RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 16 to June 22, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that Hatem Bazian is the unsung inspiration and key driving force behind the anti-Israel protests that have sprung up at college campuses across the country. The West Bank native, now a lecturer at UC-Berkeley, has worked for decades to radicalize students against the Jewish state. Sperry reports: In 1993 Bazian helped found the first college chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine – whose national organization says it supports more than 350 “Palestinian solidarity organizations.” In 2006, he co-founded (and still leads) SJIP’s umbrella organization, American Muslims for Palestine, which provides funding and guidance for the chapters for, among other things, holding anti-Israel “teach-ins,” erecting pro-Palestinian tables, crafting media “talking points,” and creating flyers and placards for the campus encampments and occupations that demonize Israel and sanitize Hamas atrocities as “resistance.” On Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas murdered 1,200 people in Israel and took several hundred more hostage, the National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is controlled by the AMP, distributed a “Resistance Toolkit” that celebrated Hamas’ attack as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: Across land, air and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers” separating Gaza from Israel. As AMP’s chairman, Bazian has visited several encampments, including at the University of Pennsylvania, San Diego State University, UC-San Diego, University of San Francisco and UC-Berkeley, where his acolytes set up a “Gaza Solidarity Camp.” Although Bazian denies claims that he is antisemitic, his speeches have echoed the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s teaching that “the Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews.” Denying that he has called for violence, Bazian has a long history of calling for intifada – a form of Palestinian resistance often associated with suicide bombings – in America. “They’re going to say [I’m] some Palestinian being radical – well, you haven’t seen radicalism yet. It’s about time we have an intifada in this country!” Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Maricopa Cops Squander Millions, RCI
Call Department of Energy Irresponsible, RCI
Vermont Counts Its Chickens, RCI
Denying Calif. Voters Control Over Taxes, RCI
Louisville Pol Slugs Taxpayers, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Steps Under Way to Resist a New Trump Administration, NY Times
Hunter Biden Had Sweeter Burisma Deal in Works, Just the News
Hunter Biden and Push for Burisma Entrée to VP Office, Just/News
Biden Is Giving Red Districts Green Jobs, Bloomberg
Judge in Trump Docs Case Rejected Stepping Aside, New York Times
Biden Admin Worked With Eco Groups to Shut Down Coal, Free Beacon
Communist Leaders Invited Hunter Biden to China in 2013, Fox News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission took action against a sprawling network of nonprofits that had raised millions on the promise of helping the needy — cancer patients, veterans, firefighters — while mostly lining its own pockets. Executives and corporate entities behind Outreach Calling were fined more than $58 million and banned from all charitable fundraising for life, but this article reports that regulators kept one door open in most of the settlements -- the ability to continue fundraising for political purposes: For Thomas Berkenbush, who was a co-manager at Outreach, that provision would prove to be a windfall. Before the deal with the FTC was even finalized, Berkenbush filed paperwork to establish a new company, Office Edge LLC. Since then, Office Edge has been paid about $866,000 for fundraising from organizations that similarly claim to be working on behalf of cancer patients, veterans and firefighters. The difference? These groups are not charities, they’re political nonprofits that claim to use donations to influence elections and support broad political causes. … A ProPublica investigation has connected Berkenbush to a network of at least 10 of these 527 groups that have raised more than $33 million on the promise of supporting admirable causes, but that have spent little on activities that could be construed as having a political purpose. Most of the money goes to fundraisers who have only been paid by 527s in the group ProPublica identified. This article adds evidence to the idea we may already be at war with China. It reports that a private social network run by a self-identified Chinese government agent provides illegal immigrants with resources to get into the U.S. and evade border authorities: The American Self-Guided Tour Channel is a Chinese-language group with over 8,000 members on the encrypted instant messaging platform Telegram that serves as both a forum for discussing Chinese illegal immigration and a hub for documents detailing specific routes to the U.S., a DCNF review of the channel found. Documents in the Telegram channel translated by the DCNF identify U.S. border wall gaps, instruct Chinese nationals on how to answer questions from Border Patrol agents and provide scripts for requesting asylum. The article reports that the network is overseen by an individual who spreads Chinese Communist Party propaganda, bans accounts that fail to toe the party line and identifies himself as a Chinese police officer. Customs and Border Protection data shows that the overwhelming majority of the roughly 48,000 Chinese illegal immigrants encountered by U.S. authorities in 2024 have been single adults – and experts warn that “military-aged males” make up the lion’s share. In a separate article, CNN reports that Chinese connected “pig butchering” scams – in which con artists assume false online identities and spend months financially grooming and fattening up their victims to get them to invest on fraudulent cryptocurrency websites – are taking a terrible toll on Americans: It’s theft at a scale so large that investigators are now calling it a mass transfer of wealth from middle-class Americans to criminal gangs. Last year, the FBI estimates, pig butchering scams stole nearly $4 billion from tens of thousands of American victims, a 53% increase from the year before. A world without war is nice to imagine but hard to fathom. But, this article reports, future armed conflicts could become more challenging given the problems nations across the globe are facing recruiting soldiers: In the United States, the Army is slashing its ranks by thousands of positions amid chronic recruiting shortfalls. In Europe, despite military spending increases since the war in Ukraine, the shortfalls are, if anything, even worse: Germany’s military has been shrinking for years despite a major recruiting push, while the UK may soon decommission four warships because of a lack of sailors to sail them. Despite a military buildup prompted by concerns about China, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are falling short of their recruitment goals. Even China, which has the world’s largest military by people-power – with some 2 million active personnel – is struggling to recruit the skilled high school graduates it needs to operate its increasingly advanced weaponry. There’s an active debate among defense analysts about whether China even has the personnel needed to pull off an invasion of Taiwan. But, this article reports, militaries do have a controversial fallback strategy: conscription. Still, it notes, “given the cultural and political upheaval that ultimately caused the draft to be scrapped toward the end of the Vietnam War, a return to mass conscription is not an option most U.S. [or other Western] leaders would prefer to contemplate.” Here's why Karen McDonough may lose her home. During the housing crash in 2008, she, like millions of Americans, took out a second mortgage on her home. When she later asked for a modification of her loan, the mortgage company told her – but did not put in writing - that the $77,000 debt had been forgiven as part of her restructuring. In fact, the second mortgage had been sold to investors who waited more than a decade to demand payment. She thought it was a scam, until they foreclosed and sold her home: McDonough had fallen victim to what's called a zombie second mortgage. Homeowners think these loans are long dead. But then the loans come back to life because they get bought up, sometimes for pennies on the dollar, by debt collectors. These companies often tack on a mountain of retroactive interest and fees, even though that can be legally dubious in some cases, and then move to collect and foreclose on people's homes. … Zombie second loans can be perilous for homeowners because they were real mortgages, signed 15 or 20 years ago, and often there are still liens recorded on the properties. This article reports that the practice is widespread: “In New York, NPR found at least 10,000 old second mortgages that foreclosure activity had been initiated on in just the past two years.” It also reports that lawyers are trying to find ways to help people stay in their homes: “Despite everything that has happened, Karen McDonough is still in her little yellow house. The eviction proceedings are on hold while her lawyers push ahead with her case.” White-collar companies that once championed discrimination in the name of diversity are tiptoeing away from those programs. This article reports that PricewaterhouseCoopers and JPMorgan Chase are among the firms that recently removed or altered descriptions of their programs for underrepresented students. The shift came after an “anti-woke” movement took aim at U.S. companies and a Supreme Court decision overturned affirmative action in college admissions. Employers’ embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives peaked in 2021, sparked by the death of George Floyd and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement a year earlier. In the years since, access to diversity programs has been slowly declining, a Glassdoor study in April found. Companies have made the changes quietly, often by playing down terminology such as “DEI” and opening up programs once reserved for diverse applicants to everyone. Many stopped referencing their DEI programs in annual reports altogether, The Wall Street Journal has reported. … Accounting firm PwC’s well-known Start internship program, which accepted only “traditionally underrepresented” minority applicants for years, removed that requirement last fall. The program’s description now says it encourages students of diverse backgrounds to apply. PwC declined to comment. Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in May removed “self-identify as a member of a historically underrepresented group” from a list of attributes ideal candidates should possess for its sophomore summer business-analyst program. | 