By Pete Hoekstra, GATESTONE  •  April 27, 2023

• Two Chinese companies, Gotion and CATL, are on the verge of building two new battery manufacturing facilities in Michigan. These companies were lured by billions in state and local tax incentives and infrastructure investments, and the environmental requirements buried in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
• [T]he state of Michigan is making a big bet on electric vehicle (EV) technology in concert with the Chinese Communist Party. What could go wrong?
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T. Belman. Wikipedia has a very interesting record  of how the Declaration of Independence was written. Well worth reading. It includes this:

Paragraph 13 of the Declaration provides that the State of Israel would be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;. However, the Knesset maintains that the declaration is neither a law nor an ordinary legal document.^[33] The Supreme Court has ruled that the guarantees were merely guiding principles, and that the declaration is not a constitutional law making a practical ruling on the upholding or nullification of various ordinances and statutes.^[34]

This should be remembered when the Left argues for “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex;”

Just as Israel has moved on from Ben Gurion’s socialist vision, Israel  should free herself from Ben Gurion’s declaration committing us to “provide equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants”. Political rights should only be granted Jews.

By Elliot Kaufman, Wall St. Journal, April 25, 2023

How did Israel, a liberal cause at its founding 75 years ago, become right-wing? You could begin the tale in 1935, when a Jewish state was still far from assured. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of right-wing Zionism, despised by the socialist mainstream, made a promise and a threat to David Ben-Gurion, the Labor Zionist leader of Palestine’s Jewish community:

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T. Belman. This article is brilliant. The battle is not over judicial reform but over the kind of Israel the Israelis want.  He sees no room for compromise. Read the whole thing.

I grappled with this issue eighteen years ago in my article, Particularism Before Universalism  and made the case for “particularism.

“This raised howls of racism from some. But to deny your enemies certain rights is not racism, because it is not based on physical characteristics. It is self-defense, because it is based on their stated intention to destroy us. 

“Paul Eidelberg, in his important book Jewish Statesmanship, stands against a loyalty oath as the solution, “It is the height of impudence, of conceit and even of stupidity to grant equal political rights to Arabs in the expectation that they will renounce their religion and 1,300 year old civilization for a ballot box.”

I am a secular nationalist but have no confidence in liberal or reform Judaism to survive. Look at the Jews in America. They are doomed. But I do believe that way can be found that allows for the two Israels to coexist.

The massive protests preceding Israel’s 75th birthday have resurrected a century-old question that now demands an answer: : A Jewish state or state for Jews?

By Liel Leibovitz, TABLET

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“China Won’t let Russia lose”
“Zelensky asked Xi for a diplomatic call and Xi agreed.”

ENGLISH SUBTITLES: go to settings at bottom and then click on Subtitles/auto-translate/English.

My net assessment is that Israel is winning on all battlefronts, even though there are inevitable conflicts ahead. Neither the perpetual Palestinian conundrum, nor the Iranian threat to Israel, nor the unstable regional situation – truly cloud Israel’s future.

By  David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

As Israel miraculously approaches its 75th Independence Day, too many people seem to be focused on overhead clouds instead of the shining sun. Fixated on the troubles within Israel’s borders and the dangers beyond them instead of the brilliance bursting forth from the nation of Israel in realms galore.

To this I say, beshaat chedveta, chedveta! At times of rejoicing, rejoice! (And at times of sorrow, be sorrowful, beshaat avla, avla.) This was the response given by the fourth generation Mishnaic sage Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korcha to a non-Jew who challenged him with a theological question about God regretting the creation of the world.

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‘We should have made it a precondition for joining the govt, as Ben-Gvir did with laws he wanted passed.’

By Y Rabinovitz, INN

A prominent haredi political commentator, Avi Bloom, has congratulated National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for refusing to back down in the face of threats and insisting on representing the government at a Memorial Day ceremony. “One cannot exclude half the nation,” Bloom said, speaking on Radio Kol Chai.

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By Jerome Corsi, AM THINKER   26.4.23

Working through the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Biden administration is quietly but persistently implementing global warming (aka “climate change”) regulations that will force U.S. corporations to implement costly audit and control procedures for a wide range of CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions that result from their company’s operations.

We are witnessing a bureaucratically imposed restructuring of capitalism to comply with an ideologically driven Net Zero Emissions (NZE) policy. The restructuring aims to impose neo-Marxist “public good” restraints on private corporations through White House-issued executive orders and federal agency rulemaking, not congressional legislation. Suppose the SEC is successful in this effort. In that case, the U.S. will join the European Union (EU) in hamstringing U.S.-based corporations with profit-inhibiting accounting requirements certain to constrain profitability—all in pursuit of a demonization of CO2 that fact-based climate science fails to support. The impact on the Earth’s climate will be minimal, but the effects on the U.S. economy could be devastating.
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T. Belman. Kemp is focussed on the role played by the Russian Oligarchs in Ukraine War. In today’s video by Dr. Turley, he points to a  Study; US is an Oligarchy, not a Democracy, by two Princeton professors after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public policy issues.

“When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”

In the following 9 years the situation got demonstrably worse. In other words, the US is a democracy in name only.

by Richard Kemp, GATSTONE  •  April 26, 2023

• The media prefer to talk of mansions and opulent yachts rather than the corporate assets which continue to generate profits for the oligarch class that includes men like Alexei Miller, Igor Sechin, Roman Abramovich, Boris Rotenberg, Vladimir Potanin, Viatcheslav ‘Moshe’ Kantor, and Igor Shuvalov as well as their sons and daughters who occupy key banking and business roles too. All of these have been sanctioned and some of their assets frozen.
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Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
Santa Fe New Mexican, April 23, 2023,

The U.S. does not give foreign aid to Israel — the U.S. makes an annual investment in Israel, giving US taxpayers a return of several hundred percent.

While Israel is a grateful recipient of U.S. military systems, it also serves as a battle-tested, cost-effective laboratory for the U.S. defense and aerospace industries, (employing 3.5 million Americans). This enhances U.S. performance on the battlefield and the U.S. economy, national security and homeland security.
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by Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz, The Dispatch, April 21, 2023

https://schanzer.pundicity.com/26914/jordan-threat-to-the-middle-eastern-order

The month-long Muslim holiday of Ramadan ends today, and the Middle East appears to have narrowly averted a war. Just days ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran threatened to wipe the Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv off the map. This came in wake of statements by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei touting his coordination of terrorist groups that recently attacked Israel. Iran-backed violence was reported this month in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Jerusalem.

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By Ted Belman

Graph of Israel’s GDP from 1960 to 2021

On Israel’s 75 anniversary of it founding, I want to share some striking statistics with you.

According to this graph Israel’s GDP went from about $200 Billion in 2009 to $488 Billion in 2021. And the per capita GDP approximately doubled to $52,170 in 2021.

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Too few in the west grasp why this terrible toll continues to rise

MELANIE PHILLIPS

Israeli child hugs his father’s gravestone on Israel’s Remembrance Day (date unknown)

Today is Israel’s Remembrance Day. This is when the nation commemorates all those who have fallen in battle defending it against its attackers, and remembers also all those Israeli civilians who have been murdered by Arab terrorism.

Since the State of Israel was established in 1948, 24,213 men and women have been killed in military service and 4,255 men, women and children have been murdered in terror attacks. To put these losses in proportion, in 1948 Israel had 806,000 people; today, its population is approaching 10 million. In America, the population during that period has risen from around 130 million to 336 million, and in the UK from 50 million to 67 million.

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T. Belman.  Abed Amaala is a leader of a very large Bedouin clan in Jordan.  He spoke in both my 2017 conference and my 2022 Webinar on the Jordan Option.

Abed Amaala just tweeted:

King Abdullah II gives orders to stop contacts and security coordination between the Jordanian government and the Israeli government. And he gave his orders to activate and demonize the Jordanian-Israeli border and kidnap Israelis from inside Jordan and on the Jordanian-Israeli border to put pressure on Israel and release the Jordanian representative, Imad Al-Adwan, who was arrested in Israel. Terrorist cells inside Jordan affiliated with the Hashemite regime are ready to implement plans to kidnap Jews inside Jordan and on the Jordanian-Israeli border. A warning to the Israelis, and this is a dangerous thing, especially since it pushes the sons of the large Jordanian clans to sacrifice them in order to shuffle the political cards and save the Hashemite regime from falling. King Abdullah II is playing with fire and destroying the reputation of East Jordanians and Jordanian clans with terrorism.

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Bringing all of us down – and fast.

by Bruce Bawer, FPM

In The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, painted a grim picture of the damage done by university administrators desperate to diversify their student bodies at all costs. Identity studies programs, MacDonald made clear, exist not only because of the desire of progressive professors to promote postmodern ideology, but also because such courses, which involve little more than complaining about purported oppression and parroting inane jargon, are far easier for underqualified students to wrap their minds around than something serious and useful. In the same way, the introduction of “critical race studies” provides a handy route through law school for black kids who’d never be able to negotiate a traditional legal curriculum.

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By Stella Paul, AM THINKER

Hospitals should be places you can trust to provide comfort and healing when you’re most vulnerable. But that trust may have been shattered by brutal Covid protocols that critics claim turned many hospitals into hellscapes of systematic medical murder.

The victims’ stories have been muffled by the mainstream media, but they’re starting to break through. For one thing, lawsuits against three hospitals have been filed in California by 14 bereaved families who claim their loved ones were killed by a deadly protocol. Meanwhile, activist organizations like Protocol Kills, the FormerFedsGroup Freedom Foundation, and American Frontline Nurses are collecting and documenting stories from bereaved families about what happened to their loved ones when they entered a hospital hoping for healing and, instead, were led to bizarre and tortured deaths.
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In the end, perhaps the best definition of socialism is simply “The endless war against merit.”

By Victor Davis Hanson, AM GREATNESS

Sometimes when you are in the midst of a revolution, you do not even know it.

I doubt all the Germans who voted in National Socialism quite foresaw what quickly was to come. Those who overthrew the Bourbons or the Romanoffs had no real idea that they had sown the wind and were soon to reap the Jacobin and Bolshevik whirlwind.
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