Headlines

Any hope that Kamala Harris would condition or suspend arms and funding for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza was killed by her speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Thursday … She described what has happened in Gaza over the past 11 months as “devastating”, “desperate” and “heartbreaking”. In the lexicon of pro-war liberal politicians, these words are an empty, meaningless facsimile of empathy.  The words that peace campaigners were looking for were wholly absent: nothing about Israel’s vast catalogue of war crimes – not even a swipe at war-criminal-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu, who, after all, wants Donald Trump back in the White House. Whichever pro-war candidate is victorious in November, the Israeli leader wins.

Fifty-six percent of registered voters favor a policy of “arresting and deporting thousands of illegal immigrants,” according to a poll conducted in August by YouGov. Just 35 percent of voters oppose the repatriation policy, according to the August 25-27 poll of 1,555 adult citizens and voters. When counting only “strongly” opinions, the split was almost two-to-one, at 37 percent to 21 percent. The YouGov results match other polls that show majorities favor large-scale deportations. The rising opposition to migration reflects the gradual shift of Democratic voters from acceptance of migration towards rejection during President Joe Biden’s chaotic mass migration into American communities. That migration has inflated the nation’s population by roughly 10 million people who arrived via legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes.

A resurfaced clip that has gone viral shows Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Vice President Kamala Harris’s newly announced running mate, saying that free speech should not always be guaranteed in a democracy. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz said in December 2022 on MSNBC when asked about penalties for spreading election misinformation. Walz’s controversial remark resurfaced amid growing scrutiny over his far-left policy record and its effect on Harris’s Democratic ticket.

… A progressive favorite in Minnesota, where he is now governor, Walz is also heralded for his background as a public school educator. Lesser known is the fact that, while teaching in rural, largely white Midwestern school districts, Walz developed a particular interest in Holocaust and genocide education … How to teach the Holocaust well has occupied Walz for decades. In 1993, while teaching in Nebraska, he was part of an inaugural conference of U.S. educators convened by the soon-to-open U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C … And as governor, he backed a push to mandate teaching about the Holocaust in Minnesota schools … His 27-page thesis, which JTA obtained, is titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.”

Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) is celebrating a “historic success”, with a big victory for the far-right party in the eastern state of Thuringia. The AfD won almost a third of the vote, nine points ahead of the conservative CDU, and far in front of Germany’s three governing parties. The result gives the far right its first win in a state parliament election since World War Two, although it has little hope of forming a government in Thuringia because other parties are unlikely to work with it. The AfD came a close second in Sunday’s other big state election, in the more populous neighbouring state of Saxony. Results there gave the CDU 31.9% of the vote, just ahead of the AfD, again far ahead of the three parties running the national government – the Social Democrats, Greens and liberal FDP.

Teachers [in Britain] will be taught to challenge “whiteness” in lessons. Guidance has been created for teacher-training courses, to ensure future educators are “anti-racist” and prepared to implement this in the classroom. Teachers will be instructed in how to “disrupt the centrality of whiteness” in schools, according to a best-practice document. The term “whiteness” in critical race theory refers to social attitudes considered normal by white people, and guidance suggests that concepts including “meritocracy”, “objectivity” and “individualism” should be questioned … Documents claim that encouraging “anti-racist” teacher training will help to maintain a diverse teaching workforce, and will help to close the attainment gap between white and non-white pupils.