JUNE 19/20

A hardening of resistance on its fringes suggest China may have met the limits of its extra-territorial projections

ASIA TIMES

After years of China’s soft- and hard-power projection beyond its borders, it feels as if tensions are snapping on the country’s perimeters.

In the Himalayan foothills, where Chinese sensitivities are often tested by pro-Tibetan sentiment, Indian troops have been battling People’s Liberation Army troops stationed in disputed territory. In the South China Sea, where Beijing has been making territorial claims by creating artificial islands and seizing natural ones, the Philippines has reunited with the US to counter further Chinese expansion. And even further south, Australia’s substantial trade links with the world’s second-largest economy are at risk in what’s looking like another front in a new Cold War.

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PM Netanyahu’s hesitation about applying Israeli law to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley is clearly a product of the immense pressure he is under from every direction to shelve President Trump’s Middle East peace plan.

By Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM

Over the past week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has changed his mind countless times regarding how and when he will implement Israel’s sovereignty plan in Judea and Samaria in consonance with President Donald Trump’s vision for peace. Netanyahu’s vacillations are clearly a product of the immense pressure being exerted on him to cancel the plan to apply Israeli law to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley and turn his back on President Trump’s Middle East peace plan.

This is a shame. It is also absurd. When we consider the source of much of the pressure – and the reasons it is being exerted – it becomes glaringly clear that the critics and opponents must be ignored. Their actions are not being taken out of conviction so much as hostility or distress. Israel must cast aside their hectoring and pressure and implement the sovereignty plan with all due haste.
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A recent analysis by the Ministry of Intelligence Services suggests that international criticism of the initiative will wane after a short period of time and could even force the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

By Ariel Kahana, ISRAEL HAYOM

The community of Efrat in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc with the city of Bethlehem in the background | Photo: Reuters/Ronen Zvulun

A recent analysis by the Ministry of Intelligence Services determined that now is the best time to implement the sovereignty initiative in parts of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley. Additionally, ministry researchers don’t expect an outbreak of violence and said relations with Arab countries will return to normal in short order.

The position paper presented to Intelligence Services Minister Eli Cohen (Likud) and obtained by Israel Hayom, presented the advantages of the initiative.

“[The initiative] improves the starting conditions of future negotiations with the Palestinians for Israel and crystallizes the cost of Palestinian rejection of peace talks, and therefore could spur [the Palestinians] back to the negotiation table in an effort to halt additional phases,” the paper said.

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By Dr. Craig Luther,  FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE

BLACK LIVES MATTER has taken America by storm. Simply put, it is a radical Leftist outfit that seeks to replace capitalism with socialism, abolish the police (and let criminals out of jail), and looks to socialist Venezuela as a model. Historically, BLM’s antecedents reach back to the Black Panthers of the 1960s; in recent years it has drawn inspiration from the radical Occupy Wall Street movement.

The BLM movement was given added impetus by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Left mobilized upon Brown’s tragic death in 2014, BLM and other radical groups promoting the false narrative of “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”–supposedly the young man’s final words before he was, we were told, brutally gunned down by a racist white cop. Destructive and deadly riots ensued.

Of course, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” was One. Big. Lie. Every black witness who testified before the grand jury stated that Michael Brown had attempted to force his way into the officer’s police cruiser, assaulted the officer, and tried to grab his weapon. Looked at objectively, Mr Brown was a thug who, sadly, paid with his life for the terrible choices he made; even the Obama justice department could not come to a different conclusion.

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By Eric Mandel, THE HILL — 06/15/20

While America has been distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent unrest over racial divisions, emerging alliances are reshaping the Islamic world throughout the Middle East that could affect U.S. interests for years to come. Too many view the Muslim world only through the lens of Sunni v. Shiite, or Israeli v. Palestinian, and the developing alignments require the United States to continually analyze the region and look for opportunities to advance our interests, as our adversaries look for American weakness to advance theirs.

According to Middle East expert Jonathan Spyer, one new alliance of “three significant Muslim countries — Turkey, Pakistan and Malaysia — is a reflection of a shift in power in the Islamic world away from its traditional Arab center.” This is a triad that may be off the U.S. radar and whose potential importance is not appreciated in Washington.
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The case of Louis Shenker, expelled from UMass Amherst for wrongthink.

By Ziva Dahl, AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Goodell Hall at UMass Amherst, 2006 (Lion Hirth/Wikimedia Commons)

Students at American universities have long experienced public shaming and cyberbullying by their peers. Now their own faculty and administrators are attacking them.

Campus professors, administrators, and graduate student instructors publicly smeared UMass Amherst student Louis Shenker as a dangerous racist and falsely charged him with hate crimes to get him expelled from school, claiming that his “views are not the kind we want to cultivate at the University.”

Louis Shenker wouldn’t win a popularity contest on any progressive campus. He is Jewish, a conservative, an outspoken Zionist, and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump. Shenker vigorously advocates for his political opinions.

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June 8/20

DACA Decision Is Final Straw for Trump; POTUS Issues Unheard of SCOTUS Statement

By C. Douglas Golden, WESTERN JOURNAL

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled against the current president’s attempts to undo the prior president’s fiat.

In a 5-4 decision, the nation’s highest court ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an initiative that offered individuals who came to the United States as children legal protections against removal and allowed them to work in the country.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, claimed the Trump administration moved arbitrarily to end the program, saying it didn’t offer adequate justification for winding it down. Roberts was joined by the four liberal justices on the court: Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

“The dispute before the Court is not whether [the Department of Homeland Security] may rescind DACA. All parties agree that it may. The dispute is instead primarily about the procedure the agency followed in doing so,” Roberts’ ruling read.

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T. Belman.  While the total focus is on white colonialism and white privilege, No one mentions Islamic colonialism and Muslim privilege. As you know, Mohammed roared out of the Arabian Peninsala in the Seventh Century and conquered by brutal force and suppression, many countries which are today Islamic.  You can just imagine how they suppressed dissent and enforced conformity.  Even today, no one is allowed to leave the faith, on pain of death. Both the people of the Book (Christians and Jews) and the infidels (all others) are treated as second class citizens (dhimmis).

Any criticism of the white world today can be applied to the Islamic world ten times over.  I don’t buy this white guilt shit.

Any white privilege we have is due to our superior culture, philosophy and values.  They must be preserved and protected at all costs.

By Melanie Phillips

The experience of being an immigrant group and living as a minority in an often hostile culture is, of course, one that diaspora Jews know only too well.

There are obviously huge differences, though, between the Jewish and black experience. Yet one of the most important is overlooked.

In Britain and America, as we have seen over the past few weeks, a movement is under way to rewrite American and British history with the aim of changing the culture. The charge is that white society is endemically racist.

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In virtual briefings, Abdullah also tells congressional leaders that he has been attempting to convince the Palestinians to restart peace talks with Israel

By Eric Cortellessa, TOI

Jordanian King Abdullah II delivers a speech at the European Parliament on January 15, 2020 in Strasbourg, eastern France. (Frederick Florin/AFP)

WASHINGTON — Jordan’s king is warning congressional leaders that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to annex parts of the West Bank would strengthen Hamas and damage Israel’s ability to normalize relations with the rest of the region, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

King Abdullah II has been leading a lobbying campaign against Israeli plans to begin annexing West Bank settlements and the entire Jordan Valley under the Trump administration’s peace proposal, taking his case to US lawmakers in multiple teleconference meetings this week.

“He urged members to understand that annexation would affect the daily lives of Palestinians and that he feared that it would radicalize Palestinians and empower violent extremists. Hamas would benefit from annexation,” the Washington-based source told The Times of Israel.

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PA leader understands his people have no appetite for another intifada, and so is focusing his efforts on the global arena, hoping for statehood recognition

By AVI ISSACHAROFF, TOI Today, 9:26 am

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas puts on a face mask as he heads a leadership meeting at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah on May 19, 2020. (Alaa Badarneh/Pool Photo via AP)

Though Israel’s planned annexation of parts of the West Bank hasn’t happened yet, on the ground its tremors are already being felt.

The first victim of the fracas around annexation is the security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, halted last month. Though there are still some phone conversations between the parties, these are occurring less and less frequently.

The good news on this front is that the PA continues to work to thwart terror attacks, and isn’t attempting to block activities such as Jewish prayers at Joseph’s Tomb near Nablus.
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The Supreme Court endorses a double regulatory standard.

WSJ

Sometimes getting to the right policy via the wrong process does more harm than good. We fear that will be the case with Thursday’s unfortunate 5-4 Supreme Court decision to block President Trump’s rescission of Barack Obama’s order for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, widely known as Daca.

The decision in DHS v. University of California is being cheered because it offers a reprieve to the so-called Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. We support legalization for these 700,000 or so immigrants, as a matter of fairness and as contributors to American life. But this is an issue for Congress. The Court’s ruling on administrative-law grounds reads like a desired policy outcome in search of justifying legal logic, and it is likely to do long-term harm to the Constitution’s separation of powers and maybe to immigration reform.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the four liberals, as he so often has, in ruling that the Trump Administration hadn’t properly followed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The Court remanded the rescission back to DHS to rewrite with a formal rule-making with notice and comment period.
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By Michael E. Hammond, AMERICAN THINKER

Remember the heady days of June 2016, when Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump in every one of twelve major polls — by a margin of 10 points, according to ABC and the Washington Post?

Or August 2016, after the Khan imbroglio, when Clinton was beating Trump by 7 points, according to USA Today/Suffolk?  It was hardly an outlier.

Or October 2016, after the exposition of the “Billy Bush tapes,” when, coming up on the election, Clinton was beating Trump in virtually every poll?  Of the 78 polls started after September 21, 2016, 73 had Clinton winning, four had Trump winning, and one was a tie.

At the time, I said, in two articles that Trump would be the 45th president of the United States.  I explained why.

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Congress must discover what forces worked behind the scenes to incite, organize, support, even fund this violent seditious anarchy.

By Ken Abramowitz and John Sutz, INN 19/06/20 09:30

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was stopped by police in Minneapolis, MN because he allegedly attempted to use counterfeit money and appeared intoxicated.

Videos show that Mr. Floyd did not resist the arrest — yet he was brutally killed by a white police officer who held him down, with a knee to his neck for almost nine minutes, as he desperately pleaded, “I can’t breathe.”

The video of Mr. Floyd’s senseless killing went viral, and huge protests broke out shortly afterwards in numerous cites by outraged citizens. Initially, the protests were peaceful, They were depicted by participants as a reaction not just to the murder of Mr. Floyd, but also, to allegations of American police officers using excessive, unjustified violence against alleged criminals — especially black people — for many years.

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By Kurt Schlichter, TOWNHALL

It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.

The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.

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