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In this mailing:
* Guy Millière: Israel Under Attack: Biden's Coup to Get Iran the Bomb
* Amir Taheri: The West, The Rest and The Great Everywhere


** Israel Under Attack: Biden's Coup to Get Iran the Bomb ([link removed])
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by Guy Millière • March 5, 2023 at 5:00 am
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oneinstitute.org%2F19450%2Fisrael-biden-coup&pubid=ra-52f7af5809191749&ct=1&title=Israel+Under+Attack%3A+Biden%27s+Coup+to+Get+Iran+the+Bomb [link removed]
* "U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn't about the future of Israel's judiciary. It's about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb." — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, March 2, 2023.
* In reality, Iran's mullahs will most likely blackmail the Biden Administration for billions of dollars not to use their new bombs "on my watch", as then President Barack Obama put it in 2015. With a new administration, there can be a new blackmail.
* The Palestinian Authority's "pay-for-slay" jobs-program, paid for by "over $200 million" fungible U.S. taxpayer dollars in funding reinstated by President Joe Biden, incentivizes and rewards the murder of Jews.
* Abbas' Fatah faction boasted of carrying out 7,200 terror attacks in 2022 against Israel, while criticizing Hamas for not attacking Israel.
* Many Israelis have no illusions anymore. They see that the Palestinian Authority incites Jew-hate, whips up terrorism and tells Arab children and adults that to be a martyr for Islam allows them direct access not only to paradise, but also to generous funds for the terrorists and their families.
* Israelis can also see that the Biden Administration has continually made decisions hostile to Israel, including once again funding the Palestinian Authority without even requiring that it renounce terrorism. The Administration also brought back the goal of a "two-state solution": if a Palestinian state were to emerge, it could -- and most likely would -- be used as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, as promoted in the Palestinian "Phased Plan": Get whatever land you can, then use that to get the rest.
* Mainly, Israelis saw that the Biden administration never gave up trying to enable to enable the mullahs' regime in Iran to have unlimited nuclear weapons -- all while the mullahs have made the genocidal destruction of Israel their overriding goal.
* Accordingly, on November 1, 2022, millions of Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's Prime Minister, heading a broad coalition government. The coalition also pledged to restore the balance between the Knesset and the Supreme Court.
* In the United Kingdom, Parliament has the final say -- not the High Court. For the last 30 years, this has not been the situation in Israel.
* In the 1990s, Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, declaring that "everything is justiciable," executed a "judicial revolution," through which the Court has arrogated virtually all political power, including the ability to override laws and even operational decisions by the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.
* The government's proposed reforms would simply restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers that Israel had before Barak's "revolution."
* Since Barak's tenure, Israel's Supreme Court and the Attorney General have become a self-selecting group, unelected by the public or their representatives. Their decisions, lacking a constitution, were increasingly based not on law but on their invented doctrine of "reasonableness" -- often resulting in "whatever I think is reasonable".
* At present, Israel's Supreme Court, among other freewheeling entitlements, may overrule a quasi-constitutional Basic Law based on 'reasonableness"; accept petitions from anyone regardless of standing (even if the petitioner would not be directly affected by the outcome -- a provision that has resulted in a firehose of lawsuits by "concerned" non-governmental-organizations); and veto political appointments.
* For years, many Israelis had gotten used to turning to the Supreme Court for favorable "final say" decisions that they were not able to obtain through the elected parliament, the Knesset. Overnight, they now find themselves losing their perch.
* The new Israeli government has not violated any of the rules of Israeli democracy. In a democratic country that held a free and fair election, the one thing that does not seem democratic is to demand that the decision of the voters be overthrown.
* Demonstrations continue, but even if 100,000 protestors turn out, it is still only a small number compared to the 2.4 million citizens who voted for Israel's new government.
* Behind this subversion, it turns out, is none other than the U.S. State Department, which for years has reportedly been channeling funding to a "far left", "anti-Netanyahu" non-profit organization, the Movement for Quality Government (MQG) .
* "Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government's proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.... Since MQG's primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it's fairly clear that when MQG refers to 'democracy education,' it doesn't mean majority rule". — Caroline Glick, JNS, January 17, 2023.
* Ironically, in Washington D.C., a "January 6^th Committee", without due process -- no cross examination, no independent selection of members, no right to counsel, no exculpatory evidence -- pretended to "investigate" as criminal the very same activity that the Biden Administration is backing in Israel: trying to change the outcome of a free and fair election.
* Israel is and will remain a very much a democracy – just as it was before Justice Aharon Barak arrogated virtually unlimited powers to its Supreme Court. Calls for uprisings and civil disobedience, combined with false accusations of "fascism" -- and the whole focus-group supermarket of pejoratives -- appear to be just sore-loser propaganda.
* The demonstrations -- despite what the Biden Administration might wish -- are just the loud last gasp of upper-class "elites" who have been entrenched in powerful unelected positions for decades.
* That all this undemocratic disruption being done in the name of "defending democracy" just makes matters worse. The reality, sadly, is quite the opposite.
* At a time when terrorism has struck and with a U.S. administration unfriendly to Israel, it is revealing that professed friends of Israel can talk in such an irresponsible way. They speak of a threat to Israeli democracy? They are a threat to Israeli democracy.
* Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in Israel at the time of two of the Jerusalem terror attacks, rather than condemn them clearly and unambiguously, spoke mushily of a "horrifying surge in violence... we will be encouraging the parties to take steps to calm things down", as if Israel had been the one promoting violence.... He was giving a lesson in democracy to Prime Minister Netanyahu -- not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who openly calls for Palestinians to murder Israelis. How thoughtful.
* The Israeli government is trying to restore the democratic institutions that it used to have, of which it has been stripped.
* The Israeli government is trying to prevent the murder of innocent Jews and to stop terrorist attacks. Those, however, do not appear to be the goals that everyone has.
* What endangers the State of Israel or any nation is not a government dedicated to the safety of its citizens, but people who seem blind to the real dangers: whether from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iranian regime, the Chinese Communist Party.
* The greatest danger comes from those who cling to the illusion that diplomacy without the credible threat of military consequences will have any effect. These irresponsible individuals seem to prefer avoiding conversation about such dangers, or else try to downplay them. It is much less frightening to talk about gender pronouns than China's preparations for war.
* Iran must not be allowed to get the bomb -- "or maybe just a few".

Pictured: Anti-government protesters try to break through a police line, in an attempt to block a road in Tel Aviv, Israel on March 4, 2023. (Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

"U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn't about the future of Israel's judiciary. It's about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb," writes Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine.

The world has learned a lot watching America's Middle East freedom agenda.... The first of these lessons is that when U.S. policymakers selectively deploy the rhetoric of democracy and human rights against target governments, their words are typically accompanied by practical measures to destabilize those governments, including U.S. allies....

"In reality, the maritime agreement was just the latest in a series of initiatives to realign U.S. interests with those of the terror regime in Tehran while alternately sweet-talking and threatening traditional U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to fall into line...

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** The West, The Rest and The Great Everywhere ([link removed])
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by Amir Taheri • March 5, 2023 at 4:00 am
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* [W]e see that at least part of the predicted clash [of civilizations] is taking place within the same "civilization". It is in the United States and Western Europe that we witness such phenomena as wokeism and cancel culture while many "emerging nations" are breaking some taboos to open a wider space for discussion and dissent.
* With the exceptions of China, Iran and Russia that have experienced a stiffening of authoritarian rule, most "rest" nations have timidly moved towards an opening of the political space if not actual democratization. In contrast, several nations in Scruton's "west" have seen the emergence of populist-authoritarian, and ultimately anti-democratic, trends.

(Image source: iStock)

In studying history predictions that didn't happen are often as interesting as those that became real events.

Remember the "clash of civilization" that was to pitch one part of mankind to another in a multilayered cultural, religious, economic and, yes, even racial war? Decades later we see that at least part of the predicted clash is taking place within the same "civilization". It is in the United States and Western Europe that we witness such phenomena as wokeism and cancel culture while many "emerging nations" are breaking some taboos to open a wider space for discussion and dissent.

It is also in Western democracies that bowdlerization even of classical texts is making a comeback.

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