would unite to challenge it, for the infidels are of one nation.

“O true believers, contract not an intimate friendship with any besides yourselves: they will not fail to corrupt you. They wish for that which may cause you to perish: their hatred hath already appeared from out of their mouths; but what their breasts conceal is yet more inveterate. We have already shown you signs of their ill will towards you, if ye understand.” (The Family of Imran – verse 118).

It is not in vain that the verse is ended with Allah’s words “if ye understand.”

Our Attitudes Towards:

A. Islamic Movements:

Article Twenty-Three:

The Islamic Resistance Movement views other Islamic movements with respect and appreciation. If it were at variance with them on one point or opinion, it is in agreement with them on other points and understandings. It considers these movements, if they reveal good intentions and dedication to Allah, that they fall into the category of those who are trying hard since they act within the Islamic circle. Each active person has his share.

The Islamic Resistance Movement considers all these movements as a fund for itself. It prays to Allah for guidance and directions for all and it spares no effort to keep the banner of unity raised, ever striving for its realisation in accordance with the Koran and the Prophet’s directives.

“And cleave all of you unto the covenant of Allah, and depart not from it, and remember the favour of Allah towards you: since ye were enemies, and he reconciled your hearts, and ye became companions and brethren by his favour: and ye were on the brink of a pit of fire, and he delivered you thence. Allah declareth unto you his signs, that ye may be directed.” (The Family of Imran – Verse 102).

Article Twenty-Four:

The Islamic Resistance Movement does not allow slandering or speaking ill of individuals or groups, for the believer does not indulge in such malpractices. It is necessary to differentiate between this behaviour and the stands taken by certain individuals and groups. Whenever those stands are erroneous, the Islamic Resistance Movement preserves the right to expound the error and to warn against it. It will strive to show the right path and to judge the case in question with objectivity. Wise conduct is indeed the target of the believer who follows it wherever he discerns it.

“Allah loveth not the speaking ill of anyone in public, unless he who is injured call for assistance; and Allah heareth and knoweth: whether ye publish a good action, or conceal it, or forgive evil, verily Allah is gracious and powerful.” (Women – verses 147-148).

B. Nationalist Movements in the Palestinian Arena:

Article Twenty-Five:

The Islamic Resistance Movement respects these movements and appreciates their circumstances and the conditions surrounding and affecting them. It encourages them as long as they do not give their allegiance to the Communist East or the Crusading West. It confirms to all those who are integrated in it, or sympathetic towards it, that the Islamic Resistance Movement is a fighting movement that has a moral and enlightened look of life and the way it should cooperate with the other (movements). It detests opportunism and desires only the good of people, individuals and groups alike. It does not seek material gains, personal fame, nor does it look for a reward from others. It works with its own resources and whatever is at its disposal “and prepare for them whatever force you can”, for the fulfilment of the duty, and the earning of Allah’s favour. It has no other desire than that.

The Movement assures all the nationalist trends operating in the Palestinian arena for the liberation of Palestine, that it is there for their support and assistance. It will never be more than that, both in words and deeds, now and in the future. It is there to bring together and not to divide, to preserve and not to squander, to unify and not to throw asunder. It evaluates every good word, sincere effort and good offices. It closes the door in the face of side disagreements and does not lend an ear to rumours and slanders, while at the same time fully realising the right for self-defence.

Anything contrary or contradictory to these trends, is a lie disseminated by enemies or their lackeys for the purpose of sowing confusion, disrupting the ranks and occupy them with side issues.

“O true believers, if a wicked man come unto you with a tale, inquire strictly into the truth thereof; lest ye hurt people through ignorance, and afterwards repent of what ye have done.” (The Inner Apartments – verse 6).

Article Twenty-Six:

In viewing the Palestinian nationalist movements that give allegiance neither to the East nor the West, in this positive way, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not refrain from discussing new situations on the regional or international levels where the Palestinian question is concerned. It does that in such an objective manner revealing the extent of how much it is in harmony or contradiction with the national interests in the light of the Islamic point of view.

C. The Palestinian Liberation Organization:

Article Twenty-Seven:

The Palestinian Liberation Organization is the closest to the heart of the Islamic Resistance Movement. It contains the father and the brother, the next of kin and the friend. The Moslem does not estrange himself from his father, brother, next of kin or friend. Our homeland is one, our situation is one, our fate is one and the enemy is a joint enemy to all of us.

Because of the situations surrounding the formation of the Organization, of the ideological confusion prevailing in the Arab world as a result of the ideological invasion under whose influence the Arab world has fallen since the defeat of the Crusaders and which was, and still is, intensified through orientalists, missionaries and imperialists, the Organization adopted the idea of the secular state. And that it how we view it.

Secularism completely contradicts religious ideology. Attitudes, conduct and decisions stem from ideologies.

That is why, with all our appreciation for The Palestinian Liberation Organization – and what it can develop into – and without belittling its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, we are unable to exchange the present or future Islamic Palestine with the secular idea. The Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion and whoever takes his religion lightly is a loser.

“Who will be adverse to the religion of Abraham, but he whose mind is infatuated? (The Cow – verse 130).

The day The Palestinian Liberation Organization adopts Islam as its way of life, we will become its soldiers, and fuel for its fire that will burn the enemies.

Until such a day, and we pray to Allah that it will be soon, the Islamic Resistance Movement’s stand towards the PLO is that of the son towards his father, the brother towards his brother, and the relative to relative, suffers his pain and supports him in confronting the enemies, wishing him to be wise and well-guided.

“Stand by your brother, for he who is brotherless is like the fighter who goes to battle without arms. One’s cousin is the wing one flies with – could the bird fly without wings?”

D. Arab and Islamic Countries:

Article Twenty-Eight:

The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion.

Arab countries surrounding Israel are asked to open their borders before the fighters from among the Arab and Islamic nations so that they could consolidate their efforts with those of their Moslem brethren in Palestine.

As for the other Arab and Islamic countries, they are asked to facilitate the movement of the fighters from and to it, and this is the least thing they could do.

We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that “Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women.”

Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. “May the cowards never sleep.”

E. Nationalist and Religious Groupings, Institutions, Intellectuals, The Arab and Islamic World:

The Islamic Resistance Movement hopes that all these groupings will side with it in all spheres, would support it, adopt its stand and solidify its activities and moves, work towards rallying support for it so that the Islamic people will be a base and a stay for it, supplying it with strategic depth an all human material and informative spheres, in time and in place. This should be done through the convening of solidarity conferences, the issuing of explanatory bulletins, favourable articles and booklets, enlightening the masses regarding the Palestinian issue, clarifying what confronts it and the conspiracies woven around it. They should mobilize the Islamic nations, ideologically, educationally and culturally, so that these peoples would be equipped to perform their role in the decisive battle of liberation, just as they did when they vanquished the Crusaders and the Tatars and saved human civilization. Indeed, that is not difficult for Allah.

“Allah hath written, Verily I will prevail, and my apostles: for Allah is strong and mighty.” (The Dispute – verse 21).

Article Thirty:

Writers, intellectuals, media people, orators, educaters and teachers, and all the various sectors in the Arab and Islamic world – all of them are called upon to perform their role, and to fulfill their duty, because of the ferocity of the Zionist offensive and the Zionist influence in many countries exercised through financial and media control, as well as the consequences that all this lead to in the greater part of the world.

Jihad is not confined to the carrying of arms and the confrontation of the enemy. The effective word, the good article, the useful book, support and solidarity – together with the presence of sincere purpose for the hoisting of Allah’s banner higher and higher – all these are elements of the Jihad for Allah’s sake.

“Whosoever mobilises a fighter for the sake of Allah is himself a fighter. Whosoever supports the relatives of a fighter, he himself is a fighter.” (related by al-Bukhari, Moslem, Abu-Dawood and al-Tarmadhi).

F. Followers of Other Religions: The Islamic Resistance Movement Is A Humanistic Movement:

Article Thirty-One:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions. It does not antagonize anyone of them except if it is antagonized by it or stands in its way to hamper its moves and waste its efforts.

Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. Past and present history are the best witness to that.

It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror. Everyone of them is at variance with his fellow-religionists, not to speak about followers of other religionists. Past and present history are full of examples to prove this fact.

“They will not fight against you in a body, except in fenced towns, or from behind walls. Their strength in war among themselves is great: thou thinkest them to be united; but their hearts are divided. This, because they are people who do not understand.” (The Emigration – verse 14).

Islam confers upon everyone his legitimate rights. Islam prevents the incursion on other people’s rights. The Zionist Nazi activities against our people will not last for long. “For the state of injustice lasts but one day, while the state of justice lasts till Doomsday.”

“As to those who have not borne arms against you on account of religion, nor turned you out of your dwellings, Allah forbiddeth you not to deal kindly with them, and to behave justly towards them; for Allah loveth those who act justly.” (The Tried – verse 8).

The Attempt to Isolate the Palestinian People:

Article Thirty-Two:

World Zionism, together with imperialistic powers, try through a studied plan and an intelligent strategy to remove one Arab state after another from the circle of struggle against Zionism, in order to have it finally face the Palestinian people only. Egypt was, to a great extent, removed from the circle of the struggle, through the treacherous Camp David Agreement. They are trying to draw other Arab countries into similar agreements and to bring them outside the circle of struggle.

The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger eminating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.

Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. “for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither.” (The Spoils – verse 16). There is no way out except by concentrating all powers and energies to face this Nazi, vicious Tatar invasion. The alternative is loss of one’s country, the dispersion of citizens, the spread of vice on earth and the destruction of religious values. Let every person know that he is responsible before Allah, for “the doer of the slightest good deed is rewarded in like, and the does of the slightest evil deed is also rewarded in like.”

The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.

“..and we have put enmity and hatred between them, until the day of resurrection. So often as they shall kindle a fire of war, Allah shall extinguish it; and they shall set their minds to act corruptly in the earth, but Allah loveth not the corrupt doers.” (The Table – verse 64).

Article Thirty-Three:

The Islamic Resistance Movement, being based on the common coordinated and interdependent conceptions of the laws of the universe, and flowing in the stream of destiny in confronting and fighting the enemies in defence of the Moslems and Islamic civilization and sacred sites, the first among which is the Aqsa Mosque, urges the Arab and Islamic peoples, their governments, popular and official groupings, to fear Allah where their view of the Islamic Resistance Movement and their dealings with it are concerned. They should back and support it, as Allah wants them to, extending to it more and more funds till Allah’s purpose is achieved when ranks will close up, fighters join other fighters and masses everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to the call of duty while loudly proclaiming: Hail to Jihad. Their cry will reach the heavens and will go on being resounded until liberation is achieved, the invaders vanquished and Allah’s victory comes about.

“And Allah will certainly assist him who shall be on his side: for Allah is strong and mighty.” (The Pilgrimage – verse 40).

The Testimony of History

Across History in Confronting the Invaders:

Article Thirty-Four:

Palestine is the navel of the globe and the crossroad of the continents. Since the dawn of history, it has been the target of expansionists. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, had himself pointed to this fact in the noble Hadith in which he called on his honourable companion, Ma’adh ben-Jabal, saying: O Ma’ath, Allah throw open before you, when I am gone, Syria, from Al-Arish to the Euphrates. Its men, women and slaves will stay firmly there till the Day of Judgement. Whoever of you should choose one of the Syrian shores, or the Holy Land, he will be in constant struggle till the Day of Judgement.”

Expansionists have more than once put their eye on Palestine which they attacked with their armies to fulfill their designs on it. Thus it was that the Crusaders came with their armies, bringing with them their creed and carrying their Cross. They were able to defeat the Moslems for a while, but the Moslems were able to retrieve the land only when they stood under the wing of their religious banner, united their word, hallowed the name of Allah and surged out fighting under the leadership of Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi. They fought for almost twenty years and at the end the Crusaders were defeated and Palestine was liberated.

“Say unto those who believe not, Ye shall be overcome, and thrown together into hell; an unhappy couch it shall be.” (The Family of Imran – verse 12).

This is the only way to liberate Palestine. There is no doubt about the testimony of history. It is one of the laws of the universe and one of the rules of existence. Nothing can overcome iron except iron. Their false futile creed can only be defeated by the righteous Islamic creed. A creed could not be fought except by a creed, and in the last analysis, victory is for the just, for justice is certainly victorious.

“Our word hath formerly been given unto our servants the apostles; that they should certainly be assisted against the infidels, and that our armies should surely be the conquerors.” (Those Who Rank Themselves – verses 171-172).

Article Thirty-Five:

The Islamic Resistance Movement views seriously the defeat of the Crusaders at the hands of Salah ed-Din al-Ayyubi and the rescuing of Palestine from their hands, as well as the defeat of the Tatars at Ein Galot, breaking their power at the hands of Qataz and Al-Dhaher Bivers and saving the Arab world from the Tatar onslaught which aimed at the destruction of every meaning of human civilization. The Movement draws lessons and examples from all this. The present Zionist onslaught has also been preceded by Crusading raids from the West and other Tatar raids from the East. Just as the Moslems faced those raids and planned fighting and defeating them, they should be able to confront the Zionist invasion and defeat it. This is indeed no problem for the Almighty Allah, provided that the intentions are pure, the determination is true and that Moslems have benefited from past experiences, rid themselves of the effects of ideological invasion and followed the customs of their ancestors.

The Islamic Resistance Movement is Composed of Soldiers:

Article Thirty-Six:

While paving its way, the Islamic Resistance Movement, emphasizes time and again to all the sons of our people, to the Arab and Islamic nations, that it does not seek personal fame, material gain, or social prominence. It does not aim to compete against any one from among our people, or take his place. Nothing of the sort at all. It will not act against any of the sons of Moslems or those who are peaceful towards it from among non-Moslems, be they here or anywhere else. It will only serve as a support for all groupings and organizations operating against the Zionist enemy and its lackeys.

The Islamic Resistance Movement adopts Islam as its way of life. Islam is its creed and religion. Whoever takes Islam as his way of life, be it an organization, a grouping, a country or any other body, the Islamic Resistance Movement considers itself as their soldiers and nothing more.

We ask Allah to show us the right course, to make us an example to others and to judge between us and our people with truth. “O Lord, do thou judge between us and our nation with truth; for thou art the best judge.” (Al Araf – Verse 89).

The last of our prayers will be praise to Allah, the Master of the Universe.

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2024 Arizona Election: Some Advice From Jim O’Connor – Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission

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By Neland Nobel

Editors’ Note: Election integrity arguments generally fall into two camps, which are not mutually exclusive.  One camp makes the case that government agencies, working with broadcast and social media, put their thumbs on the scale to defeat Republicans and specifically, Donald Trump.  We think that the case has now become quite solid, given the evidence that has emerged.

The other camp believes that the mechanism of voting itself has been fatally compromised in a variety of ways.  This case also is fairly solid, but not as solid as we would like it to be.  In part, this has been caused by the refusal of the courts to intervene and thus for conclusive proof to be demonstrated.

What is clear is that the public does not trust the media, the government, or the vote-counting mechanism. If for no other reason than restoring public trust in elections, we think the suggestions of Jim O’Connor should be adopted. Yes, it will require some changes and initially, it might be slower. But so what? If the public does not believe elections are open and fair, this does grave damage to our democratic system. If people think elections are rigged either by the media or those in charge of running elections, what is the point of engaging in politics? Why vote and why run for office? If the system is tainted, it destroys the representative system whereby the people can work out their differences in a peaceful manner.

Election integrity is not a fringe movement or argument. Accurate and fair elections are the necessary and essential requirements of a free society.

The following is a letter from Jim O’Connor, Chairman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, to the County Supervisors in Arizona:

Supervisors:

Thirty years ago, I served as an advisor to the California Senate Select Committee investigating Orange County, CA bankruptcy. My most significant takeaway was the influence that a single outside attorney’s advice had on that county’s elected Board of Supervisors. He sold them on the urgent need to “protect the County” by filing for bankruptcy.

The enormous cost of that infamous decision is now in the history books. County vendors, employees, teachers, and many other County government districts who had their surplus cash invested in the County Investment Pool suffered loss of availability of their monies to pay daily operating expenses, were forced to engage outside legal counsel of their own, and resulted in a lack of trust in their local government to act with integrity.

Many of you may recall the appeal I made to you just one year ago, in my letter sharing the investigation I conducted regarding the vulnerability of voting machines and tabulators in our Arizona elections. I included a video of a workshop I held on October 1, 2022, which included expert witness testimony from eleven national experts on cybersecurity. They unanimously agreed that the above-cited machines and tabulators were more vulnerable to hacking than the average home computer.

A small number of you stood bravely in attempts to investigate options on your own to assure all your county voters the sanctity of their votes. This stand was taken in the face of media name-calling, bullying from others with a self-interest to protect, and various state-elected officials weaponizing government to attack you individually. The courage you exhibited rivaled that of Daniel in the Lion’s Den and David versus Goliath.

During this past year, we have had more facts uncovered nationally regarding the maladministration of elections throughout the Country. We have also seen that our County, State and federal Courts are unwilling to adjudicate fairly given their hesitancy to address the legal doctrine “The Election/Political Question”.

This has left voters in our State and our fifteen counties with a significant diminution of trust in their governments. I believe our system of government works because voters trusted the election process; thereby submitting to the outcome without regard to who won the contest. I further believe that trust has been violated resulting in large numbers of voters unwilling to participate as they are resigned to believing their votes don’t count. Further, many more are frustrated with what they perceive as a corrupt process with no accountability.

Serving in a statewide elected position myself, it is of grave concern to me that each of you currently has all the necessary power and authority to fix this problem before our 2024 election season. It will require a majority of each of your boards to stand together. To do the right thing for every voter in your county. Of all the difficult problems we deal with in government, this is truly the most non-partisan.

May I respectfully ask each of you to reflect on the wisdom found in the book of Proverbs 8: 12-21.

“I am Wisdom. Common Sense is my closest friend; I possess knowledge and sound judgment. If you respect the LORD, you will hate evil. I hate pride and conceit and deceitful lies. I am strong and I offer sensible advice and sound judgment. By my power kings govern and rulers make laws that are fair. Every honest leader rules with help from me. I love everyone who loves me, and I will be found by all who honestly search. I can make you rich and famous, important and successful. What you receive from me is more valuable than even the finest gold or the purest silver. I always do what is right, and I give great riches to everyone who loves me.”

Each of you shall be in my prayers and the prayers of all who join me, as you deliberate the merits of not using machines and tabulators in our 2024 elections.

Jim O’Connor, Statewide Office Holder

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No, The Conflicts In Israel And Ukraine Are Not ‘One War

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By John Daniel Davidson

Neocons are twisting themselves into rhetorical pretzels to make the case for one big war — with the U.S. right in the middle of it.

A memo must have gone out this week to all unreconstructed neocons directing them to propagate the idea that the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine are “one war,” and that the stakes of this one war are so high — civilization itself hangs in the balance! — that the United States must get deeply involved in both of them.

I know it sounds idiotic, but that’s the line. President Joe Biden peddled a version of it in an Oval Office speech Thursday, saying Hamas and Putin represent different threats but “both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”

This flimsy talking point made the rounds earlier in the week when neocons like Jonah Goldberg and Matthew Continetti both argued that Israel and Ukraine are “the same war on two fronts,” as Goldberg put it. Everyone knows about Iran’s support for Hamas, he said, but the “more vital question is of Russia’s involvement.”

And what, pray tell, is the connection between Moscow and Hamas? Well, you see, Iran supports Hamas, and Iran and Russia both depend on oil revenue. Both are sanctioned by Western governments and “Global instability keeps the petrodollars flowing.” See the connection? Wake up, sheeple!

As for Israel and Ukraine, Goldberg claims they are both “flawed but decent democracies facing enemies who seek to erase them from the map.”

This is like a Kamala Harris speech on foreign policy: Israel is a country. Ukraine is a country. Because they are both countries, they have much in common. Both are at war. War is when good armies fight bad armies. Ukraine and Israel are good. Russia and Hamas are bad. Therefore, Israel and Ukraine are fighting the same war.

Seriously though, setting aside obvious facts like Israel is one of America’s closest allies and Ukraine is not an ally at all, let’s start with the fatuous notion that Israel and Ukraine are both “flawed but decent democracies.” Even before the war, Ukraine ranked well below a bunch of Third World “sh-thole countries” on nearly every democracy matrix, and was only slightly better than Russia on most corruption indices. A 2021 report by Freedom House pegged Ukraine as a “transitional or hybrid regime,” not a democracy, and rated it only “partly free.”

Once the war began, it got worse. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shut down the free press, banned all opposition political parties, and canceled elections. Ukraine is now a one-party state where the party controls the news media. That doesn’t sound like any democracy I’ve ever heard of, and it certainly isn’t anything like Israel, which has a free press and free elections — things that aren’t just characteristics of democracy but prerequisites for it.

What about Biden and Goldberg’s notion that Ukraine and Israel both face enemies that want to wipe them off the map? I get that demonizing foreign adversaries is a way to gin up support for endless and unpopular foreign adventures, but the comparison here is ridiculous. Russia is a rational authoritarian state, not part of a fundamentalist Muslim terror network trying to start World War III. It doesn’t want to annihilate Ukraine, it wants to absorb it into a greater Russia (Putin himself has said so repeatedly).

We can all recognize Putin is the aggressor in this war while also admitting that the difference between Russians and Ukrainians is mostly a regional accent. Given the unique historical circumstances and the realities of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, the best thing we can do to help Ukraine is to push it to negotiate a political settlement with Russia — something we should have been doing before the first shot was fired.

That of course is impossible in Israel, which isn’t fighting to keep “occupied lands,” as Ukraine is, and would likely give 99 percent of the West Bank and Gaza back to Egypt and Jordan if it could. Acting like there’s some equivalency between the Donbas and Gaza isn’t just historically illiterate, it’s insulting to Israel. As for Hamas and its allies in Tehran, they don’t want to rule over the Israelis or absorb them into a greater Palestine, they want to drive them into the sea.

But I don’t want to beat up on Goldberg too much because he’s not the only one spouting this nonsense. Continetti over at The Washington Free Beacon published a somewhat less ham-fisted version of the same “one war” argument this week. He says both conflicts stem from two big mistakes by President Biden that weakened American deterrence: the Afghanistan withdrawal and the revival of the Iran nuclear deal. The Afghanistan debacle convinced Moscow there would be little cost in an outright invasion of Ukraine, and Tehran took advantage of Biden’s diplomatic overtures to unleash regional mayhem.

Both observations are correct as far as they go. American weakness abroad usually results in revisionist powers pursuing their revisionist goals, as we saw during the entire Obama presidency and again during Biden’s term. But Continetti takes these observations much farther than they can reasonably go.

Without explaining what core U.S. interests are implicated in the Russia-Ukraine war, or what a Ukrainian victory in that conflict might entail, he simply asserts that Biden “must recognize that Ukrainians and Israelis alike man distant ramparts in a war for the civilized world,” as if a Moscow-dominated Ukraine represents the same kind of civilizational threat as an Iranian-dominated Middle East. But of course it doesn’t. The former would mean a return to the status quo ante 2014 in Ukraine (which might be where we end up even with a Ukrainian “victory”). The latter would mean nuclear war.

But never mind that. How do we save civilization? Congress must dole out funds to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan right away — and that’s just for starters, says Continetti. “Then Biden must tell Congress that this money is a down payment. The next step is a much larger appropriation. America must commit to a conventional and strategic arms buildup that will instill fear in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Beijing.”

One could argue that given the decrepit state of the U.S. military and the unstable state of world affairs, a conventional and strategic arms buildup is long overdue. But that’s not what Continetti is arguing. Remember, civilization itself is at stake, which here serves as a rhetorical legerdemain to skip over how, exactly, the U.S. under Biden’s leadership is supposed to reverse decades of industrial and military decline, keep funding the quagmire in Ukraine, while also supporting Israel, Taiwan, and maintaining U.S. military readiness.

As Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts noted in a recent op-ed, the U.S. has overcommitted resources to Ukraine at the expense of allies like Israel: “In January, the U.S. raided one of our major arms stockpiles in Israel, designed to support our allies in that region, and instead transferred 300,000 155mm shells to the war in Ukraine.”

Such details don’t concern the likes of Goldberg and Continetti. For them, all revisionist powers meld together into a single enemy, all foreign conflicts become essentially the same, and all of them require U.S. intervention. They really think this way, so at least they’re being honest. The neocon mind comprehends only one war — a forever war that must be fought over and over, decade after endless decade, no matter the cost, no matter how pyrrhic the victory. No thanks.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Youtube CNBC

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Government Unions Call The Shots

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By Dr. Thomas Patterson

American schoolchildren are taught that they are being raised in a democracy, where elected officials pass the laws, bureaucrats administer the laws, and government workers dutifully carry them out.

That’s a crock. Americans at this time are mostly governed under rules generated by an unelected bureaucracy, the so-called “dark state”. Worse, personnel and financial matters are controlled by the workers themselves through their government unions. The rest of us are left out of the loop.

It was in the 1960s at the height of the “rights“ revolution that 38 states and the federal government first granted government unions the right to collective bargaining. Curiously, government workers already had civil service protections and there were no abusive work conditions needing reform. Government employees were considered to have a moral duty to protect the public interest, not bargain against it.

Since the door was cracked open, there has been a relentless torrent of workers’ rights and benefits. In every bargaining cycle workers win so many concessions from the bosses they elect that government managers no longer really manage. Unions do.

There are consequences.  Baltimore schools have received heavy criticism for having 23 schools last year without a single student proficient, i.e. barely adequate, in math.  Baltimore is hardly alone. Chicago had 37 schools last year with zero students proficient in either math or English and many other urban school districts have similar records of failure.

Normally, administrators faced with a crisis of this magnitude would radically overhaul their operations and personnel. But because of union controls, political leaders, school boards and administrators are essentially powerless to make meaningful changes. In Illinois, an 18-year study found two out of 95,000 teachers were terminated for poor performance. The dismissal rate in California, the home of multiple failing districts, is even lower. In fact, almost every teacher is rated as excellent.

The disastrous closing of the schools during COVID-19 and the attendant learning loss were also totally union-inspired. Long after it was well known that children were at minimal risk from Covid, intransigent unions refused to return to the classroom. The educational damage callously inflicted on our school children is a national shame.

Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, igniting racial riots worldwide, was a known bad actor with multiple complaints on his record. But the police chief lacked the authority to terminate or even reassign him.  Union-imposed “due process“ for police typically precludes interviewing the officer until he views all witness statements, then multiple hearings and reviews, and finally a chance for a reprieve from union-selected arbitrators.

The process is so daunting that many supervisors don’t even try to address bad behavior. Of the 2600 complaints against Minneapolis police officers in the prior decade, just 12 resulted in disciplinary actions, none of them severe. This inability to discipline rogue officers is a major contributor to the undeserved poor public image plaguing many police departments.

The outsized influence of unions has a single source: their ability to financially influence elections. Public unions in America collect about $5 billion in compulsory dues annually or $20 billion per election cycle. So for example, newly elected Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who will head the “management“ team in union negotiations, received over 90% of his campaign funding from public unions, assuring the talks will go smoothly.

The captive New York legislature passed 21 bills to enhance public employee benefits in 2021 alone. In California, union-mandated rules are so lax that last year, 3600 state employees received $100,000 each in overtime pay, very little of it legitimate overtime. In Illinois, a state that would declare bankruptcy if it were a private enterprise, Governor J.B. Pritzker settled his political debts with a 19.28% raise for 35,000 State employees.

Put simply,  government unions have used collective bargaining and campaign cash to seize effective control of government and run it for their own benefit.  A republican government can’t work if authorities selected through the democratic process don’t have the ability to do their jobs.

We need to find fearless leaders who will have the guts to take on the unions and once again restore the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

*****

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Zero Net EV Economic Or Climate Benefits And Government Admits It

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By Larry Bell

Buried deeply in the bowels of a 56,342-page Federal Register Volume 88 — along with an environmental assessment accompanying the Department of Transportation’s newly proposed fuel standards — are some candid admissions that electric vehicle- (EV) promoting bureaucrats and subsidy beneficiaries aren’t anxious for any of us to know about.

One is that “Net [social-economic] benefits for passenger cars remain negative across alternatives.”

After factoring in a 2% increase in mandated requirements each year with an estimated $5.8 billion reduction in public welfare spread across the life of total drivers’ cars —  including wildly speculative climate change benefits — net costs of transportation “alternatives” proposed by DOT are estimated at very nearly twice that amount ($11 billion).

Another revelation is that even by DOT’s estimates, the proposed legislation would reduce average global temperatures in 2060 by 0.000%.

What a deal … a humongously expensive and disruptive net-zero carbon climate change thwarting goal with net-zero influence!

As pointed out in The Wall Street Journal, “The predictions are full of gimmicky assumptions designed to understate costs.”

Included are omitted opportunity costs, whereby to improve the economy, other popular improvements drivers including structural safety features, trunk space, acceleration, and increasingly rare spare tires to reduce weight are sacrificed.

Meanwhile, as the Journal points out, the costs of paying for any EV “benefits” are now so comically high “that regulators can no longer pretend that mandating greater fuel economy for passenger cars is good for society.”

So, let’s look at that so-called “economy.”

Forgo any illusions that according to Kelley Blue Book, paying an average $11,000 more to buy an EV than a full-sized gas-powered car and nearly $30,000 more than the average compact will be made up in net mileage efficiency advantages, or imagine it as any sort of longer-term trade-in investment.

Forget any notion that all that “green energy” needed to recharge them grows on trees, or that the costs of that electricity won’t escalate as the Biden administration, or any Democrat successor, continues to put the kibosh on fossil fuel that supply more than 80% of U.S. and world energy, replacing it with seasonal and weather-dependent electricity from friendly breezes and sunbeams that produce about 3% combined.

Then try to contemplate how much more of that unreliable, intermittent electricity would be needed to grow currently less than 1% of the 250 million EVs in the U.S. including SUVs and light-duty trucks to fulfill EPA’s de facto mandate for those magical “free energy” plug-ins to make up 17% of the market by 2026.

On top of that, think for a moment about the consequences of adding all those new EV electricity demands to already overloaded power grids, plus depend on China which controls 85% of the world supply of rare earth minerals required for all those solar, wind and EV batteries.

On the resale end, an average on-the-road 12-year-old used EV will be on its second or third new battery before an owner can sell it.

With a Tesla battery typically costing about $10,000, the resale price will likely have to be significantly higher than that of a comparably aged and sized internal combustion model in similar condition.

Expect those battery costs to increase in concert with global demands for nickel — a primary component of lithium-ion cathodes — having already about doubled over the past six years from $10,336 per metric ton in August 2016 to $21,091 in July.

The National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that EV drivers not only pay more but also put about half as many miles on their cars as the average driver.

The research suggests EVs’ limited range along with prolonged and limited recharging options have resulted in their use as secondary — not primary — household vehicles.

There’s little wonder then why most EV purchasers are wealthy enough to afford them as second cars, retaining a petroleum-fueled model for long single-day highway trips.

Imagine, for example, the time required to drive farther than 270 miles — the range of a Tesla on a single charge — necessitating at least one stopover at an assumed available interim recharging location.

In this case, estimate that while it will take only 4.5 hours to travel that first 270-mile link, plan for up to an additional hour for a battery recharge … assuming an available supercharge station will be open where and when needed.

That average EV recharging time and range will depend upon seasonal locale temperatures.

Batteries yield about 20% less energy in cold conditions, explaining why most EV owners live in temperate and semi-tropical climates … half in California alone.

According to AAA, cold weather can cut EV range by 12%, a loss that leaps to 41% with the heater on full blast. Running the air conditioner in hot weather takes a similar toll on trip efficiency.

Since EVs cost more to build, automakers jack up the prices of gasoline vehicles to cover production losses.

As CEO Jim Farley of Ford admitted last year, he conspicuously trimmed back Ford’s commitment to EVs, saying the company was losing too much money on them.

Nevertheless, if you like the idea of owning an electric vehicle and can afford one, then go for it!

And if luxuriating on virtue signaling or shaming points with neighbors and friends brightens your day — well, that’s okay too, even though they’re helping you pay for it.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, The Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

Weekend Read: Propaganda and the US Government thumbnail

Weekend Read: Propaganda and the US Government

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By Robert Malone

In Edward Bernays classic tome Propaganda, published in 1928, was an attempt to both alert the public to the power of propaganda while also allying the public’s fear of it. The overall messaging of the book now seems so naïve. One of the core themes and underlying beliefs of the book is that there are elements in society that are not corruptible.  

As an example, the book ends with the thesis that newspapers are the arbiter of news, thus the editors, writers and owners are the gatekeepers ensuring the public of a fair rendition of both sides of any issue. That the idea of newspaper spreading propaganda was virtually unthinkable.

This may have been how journalism was perceived in the past, but that is no longer the case (if it ever was). The idea that the government or a political party might buy up enough advertising space or provide other incentives so that a newspaper editor would think twice about running a story contrary to the government’s position was not even a consideration. The view was that newspaper writers, editors, or the owners couldn’t be bribed or converted to one cause or another seems to not enter the author’s mindscape. The idea that the newspapers of today would become advocacy conduits for one set of beliefs held by the government over another set of beliefs seemed farfetched in 1928. Now it seems unthinkable that it would be any other way.

Propaganda is a form of public opinion manipulation involving the creation of a specific narrative that aligns with a political agenda. It uses techniques like nudging, repetition, emotional appeals, selective information, and hypnotic language patterns to influence the subconscious mind, thereby bypassing critical thinking and shaping beliefs and values.

Propaganda is made up of truth, almost truths, half-truths, truth out of context as well as false truths. Its purpose is not necessarily evil, but it is always meant to manipulate the mental state of those receiving it. This is an important concept that this classic book makes over and over again. Governments and organizations use propaganda for good and evil.

The distribution of “truthful” or “untruthful” information which causes the recipient to become wary or skeptical of the government and its intentions is defined by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as malinformation. Information which may or may not be truthful but differs from the US Government’s approved narrative at that point in time is defined by DHS as misinformation. Either DHS-defined malinformation or misinformation which is being distributed for a political purpose is defined as disinformation. Under the Biden administration, DHS defines the spreading of mis- dis- or malinformation as domestic terrorism, which then technically allows various laws, policies, and US government programmatic infrastructure to “counter” such information and those who distribute it to be deployed in response.

In general, propaganda is classified by colors: White, Gray, and Black Propaganda.

White Propaganda:

  • White propaganda is a type of propaganda where the producer of the material is clearly marked and indicated, and the purpose of the information is transparent.
  • White Propaganda is commonly known as marketing and public relations.
  • White Propaganda involves communicating a message from a known source to a recipient (typically the public or some targeted sub-audience).
  • White Propaganda is mainly based on the fact, although the whole truth is often not told.

Gray Propaganda:

  • Gray Propaganda is the communication of a false narrative or story from an unattributed or hidden source.
  • The messenger may be known, but the true source of the message is not.
  • By avoiding source attribution, the viewer becomes unable to determine the creator or motives behind the message. This is common practice in modern corporate media, in which unattributed sources are often cited.
  • An example of gray propaganda would be placing news stories in news outlets instead of buying ads to directly appeal to the intended audience. This is also common practice, extending to “ghostwriting” of entire articles by corporations or advocacy groups which are then published as if originating from independent news outlet analysis and writing.
  • When using gray propaganda, a message or false narrative coming through the news media appears to be neutral, thus believable, whereas the direct appeal from someone who is clearly an opponent of the target (person or organization) or advocate of the promoted message would be unbelievable.
  • Astroturfing, the use of fake organized “grassroots” movements to spread a message or false narrative —is an example of gray propaganda.
  • Operation Mockingbird, the large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and manipulated domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes, often employed Gray Propaganda.

Black Propaganda:

  • Black propaganda is designed to create the impression that it was created by those it is intended to discredit.
  • Black Propaganda is typically used to vilify or embarrass an opponent or enemy through misrepresentation.
  • The major characteristic of black propaganda, when effective, is that the recipient (audience) is not aware that someone is influencing them, and therefore does not feel pushed in a certain direction.
  • Black propaganda purports to emanate from a source other than the true source. This is the type of propaganda most often associated with covert psychological operations.
  • Sometimes the source is concealed or credited to a false authority and used to spread lies, fabrications, and deceptions.
  • Black propaganda is the “Big Lie,” including all types of creative deceit.
  • Black propaganda relies on the willingness of the receiver to accept the credibility of the source. If the creators or senders of the black propaganda message do not adequately understand their intended audience, the message may be misunderstood, seem suspicious, or fail altogether.

Examples of Black Propaganda:

  • Declassified documents have revealed that the British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilizing Cold War enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas.
  • The US DoD Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) (now renamed and restructured as “Office of Information Activities”) was specifically designed to propagate black propaganda.
    • The Office of Information Activities (OIA) currently resides within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict with responsibility for policy oversight of military psychological operations activities.
    • Following 9-11, the US DoD organized and implemented the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which maintained a mission described by the New York Times as “circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use[d] not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations.”[
    • At the time, Pentagon officials said that the OSI was to pursue ‘a broad mission ranging from ‘black’ campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to ‘white’ public affairs that rely on truthful news releases.’Therefore, OSI’s operations were intended to include black propaganda activities.
    • OSI’s operations included contacting and emailing media, journalists, and community leaders with information that would counter foreign governments and organizations that are hostile to the United States. In doing so, the emails would be masked by using addresses ending with .com as opposed to using the standard Pentagon address of .mil, and hide any involvement of the US government and the Pentagon.

With the advent of computational technology, particularly the internet – the ability of many different factions to use propaganda has grown exponentially.

Computational propaganda can be described as an “emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the Internet” (Woolley and Howard, Computational Propaganda. Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media, 2018, p. 3). Computational algorithmic propaganda is used in social media – on blogs, forums, and other websites that involve participation and discussion.

This type of propaganda is often executed through data mining and algorithmic bots, which are usually created and controlled by advanced technologies such as AI and machine learning. By exploiting these tools, computational propaganda can pollute information and rapidly spread false news around the internet (Woolley and Howard, 2018).

The European Parliament has defined computational propaganda as “the use of algorithms, automation, and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.” 

One can easily detect a major issue with this definition. Remember, the classic definition of propaganda is that it can composed of truths and untruths meant to coerce and manipulate for good or evil. However, the working definition of “computational propaganda” is that it is only comprised of “misleading” information meant for nefarious (evil) purposes. Does this mean that if a government uses computational algorithms to manipulate via truthful information then this is not computational propaganda?

By using this narrow definition, which has spread throughout academia and the internet, the European Parliament has defined propaganda to include only malicious “misinformation.” Hence, computational methods to spread good information would not be included in their definition of computational propaganda. Was this an intentional oversight? Most likely not.

Truth be told, it isn’t just “bad actors” who are using computational propaganda. Examples abound of how these technologies are being discussed and have been used across the world by governments to induce people to eat better, stop smoking, or even how to behave in public spaces. This is generally referred to as “Nudge” technologies.

The problem is that, historically, those who employ propaganda will use whatever means are necessary to achieve their ends. Even when propaganda is in the service of doing good and is backed up by experts in the field. Propaganda aims to control our thoughts and behaviors. The propagandist measures success by “effectiveness.” Propagandists will use whatever tools they are allowed to use to achieve those ends. Currently, there are no government regulations on just how far they are allowed to go. In fact, it is rarely acknowledged that these tools are even being used.

The tools available to modern propagandists have become increasingly sophisticated. Not only are we being subjected to data mining of the personal information which are freely available via the web to use against us, but these data are being combined with behavioral tools such as nudging, neuro-linguistic programing, hypnosis, visualization, repetitive imagery, and messaging, which are often employed through the use of bots and trolls.

Here is a safety tip: never participate in free, online questionnaires or games. The organizations that create these activities are selling your answers and your email or Facebook address/personal information to interested third parties. This is one method of data mining that we should all be familiar with.

Over the last three years of the COVIDcrisis, propaganda methods based on advanced applied psychology have been developed and successfully deployed to coerce people into taking experimental vaccine products, wearing paper masks that are not effective in preventing viral infection or transmission, and quarantining or “lock down.” We have all lived through the effects of this massive propaganda campaign, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Psyops: When propaganda techniques are used by the military, intelligence agencies, or the police, it is referred to as psyops. Psyops can be used by governments against a foreign population (PsyWar) or against the citizens of a government (domestically).

There is a misconception that the US Government does not conduct propaganda on its domestic population. This may have once been the case, but no longer. According to the US Department of Defense “Psychological Operations Manual” of 2010, in the case of domestic crisis management the DoD can become involved in Psyops operations against civilian citizens during times of crisis management. The manual states:

“When authorized, PSYOP forces may be used domestically to assist lead federal agencies during disaster relief and crisis management by informing the domestic population.”

Although many believed that the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 banned the use of propaganda by the US government, nothing is further from the truth. The Smith-Mundt Act only applied to specific media outlets developed by the US Government for foreign markets, and only to the US State Department and to the relatively obscure Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Furthermore, most of the prior restrictions placed by that act were repealed or amended in 2013. There is nothing that stops the US Government (including CIA and DoD) from propagandizing the American people. Our government, media, universities, and medical establishments are just a few of the domestic organizations that routinely use propaganda.

Between 1975 to 1976, a wide range of CIA operations (including CIA ties with journalists) were examined in a series of Congressional investigations (the “Church Committee”). The most extensive discussion of CIA relations with news media from these investigations is in the Church Committee’s final report, published in April 1976. The report covered CIA ties with both foreign and domestic news media.

For foreign news media, the report concluded that:

The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.

For domestic media, the report states:

Approximately 50 of the [Agency] assets are individual American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. Of these, fewer than half are “accredited” by U.S. media organizations … The remaining individuals are non-accredited freelance contributors and media representatives abroad … More than a dozen United States news organizations and commercial publishing houses formerly provided cover for CIA agents abroad. A few of these organizations were unaware that they provided this cover.

Journalist Carl Bernstein, writing in an October 1977 article in the magazine Rolling Stone, said that the Church Committee report covered up CIA relations with news media, and named a number of journalists and organizations whom CIA officers he interviewed said worked with the CIA. A copy of that article, titled “THE CIA AND THE MEDIA How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up” can be found here via the wayback machine.

Many believe that the CIA is prohibited from deploying modern propaganda and surveillance technologies on US Citizens, but that is not the case. In prior years, there have been various directives to this effect, for example:

According to the final Church Committee report, former CIA director William Colby told the committee that in 1973 he had issued instructions that “As a general policy, the Agency will not make any clandestine use of staff employees of U.S. publications which have a substantial impact or influence on public opinion.”

In response to the pressure from the emerging Church Committee findings, in February 1976 CIA Director George H. W. Bush announced an even more restrictive policy: “Effective immediately, CIA will not enter into any paid or contractual relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station.

The final Church Committee report also stated that all CIA contacts with accredited journalists had been dropped at the time of publication. The Committee noted, however, that “accredited correspondent” meant the ban was limited to individuals “formally authorized by contract or issuance of press credentials to represent themselves as correspondents” and that non-contract workers who did not receive press credentials, such as stringers or freelancers, were not included.

Here is what congressional law (National Security Act of 1947) has to say about domestic CIA activities (clause from SEC. 104A. (50 U.S.C. 3036):

RESPONSIBILITIES.—The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency shall—

(1) collect intelligence through human sources and by other appropriate means, except that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency shall have no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions;

(2) correlate and evaluate intelligence related to the national security and provide appropriate dissemination of such intelligence;

(3) provide overall direction for and coordination of the collection of national intelligence outside the United States through human sources by elements of the intelligence community authorized to undertake such collection and, in coordination with other departments, agencies, or elements of the United States Government which are authorized to undertake such collection, ensure that the most effective use is made of resources and that appropriate account is taken of the risks to the United States and those involved in such collection; and

(4) perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the President or the Director of National Intelligence may direct. 

So while “internal security functions” were specifically prohibited by Congressional legislation, Congress provided the administrative state and the Executive (President) a back door to authorize the CIA do pretty much whatever they want it to do.

The American Civil Liberties Union followed up on the related issue of domestic CIA spying in a 2015 investigation and report titled “New Docs Raise Questions About CIA Spying Here at Home.” While links to many of the key cited documents have been deleted by today’s ACLU, they can be found at other sources such as the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. While the article is from 2015, subsequent executive actions and legislation only appear to have increased the authority of the intelligence community including the CIA to engage in domestic surveillance (directly and via the FBI), censorship, and propaganda activities.

The current debate about government surveillance has largely overlooked the CIA, possibly because we know little about the agency’s activities within the United States. While the relevant legal authorities governing the CIA, including Executive Order 12333, set out the CIA’s mandate, they do so in broad terms. Beyond the generalities in EO 12333 and other laws, the public has had few opportunities to examine the rules governing the CIA’s activities.

The Most Important Surveillance Order We Know Almost Nothing About

But we know more today than we did a few weeks ago. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the CIA has released a slew of documents concerning CIA surveillance under EO 12333. (The Justice Department has also recently released a set of documents related to the executive order.)

The national debate in the 1970s about the proper limits of US government spying on its own citizens was, to a large extent, about the CIA. In the wake of the Watergate scandal and news stories about other illegal CIA activity, President Gerald Ford and Congress launched investigations into the full range of CIA misdeeds — from domestic spying programs and infiltration of leftist organizations to experimentation on non-consenting human subjects and attempts to assassinate foreign leaders.

Although the CIA’s legal authority to spy on Americans was very narrow, these investigative committees — chaired by Sen. Frank Church, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and Rep. Otis Pike — discovered that the CIA had engaged in a massive domestic spying project, “Operation CHAOS,” which targeted anti-war activists and political dissenters. The committee reports also revealed that, for more than 20 years, the CIA had indiscriminately intercepted and opened hundreds of thousands of Americans’ letters. In addition to documenting the intelligence agencies’ extensive violations of the law, the Church Committee concluded that the constitutional system of checks and balances “has not adequately controlled intelligence activities.“

The Church Committee’s conclusion — at core, an admonition — still resonates today. While the documents that the CIA has released are heavily redacted, raising more questions than they answer, they strongly suggest that the agency’s domestic activities are extensive.

Some highlights from the documents:

A key CIA regulation — titled “AR 2-2” — governs the conduct of the CIA’s activities, which include domestic intelligence collection.

AR 2-2, which has never been publicly released before, includes rules governing a wide range of activities, including surveillance of US persons, human experimentation, contracts with academic institutions, relations with journalists and staff of US news media, and relations with clergy and missionaries.

Several annexes to AR 2-2 contain the agency’s EO 12333 implementing procedures. For example, Annex A, “Guidance for CIA Activities Outside the United States,” sets forth the procedures that apply to CIA activity directed toward US citizens and permanent residents who are abroad. Much of the relevant information is redacted. Annex F, “Procedures Governing Conduct and Coordination by CIA and DEA of Narcotics Activities Abroad,” is similarly redacted in key sections, including the section discussing the agencies’ “Specific Agreement Concerning Electronic Surveillance.”

The documents indicate that the CIA engages in a wide array of domestic activity, often in conjunction with the FBI.

Domestically, the CIA’s spying is governed by Annex B to AR 2-2, “Guidance for CIA Activities Within the United States.” This document explains:

Although EO 12333, AR 2-2, and Annex B prohibit the agency from engaging in electronic surveillance within the United States, the CIA can nevertheless ask the FBI to do its bidding:

Annex B and the CIA-FBI memorandum of understanding comport with past reporting that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorized the FBI to work with the CIA to collect Americans’ financial records in bulk under Patriot Act Section 215.

In addition, Annex B explains that the CIA may “use a monitoring device within the United States under circumstances in which a warrant would not be required for law enforcement purposes if the CIA General Counsel concurs.”

But what qualifies as a “monitoring device?” And how exactly does monitoring differ from “electronic surveillance,” which the CIA is prohibited from doing domestically? We don’t know. In the newly released documents, the definition of “monitoring” (as distinct from “electronic surveillance”) is redacted.​

The CIA also turned over several years’ worth of annual reports to Congress about the agency’s activities under EO 12333. These reports begin by discussing “Intelligence Activities Conducted by CIA Within the United States.” This header is followed by dozens of entirely redacted pages — once again suggesting that the agency is engaged in a significant amount of intelligence activity here at home. ​

The rules for the handling of Americans’ information are so complex that the CIA struggled to apply them properly.

A 2002 report by the CIA inspector general, “Intelligence Activity Assessment: Compliance with Executive Order 12333: The Use of [redacted] Collection [redacted] from 1995–2000,” observed “a general and widespread lack of understanding” within the CIA of the rules governing the retention and sharing of US citizens’ and permanent residents’ information. In particular, the OIG found that few managers or other officers “could accurately state the appropriate procedures for retaining or disseminating U.S. person information,” and it concluded that these rules were “not being applied consistently” by the agency.

It benefits our government for people to believe that the US Government does not use propaganda against its own people, but nothing could be further from the truth. Furthermore, through the reciprocal spying and intelligence sharing terms and conditions of the Five Eyes Alliance (FVEY), any barriers to domestic spying and propaganda activities that one of the FVEY intelligence agencies encounters can be circumvented by working with another member.

By combining propaganda with techniques such as neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, bots, big data, and controlled messaging, do “we the people” even have individual beliefs, or is everything we think manipulated? If that is the case, what does this mean for democracy?

When a government decides to wage PsyWar on its own citizens, then the fundamentals and concepts of free agency, sovereignty, voting integrity and representative democracy become irrelevant.

If we wish to remain independent thinkers and preserve our ability to learn, think, and debate issues we must become warriors in the fight against propaganda.

A Real World Example of How the USG Propaganda System Works to Control

Johns Hopkins University, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the CDC, The UN, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the CIA as well as world leaders and mainstream media (MSM), held a series of Pandemic war games that occurred over the span of decades. The outcome of these exercises usually ended with the conclusion that there is a need to control populations in the case of a biothreat, during which behavioral modification and Psyops techniques would be used to enforce cooperation from the populace.

Even now, one can wander over to the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security website and see their current projects include an analysis of “anti-misinformation actions,’“ which they call the “Environment of Misinformation.” In March 2021, this center published a report entitled “National Priorities to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation for COVID-19 and Future Public Health Threats: A Call for a National Strategy.” In that report, they laid out some of the plans that governments across the world enacted during COVID-19.

“Ensure a whole-of-nation response through multisector and multiagency collaboration

  • Ensure multisector collaboration in the development of a national strategy to combat public health misinformation through collective planning with social media, news media, government, national security officials, public health officials, scientists, the public, and others.

National Priorities to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation for COVID-19 and Future Public Health Threats: A Call for a National Strategy

  • Increase coordination across the range of government stakeholders and conduct a cross-governmental analysis of efforts and responsibilities for managing health-related misinformation and disinformation in order to streamline and organize efforts. Key US agencies include the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Homeland Security as well as intelligence agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
  • Encourage active, transparent, nonpartisan intervention from social media and news media companies to identify and remove, control the spread of, and curtail generators of false information.”

Note the first sentence advocates both a “whole-of-nation” and “multiagency” response and collaboration. That would include the Department of Defense as well as all branches of US intelligence. The next section specifically mentions the DoD and intelligence becoming more involved in combating misinformation and disinformation, not only for COVID-19 but for FUTURE public health threats.

The truth is that world leaders, governments, Big Media, Big Pharma, social media, and tech giants are already busy planning out the next pandemic response. In fact, they are again weaponizing masks (and even banking!), and collecting up COVID case counts by more and more testing to ramp up the sales and marketing (eg propaganda) for new “booster” vaccines. This planning includes all of our intelligence agencies. In fact, on the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security webpage titled “CURRENT PROJECTS, the Working Group on Readying Populations for COVID-19 Vaccine” lists two of its working group members as IQT (In-Q-Tel), which is the CIA’s private investment firm. This shows just how completely the CIA has captured the public health complex. This group’s mission includes “an agenda to guide the aggregation, generation, and translation of research about the social, behavioral, and communication challenges anticipated with COVID-19 vaccine.” This is evidence that the CIA, through IQT, is involved in working with non-profit agencies to create propaganda campaigns against the American people.

So, isn’t it time for those of us who believe there is a better way to live than to be controlled, to plan out responses and measures to combat all these draconian measures? To develop countermeasures that could be utilized to a bio-threat that do not employ censorship, propaganda, mandates, and behavioral modification techniques. You know, the old-fashioned way where the government relies on people to use their own critical thinking skills to assess what is best for themselves and their families after getting and examining all the relevant information available.

A collective group discussion concerning both how “we” were and are still being controlled, nudged, censored and lied to during the COVID-19 pandemic is in order. Because these efforts to control through behavioral modification and propaganda are only increasing throughout our digital world.

Truth and Propaganda:

Stella Morabito, author of the article “Truth or Propaganda” defines 10 questions one should ask to distinguish between truth and propaganda. A “yes” answer to any of these questions should make one wary of the source of the information.

1.     Is your natural curiosity being suppressed? Whether the debate is about global warming or gender-neutral bathrooms, or anything else, if you have a nagging question or concern that is being cut off or shouted down, this is a clear sign you are being force-fed propaganda.

2.     Are you being threatened with slurs or labels? Might you risk being called “bigot” or “hater” or “flat-earther” or worse if you simply express a personal preference? If so, you are in propaganda territory. Name-calling serves two purposes for propagandists: (1) it shuts down free inquiry and debate, and (2) it psychologically manipulates you through a fear of being “tarred-and-feathered.”

3.     Do you feel you will be ostracized if you ask a question or express a politically incorrect view? The threat of ostracism is probably the oldest manipulative trick in aid of mind control. We are hardwired from infancy to avoid social isolation, which is why peer pressure is such a powerful force. This is also why solitary confinement is among the most dreaded of punishments. Political correctness depends on inciting the primal human fear of loneliness.

4.     Do you notice a “herd effect” as people shift their opinions to adapt to a politically correct opinion? When others don’t feel comfortable having a real conversation with you, you’re living in a propaganda stew. Perhaps you see a classmate whom you were able to chat with earlier in the year but who has “evolved” with the program to the point that you can’t talk earnestly anymore. Maybe you notice how another classmate is excessively tentative in her speech and tone, a precautionary measure to avoid saying something “unacceptable.”

5.     Are you being pigeonholed as a result of your question or opinion? Today’s propaganda often deconstructs your humanity by way of a scorecard that rates your level of privilege or oppression, based on skin color, class, family make-up, sexuality, “gender identity,” and a whole host of “intersectionality” components. Sadly, officials who promote “diversity and equality” are trained to ignore your humanity as an integrated individual so they can view you as a composite of bits and pieces of identity politics.

6.     Do you sense that if you express ideas freely, you will be labeled a nutcase? Do you sense relational aggression at play? Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse that is used by wife-beaters as well as cult leaders. It is a natural byproduct of unchecked propaganda, too. The tactics of gaslighting are basically twofold. First, to get you to doubt your sanity, or at least get you to think you are utterly alone in your perceptions of the world. (Consider the constant use of the term phobia by today’s propagandists.) Second, gaslighters make a point of regulating and controlling the personal relationships of their victims so they feel even more isolated and dependent.

7.     Will others be “triggered” by your opinion? If so, you are likely in a propaganda pocket: an “inquiry-free zone.” Emotional maturity has a lot to do with an individual’s ability to adapt. But propagandists see such maturity as a threat to their agendas. In fact, anything that enhances friendship or real understanding gets in the way of propaganda. Those who are “triggered” by a different opinion—who shut down emotionally by it—tend to be both the victims and the purveyors of propaganda.

8.     Are you expected to trade in reality to prop up somebody’s illusion? One common example is the requirement that you adhere to pronoun protocols, even those that insist you refer to an individual with the plural pronouns they and them. This is a prime example of propaganda messing with your mind by messing with everybody’s language. No common language, no common reality, no communication. People end up even more isolated, unmoored in alternative realities that destabilize a sense of self.

9.     Are you tempted to self-censor to avoid social punishment? Or are you tempted to falsify what you believe to gain social rewards? These two reactions build something called a “spiral of silence” that facilitates propaganda by creating the illusion of an opinion shift. It separates and isolates those who hold politically incorrect opinions by inducing them—through fear of social rejection—to engage in self-censorship or to pretend to be on board with the program.

10.  Do you sometimes feel like you’re stuck in a cult? Unchecked propaganda is cultlike in nature because it suppresses free inquiry and pushes utter conformity of thought. It also incorporates a lot of features of cults, including the use of deception, psychological manipulation, behavior modification, mind-hacking, divide-and-conquer tactics, social polarization, relational aggression, gaslighting, language control, and much more.”

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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Biden Announces $100 Million In Aid To Gaza Days After Hamas Stole Humanitarian Supplies thumbnail

Biden Announces $100 Million In Aid To Gaza Days After Hamas Stole Humanitarian Supplies

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By Reagan Reese

Pesident Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the United States will be sending $100 million in aid to the West Bank and Gaza just days after the terrorist organization Hamas stole humanitarian supplies.

Biden, during his visit to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to the country while they are at war with Hamas. The aid package announced by Biden comes after the United Nations organization reported that its fuel and medical supplies meant for Palestinian refugees were reportedly stolen by Hamas, according to the Times of Israel. (RELATED: Biden Says It Would Be ‘Big Mistake’ For Israel To Occupy Gaza, Hamas Doesn’t Represent Palestinians)

“Today I am also announcing $100 million in new U.S. funding for humanitarian assistance in both Gaza and the West Bank,” Biden said. “This money will support more than one million displaced in the conflict affecting Palestinians including emergency needs in Gaza.”

The president said he spoke with the Israeli cabinet and asked them to ensure that the humanitarian aid meant for Gaza civilians reached them rather than Hamas.

“Let me be clear, if Hamas diverts or steals the assistance, they will have demonstrated once again that they have no concern for the welfare of the Palestinian people, and it will end,” Biden said. “As a practical matter, it will stop the international community from being able to provide this aid.

Biden announces $100M in humanitarian aid in Gaza and West Bank. @mattriversabc: “On Israel’s part that would entail allowing aid to go into Gaza and presumably would entail Israel stopping the air strikes that have pummeled the southern part of Gaza near the Egyptian Border.”

The president included that the United States will make sure that Israel has what it needs to continue its war against Hamas and will continue to fund the Iron Dome, the country’s missile defense system.

Biden’s trip was originally supposed to include a visit to Jordan to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Majesty King Abdullah II, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to discuss humanitarian aid to Gaza. The trip was cancelled, however, after Gaza hospital was bombed and the perpetrator has not yet been confirmed.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia commons

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Former CIA Boss Has No Regrets About Rigging 2020 With Hunter Biden Laptop Lies thumbnail

Former CIA Boss Has No Regrets About Rigging 2020 With Hunter Biden Laptop Lies

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By Joy Pullmann

Of course, former CIA Director Leon Panetta is not sorry. Lying to Americans and the press works, baby.

President Obama’s CIA Director Leon Panetta said, “No, I don’t have any regrets,” when Fox News’ Bret Baier asked him Friday about signing an October 2020 letter that pushed misinformation that affected the presidential election. The letter signed by 51 former top U.S. intelligence officials falsely claimed a Hunter Biden laptop containing evidence of Biden family corruption instead looked like foreign “disinformation.”

Polling indicatesif Joe Biden voters had learned of the laptop’s contents before they cast their votes in 2020, 17 percent would have changed their votes. That’s enough to have reversed the presidential results.

Panetta excused using his intelligence credentials to influence a presidential election by telling Baier, “Well, Bret, look, I was extremely concerned about, uh, Russian, uh, interference and misinformation. And we all know intelligence agencies discovered that Russia had continued to push disinformation across the board. And my concern was to kind of alert the public to be aware that these disinformation efforts went on. And frankly, I haven’t seen any evidence from any intelligence agency that that was not the case.”

Earlier this year, Special Counsel John Durham published a 316-page report showing the Russian disinformation hype that consumed the Donald Trump presidency was a Democrat Party information operation fed to willing U.S. intelligence agencies based on manufactured falsehoods. Earlier reporting and investigations had already demonstrated this reality for years.

Durham documented that President Obama, Joe Biden, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew on Aug. 3, 2016, about the Clinton campaign’s plans to run the Russian disinformation operation. They all knew it was a hoax before intelligence officials they oversaw started seeding the hoax in complicit media through carefully selected leaks. That makes the Russian collusion narrative U.S. government disinformation. And Panetta is still running it.

Brennan also signed the Hunter Biden disinformation letter Panetta signed and now refuses to disavow. The Federalist exclusively reported earlier this year that CIA officials recruited letter signatories and the CIA approved it before its publication. While a senior adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, former Obama national security official and current U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also reached out to sitting CIA officials to recruit letter signatories and support.

Yet when Baier pushed him on the letter one last time, Panetta responded by trying to cover up one discredited, government-laundered disinformation operation with another one: “No, I don’t have any regrets about not trusting the Russians.”

Of course he’s not sorry. Lying to Americans and the press works, baby. Not one Democrat or intelligence official has had to pay a serious price for weaponizing U.S. intelligence agencies into partisan actors, a harbinger of totalitarianism. Why would they regret what works so well? Worst-case scenario, they may have to endure hearings in Congress that never result in firings, loss of funds, or restrictions on their powers.

Panetta surely knows that intelligence actors like him have massive control over what Americans know about public affairs, and thus election results. They can lie until the cows come home, and nobody whose voice is allowed to be heard will call them on it. It’s this dynamic that so conveniently boosts their power.

A vast array of often government-funded “nonprofit” intelligence agency cutouts flag narratives that damage Democrats and pressure internet monopolies to turn down their volume. That’s the subject of a massive First Amendment case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Just scratch the surface of any of these third-party information filters to see that they work to censor true and fairly debatable ideas. This includes censoring facts that show Panetta and those like him are far bigger purveyors of misinformation and disinformation than right-wing media, onto whom they project their own wickedness. For example, just this week the narrative-sifting tech organization VineSight flagged these themes as “misinformation or toxic narratives”:

  • “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue”
  • “The 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024”
  • “Republicans should focus on Democrats not stealing the 2024 election”
  • and “Democrats are trying to interfere with the election.”

So-called fact-checkers use VineSight’s AI-combed information to choke the spread of ideas online, which surely will happen to this very article. Notably, VineSight’s “report” on “misinformation” flagged a tweet from Rep. Jim Jordan, who days later won the Republican conference vote for House speaker: “What’s happening in New York to President Trump with Alvin Bragg and Letitia James is election interference. Pure and simple.”

This web of entities ultimately helps U.S. intelligence agencies manipulate the elected officials who are supposed to oversee them, and the voters who are supposed to oversee those elected officials. If our nation’s affairs aren’t actually run by elected officials, but intelligence agencies who selectively inform them into everything from wars to overthrowing governments, we’re not a democracy, folks.

We’re more than a decade into publicly available evidence of this situation now, and Congress is still “investigating.” Not just the Spygate saga but also the Hunter Biden laptop saga involves multiple uses of federal spy agency power to rig elections for Democrats. Remember, Obama was able to spy on his party’s top political opponent and that opponent’s personal attorney due to the false pretexts the FBI fed a secret court.

Besides the former intel officials’ letter, the FBI also lied to internet monopolies about the laptop’s authenticity, according to lawsuit disclosures and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This caused internet monopolies to censor non-leftist news sources when they reported on the laptop before the 2020 election.

Nearly a year-and-a-half later, after the damage was done, The New York Times finally reported, likely without government censure, that it had verified the laptop was authentic. That once again confirmed multiple former and current U.S. intelligence personnel had lied in a transparent attempt to influence election results.

The timeline of the FBI’s knowledge of the laptop indicates the FBI used its “investigation” as a coverup on behalf of the Bidens, not an investigation, for years. That laptop is now a key trove of evidence in congressional investigations into Biden family members accepting massive bribes for access to first the vice president and now the president of the United States.

Yes, we’re getting an impeachment inquiry out of this, but while the inquiry shakes out, Democrats have the president’s power, and boy are they using it. It might even be convenient for Democrats to ditch a Biden with horrifically low approval ratings who can’t speak coherently for a fresh tyrant like California Gov. Gavin Newsom that the media can go on to lacquer with lies half of the populace will believe because Democrats say so.

While U.S. intelligence is bringing its foreign election-rigging operations stateside, it’s failing to identify conflicts that could launch World War III. There is no justification for any elected official to allow this — except if they’re part of the election protection racket.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: youtube screen shot of Fox News by The Federalist

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