Good morning, kids. Sad news, everyone. Hasan Bitmez, the Turkish MP who shrieked at his false god in attacking Israel, “you will not escape the wrath of Allah!” did not escape the wrath of actual, real God. Seems he did not survive the massive heart attack after uttering those famous last words and is now roasting somewhere in the Infernal Reaches. Here's hoping those who think like he did will soon be joining him. Have a nice eternity.
A menorah set up for Hanukkah at Oakland’s Lake Merritt, in the heart of the city, was vandalized early Wednesday, leading to condemnation by local officials — and a motor rally around the lake Wednesday night by Jews with menorahs on their cars.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, who had participated in a menorah-lighting ceremony at the site just days before, issued a statement blasting the “desecration and act of vandalism,” which appeared to be a blatant act of antisemitism.
Graffiti at the site read: “Your org is dying … We’re going to find you, you’re on F—ing alert a–hole.” Parts of the menorah were thrown into the lake. By Wednesday evening, the local Jewish community was out in force at Lake Merritt in a show of defiance, with a parade of cars circling the lake — many with illuminated menorahs on the roofs of their cars. . . An interfaith gathering Wednesday night dedicated a new menorah in a statement of defiance against hate, according to The Messenger.
While the reaction from the community is heartening, lest we forget this is Oakland, CA, an historic hotbed of racialist, Marxist-inspired violence stretching from the Black Panthers in the 60s all the way up to the present day. And most recently we had that repulsive performance from the Oakland City council that demanded a ceasefire in Gaza (i.e. the Jews must allow themselves to be slaughtered) and a rejection of a bill condemning Hamas.
We can, as I just did, blow it off and dismiss it as another blue Leftist shit-hole doing what comes natural to them, but it's living in the past. It's ignoring a pretty alarming indicator of just how far our society has utterly collapsed. America being as large and diverse (naturally) as it is, we've always been divided along geographic and cultural lines as well as separated by issues. But there was always a sense of unity that held us together, even during some of the most trying times.
No more. That went out the window, especially with the coming of Obama if not earlier (maybe the 10-year period starting with the high-tech lynching of Clarence Thomas bookended by planes slamming into the World Trade Center and the immediate aftermath). Here is just one alarming example of the probably irreparable divide that separates us:
A new poll by The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports found that nearly half of likely voters (47%) believe former President Donald Trump to be guilty of “crimes associated with an alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election.” If Trump is found guilty, Democrats in particular favor harsh punishments for Trump, as well as any members of the media “who also alleged that fraud tainted the election results.”
When prompted with, “Former president Donald Trump has been formally charged with crimes associated with an alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Do you think Donald Trump is guilty, not guilty, or are you unsure if he’s guilty or not guilty?”, 47% of likely voters answered “yes,” including 72% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans.
When asked what Trump’s punishment should be if he is found guilty of these crimes, 34% of likely voters said he should receive a fine, 5% said he should go to prison for less than one year, 16% said he should go to prison for one to five years, 16% said he should go to prison for more than five years, 7% said he should go to prison for life, 3% said he should be permanently exiled, and 2% said “death” should be his punishment. Eighteen percent (18%) selected “not sure."
A combined 18% of Democrats believe Trump should be imprisoned for life, permanently exiled, or put to death, compared to a combined 3% of Republicans.
. . . In addition, when prompted with, “If President Trump is found guilty of crimes associated with attempting to overturn the 2020 election, do you think members of the media who also alleged that fraud tainted the election results should be criminally punished as well?”, 48% of likely voters responded “yes,” 33% responded “no,” and 19% responded “not sure.” Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Democrats responded “yes,” compared to 43% of Republicans. . .
. . . When asked “what the punishment should be for those in the media who alleged that the 2020 election outcome was fraudulent,” 33% of likely voters said media members should receive a fine, 18% said they should be banned from public speaking, 4% said they should go to prison for less than one year, 7% said they should go to prison for more than one year, and 10% said they should receive “both [a] speech ban and prison.” Twenty-eight percent (28%) said they were “not sure.”
[Heartland's Jim Lakely, VP and Director of Communications states] “Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are integral to an open society. Unfortunately, a growing number of Americans do not believe that these fundamental freedoms should apply to controversial topics, such as questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. Incredibly, almost one in two self-identified Democrats believe that anyone in the media who raised concerns about the veracity of the previous presidential election should be punished through a ban on public speaking, prison time, or a combination of both.
“This is quite distressing and reflective of the increasing aversion to freedom of speech that is becoming all too common throughout our education system and society at large. If America is to remain the beacon of liberty, we must ensure that freedom of the press and freedom of speech remain robust and well outside the realm of partisan politics.”
CBD and I will have Jim Lakely on as our guest for the weekend edition of the podcast to discuss these alarming numbers, so BOLO in the sidebar for that on Saturday.
So, Donald Trump should be imprisoned or put to death for not only the false charges that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but in reality merely questioning the 2020 results, and real journalists silenced? Regardless of the fact that 2020 was indeed stolen, what this shows, as if we needed further proof, is that the First Amendment is now null and void if what one says does not comport with the memes, shibboleths and official story of the Junta and/or approved ethnic/electoral blocs.
How in God's name can anyone, regardless of their politics, not recoil in horror at the sheer gravity of what this poll indicates? Oops, here I am living inside my head and in the past. I was brought up and educated at a time when the schools were not yet complete brainwashing mills (though looking back, I realize that a number of inconvenient truths about Democrats and Leftists were left out of my social studies and history classes). For sure, they are now. That's how dimwitted, affirmative action cases like Claudine Gay, completely bereft of the brains, skills and aptitude to even wipe down a blackboard end up as president of Harvard.
It's also how students can cheer on babies being roasted alive as justified and righteous. Or this:
One in five young people eligible to vote in the 2024 presidential election told pollsters they agreed with the statement “the Holocaust is a myth.” Nearly one-quarter agreed with the statement “the Holocaust has been exaggerated.”
Notably, another 30 percent said to pollsters they “did not know” whether the Holocaust was a myth. Only eight percent of people 30 to 44 years old similarly called the Holocaust a myth. Almost one-third of young Americans at 28 percent believe that Jews “wield too much power” in the United States – five times more than those aged 65 and older. This includes 27 percent of black respondents, 19 percent of Hispanics, and 13 percent of white respondents.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper attributed the resurfacing of Antisemitism to “[a] generation brought up on social media—including and especially Tik Tok which leads to Shoah (Holocaust) denial and misappropriation of the Shoah, including by politicians—seems everyone is compared to Hitler. A generation with information glut but little perspective; no online librarian, no filters, little collective memory back to the 20th Century.”
Now, look at everything since the time of Christ up to the present day – 2,000 years of western, European civilization that brought us (albeit in fits and starts) out of the dark ages being systematically torn down and eradicated right in front of our eyes. And seemingly there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.
In the midst of the recent and nationwide demonstrators featuring students (and many others) denouncing Israel for its alleged crimes, Algemeiner reported that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.”
This wholly unstartling bit of information was gleaned from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley. Ron Hassner, who has the unenviable position of being Berkeley’s Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, conducted the survey, which began by presenting students with 18 issues and asking them to rate how interested they were in them.
These issues, according to Hassner, included “US-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5).” The survey went on from there to ask the respondents a “series of open-ended questions ‘on history, geography, and current affairs.’”
Forty-three percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.”
That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous leftist rubbish about the massive, outrageous, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. In all likelihood, they haven’t even heard of either one.
Why is that likely? Because they know virtually nothing regarding the conflict about which they claim to care very deeply: “Eighty-four percent of those in the most passionate cohort could not name the decade when Israel captured the West Bank, while 75 percent could not locate the Palestinian territories in question on a map.” Moreover, a full twenty-five percent of these programmed and propagandized student “placed the Palestinian Territories west of Lebanon, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.” Nor did just a few of them drive the Palestinians into the sea that they chant about wanting to fill with Israelis: “The class average for this blunder was 14%.”
The anger of the students toward Israel correlated with their ignorance of it: “the most passionate students were also the least likely to leave questions unanswered and ‘the most likely to offer a wild guess,’ marking them as the most overconfident respondents.” This pattern continually recurred “in all answers related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . . ”
. . . Yes. The students who are most passionate about hating Israel know the least about the conflict because they are suffering from a social contagion, not acting upon a reasoned conclusion. Those who actually study the issue, if they do so thoroughly and honestly, will come out supporting Israel. Our nation’s colleges and universities are doing their level best to prevent that outcome.
The Left’s Long March Through the Institutions has been a resounding success. Most of our nation’s colleges and universities, including — indeed, especially — those who enjoy an outsize influence on American politics and culture, have long ago ceased to be centers of higher learning and have become centers of far-Left indoctrination. Marxist sloganeering and agitprop masquerades as genuine intellectual inquiry, and so it’s no wonder that once American youth graduate from their once-renowned institutions, they happily take jobs in government or social media that involve stripping free speech and self-defense rights from Americans. They have been trained to be cogs in the machine. Their hatred of Israel is just one aspect of that indoctrination.
The more ignorant the respondent, the louder and more strident they are in their absolutism. Look at virtually any Democrat political and certainly any mid to high-level bureaucrat especially in Foggy Bottom, the CIA and DOJ. Then look to a certain house in the Kalorama section of D.C.
That last paragraph from Robert Spencer puts everything into frightening perspective. The piece-of-shit who resides in that Kalorama home once said "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Year Zero, here we come. Or here we are?
Have a good weekend.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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