Headlines

… The shooting of Obeid with a U.S.-made weapon was not an isolated incident. Human rights groups have recorded dozens of incidents of the Israeli military using U.S.-made weapons in unlawful ways to injure and kill Palestinian civilians. During weekly demonstrations in Gaza last spring, for example, Amnesty International documented Israeli snipers injuring unarmed Palestinian protesters using weapons manufactured by Remington, the U.S.’s second largest gun corporation. Taken together, witness testimony, video evidence and human-rights reports paint a picture of U.S. arms flowing to an Israeli army that recklessly uses live ammunition on civilians who pose little threat, in apparent violation of international law.

… In the eyes of social justice leftists, who are coming to dominate American liberalism’s thoughts, words, and deeds, [television commentator Tucker] Carlson is a racist for questioning diversity, but [New York Times journalist] Sarah Jeong is not a racist — is, indeed, an anti-racist — for repeatedly disparaging white people … In short, those people belonging to any non-white group cannot possibly be racist toward whites, while white Americans are unique in their capacity to be guilty of racism. But there’s more: whites are not only singularly capable of racism, but people unable, despite the most earnest, protracted efforts, to be innocent of it.

… He [Ron Unz] discovered and proved with hard data that Jews discriminate against you to a degree you could not even guess. While you queue at the front door of the Elites, they enter freely by the back door. Chances of a smart non-Jewish “white” American kid getting there are ten-fold lower than that of a Jew. There are ten times more smart non-Jewish white American kids than smart Jewish kids, but there are more Jewish students in the Ivy League than white non-Jews. The system is biased, and not in your favour … In actual words of Ron Unz, “Jews are enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000 percent greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance.”

A bet on Donald Trump for president may have seemed risky two years ago. But for billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the payout has been spectacular. The 85-year-old and his wife Miriam gave $82 million to Republicans and candidate Trump in 2016, and within two years watched their man execute two major Adelson asks: moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal … For the first time in recent presidential history, there is no pretense of peace with the Arabs … Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government just passed a nation-state law that declares Israel a Jewish state, one that affirms Jewish settlements and the right to self-determination for Israeli Jews only, codifying, in essence, that the 1.8 million Arabs living there are second-class citizens. This loads the dice before the games even begin.

In the new Russian World War II documentary “Ost Front” (“Eastern Front”) Nazis are painted with their own very human brush. Stitched together almost entirely from official WWII Nazi propaganda footage, audiences are treated to scenes of Nazis skating peacefully on a frozen river, reading letters from home, and passing around photos of their babies … The film was financed by Russia’s Ministry of Culture and screened last month at the Russian Documentary Film Festival in New York. Director Andrey Osipov scoured Russian archives, watching over 167 hours of German footage to cherry pick never-before-seen moments like these from the German campaign in the Soviet Union … The film, which presents beautifully-shot Nazi footage without any commentary, depicts the Germans in a sympathetic light.

A provocative ten-minute cartoon story about a “reformed,” anti-racist Adolf Hitler. After decades of quietly living in Argentina, he emerges to tell the world that he’s repudiating his racist views. To prove his sincerity and atone for his sins, he launches a dynamic anti-racist campaign that wins broad, enthusiastic support. Showing special concern for Israel, he persuades Israeli Jews to embrace a comprehensive program of love, diversity and tolerance. The predictable result is the rapid ethnic-religious transformation of the country, and its demise as a Jewish state.

President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw from Syria has been greeted, predictably, with an avalanche of condemnation … The argument that ISIS will reorganize and re-emerge as a result of the American withdrawal assumes that it is the 2,000 strong U.S. armed forces that are keeping it down, which is ridiculous. The best remedy against an ISIS recovery is to support a restored and re-unified Syria, which will have more than enough resources available to eliminate the last bits of the terrorist groups remaining in its territory … As for the United States, the military should only be deployed anywhere to defend the U.S. itself or vital interests. There is nothing like that at stake in Syria … How has American intervention in the Middle East and south and central Asia benefited the people in the countries that have been invaded or bombed? Not at all.

… The nation’s academic and legal elite try to sell us on the notion that men and women and people of all races should be proportionally represented in socio-economic characteristics … Inequalities and disparities are seen as probative of injustice. Thus, government must intervene, find the cause and engineer a policy or law to eliminate the injustice. Such a vision borders on lunacy … If there is a dominant feature of mankind, it’s that we differ significantly over a host of socio-economic characteristics by race, sex, ethnicity and nationality. The differences have little or nothing to do with any sort of social injustice or unfair treatment … Jews are not the only people taking more than their “fair share” of things. Blacks are 13 percent of the U.S. population but, in some seasons, have been as high as 84 percent of NBA players.

You may feel you are just not a maths person, or that you have a special gift for languages, but scientists have shown that the genes influencing numerical skills are the same ones that determine abilities in reading, arts and humanities. The study suggests that if you have an academic Achilles heel, environmental factors such as a teaching are more likely to be to blame. The findings add to growing evidence that school performance has a large heritable component, with around 60 percent of the differences in pupil’s GCSE results being explained by genetic factors. Although scientists are yet to pinpoint specific genes, the latest work, published in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that the same ones are involved across subjects.

Christmas is supposed to be a holiday for Christians, but this year Santa’s bringing a very special present for America’s Jews: the gift of seeing Ruth Bader Ginsburg the way we wish she looked. Opening in theaters December 25th, On the Basis of Sex tells the story of a plucky young RBG as she risks everything in a quest to become a nationally known feminist hero … The first is something I’ve written about before — the remarkable Jewish ability to be either white or “ethnic” depending on the needs of the moment. Jews don’t mind being seen as white; we just don’t want to be seen as white when it disadvantages us … Ginsburg is pushing an agenda that is near and dear to many (most?) American Jews. So, just as in the case of Holocaust films, there’s probably a perception that whites will more easily accept that agenda if they think it’s coming from one of their own.

… During Hollywood’s golden age — roughly from 1925 to 1965 — Jews rarely played Jews in the movies. Call it Hollywood’s Jewish Paradox … Even though the men who built Hollywood were largely Jews, they rarely produced movies about Jews. When they hired Jews, they rechristened them with gentile names — Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, Jacob Garfinkle was renamed John Garfield, and so on … In the infrequent case that there was a Jewish narrative, more often than not gentiles were cast as Jews … The postwar period was as fraught for Jewish Hollywood as the past two decades had been … The major Jewish roles for women in 1950s movies were Rebecca in “Ivanhoe,” Marjorie Morningstar and Anne Frank. Each was played by a Gentile actress, respectively Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood and Millie Perkins.

… The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews … As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day … I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.

A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the “true blue Jews” … Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said “The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture …

… The SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] was founded in 1971 … Today the SPLC’s list of 953 “Active Hate Groups” is an elaborate taxonomy of ill will … For decades, the hate list was a golden seal of disapproval, considered nonpartisan enough to be heeded by government agencies, police departments, corporations and journalists. But in recent years, as the list has swept up an increasing number of conservative activists … those conservatives have been fighting back … Along the way, the SPLC undermined its own credibility with a couple of blunders. In 2015, it apologized for listing Ben Carson as an extremist (though not on the hate list), saying the characterization was inaccurate. Then, this past June, the group paid $3.4 million to Muslim activist Maajid Nawaz and his Quilliam organization to settle a threatened lawsuit.

We all had a big shock this week when, seemingly out of the blue, President Trump announced that he was removing US troops from Syria, and would draw down half of the remaining US troops in Afghanistan. The president told us the troops were in Syria to fight ISIS, and with ISIS nearly gone the Syrians and their allies could finish the job. All of a sudden the Trump haters who for two years had been telling us that the president was dangerous because he might get us in a war, were telling us that the president is dangerous because he was getting us out of a war! … There was more than a little hypocrisy among the “never Trump” resistance over the president’s announcement.

… An unacknowledged cause of establishment frustration and rage at Trump’s pullout from Syria and Afghanistan is the growing realization that the post-Cold War new world order it has sought and still seeks to create is likely never to be. Indeed, it is now visibly slipping away. The American people refuse to subscribe to its global agenda. They will not pay the price in blood, treasure and distraction from our own troubles here at home. Trump’s victory was America’s way of saying, “Goodbye to all that!” And it is this dawning recognition that helps explain the establishment’s exasperation.

Pilgrims from around the world flocked to Bethlehem on Monday for what was believed to be the biblical West Bank city’s largest Christmas celebrations in years. Hundreds of locals and foreign visitors milled in Manger Square as bagpipe-playing Palestinian Scouts paraded past a giant Christmas tree. Crowds flooded the Church of the Nativity, venerated as the traditional site of Jesus’s birth, and waited to descend into the ancient grotto … Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the top Roman Catholic cleric in the Holy Land, entered Bethlehem after crossing an Israeli military checkpoint from Jerusalem. At a midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity, Pizzaballa addressed a packed house of worshippers and dignitaries that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

As Christians turn the focus on the town of Bethlehem ahead of Christmas, an Irish nun who has worked in the region for more than 20 years says to remember the local Christians are Palestinians suffering the same as their Muslim brothers and sisters.
“This may seem a very simplistic thing for me to say, but there are some elements of Christian churches, in the United States especially, who do not know or do not want to know that the local Christians are local Arabic-speaking Arab Christians: Local to the Palestinian territory and to Jerusalem and to the Church,” said Sister Bridget Tighe, the general director of Caritas Jerusalem, which serves as the humanitarian arm of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land.

Millions of French citizens have been violently demonstrating across France for the last month. They are known as the gilets jaunes, or “yellow jackets” … This is no ordinary manifestation. This is a genuine uprising by millions of city and country folk, young and old, crossing different ethnic and cultural lines … Think you know the real France? Here are a few facts that may shock you … There’s a real France, that few ever see. The France of the gilets jaunes. Or as we might label them, les deplorables. And they are in a state of fury at a ruling class who not only let the population suffer, while enjoying a life of luxury and wealth, but who also blame ordinary people for their own suffering.

… A new book has revealed the dark side of Europe’s liberation after the Second World War. Professor Mary Louise Roberts, from the University of Wisconsin, said within months of D-Day ordinary French women came to fear their American ‘liberators’. She tells how, by the summer of 1944, large numbers of women in Normandy filed complaints about rapes by US soldiers. And their arrival prompted a wave of crime all over France, with American soldiers caught committing robberies and petty thefts … The locals of Le Havre were shocked by the soldiers’ behaviour and wrote letters of protest to their mayor.

The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American GIs were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light. In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.” This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument …

… The Economist has analysed all international and civil wars since 1900, along with the belligerents’ wealth and degree of democratisation (assigning colonies to their own category). We counted all conflicts involving national armies in which at least 100 people per year were killed, excluding deaths from terrorism, massacres of civilians outside combat, starvation or disease. The data show a strong correlation between democracy and peace, with a few exceptions. (The United States has been quite bellicose, and its advanced democracy did not prevent a civil war in 1861 that claimed more American lives than any conflict since.) Moreover, the relationship does not seem to be linear. The countries most prone to wars appear to be neither autocracies nor full democracies, but rather countries in between. A similar finding applies to prosperity.

American military officials drew up a secret plan in 1930 for war against Britain in which Canada would be the main battleground. “Joint Plan Red,” as it was known, envisaged the elimination of Britain as a trading rival. Professor Floyd Rudmin of Queens University in Ontario, Canada, charges that the plan was a blueprint for an American invasion of Canada. According to the plan, the United States was prepared to invade Canada if political unrest brought on by Quebec’s secession threatened American access to Canada’s fresh water and cheap hydroelectric power. The war plan document was drawn up by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy in May 1930, when Herbert Hoover was President … Its aim was to dismember the British empire on the grounds of “competition and interference with American foreign trade.”

The Republican-controlled federal government is setting new records for blowing out the national debt, and substantial spending cuts don’t appear anywhere on the outgoing Congress’ radar … The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s monthly budget review for November 2018 found that that the first two months of fiscal year 2019 have yielded a deficit of $303 billion … The deficit for the month of November 2018 alone was $205 billion – over $66 billion more than the same time last year … Meanwhile, the national debt clock is still growing, with a total just south of $22 trillion as of Friday morning [Dec. 14]. Yet here we are at the end of the year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any meaningful effort to cut government spending in the upcoming spending package.

Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West? … What are the underlying causes of these 21st-century crises of Western democracies? Certainly, globalization, with its creation of ties among transnational elites at the expense of nation-states and their indigenous peoples is one. Capitals — Washington, London, Paris, Berlin — seem ever more distant from the countries they rule. Then there is demography. The native-born of almost all Western nations are aging, shrinking and dying. Death rates exceed birth rates … A consequence and related cause is the rise of tribalism, or ethno-nationalism, the search for identity and community with one’s own.

… During the [US-Vietnam] war, both Vietnamese sides stressed their nationalist credentials while discrediting their opponent as a foreign puppet. The common Vietnamese soldier, then, didn’t fight and die for capitalism, communism, democracy, internationalism, universal brotherhood, America, Russia or China, but only for Vietnam — for only nationalism could justify so much sacrifice, pain and endurance … War against the Americans over, the Vietnamese communists promptly fought against communist Cambodia, then China, so there goes international communist solidarity, not that it ever existed, then the Soviet Union collapsed … Across Vietnam, then, you’ll find nationalist murals and posters exhorting the people to defend the nation …

Forty years ago, China introduced major economic reforms – lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and leading to it becoming the second-largest economy in the world. Here’s the story of how China changed – in pictures … Care ownership in China has soared – there are now over 300 million registered vehicles in the country – while bike ownership has dropped.

… To the surprise of no one who understands human nature, many whites didn’t appreciate being told that they had to die off for “progress” to be achieved. They didn’t like being derided by their betters as “bitter clingers” with their guns and Bibles, and they especially didn’t like being termed “deplorables” unworthy of compassion or consideration … What commentators term “identity politics” has now become normative, thanks to the Democrats indulging in it, and Trump is now aping them. It would be more correct to term this what it actually is: nationalism. Ethno-racial nationalism is an enormously potent political force … Nationalism arouses genuine passion and is a political motivator like no other … The Republicans are now the White party, de facto, whether they want to be or not.

Christmas is very important in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank as it contains Bethlehem, the town in which Jesus was born. Bethlehem is about six miles (ten kilometres) south of Jerusalem … Only about 20 percent of Palestinians are Christian, but many Muslim Palestinians are also proud that Jesus was born in a Palestinian Territory! On Christmas Eve there is a parade through the town. This is very important to the Christian part of the population … Perhaps the most famous part of Christmas in Bethlehem is the church service of the Mass of the Nativity. It is held on Christmas Eve afternoon/ evening/midnight in the Church of the Nativity. The Church is built over the place where it’s traditionally thought that Jesus was born … In Arabic Happy/ Merry Christmas is Eid Milad Majid , which means ‘Glorious Birth Feast’.

Christmas is celebrated by soldiers at the front and by families at home. From the World War II German weekly newsreel, “Die Deutsche Wochenschau,” of Dec. 21, 1942. German-language narration. The concluding background choral music is “Hohe Nacht der Klaren Sterne.” Runtime: 6 mins.

… Long before “fake news” had a name, the BBC was a master of fake news, in fact fake news of the most dangerous, the most vicious consequences, casting nations, not just individuals, into direct calamities. What I have in mind is of course the harmul role of the BBC as the propaganda machine of British imperialism around the globe. As well as in enabling and facilitating the CIA/ MI6 coup of 1953 in my homeland [Iran] in particular … During the wartime period “there was no pretense of objective reporting and impartial analysis. After all, George Orwell learned much about Newspeak and Doublespeak while working for the BBC Indian Department. Some suspect his Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four was modeled on the BBC building in Portland Place, London.”

… Throughout his lifetime, the great English writer continually questioned all “official” or “accepted” versions of history. As early as 1945, just after the end of the war in Europe, he expressed doubts about the widespread stories of “gas oven” exterminations (Notes on Nationalism). George Orwell was a revisionist. He detested officially sanctioned atrocity and hate propaganda …. The fact that the Institute for Historical Review is so hated and vilified by the bigoted forces of darkness that seek to strangle any contrary voice, no matter how modest, is itself evidence of its importance as a bulwark against intellectual tyranny and scholastic repression.

A top British lawyer and his partner immigrated to Israel this week, citing rising anti-Semitism in Europe. “Europe in my view is finished. Every day you see people being attacked in one way or another across Europe,” Mark Lewis told Israel’s Channel 10 news, which accompanied his arrival … “You see people murdered in museums in Belgium, people murdered in schools in France, people attacked in England. There is only one place for Jewish people to go,” Lewis added. Lewis, 54, one of the UK’s leading libel lawyers, said he has been increasingly subjected to hate speech and threats for being Jewish, including being subjected to regular abuse and death threats online … “We’re a wandering people, and it’s time to wander again. People just don’t want to see it,” Lewis said of his fellow British Jews.

… Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do in his campaign … The war party project, to bring about regime change in Tehran through either severe sanctions leading to insurrection or a U.S.-Iranian clash in the Gulf, will suffer a severe setback with the U.S. pullout from Syria. However, given the strength of the opposition to a U.S. withdrawal — Israel, Saudi Arabia, the GOP foreign policy establishment in Congress and the think tanks, liberal interventionists in the Beltway press, Trump’s own national security team of advisers — the battle to overturn Trump’s decision has probably only just begun … Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria at least has assured us of a national debate on what it will mean to America to extricate our country from these Mideast wars, the kind of debate we have not had in the 15 years since we were first deceived into invading Iraq.

Every Christmas Eve, hundreds of people from all over the world crowd outside the octagonal-shaped chapel in Oberndorf, Austria, to sing along to one of the world’s most-beloved Christmas carols: Silent Night. Amid sparkling white lights on a December night, two men, one strumming a guitar, stand in front of the small chapel and sing, in German, Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, much like the song was first performed on Christmas Eve in 1818. And then carollers, bundled against the cold, sing the song in various languages. It’s a scene especially poignant this holiday season, as 24 December 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the song’s humble origins in Oberndorf.

… The Germans seem to have made the first move. During the evening of December 24 they delivered a chocolate cake to the British line accompanied by a note that proposed a cease fire so that the Germans could have a concert. The British accepted the proposal and offered some tobacco as their present to the Germans. The good will soon spread along the 27-mile length of the British line. Enemy soldiers shouted to one another from the trenches, joined in singing songs and soon met one another in the middle of no-mans-land to talk, exchange gifts and in some areas to take part in impromptu soccer matches. The high command on both sides took a dim view of the activities …

On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson rose before a joint session of Congress to make the case for a declaration of war on Germany … Wilson was a High Progressive who, as one of the earliest participants in the then-new discipline of political science, cheered America’s rise to world power because vigorous foreign policy empowered the presidency … Wilson did not make the world safe for democracy … Why then, has Wilson’s Progressive civil religion — a heresy from the perspective of the classical American creed — remained the “default position” of U.S. foreign policy almost ever since? Perhaps historian Richard Gamble is correct in suggesting that “Righteous interventionism appeals to our national vanity and piety. We have to face the fact that there is something deeply and authentically American about Wilsonianism.”

… World War II grew out of World War I; indeed, it was made virtually inevitable by it … Germany was to become an outcast nation on the basis of its war guilt. The problem was that Germany was not uniquely guilty. World War I was the product of a complex political dynamic in which nations other than Germany — Russia and France, for example — played important roles. Nevertheless, Germany was branded as the perpetrator … During the war the Allies imposed a starvation blockade on Germany. Due to French insistence, that blockade remained in place until the treaty was signed in June 1919. The German people were made to watch their children starve for six months after the guns fell silent. The blockade killed an estimated 800,000 people.

… The US is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal because of pressure from Israel, that’s all. As long as Israel exists, Iran will be targeted. Israel was behind the American war against Iraq and Libya, and it’s seeking to destroy Syria and Iran also. Israel was founded on terror, and is maintained by terror, so peace won’t come to the Middle East until Israel disappears. The renewal of American sanctions against Iran is causing problems to the entire world, not just Iran, and that’s why it will end up hurting America the most … Iran will certainly survive these sanctions, which are already cracking. By standing up to the US and Israel, Iran is setting an admirable example to the rest of the world, and its stature will only increase as the American empire declines further.

… The main problem, you see, with police-recorded ‘hate crimes’ or ‘hate incidents’ is that they are entirely subjective. Any event must be recorded as a hate incident if it is perceived to be so by the victim, or any other person. This means that anything can now be a police matter … Here are some of the most dubious and ludicrous ‘hate incidents’ recorded by the British constabulary of late – a reminder to take this latest crime panic with a massive dose of scepticism. According to an investigation in the Mail on Sunday, a dog pooing outside someone’s house was treated as a hate incident in 2015-16. ‘An unknown dog has fouled outside of victim address and victim perceived this to be a racial incident’, read the police log.

Color of Change, a radical leftist group campaigning to censor conservatives and right-leaning groups, exploited the 2015 Charleston church shooting to go after the David Horowitz Freedom Center … “Bloodmoney,” Color of Change’s smear campaign, seeks to shut down the fundraising abilities of conservative organizations by pressuring credit card companies and payment processors to deny access to conservative groups blacklisted by the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC]. Color of Change falsely accuses all of these groups of promoting violence and white supremacy … Conservatives are being censored, deplatformed, banned, demonetized and kicked off services based on the mere word of a leftist group. No actual evidence necessary.

U.S. government debt is on track this year to rise at the fastest pace since 2012, as a stronger economy fails to keep pace with the wave of red ink that’s rising under the Trump administration. Total public debt outstanding has jumped by $1.36 trillion, or 6.6%, since the start of 2018, and by $1.9 trillion since President Trump took office, according to the latest Treasury Department figures. The latter figure is about the size of Brazil’s gross domestic product … As of Monday [Dec. 10], the nation’s debt stood at a record $21.9 trillion. The borrowing is needed to cover a budget deficit that expanded by an estimated $779 billion in Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the widest fiscal gap in six years. By the end of Trump’s first term, the debt is expected to rise by $4.4 trillion despite historically low unemployment, relatively low interest rates and robust growth.

Do deficits matter? Clearly, the White House and a substantial number of congressional Republicans can’t decide. On one hand, they sound like cost-cutting deficit hawks when out on the stump or issuing tweets. But once the TV lights go off, they turn tables to support record spending and deficit-driven borrowing that have left us with an unprecedented burden of national debt — more than $21 trillion today and counting … Over the long term, deficit spending is detrimental to economic growth and national prosperity. And as deficit spending continues, its adverse effects add up over time … Deficits matter because they’re a symptom of runaway government spending that weakens investment by businesses and individuals to enhance growth and productivity.

… The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland … In another sign of how far removed Washington is from the American public, 40 per cent of respondents want the US to impose sanctions to stop Israel expanding its settlements on Palestinian territory. In short, they support the most severe penalty on the BDS [anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” movement] platform. And who is chiefly to blame for Washington’s unresponsiveness? Some 38 per cent say that Israel has “too much influence” on US politics. That is a view almost reflexively cited by Israel lobbyists as evidence of anti-Semitism.

… Israel’s ability to corrupt and misdirect is all based on Jewish money, a process in which Zionist oligarchs buy their way to power and access. So the solution is to hit back where it really hurts – boycott Israel and Israeli products, and do the same for the companies that are the sources of income for the American Jews who are the principal supporters of the Zionist project. The United States Congress is currently moving to make it illegal to openly advocate boycotts of Israel or even to inquire about doing so, while 25 states have already also done the same to a greater or lesser extent … It is a measure of Jewish power in the U.S. that American politicians choose to provide cover for Israel’s misdeeds even if it means the end of the First Amendment and free speech.

In a newly revealed letter from 1986 , the UK’s Prince Charles implied that the “influx of foreign, European Jews” to Israel was to blame for fueling the Israeli-Arab conflict, and lamented that US presidents were unwilling to take on the American “Jewish lobby.” … Charles also wrote he hoped a US president would take on the “Jewish lobby,” presumably in order to solve the Israeli-Arab conflict. “Surely some US president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in US?,” wrote Charles. “I must be naive, I suppose.”

If Twitter hasn’t suspended or banned you yet, don’t feel relieved. You may be next. When Twitter and other big tech companies started banning fringy rightwing characters over the past year or so, few people objected, because even most conservatives weren’t sympathetic to those purged. It’s hard to feel sympathy for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But once the radicals were banned, it became far easier to ban others … Google, Facebook and Twitter have all censored those on the right. How do they do it? By treating some speech as hate speech — even when it’s not … Notably, the “protected categories” include areas that Christians and those on the right are likely to criticize. Topics that the left is likely to criticize, like Israel, are generally not included. You want to trash poor rural white people? Go right ahead.

“Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” the banners cried out. “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” others admonished, draping from the rafters above a packed, roaring crowd at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. On Feb. 20, 1939, 22,000 members of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, took over the venue that stars still consider a peak achievement if you can fill it up. That night, it was a full house for Bund leader Fritz Kuhn .. Dozens of the Bund’s drum and bugle corps marched down the center aisle and mounted the stage, which featured a 30-foot-tall portrait of George Washington surrounded by American and Bund flags … The Bund claimed 20,000 members and 100,000 sympathizers across the country at the time of the rally.

In the feverish eight years of world history immediately preceding the entry of the United states into World War II, there streaked across the American political firmament a rather noisy meteor officially called Das Amerikadeutscher Bund, more generally referred to as the German-American Bund or simply as the Bund. In its brief lifetime, the Bund was the object of much hostility, suspicion and fear. It had an almost universally “bad press” and wild exaggerations concerning its aims, its size and its resources were uttered with patent self-interest and arrières pensées [ulterior motive] by a number of politicians, journalists and assorted public figures. Yet post-war historians usually dismiss the Bund in a sentence or two when writing general histories of the American thirties.

Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine said on Wednesday it had fired Claas Relotius, an award-winning staff writer, after finding he fabricated and invented facts in many articles in recent years … Some of the roughly 60 stories Relotius had written since 2011 were accurate but others were “completely invented or embellished with manipulated quotes or other fact-fantasy,” it said. Among the fabricated stories were articles about a wrongfully detained Guantanamo inmate, about children kidnapped by Islamic State, and about a woman attending the execution of a death sentence as a witness in the United States. Spiegel said it had immediately terminated his work contract. Relotius, who is 33-years-old and started writing for Der Spiegel in 2011, was not available for comment.

It isn’t surprising or new information that Generation X has higher debt loads than other generations. Gen X — aged roughly 36-51 — often have mortgages, children, parents to take care of, and student loan debt. But Gen X is facing more financial pressures than other generations did when they went through the same lifestage … Almost 25 percent of Gen X-ers it surveyed say it’s “nearly impossible” to pay off significant debt … According to the report, which surveyed more than 2,000 people in the U.S., 80% of Gen X has debt. Millennials are the next most likely group to have debt — 75% are carrying a debt load. Just under 70% of baby boomers have debt. According to 2017 statistics from credit reporting agency Experian, the report found that Gen X is carrying roughly $30,000 of debt on average — excluding mortgages.

The University of Sydney has moved to sack controversial senior lecturer Tim Anderson after he showed students material featuring the Nazi swastika imposed over the flag of Israel … He regularly posted on social media about the crimes of the “apartheid” Israeli state, and complained the mainstream media was complicit in distorting the narrative about Israel and Palestine … Dr Anderson had published on social media and in lecture slides “material which included the Nazi Swastika over the Israeli flag,” the spokeswoman said, and this was found to be “disrespectful and offensive, and contrary to the university’s behavioural expectations and requirements for all staff”.

Sydney University academics have criticised the suspension of an academic who showed students material featuring the Nazi swastika imposed over Israel’s flag, saying it was a body blow to academic freedom. By Friday afternoon 30 academics, including several emeritus professors, had signed the open letter arguing that academic freedom was “meaningless if it is suspended when its exercise is deemed offensive.” … Earlier this week, Sydney University served Dr Anderson a termination notice, saying the swastika material amounted to serious misconduct that was “disrespectful and offensive, and contrary to the university’s behavioural expectations”.

Thousands of faithful and dignitaries have attended the lighting of the giant Christmas tree outside the Church of the Nativity in the traditional birthplace of Jesus. Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and Father Francesco Patton, a top official with the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, were present at Saturday’s ceremony [Dec. 1] in the Palestinian biblical city of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Hamdallah said the Palestinians were resisting Israeli plans “to uproot us and strip us from our civilization and history.” A fireworks display and festivities accompanied the annual ceremony at the Manger Square in the run up to Christmas Eve, which attracts thousands of pilgrims and tourists from around the world.

The town of Bethlehem is geared up for the Christmas season. A net of lights strings from building to building, creating a canopy over the town’s famous Manger Square … Groups of tourists and pilgrims go in and out of the Nativity Church to see the gold-plated star marking the spot where Jesus was born … “Palestinians do not have any control of the borders,” says Baha Hilu, a Palestinian tour guide in Bethlehem. “We are only on the receiving end of Israeli tourism.” … Israel effectively has a monopoly over tourism, Hilu explained. Palestinians, like the wandering tour guides outside the Nativity Church, are usually excluded from it … A 2017 report published by the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism details how the Israeli monopoly on tourism directly contributes to normalisation of the occupation.

The Los Angeles Times’ former publisher and editor, Davan Maharaj, reportedly received a $2.5-million settlement following his exit from Tribune Publishing Co. after revealing to a mediator he had recorded anti-Semitic comments allegedly made by the company’s largest shareholder, Michael Ferro … In 2016, shortly after taking control of the newspaper company, Ferro allegedly complained that his business pursuits were being thwarted by a “Jewish cabal” in Los Angeles that included billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, according to a report Wednesday by National Public Radio … The remarks were made during a gathering of newspaper executives at a dinner near the Chicago headquarters of the company, which also owns the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and Orlando Sentinel.

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself … So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence. New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938. It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today. How did this come about? It happened through the trade system … It was a scam – theft on a grand scale.

… Thousands of Indian soldiers who had joined Britain in the fight against fascism swapped their oaths to the British king for others to Adolf Hitler – an astonishing tale of loyalty, despair and betrayal that threatened to rock British rule in India, known as the Raj. The story the German officers told their interrogators began in Berlin on 3 April 1941. This was the date that the left-wing Indian revolutionary leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, arrived in the German capital … By the end of 1941, Hitler’s regime officially recognised his provisional “Free India Government” in exile, and even agreed to help Chandra Bose raise an army to fight for his cause. It was to be called “The Free India Legion”.

… Bose was favorably impressed with the discipline and organizational strength of fascism as early as 1930, when he first expressed support for a synthesis of fascism and socialism. During his stays in Europe during the 1930s, he was deeply moved by the dynamism of the two major “fascist” powers, Italy and Germany. After observing these regimes first-hand, he developed a political ideology of his own that, he was convinced, could bring about the liberation of India and the total reconstruction of Indian society along vaguely authoritarian-socialist lines.

… In terms of his courageous determination and the broad scope of his effort, probably no one did more to free India from British colonial bondage than Bose, who was affectionately known by his followers as Netaji (Hindi: “respected leader”). In his effort to deliver self-rule to India through armed struggle, Bose risked everything during the Second World War by forming a political and military alliance with the Axis powers. In this carefully researched and well documented 807-page biography [Brothers Against the Raj], Leonard Gordon, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, examines the lives of Subhas Chandra Bose and his elder brother, Sarat Bose.

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation … The she sole political affirmation Texans like Amawi are required to sign in order to work with the school district’s children is one designed to protect not the United States or the children of Texas, but the economic interests of Israel.

US President Donald Trump’s decision announced Wednesday to withdraw US troops from Syria marks his latest abrupt twist on the war, over which he has been inconsistent even by his standards. Trump, taking to his favorite medium of Twitter, declared the defeat of the Islamic State extremist movement, which he said was the sole reason for the presence of 2,000 troops in Syria. His stance paradoxically puts him in line with his predecessor Barack Obama, whom Trump has strongly criticized … Here are some of the positions taken by Trump on Syria … Within weeks Trump was incensed and talked of punishing Assad and its ally Russia after a fresh alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma. Trump’s team at the same time stepped up another goal in the region — curbing the influence of Iran, a major foe of US allies Saudi Arabia and Israel.

A deadly disease is rampant in Metro Atlanta, and scientists are calling it an epidemic. Channel 2’s David Huddleston spoke with researchers and doctors who said Atlanta is the epicenter of that epidemic, comparing some neighborhoods to developing African countries … “Downtown Atlanta is as bad as Zimbabwe or Harare or Durban,” said Dr. Carlos del Rio, co-director of Emory University’s Center for AIDS Research. Del Rio said the disease shifted from one that mainly affected gay men and drug users in the late ’80s to a disease that now affects just about every population, but in particular African-Americans with limited access to health care.

The proportion of prison inmates housed in German jails who were born abroad has risen to 32 per cent this year, according to the latest government figures. Federal Statistics Office data revealed that 16,267 offenders from overseas were inmates in the country’s jails as of March 31 this year — a number which has risen by almost five per cent from 2017, Die Welt reports. Comprising just under a third of the prison population, which stands at 50,957, foreign nationals are hugely overrepresented in the system compared to their numbers in Germany, where 10.6 million aliens make up around twelve per cent of the country’s total population.

… How did the United States, triumphant in the Cold War, find itself beset on so many fronts? First, by intervening militarily and repeatedly in a Mideast where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, and thereby ensnaring ourselves in that Muslim region’s forever war. Second, by extending our NATO alliance deep into Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltics, thereby igniting a Cold War II with Russia. Third, by nurturing China for decades before recognizing she was becoming a malevolent superpower whose Asian-Pacific ambitions could be realized only at the expense of friends of the United States.

The Israeli ambassador to Ukraine has sharply criticized local legislators’ move to honor a Ukrainian nationalist leader. Ambassador Joel Lion said on Facebook that he was “shocked’ to see the regional legislature in Lviv in western Ukraine declare 2019 “the year of Stepan Bandera” to mark the 110th anniversary of his birth. Bandera was a leader of Ukraine’s nationalist movement, which included an insurgent army that for one period sided with the Nazis during World War II. Jewish groups have linked Bandera’s followers to the mass murders of Jews … The ambassador [said] that “Ukraine shouldn’t forget those crimes committed against Ukrainian Jews and in no way celebrate them through honoring their perpetrators.”

Last week something historic happened in the US Senate. For the first time in 45 years, a chamber of the US Congress voted to pull US forces from a military conflict under the 1973 War Powers Act. While there is plenty to criticize in the War Powers Act, in this situation it was an important tool used by a broad Senate coalition to require President Trump to end US participation in the Saudi war against Yemen. And while the resolution was not perfect – there were huge loopholes – it has finally drawn wider attention to the US Administration’s dirty war in Yemen.

President Donald Trump set out to pick a fight with Iran from the early days of his administration. But a set of astonishing developments has pulled the rug out from under his feet, and the next three months will determine whether Trump will opt to escalate his provocations or find a face-saving exit from his bravado … Trump promised that the Iranian currency would continue to fall and that Tehran’s oil exports would go down to zero. Yet, though the Iranian economy certainly is hurting, the currency has stabilized and Trump was himself forced to issue eight sanctions waivers to European and Asian countries, undermining the policy from the get-go … Today, if you’re sitting in Tehran, you’re probably more confident in the future than if you’re in Riyadh or Washington. Trump has thrown everything he has at Iran, and it hasn’t worked.

… Rouen was not the only French victim of Allied bombs, nor was it even the worst. Some 1,570 French cities and towns were bombed or hit by artillery fire by Anglo-American forces between June 1940 and May 1945. As an example of the devastation, it is estimated that 95 percent of Saint-Lô was destroyed; Carentan and Caen, too, were virtually flattened. Some figures show that 432,000 homes and apartments across France were destroyed and another 890,000 homes were damaged. The number of French civilians killed and injured before, during, and after their liberation has long been a matter of heated debate in France. One French historian estimates that more than 50,000 men, women, and children died … The total number of dead could be as high as 70,000; more than 100,000 were wounded. The French certainly paid a high price for their liberation.

… One of Overy’s major preoccupations is with the morality of bombing civilians. At the start of the war, all sides agreed that the intentional bombing of civilians was illegal and that bombing should be confined to military targets. But desperate straits on the Western Front in spring 1940 (rather than the German bombing of Rotterdam) led the British to abandon this policy in favour of bombing targets in Germany for a military purpose even where civilians would undoubtedly be in the firing line. Both Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee were strongly in favour of this approach. For Overy, one of the many myths of the Second World War was that the Germans were the first to bomb civilians: in his view, the British got their retaliation in first.

… Between 7:50 and 8:12 p.m. local time on February 23, 1945, RAF aircraft dropped 1575 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on Pforzheim, setting off a firestorm that is widely seen as one of the most devastating in military history. According to official statistics, 17,600 people died, and tens of thousands of others were injured. The market square and old town area were destroyed and completely depopulated. In the entire city, over 80 percent of the architecture that existed in 1945 was defaced, making Pforzheim, proportionally speaking, the worst instance of destruction at the end of WWII. The Allied bombardments of Dresden and Hamburg have been well documented and remain in the public consciousness today, both in Germany and abroad. But Pforzheim doesn’t.

… It was only many years after my coming to Israel on aliya as a young Jewish woman and subsequent to obtaining a law degree from the Hebrew University and engaging in legal work for Palestinians, that the resemblance of Israeli legal system to South African apartheid really struck me … The principle of separation is at the heart of the Jewish religion itself, and Zionism is the political expression of the Jewish religion … This existential distinction between the Jew and the goy is reflected in the absence of a Jewish universal moral code, an absence which is not found within either Christianity or Islam. Judaism’s moral code is characterized by its particularity: it only binds Jews vis-à-vis Jews, not Jews vis-à-vis goys.

… Essentially almost everything I had known — or thought I had known — about the religion of Judaism, at least in its zealously Orthodox traditional form, was utterly wrong … If the Gentile population became aware of these Jewish religious beliefs and the behaviors they promote, major problems for Jews might develop, so an elaborate methodology of subterfuge, concealment, and dissimulation has come into being over the many centuries to minimize this possibility … By the 1950s, nearly all of America’s leading concentrations of electronic media power — with the sole major exception of Disney Studios — were solidly in Jewish hands … These are the central levers of political influence, and over the next generation or so, America’s long-dominant and heavily Anglo-Saxon ruling elite was replaced by a mostly Jewish one …

… China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than one percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union … Mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined. In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world … China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

… Judging by email from readers, many do not realize the scope and scale of China’s advance. Neither did I … At risk of sounding like a shameless flack for Chinese infrastructure, I can report that the rail station in Chengdu was huge, attractive, well-designed, brightly lit, and full of people … The train pulled in and looked like a freaking rocketship. We boarded and found it to be clean and comfortable, with most of the seats filled. Off we went, almost in silence, and shortly were sailing through countryside. At a cool 180 miles an hour. It was like stepping into a future world … As an American, I was internally embarrassed … The lesson to take away, or at any rate the one I took away, is that this is a very serious and competent country and not to be underestimated.

… Recently, after twelve years away, I returned for a couple of weeks to Chungdu and Chong Quing, which I found amazing … China runs a large economic surplus, allowing it to invest heavily in infrastructure and in resources abroad. America runs a large deficit. China invests in China, America in the military. China’s infrastructure is new, of high quality, and growing. America’s slowly deteriorates. China has an adult government that gets things done. America has an essentially absentee Congress and a kaleidoscopically shifting cast of pathologically aggressive curiosities in the White House. America cannot compete with a country far more populous of more-intelligent people with competent leadership and the geographic advantage of being in Eurasia … In short, China does not appear to be in irremediable decadence. America does.

… Among the reasons democracy is in discredit and retreat worldwide is that its exemplar and champion, the USA, is beginning to resemble France’s Third Republic in its last days before World War II … This century, China has shown aspiring rulers how a single-party regime can create a world power, and how democracy is not a necessary precondition for extraordinary economic progress. Vladimir Putin, an autocratic nationalist, has shown how a ruined nation can be restored to a great power in the eyes of its people and the world, commanding a new deference and respect … The diversity our democracy has on offer is not selling … We are an unserious nation, engaged in trivial pursuits, in a deadly serious world.

Tonight marks the opening of LaGuardia High School’s production of “The Sound of Music.” Audiences can expect the rousing score of Richard Rodgers, the inspiring words of Oscar Hammerstein – but if they come looking for historical accuracy, they may leave disappointed. The New York Daily News heard from students at LaGuardia, a New York City public high school for music, arts and performing arts, that a number of prop flags and emblems with Nazi iconography functioning as part of the set and costume design were ordered removed by principal Lisa Mars prior to opening night. … Some students are nonetheless concerned with the removal of swastikas … The production is hoping to educate audiences in another way, with a portion of the show’s earnings going to Holocaust organizations like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington …

“The Sound of Music” is perhaps the most popular American musical picture ever produced. But whatever its merits as entertainment, the film’s presentation of history is deceitful. In particular, its portrayal of the 1938 union or Anschluss of Austria with the German Reich is a gross distortion of historical reality.

This portrayal of the 1938 union (“Anschluss”) of Austria with the German Reich, includes contemporary film footage with English-language voiceover commentary. Runtime: 4:14 mins. For decades American officials and historians, along with the US media, have portrayed the union of Austria with the Reich as an act of “aggression” or “rape.” The truth is exactly the opposite. Rarely in history has a historical event taken place with broader and more joyful popular approval.

A satanic group has added its own statue to a series of displays in the government building of the US state of Illinois to mark the festive season. Placed between a Christmas tree and a menorah, the four-foot sculpture depicts a snake coiled around an outstretched arm holding an apple. It’s the first display sponsored by the Chicago chapter of the Temple of Satan. The state government said the temple had the same right as other religious groups to have a display … Founded in 2012 in Salem, Massachusetts, the Temple of Satan describes itself as a non-theistic group that aims to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people”.

… The storm that is hitting France came out of what looked like a clear blue sky. The angry demonstrators, known as ‘gilets jaunes’ (yellow jackets), for the warning vests all motorists must keep in their cars, inundated Paris last weekend in peaceful protests over the government’s planned increases in fuel prices, which were already among Europe’s highest … The ‘yellow jackets’ should not be confused with the breakers. What we are seeing is a justified national revolt in France against impossibly high taxes that were ignited by the unwise fuel price increases. After the riots, the price hikes were hastily eliminated. This was a necessary move, but it also undermined the authority of President Macron, whose popularity rating was at rock bottom even before the uprising. The underlying problem is that France’s taxes are far too high.

A look at nationalist youth in Hungary. Following a global trend, growing numbers of the country’s young people are joining far-right wing and neo-Nazi movements to fight for a way of life they believe is under threat. Runtime: 25:30 mins. Hungary was the first country to close its borders when around one million refugees arrived on European soil in 2015. The country’s far-right Fidesz party swiftly positioned itself as the self-proclaimed defender of “Christian Europe” under the leadership of anti-immigrant nationalist leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Inside the rise of Hungary’s far-right movement The radical narratives mounted by Hungary’s ruling Fidesz Party and far-right movements are gaining ground ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections. Euronews reporter Valerie Gauriat traveled to Hungary for the national Republic Day to hear from supporters and critics of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s hardline stance on immigration — and what it means to be Hungarian. Runtime: 15:50 mins.

A declaration approved Thursday by the Council of the European Union calls on EU member states to take steps to ensure security for Jewish communities, institutions and citizens. The declaration, agreed on by interior ministers from the 28 EU member states, emphasizes the importance of Holocaust commemoration and education; calls on all EU member states which have not already done so to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism in the fields of law enforcement, education and training; and calls on the European Commission and Europol to pay particular attention to online antisemitism and to content advocating antisemitic terrorist offenses … The World Jewish Congress welcomed the adoption …

… The “Holocaust” ceased long ago to be about the Jews who died in that war. The “Holocaust” is about Zionist power and policies. As stated, the “Holocaust” myths serve specific objectives: justifying Zionist settlement in Palestine; cultivating a guilt complex in the West over the “Holocaust” as the result of Western anti-Semitism; mobilizing Western public opinion behind financial, political, and military support for the Zionist movement; and condoning Zionist infractions of international law under the pretext that the wartime deaths of the Jews were unique and unparalleled in human history.

… In the U.S. and abroad, people on the right are always expected to sit back and be okay with election losses and unwanted cultural shifts (gay marriage, abortion, tranny rights, amnesty, refugees), while leftists are never expected to get used to anything that displeases them. If something doesn’t go their way, leftists engender countless do-overs, and if the do-overs fail, they change the rules to ensure that they win in the future. You can’t really hate them for that; I wish the right had such ruthless dedication to its values. After my talk with Mark Weber, I asked our mutual friend Jared Taylor if he shared Mark’s pessimism. Like Mark, Jared is a veteran of the culture wars. Is his outlook as gloomy as that of his old friend? Not entirely.

President Trump’s two Hannukah addresses at the annual White House Hannukah Party included a number of moving tributes, one to a group of Holocaust survivors and a second to the Jews he calls family – Ivanka and Jared Kushner. He also issued a shocking insinuation that America was not the home of its Jewish citizens. The audience of pro-Trump Jews was so enamored of their host that they seemed not to notice … The President’s remarks are deeply offensive. They take the classic anti-Semitic canard that Jews have dual loyalties to their home country and to Israel and go one step further, suggesting that Jews have only one loyalty — to Israel … Amazingly, his audience of right wing Jews applauded.

A Jewish teacher at a Catholic high school in New Jersey is suing the school for religious discrimination, claiming he faced anti-Semitism daily and was fired when he complained about it. Jacob Rabinowitz filed a lawsuit last week in Newark federal court against St. Joseph Regional High School in Montvale alleging religious discrimination, unlawful retaliation and creating a hostile work environment. The school and the Archdiocese of Newark, which oversees the all-boys school, were named as defendants. Rabinowitz, a first-year teacher from West Orange, said in the lawsuit that the anti-Semitism began on the first day of class, NJ.com reported.

… One of the organizations most interested in limiting conversations about what is going on in the world is the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] which claims that it is “the world’s leading organization combating anti-Semitism and hate of all kinds” … Its definition of “hatred” is really quite selective and is focused on anyone criticizing Israel or Jewish related issues. Its goal is to have any such speech or writing categorized as anti-Semitism and, eventually, to have “hate crime” legislation that criminalizes such expressions … The [ADL] organization boasted of the fact that it was working with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate.”

Media giant Facebook recently announced it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank. In a previous FAIR article, I noted that the “fake news” issue was being used as a pretext to attack the left and progressive news sites. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced traffic significantly for progressive outlets like Common Dreams … In 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted.

This video report looks at “post-millennials” – Americans aged between six and 21. As the Pew Research Center also shows, this new US generation will be unlike any other. Runtime: 2:25 mins.

Three historians wrote us to register concern about our recent fact-check of neo-Confederate websites that claimed that Abraham Lincoln made plans to send “all freed slaves” to Central America once the Civil War was over, and that only his assassination kept it from happening … They agreed that Lincoln did not pursue forcible deportation of ex-slaves to overseas colonies. But they argued that a new trend in Civil War research suggests that he continued to pursue colonization policies quietly, behind the scenes, after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation … These included an agreement to send up to 50,000 African-American recruits to British Honduras (now Belize), approved by the president in June 1863 and continuing until it faltered for political reasons at the end of the year …

Many Americans think of Abraham Lincoln, above all, as the president who freed the slaves. Immortalized as the “Great Emancipator,” he is widely regarded as a champion of black freedom who supported social equality of the races, and who fought the American Civil War to free the slaves. While it is true that Lincoln regarded slavery as an evil and harmful institution, it also true, as this paper will show, that he shared the conviction of most Americans of his time, and of many prominent statesmen before and after him, that blacks could not be assimilated into white society. He rejected the notion of social equality of the races, and held to the view that blacks should be resettled abroad.

America wasn’t supposed to get in the war. When the country finally did, it was to be a war “to end all wars,” to “make the world safe for democracy,” one in which, for once, the Allies would seek “peace without victory.” How powerful was the romantic and idealistic rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson, America’s historian and political scientist turned president. None of that came to pass, of course … However, the populace believed its own propaganda, crafted a myth of American triumphalism and learned all the wrong lessons from the war. Instead of being a “war to end all wars,” the Great War turned out to be just the beginning of American interventionism – the pivot toward the creation of today’s fiscal-military hegemonic state.

… We should draw the lesson that we should never credit politicians who promise us a short, glorious war. George W. Bush stood under a sign that said “mission accomplished” in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. Some 6,000 U.S. troops are still in that country today, and ISIL, contrary to what Trump keeps saying, is not yet entirely defeated. As for glorious, surely you jest … Just as Serbia set events in chain then, so too could Iran today. Trump and Pompeo have spoken of crushing Iran. But Russia and China don’t want Iran to be erased. Neither do Syria (pro-Iran) or Iraq, which even Trump gave a waiver because trade with Iran is crucial to its future.

Perhaps no war has been treated more tendentiously — and in recent decades more inappropriately — than World War I. Since the 1960s, a fixed view of that conflict has developed in academic and journalistic circles that places the blame almost entirely on one side … All the Great Powers behaved rashly, and to their credit the most scrupulous historians do not spare any of the actors on the Allied side. The avoidable disaster of 1914 teaches us, according to Christopher Clark, how the Great Powers “sleep-walked” their way into a war from which European civilization never recovered.

… The current global expansion will likely continue into next year, given that the US is running large fiscal deficits, China is pursuing loose fiscal and credit policies, and Europe remains on a recovery path. But by 2020, the conditions will be ripe for a financial crisis, followed by a global recession … Unlike in 2008, when governments had the policy tools needed to prevent a free fall, the policymakers who must confront the next downturn will have their hands tied while overall debt levels are higher than during the previous crisis. When it comes, the next crisis and recession could be even more severe and prolonged than the last.

… Time and again, this [Trump] administration overplays its hand. In case after case it acts on its own, expecting other nations to follow, only to discover that few or none do … Nostalgia is part of the problem. The world turns, and Washington is lost in a kind of memory palace, where it nurses the desire to prolong those decades of unchallenged primacy that it enjoyed after World War II. It refuses to accept there is no turning back the clock. While it wants to play “follow the leader” other nations drop out of the game … Washington must abandon its Wilsonian ambition to shape the world in its own image if it is to remain an effective power — as it can and should — in the new global order. The new Iran sanctions already appear to be a turning point in this respect: Donald Trump’s Washington thought it could lead, but virtually no one is following.

… [Prof. Jeffrey] Sachs describes three competing visions of American foreign policy. The first is represented by the liberal internationalists, or exceptionalists as he refers to them. These are largely the current establishment foreign policy elite, those who see America as the indispensable nation — a current that runs deep in American history— that should forcibly assert itself on the world stage, steering events to our liking and benefit. In this telling, America should be the unrivaled world hegemon … Sachs’s internationalism differs from the liberal internationalism of the foreign policy elite in that it rejects American exceptionalism, which is “passé, a throwback to the years after World War II when the United States dominated the world economy and was far ahead of the rest of the world in military and civilian technology.

… Among military men, isolationists, and FDR-haters, it became an article of faith that all along the president had been seeking a “back door” into World War II. He suppressed signs of the impending attack, it was claimed, because he reasoned that only a strike against American soil would unite the public behind his goal. This is the canard that so many books, in the decades since, have labored to prove … Those arguments, like most conspiracy theories, had a kernel of truth. FDR certainly favored American intervention in the war, as had been obvious at least since his support for Lend-Lease in 1940 … Most significant, no one ever produced credible evidence that Roosevelt knew the attack was coming. In fact, contemporaneous diaries and accounts show reactions of surprise among top officials.

… Was the decision to declare war on the United States, effectively relieving the Roosevelt administration of the responsibility of mobilizing American sentiment for war in Europe, among Hitler’s greatest blunders? Probably not. Washington and Berlin agreed that war was inevitable; the only question was who would fire the first shots. The United States and Germany were at war in all but name well before December 1941 … Germany declared war on the United States not out of a fit of pique, but rather because it believed that the United States was already effectively a belligerent, and that wider operations against the U.S. would help win the war. In particular, the Axis declaration of war enabled an operation that the Germans believed was key to driving Britain out of the conflict; a concerted submarine attack against U.S. commercial shipping.

Here is the complete text of Hitler’s historic address of Dec. 11, 1941, in which the German leader recounts the reasons for the outbreak of war in September 1939, explains why he decided to strike against the Soviet Union in June 1941, reviews the dramatic course of the war thus far, and deals at length with US President Roosevelt’s hostile policies toward Germany. Hitler details the US government’s increasingly belligerent actions against Germany and Italy, and concludes by announcing that Germany was now joining Japan in war against the United States.

Blazoned in huge black letters across page one of the December 4, 1941, issue of the Chicago Tribune was the headline: F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS! … Chesly Manly, the Tribune’s Washington correspondent, revealed what President Franklin D. Roosevelt had repeatedly denied: that he was planning to lead the United States into war against Germany. The source of the reporter’s information was no less than a verbatim copy of Rainbow Five, the top-secret war plan drawn up at FDR’s order by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy … Rainbow Five called for the creation of a ten-million-man army, including an expeditionary force of five million men that would invade Europe to defeat Hitler.

… Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures – between 6,000 and 10,000 churches die each year in America – and that number will likely grow. Though more than 70 percent of our citizens still claim to be Christian, congregational participation is less central to many American’s faith than it once was. Most denominations are declining as a share of the overall population, and donations to congregations have been falling for decades. Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated Americans, nicknamed the “nones,” are growing as a share of the U.S. population … A large number of abandoned churches have become wineries or breweries or bars. Others have been converted into hotels, bed and breakfasts, and AirBNBs.

The largest American military base in Syria covers more than five hundred acres, but it can’t be seen from the road … The number of military personnel in the country has steadily grown … Congress has not authorized military action in Syria, nor is there a United Nations mandate permitting the use of force. Nevertheless, over the last three years, the mission has morphed into something more like a conventional ground war. The United States has built a dozen or more bases from Manbij to Al-Hasakah, including four airfields … Basic facts are kept classified … On September 24th, Bolton confirmed to reporters in New York that American troops would not withdraw from Syria until all Iranian forces were gone, including Iranian “proxies and militias,” which could describe any number of armed groups, including the Assad regime itself.

… The Trump administration, however, has escalated tensions, going as far as threatening Iran with war. The administration is under the false impression that by strangling Iran’s economy through sanctions and applying a “maximum pressure policy” it can force Iran to capitulate to its demands or face the possibility of its collapse. This is either a dangerous misjudgment or a calculated decision to go to war with Iran that will have devastating ramifications for regional stability and U.S. interests … For a nationalistic country like Iran, which over the course of its long history has never bowed down to its adversaries, it is simply inconceivable to negotiate under circumstances that resemble a humiliating capitulation to a bullying adversary.

… Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum is one of the world’s pre-eminent chroniclers of the crimes of the Soviet Union … Her new book Red Famine — a masterpiece of scholarship, a ground-breaking history, and a heart-wrenching story — turns to the horrors of Soviet policy in Ukraine, specifically Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 … At least five million people died from starvation in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1934 — including 3.9 million Ukrainians … Under the leadership of the Stalin’s close associate, the barbarous Lazar Kaganovich, teams of policemen and party officials smashed and stole their way through the Ukrainian countryside, entering houses and “confiscating” all available food, livestock and even pets. They left nothing edible behind.

In the years 1932 and 1933, a catastrophic famine swept across the Soviet Union … Despite the shortages, the state demanded not just grain, but all available food. At the height of the crisis, organized teams of policemen and local Party activists, motivated by hunger, fear, and a decade of hateful propaganda, entered peasant households and took everything edible … At the same time, a cordon was drawn around the Ukrainian republic to prevent escape. The result was a catastrophe: At least five million people perished of hunger all across the Soviet Union. Among them were nearly four million Ukrainians who died not because of neglect or crop failure, but because they had been deliberately deprived of food … “Russians Hungry But not Starving” became the accepted wisdom.

… Even when I believed, mistakenly, that the “Jewish people” was exiled by the Romans in 70 C.E. or 132 C.E., I didn’t think that this conferred on the Jews some sort of imagined “historic right” to the Holy Land. If we seek to organize the world as it was 2,000 years ago, we will turn it into one big madhouse. Why not bring Native Americans back to Manhattan, for example? … As I pursued my research, my realization that the Exodus from Egypt never happened and that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah were not exiled by the Romans, left me nonplussed. There is not one study by a historian who specializes in antiquity that recounts that “exile” or any serious historiographic study that reconstructs a mass migration from the place. The “exile” is a formative event that never took place …

The majority of the United Nations General Assembly has adopted a resolution urging the Israeli regime to withdraw from the entirety of the Syrian Golan Heights it occupied some half a century ago. The resolution, titled The Syrian Golan, was adopted by a record vote of 99 in favor, 10 against and 66 abstentions on a Friday session, declaring that the Israeli controversial move to extend its laws, jurisdiction and administration on the occupied mountainous plateau is null and void, and calling on the Tel Aviv regime to pull out from the strategically-important territory.

… On Tuesday Israeli authorities announced the seizure of 267 dunams (66 acres) of land belonging to the Catholic Church in the northern area of the occupied Jordan Valley. Mutaz Bisharat, a Palestinian official in charge of Jordan Valley’s Israeli settlement file, told Ma’an News that this decision by Israeli authorities is a threat to Palestinian families living in nearby areas, and that this is an Israeli strategy to expand illegal Israeli settlements across the Jordan Valley. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), over 6,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from the Jordan Valley area since 2008. Over 60 percent of them belong to Bedouin communities.

… How is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business? Unfortunately it is “our business” because of President Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically- elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his Administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama Administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote … What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world, and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that. But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest.

But there is a larger issue here. Why is control of the Kerch Strait any of our business? Why is this our quarrel, to the point that U.S. strategists want us to confront Russia over a Crimean Peninsula … Why are we letting ourselves be dragged into everyone’s quarrels — from who owns the islets in the South China Sea, to who owns the Senkaku and Southern Kurils; and from whether Transnistria had a right to secede from Moldova, to whether South Ossetia and Abkhazia had the right to break free of Georgia, when Georgia broke free of Russia? Do the American people care a fig for these places? Are we really willing to risk war with Russia or China over who holds title to them?

US President Donald Trump has admitted that the US only keeps its troops in the Middle East to protect Israel. In an interview with the Washington Post, Trump explained that he would not withdraw US troops from the region because of the need to support Israel, despite the fact that other US concerns such as oil were no longer sufficient reason to remain. Trump told the Post: “Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world [the Middle East]? One reason to is Israel. Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced. So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.” … It is no secret that the US provides extensive military support to Israel. In October, the largest ever US military aid package to Israel – worth $38 billion to be delivered over a period of ten years – entered into force.

… T. M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges … Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” … In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments, and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.

… Increasing numbers of British voters now think that the original referendum to withdraw Britain from the European Union after four decades of grudging membership was a catastrophic mistake. Britain was one of Europe’s big three members; without with EU, Britain will be marooned somewhere off the coast of northern Europe and forced to become totally responsive to US demands and policies … Britain is no longer the manufacturing powerhouse it was before World War II … Divorcing Britain from the EU will be nightmarishly complex and fraught. The Bank of England warns that Brexit will plunge the country into a serious recession … The way out of this nasty mess is for Parliament to do its job and mandate another referendum. Many pro-Brexit voters misunderstood the real issues and regret their hastiness.

… Hill was fired by CNN within 24 hours. The message is clear. You can criticize Christianity, Muslims, white males, Donald Trump and the American government at will … but never, never go after Jews or Israel even indirectly if you want to keep your job … To be sure, CNN is pro-Israeli in its reporting and, more important, in terms of choosing what not to report. Its lead political anchor is Wolf Blitzer, a former American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) employee, who speaks Hebrew and has lived in Israel. Like most major American mainstream media outlets, CNN has numerous Jewish employees working to select, edit and produce the news stories that actually air, well placed to manage what does finally go out to the public. Reports critical of Israel or Jews are not welcome anywhere in the U.S. national media …

The sale of more than a dozen pieces of WW2 Nazi memorabilia, including a portrait of Hitler, at a regional NSW [Australia] auction has drawn criticism from the country’s Jewish community. The auction in Bredbo, near Queanbeyan, on Saturday features Nazi medals, helmets, jewellery and the Hitler portrait. Spokesman for the auction company Don Mahoney defended the sale of the items, saying they formed a small part of a large sale of military items. He said some Australian politicians were known to collect Nazi memorabilia. “I can’t mention names, but you would be shocked, I have sold Nazi memorabilia to solicitors, bank managers, accountants, politicians over the years,” Mr Mahoney told AAP.

The Netherlands’ state-run rail company NS has agreed to set up a commission to compensate Holocaust survivors and their relatives for transporting Jews to a Nazi transit camp. Its decision to “learn, honour and remember in an enduring way” followed a campaign by Salo Muller, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz. Some 107,000 Jews were taken to Westerbork and deported, mainly to deaths camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Only 5,000 survived. NS said it had decided to avoid a legal battle, years after French rail company SNCF was ordered to pay compensation for its role in deporting 76,000 French Jews during World War Two. SNCF eventually apologised for its role in 2010, and later agreed a compensation fund after US lawmakers threatened to bar the state-run company from rail contracts.

US President Donald Trump indicated in an interview published Wednesday that, although he could remove troops from the Middle East, citing cheaper oil as an explanation, one reason not to do so is concern for Israel’s security. “Now, are we going to stay in that part of the world? One reason to is Israel,” Trump told the Washington Post. “Oil is becoming less and less of a reason because we’re producing more oil now than we’ve ever produced,” he added, appearing to envision a world where the US would be less beholden to Saudi Arabia. “So, you know, all of a sudden it gets to a point where you don’t have to stay there.” … Trump last week suggested that Israel would face major regional difficulties in the Middle East were it not for the stabilizing presence of Saudi Arabia, explaining his decision not to take measures against Riyadh.

… Sure, he may hector imperial allies to spend more on their militaries (while insisting he respects their sovereignty), but that’s just a show. He’s an all-in imperialist, so we shouldn’t be fooled by the staged populism that sometimes is mistaken for come- home-Americanism. America First in practice embodies George H. W. Bush’s summation of America’s foreign policy: “What we say goes.” … Trump is a caricature of a conventional American politician — which is why the political establishment despises him so. He lacks the diplomatic costume that makes brutality acceptable or at least enables people to live comfortably with their heads in the sand. But he’s just another faithful defender of the empire, and as such, he needs an enemy. In fact, he has plenty; take your choice: China, Iran, — and, yes — Russia.

… Among the problems facing America, in the eyes of her people in November, not one of the top ten involved a foreign threat. In the following order, all involve the troubled state of our splintered nation: immigration/illegal aliens; dissatisfaction with government/ poor leadership; health care; unifying the country; race relations/ racism; lack of respect for each other; ethics/moral/ religious/family decline; economy in general; unemployment/ jobs; and education. Immigration, race, culture, the economy and education appear to be the agenda Americans want addressed in 2020 … Progressives fail to understand that what they describe as greater and ever more desirable diversity, millions of Americans see as the conquest of their country by an endless flood of uninvited strangers.

CNN on Thursday said it had ended its contract with one of its political commentators after he used a phrase associated with Palestinian extremists – “a free Palestine from the river to the sea” – during a speech at the United Nations. “Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN,” the network said in a statement. Lamont Hill, a professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University who also hosted the syndicated television show “Our World with Black Enterprise,” spoke at the United Nations on Wednesday at an event held for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People … Lamont Hill defended his remarks, saying in a tweet that the phrase predates Hamas by some 50 years.

Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged that he had placed a hold on major funding legislation for Israel, saying he wanted time limits on assistance to the Jewish state. The Kentucky Republican also said he wanted cuts in aid to countries he says are hostile to the United States. “While I’m not for foreign aid in general, if we are going to send aid to Israel it should be limited in time and scope so we aren’t doing it forever, and it should be paid for by cutting the aid to people who hate Israel and America,” Paul’s office said in an statement … The hold has been countered vigorously by major pro-Israel groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Christians United for Israel, through online ads and action alerts to membership.

The Dutch Foreign Ministry is officially urging Jews no matter where they are to speak out against Israel’s presence in the West Bank. An official ministry document listing actions that “encourage diaspora Jewish communities to voice their opposition to the occupation” appeared in a government report published earlier this year on Dutch funding for the Breaking the Silence group. It was an unusual statement among European governments offering funding for organizations that they say are promoting peace or coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians. Breaking the Silence is a group of Israeli combat veterans who oppose the occupation.

… The accused had no attorney, and there was no question of last rites for those condemned to death. The corpses were not put into coffins. The dead were not restored to their families. Very expeditious, this maquis seldom used torture … Perhaps the most detestable acts of violence are those which attack women. Near Limoges, a young woman of the region, Mlle. d’Armagnac, whose family are proprietors of a château, gets married in the church of her village: when she comes out on the parvis from the mass, maquisards kidnap her, her husband, the priest who married them, and a witness. At dawn the next day she is shot to death in her wedding gown. Motives given: first, she is a chatelaine; in the second place, she has taken care of militiamen.