Watch Out For The Bright, Shiny Object

Rightwinggranny is a little more than ten years old. I have learned a few things along the way. One of those things is that when the media is screaming headlines in unison, there is probably something going on behind the scenes that I need to be aware of. This article is an example of that.

On January 16th, Breitbart reported that New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be serving on the House Financial Services Committee. The Committee is led by Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez has made some remarks that indicate she may not totally understand exactly how America’s Representative Republic works, but that’s okay–she still got elected. So let’s look at who supported her election. Opensecrets.org is a website that tracks political campaign donations, The link I highlighted leads to information on the funding of Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign for the House of Representatives. There is nothing illegal here, but it is always interesting to see where a candidate gets their funding.

The campaign funding information on Representative Ocasio-Cortez shows that during her primary campaign, two-thirds of the donations came from small donors. She may not fully understand how our government works, but she did a very good job or organizing a campaign. Eighty-eight percent of the large donations to her campaign (over $200) came from outside her district. From the time she won the primary election until the end of June, she received $70,000 from out-of-state donors. How does a newcomer to politics build that kind of a political machine? Who were the people who helped her organize her campaign? I don’t have answers to those questions.

So why is it significant that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has been appointed to the House Financial Services Committee? That is the committee that oversees big banking, lending, and the financial sector. Representative Ocasio-Cortez has already expressed an interest in looking into the student loan crisis (a crisis created when the government took over student loans). It is quite possible that the committee will attempt to undo the deregulation President Trump has done that has led to the economic growth we are experiencing. Hopefully the Senate can protect our booming economy.

The other significant appointment you might not have heard about is the appointment of Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. (You can read more about Ilhan Omar at Power Line Blog.) 

Breitbart posted an article about the appointment yesterday.

The article reports:

Omar supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, which has been called antisemitic because it singles out the Jewish state for isolation and ignores the Palestinian side.

…House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) issued a statement in which he reminded Pelosi that she said Congress “must” oppose BDS, and that Schumer had called BDS “anti-Semitism.”

“I would love to know what changed, because Democratic leaders just promoted a pro-BDS Democrat to a key committee that deals with the State of Israel.”

McCarthy continued: “Anti-Semitism has no place in Congress and certainly not on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.”

House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) blasted Pelosi for appointing Omar to the committee, saying she had a “documented history of making anti-Semitic and anti-Israel remarks.”

He added: “House Democrats have now just endorsed that ideology.”

This appointment may simply be a reflection of the ongoing battle between Nancy Pelosi and President Trump as to who is going to lead the country. However, both of these appointments represent a very severe left turn on the part of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. It remains to be seen if Americans will support this extreme left turn.

The Sorry State Of Freedom On Our College Campuses

A friend sent me a link to a Washington Post article posted on October 9. The headline in the article is, “A second Michigan instructor withheld a recommendation letter from student headed to Israel.”

The disturbing part is the reason given:

The article continues:

Her email echoed the one that arrived last month in the inbox of Abigail Ingber, another junior at the University of Michigan. 

“I am very sorry, but I only scanned your first email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail,” John Cheney-Lippold, a cultural studies professor, wrote to Ingber in early September, upon realizing that the reference was for a program at Tel Aviv University. “As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there.”

The concept that Israel includes Palestinian land is simply not true. As Walid Shoebat has stated, “One day during the 1960s I went to bed a Jordanian Muslim, and when I woke up the next morning, I was informed that I was now a Palestinian Muslim, and that I was no longer a Jordanian Muslim.” Jordan was established to be the Palestinian state. The Palestinians were kicked out of Jordan after they attempted to overthrow its government. The Arab countries have kept them as refugees for generations in order to gin up anger against Israel with the hopes of driving the Jews into the sea. It is unbelievable that our college professors are encouraging this sort of behavior. It’s a shame our college teachers don’t know history. In actuality, the land occupied by Jordan was initially given to Israel.

The article concludes:

Michael Zakim, a cultural historian at Tel Aviv University, argued that the boycott would end up undermining “the Palestinian struggle” by unwittingly supporting forces “determined to delegitimize the humanism and internationalism that predominates on Israeli university campuses.” He labeled as “inanity” some of the means taken to “discredit Israeli academic culture,” such as the refusal to serve as an external reader on a dissertation.

Feisal G. Mohamed, then of the University of Illinois and now at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, responded, saying the boycott didn’t compel each of the actions decried by Zakim. Still, he reasoned, “any and all available means must be used to end an occupation.”

At Michigan, the board of regents declined last year to form a committee to investigate divesting the university’s endowment from companies doing business with Israel, after the student government passed a resolution supporting such a move.

But refusing to throw its weight behind BDS isn’t enough, Secker (Jake Secker) warned. If the university doesn’t take further action to insulate its students from the political actions of their professors, he said, it could have a crisis on its hands.

“This is an epidemic that’s starting to begin,” he said. “Especially being someone who has an Israeli background, I took it personally. It really disturbed me.”

Any university discriminating against students who want to study in Israel should lose all federal and state funding. BDS is not an acceptable policy, and the government should not be funding it.

When Colleges Suppress Ideas

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line Blog posted an article yesterday about a recent vote taken at Tufts University in Massachusetts.

The article reports:

Anti-Israel groups on college campuses have come up with a new tactic in their effort to pass BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) resolutions. They are manipulating the voting to exclude Jews from the process.

At Tufts, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine decided to place an anti-Israel divestment resolution on the school senate’s agenda on the evening before the Jewish holiday of Passover, at a time when many Jewish students would be unable to attend the student government meeting. More than 50 students emailed their “senators” urging them to postpone the vote until after the Jewish holiday. The senate ignored their request.

A number of Jewish, Christian, education, and civil rights groups have sent a letter to Anthony Monaco, president of Tufts, protesting the way the vote was held. Their list of remedies is included in the Power Line article.

Fortunately this story does have a happy ending.

The article at Power Line includes an update:

I’m happy to report, via a Tufts alum, that the Trustees have voted not to change Tufts’ investment policy. Further, they identified significant “concerns” in the manner in which the student senate passed the divestment resolution.

Unfortunately anti-Semitism is alive and well on America’s college campuses.

A Really Nasty Alliance

On September 23rd, The Center for Security Policy posted an article about the alliance between The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and Black Lives Matter (BLM). The ISM is a leader in the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. At the conclusion of an event in San Diego in 2014, ISM lead organizer Anna Piller, alias Anna Baltzer, send out an email blast urging her followers to descend on Ferguson, Missouri in 2015 and demonstrate with black American radicals there about the shooting of Michael Brown, a black 17 year-old robber who was killed by a Ferguson police officer when the youth tried to steal the officer’s gun after attacking him. Brown had just robbed a liquor store.  That email also broadsided a cry for action “From Ferguson to Palestine,” bringing the BDS movement and Palestinian groups, both domestic and abroad, to ally with U.S. black “liberation” groups and radicals, and tying the goals of Hamas to domestic complaints by American blacks over alleged unfair treatment by US law enforcement. This is not news to Americans who have watched demonstrations turning violent in the past year. It has become increasingly obvious that much of the violence in these protests is being done by outside agitators rather than those in the areas of the protest.

The article reminds us of the plans of Hamas for America:

At another planning conference of the ISM at Duke University, Abe Greenhouse, a self-avowed anarchist and ISM leader told one seminar that similar riots occurring weekly in the “West Bank” against Israel’s security barrier provided training for American and European anarchists to bring similar “direct actions” to the U.S. border with Mexico one day.  When we hear a presidential candidate discussing how he plans a wall along the U.S./Mexican border, it isn’t a long stretch to see what is coming, when busloads of anarchists will be brought to the U.S. southern border to riot and attack border patrol officers near the fence.

The BDS movement and BLM came out with new videos. circulating on the Web to bolster the connection between current goals of Hamas and BLM. One cries out a central theme of “When I see them I see us”, implying a connection between Hamas goals and black revolutionaries.  Mainstream media continues to largely ignore this connection. Viewers of the video will only see a suite of black and white faces seemingly fighting alleged injustice  and will not know is that some of those holding this statement  up are convicted terrorists like Rasmeah Odeh who murdered two college boys with a bomb and is fighting deportation from the USA or Angela Davis, convicted of smuggling guns for a prison break during trial that resulted in a judge being killed . To the BLM and BDS activists, the idea of increased numbers and noise the film will generate through publicity and propaganda are all that matter.

The article concludes:

Israeli intelligence must take heed next time a BLM delegation tries to enter their country. All Americans should be better informed about plans to trick them into supporting the goals of the very terrorists who pose the greatest threat to the United States and do not really serve the US and worldwide black community at home or abroad. As this united front goes on, Americans can expect to see terrorism on a daily scale as experienced by the Israelis, with shootings targeting police, riots in the streets and at our border, and general mayhem against “occupation” as blacks and minorities will be pitched the notion they are “occupied” like the Palestinian Arabs claim to be. This is something Middle East Studies need to delve into as well, as this situation increases its presence on the world stage, because what goes on there is now being brought home to America.

(Readers should note: The same day this article broke, three Phoenix, Arizona police officers were run over by a black driver who intentionally targeted them. Israel has been having these hit and run attacks by automobiles driven by Arabs as part of the “Intifada” for a long time. The Phoenix attack is a major news story in the USA, but the plethora of car attacks by Arabs against Israeli civilians and police get almost no mention in the mainstream Media. It is this writer’s opinion that the Phoenix attack is a harbinger for the same tactics being shared by Black Lives Matter and Hamas as mentioned in this article. Hatem Bazian’s call for an Intifada in America is just starting. The driver who struck the police officers, Marc Laquon Payne, is an acolyte of the Black Panther Party which is part of the BLM/Black Liberation movement /Hamas connection.

Note that the group causing trouble in America includes not only Middle Eastern terrorist groups, but also anarchists with various backgrounds. Unfortunately the ISM movement and the BDS movement are widely accepted on American college campuses. I think it is time to look at what American colleges are teaching their students. These college students represent the future leaders of America, and if they are being indoctrinated into false principles, they will not preserve our republic. When America loses its freedom, where can we go?