Derrick Wilburn, a black man and descendant of slaves, speaks on the subject of CRT

Posted on August 20, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

FEDERALIST
Colorado School Board Bans Critical Race Theory After Black Father’s Fiery Speech
by Gabe Kaminsky
August 20, 2021

A school board in Colorado Springs, Colorado, banned critical race theory from being taught after a black father gave a speech describing how racism would “by and large be dead” in the United States if institutions were not “keeping it on life support.” “ I can think of nothing more damaging to a society than to tell a baby born today that she has grievances against another baby born today, simply because of what their ancestors may have done two centuries ago.”…“Putting critical theory into our classrooms is not combating racism. It’s fanning the flames of what little embers are left. I encourage you to support this resolution. Let racism die the death it deserves.” READ MORE

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“As the large blazes began rapidly spreading towards nearby towns on Monday afternoon, emergency forces began evacuating hundreds of residents from Shoeva, Givat Ye’arim, Kibbutz Tzova, Ein Rafa and Ein Nakuba”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
Israel requests international aid amid largest fire since Carmel blaze
by Lahav Harkov
August 17, 2021

Israel is requesting international aid to combat a massive wildfire that continued to spread on multiple fronts west of Jerusalem for a second day on Monday, forcing hundreds of local residents to evacuate their homes. Fire Chief Insp.-Gen. Dedi Simchi stressed in a statement to the press on Monday evening that the fire, which has burned nearly 20,000 dunams of land so far, is on the scale of the Carmel Fire which burned large swaths of land in northern Israel in 2010, killing 44 people. READ MORE

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Israel—like the US—“not immune to the urge to cut and run”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Catastrophe in Afghanistan — for Afghans, Israel, the region… and for America
by David Horovitz
August 19, 2021

…We should note that Israel has twice in recent decades carried out its own hasty military withdrawals on our very own doorstep, under circumstances and with consequences it has to some extent lived to regret. We left southern Lebanon unilaterally in 2000, under public pressure amid the relentless loss of soldiers’ lives in the Security Zone, and were plunged into the Second Lebanon War six years later. Now we face a full-fledged Hezbollah army on that front. We left Gaza unilaterally in 2005, choosing neither to negotiate the pullout with the Palestinian Authority nor to heed the warnings that emboldened terror groups, claiming vindication, would fill the vacuum. Now we face endless friction and intermittent bloody conflict with Hamas. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL Michael Oren: The Taliban win forces the question: What’s next for the US? Will America bounce back from this debacle by reclaiming its role of peacemaker or will it continue isolationist policies, and pave a path for Iranian hegemony?

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Politics | Leave a comment

“What is happening in Afghanistan will deepen the impression among Arab governments that they cannot rely on the United States to protect their security as they used to”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Taliban triumph in Afghanistan has Arab states and Israel hedging dependence on US
by Ariel Ben Solomon
August 19, 2021

The Taliban’s quick takeover of Afghanistan has Middle Eastern countries deeply concerned about their dependence on the U.S. security umbrella. Elliott Abrams, who served as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela during the Donald Trump administration, told JNS that Arab states could be expected to increase security cooperation and consultation with Israel — “though we will not see most of it.” Asked how this could influence Iran’s thinking, Abrams replied, “I believe that Iran will have concluded the Biden team is not first-rate and wants to avoid confrontations, so Iran is more likely to test them now than it was six months ago.” READ MORE

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“Anti-Zionist activist and writer Peter Beinart recently revealed that he’d spoken privately to Ben and Jerry’s executives and encouraged their efforts on boycott decision”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

FREE BEACON
Former Ben and Jerry’s Employee Says Anti-Israel Activist Spoke to Board Ahead of Boycott Decision
by Alana Goodman
August 11, 2021

A former longtime Ben & Jerry’s employee said the company’s decision to boycott Israel was based on advice from a BDS activist who was expelled from Israel for spearheading economic pressure campaigns against the Jewish state. Susannah Levin, who spent 21 years as a freelance graphic designer for Ben & Jerry’s before resigning last month over the company’s decision to halt its sales in the West Bank, said the company’s board consulted with Human Rights Watch’s Israel-Palestine director Omar Shakir, an advocate of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement who accused the Jewish state of “crimes against humanity.” READ MORE

JNS Ex-Ben & Jerry’s employee says company spoke to anti-Israel activist pre-boycott Omar Shakir, who has been accused of anti-Semitism and ties with terrorism, penned a report in April that accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”

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“Trump administration had warned that further Chinese involvement in big infrastructure projects, like the new port in Haifa, could damage the U.S.-Israel security relationship”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

AXIOS
CIA director raised China concerns with Israeli prime minister
by Barak Ravid
August 18, 2021

While visiting Israel last week, CIA director Bill Burns told Prime Minister Naftali Bennett the U.S. was concerned about Chinese investments in Israel, particularly in the tech sector, and involvement in major infrastructure projects, Israeli officials tell Axios. That’s the highest level at which the Biden administration has raised an issue that previously became a rare point of contention between the Trump and Netanyahu governments. READ MORE

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“A caricature of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken published by the state-owned Xinhua news agency, which serves as the Chinese regime’s mouthpiece, has been slammed for its explicit use of antisemitic stereotypes”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
Chinese Regime’s Mouthpiece Slammed for ‘Despicable’ Antisemitic Caricature of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
by Staff
August 13, 2021

…A report about a meeting in Kuwait between Blinken and World Health Organization (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the end of July was accompanied by a lurid cartoon depicting the Secretary of State as devil-horned and clutching a report about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The illustration depicted Blinken towering over Ghebreyesus and wearing a long cape decorated with a US flag, his face distinguished by the outsized “Jewish” nose favored by antisemitic caricaturists down the centuries. READ MORE

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“While the law does not mention Jews, the Holocaust or World War II, it ensures that an administrative decision rendered more than 30 years ago could no longer be challenged”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Will Polish anti-restitution law permanently harm ties with Israel, Jewish community?
by Dmitriy Shapiro, JNS and ILH Staff
August 18, 2021

Despite international pressure to veto the bill, Polish President Andrzej Duda signed a bill passed by the Polish legislature on Aug. 14 that would prevent individuals with property seized by either the Nazis during World War II or the post-War Communist government from having it returned. The bill effectively ends the chances that Poland’s Holocaust survivors and their descendants from receiving restitution by filing claims to reinstate their confiscated property, including those who are currently in court seeking restitution. The action, the president wrote in a statement after signing the bill, would end decades of uncertainty for Polish people over whether the property individuals occupied have to be returned to its pre-Communist or even pre-war owners. READ MORE

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Twenty years, $2 trillion, and the most powerful army in the world were no match for the one thing the Taliban has—and that current American leadership has lost

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Assabiya Wins Every Time
by Lee Smith
August 18, 2021

Democrats and Republicans are right to blame each other for the fall of Kabul. It’s a loss for America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment as a whole. For nearly two decades Washington sent thousands of Americans to their deaths and spent trillions of taxpayer dollars to wage a strategically pointless war. And because both sides of the political divide should be held accountable, military as well as civilian officials, too, it is unlikely that anyone ever will be. Since everyone is to blame, holding anyone accountable implicates everyone. READ MORE

THE HILL Taliban commander rules out democracy in Afghanistan: ‘It is Sharia law and that is it’ A Taliban commander said Thursday that Afghanistan will not become a democracy and will be strictly run under Sharia law.

KUSI NEWS Lara Logan analyzes collapse of Afghanistan, calls Biden’s exit ‘laughable’ Logan explained, “we don’t call it diplomacy when you’re dealing with a terrorist organization”…”We’re not talking about the fact that on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we’re putting the people responsible for that attack in power in Afghanistan. We’re about to legitimize them, as the US government, and we’re going to give them aid, which comes from US taxpayers.”

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Fifty years ago this week, “President Richard Nixon unilaterally terminated the Bretton Woods system by declaring that the United States would no longer exchange dollars for gold”

Posted on August 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

AMERICAN PURPOSE
Fifty Years Ago: A Landmark Day in Economic History
by Michael Mandelbaum
August 13, 2021

Some dates live in the American collective memory: July 4, 1776, when representatives of the thirteen British colonies in North America declared their independence from the mother country; December 7, 1941—“a day that will live in infamy,” as Franklin Roosevelt called it—when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; and September 11, 2001, when the United States suffered the worst terrorist attacks in its history. August 15, 1971—fifty years ago this coming Sunday—does not have the same status, yet what took place on that day was, in its own way, as consequential for the United States and the world as were the events on those other, epochal dates. READ MORE

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