Author: admin

On Sunday, May 28th, 34-year-old Earl Hargrove Jr. of Florida was taken into custody and issued multiple charges, including one count of first-degree attempted murder and one count of aggravated battery resulting in serious bodily harm.

The incident occurred at a Mobile gas station in Tampa, Florida, where Hargrove and the victim involved – the identity of whom is yet to be disclosed by authorities – were engaged in a verbal disagreement.

Afterward, Hargrove purchased a small amount of gasoline and poured it onto the other individual before igniting them.

The victim was subsequently delivered to Tampa General Hospital and suffers from life-threatening injuries in a critical state. Chad Chronister, Hillsborough County Sheriff, voiced his opposition to the alleged behavior describing it as “deplorable.” He added, “A verbal argument should never result in this level of violence.” The confrontation’s context is currently unknown as to whether the two men were acquainted prior to the attack or not.

Authorities apprehended Hargrove at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, and is now currently behind bars in the Falkenburg Road Jail. A bond of $115,000 has been placed, with $100,000 designated for the attempted murder charge and the rest for the aggravated battery charge.

This assault on the victim by Mr. Hargrove is a sorrowful reflection of the kind of violence that should not be tolerated. It is integral that justice is served to Mr. Hargrove and that the victim is given the necessary medical attention to help recover from their life-threatening injuries. HCSO investigators are appealing to the community for any aid and for anyone with information to contact them.

Budapest would make the move official “in a number of weeks,” says Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, while Hungarian ambassador says no final decision has been made.

By JNS

Hungary will become the first European Union member state to open an embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen announced in Budapest on Wednesday.

Speaking at a synagogue affiliated with the Chabad movement, Cohen said that Hungary would make the move official “in a number of weeks,” adding that it is “great news for Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for over 3,000 years.”

The central European country has maintained a trade office in Jerusalem since 2019.

Hungary’s ambassador to Israel, Levente Benkö could not confirm Cohen’s claim, saying in a statement Thursday: “Hungary has been operating a trade office in Jerusalem since 2019 and there has been no decision on further steps so far.”

An embassy move would place Budapest in opposition to the official position of the European Union, which does not formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Paraguay is also poised to return its embassy to Jerusalem following the election of President Santiago Peña, whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated in a telephone call on Tuesday night. Netanyahu commended Peña on his stated intention to return the Paraguayan embassy to Jerusalem immediately following his inauguration in August.

The United States, Guatemala, Kosovo and Honduras currently operate embassies in Jerusalem.

Cohen was in Budapest as part of a four-day, four-country diplomatic swing through central Europe. He first visited Croatia and Slovakia, and is scheduled to head on from Hungary to Austria before returning to Israel.

During his stay in Budapest, Cohen met with his Hungarian counterpart, Péter Szijjárto, who agreed to petition the International Court of Justice in the Hague against the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” policy of providing financial payouts to terrorists and their families.

Israel’s top diplomat said that he had thanked Szijjárto “for his firm stance against the Palestinian Authority’s payments to terrorists who killed Jews,” and that the two had discussed the Iranian threat “and the need to take immediate steps” to halt its nuclear program.

“In addition, we discussed strengthening cooperation in the fields of economy, energy and tourism,” he said.

Cohen also met on Wednesday with President of Hungary, Katalin Novák.

On Tuesday in Bratislava, Cohen became the first Israeli foreign minister to address the Slavkov/Austerlitz format—a regional cooperation forum consisting of Austria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He called for unity in countering Iran, warning that its nuclear program was “close to the point of no return.”

Cohen kicked off his Central European trip on Sunday night in Croatia, on Monday meeting in Zagreb with Prime Minister Andrej Plenković and other top officials.

The post Israeli FM: Hungary to open embassy in Jerusalem appeared first on World Israel News.

In an insightful essay published last week at Foreign Policy, Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, aruged that U.S. support for Ukraine yields multiple goods: including the defense of Taiwan. It’s an assertion bracing and, somehow, both timely and evergreen all at once. Ever since Putin launched his abhorrent invasion, there has been an ongoing debate about whether the United States can provide support for Ukraine while also meeting other essential responsibilities, including, chiefly, countering a revisionist China hellbent on shaking up the status quo.

Many see this as a zero-sum game—we can choose only one ambition or the other. Critics of military assistance to Ukraine insist that whatever treasure, attention, or resources we direct to Kiev to help them deal with Russia takes away from the attention, resources, and treasure we can spend against China. With Beijing the bigger and critical threat, the decision is simple. Allying ourselves with Ukraine against a bully might feel morally satisfying, but it will prove deadly to stopping China.

Scheinmann insists these critics are wrong. Measures taken to support Ukraine, he argues, “are helping modernize U.S. forces, revive dormant defense production, develop and accelerate processes for building and fielding weapons, and spur the largest defense buildup by the United States and its allies in 40 years.” The benefits extend far beyond Central Europe. While there is much more to do, Scheinmann canvasses a number of different ways in which American defense industries, spending, innovation, and processes are becoming more streamlined, efficient, and effective. “The United States is still not moving fast enough to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan,” Scheinmann cautions, “but U.S. military aid to Ukraine is helping it get off the blocks.”

Christian realist observers should be heartened. Scheinmann’s critics are right that supporting Ukraine feels morally satisfying—but only because doing the right thing is morally satisfying. At the same time, it is indisputable that China is a threat that can be neither ignored nor underestimated. The idea that we might realistically be able to deal with both Russia and China at the same time is a moral and strategic boon.

That’s a good thing, because, as the political theorist, Matthew Kroenig, Senior Director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center, insists: the U.S. really doesn’t have a choice. From even before the Russian invasion began, Kroenig has argued that the U.S. has to develop a strategy—and the capacity—to deter and, if necessary, defeat Russia and China at the same time.

From our inception, Providence has been guided by the simple belief that the routine work of foreign policy and the maintenance of the international system is analogous to the creation mandate to cultivate the Garden. In the space of international affairs, the mandate includes tending to the tasks that uphold public safety, execute justice, and promote human flourishing. This responsibility, scripture makes clear, is shared by all peoples. It is the God-given duty placed upon governing authorities—those over whom there is no one greater charged with the responsibility to protect the innocent, requite injustice, and punish evil with the aim of creating and preserving the conditions necessary for order, justice, and peace.

Given its power—held in substantial reserves of economic, military, and political resources—the U.S. has a commensurately larger share of stewardship responsibilities. While the American government rightly prioritizes the safety  and security of the American people, this special obligation is not our only obligation. We believe the United States should continue to lead the world, in collaboration with allies, partners, and friends. Our Classical and Hebraic moral and intellectual inheritance has given us a deep sense of the responsibility to use power well and generously. We are not perfect. But we are a good bit better than the other options.

Therefore, the U.S. cannot afford to choose—and the world cannot afford to have us choose—between Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Washington’s strategic objective must be to maintain peace and stability in both regions. The Goodnews, Kroenig insists, is that the resource-rich U.S. has the capacity—if we can maintain the will—to both walk and chew gum at the same time. In order to build the capacity to do so, Kroenig has several recommendations. I’ll enumerate some of them briefly here.

First, the U.S. must commit to increase defense spending. China is a greater threat than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, therefore a meaningful Defense spending must follow recognition of this fact. We could double our present defense spending and still remain below the Cold War average as a percent of GDP. American economic power can sustain this. With a GDP that outguns both Russia and China combined, we can afford to outspend them. There is no need to make “bread or bombs” compromises.

Secondly, our increased defense spending will be next to meaningless if we do not spend it wisely on the fighting assets we need, if we do not innovate and leverage new technologies, and if we do not adapt acquisition and production models to build it all at the required scale and pace. Our support of the war effort against Russia has revealed weaknesses in the U.S. defense industrial ecosystem. We must fix them.

Third, whatever the strength of the U.S., Kroenig advises, even the walk-and-chew-gum camp know we can’t take on both Russia and China alone. Therefore The U.S. must actively lead its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific to leverage their strengths. Ukraine has demonstrated what the Central and Eastern nations are capable of if they are given the resources to fight. U.S. allies and partners need to do more. We can help them do more.

Lastly, whether we like it or not, Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling has reinforced that nuclear weapons can be used to abet conventional aggression. Beijing will certainly have grasped its meaning. We can expect China’s nuclear build up to proceed apace and for its nuclear assets to be deployed as a shield for Chinese aggression against Taiwan and leveraged to deter U.S. intervention. The U.S. must except that it must now counter two near-peer and nuclear armed adversaries. We need the numbers and kinds of nonstrategic nuclear weapons that can deter, at the very least, both Russia and China at the same time and that both adversaries would believe we would be willing to use in a last resort.

In the meanwhile, while the war in the Ukraine has clarified some of what lies ahead of us, these essential lessons are emerging from a battle that is not yet concluded. The Western alliance that supports Ukraine must decide to commit to a resolute conclusion. That conclusion should be a Ukrainian victory and a Russian defeat. Ukrainian victory will be characterized by the Ukrainian people securing and maintaining a democratic, independent, sovereign, and flourishing nation marked by order, justice, and peace and with the ability to deter aggression and defend herself. This defeat will be characterized by Moscow’s failure to achieve its strategic goal of destroying the Ukrainian nation and national identity. Because this is so, the U.S. must lead the way in giving the Ukrainians the weapons they need to win. The debates about what precisely these are will hotly contested. The resolve to give them should not be.

With a clear strategy coupled to clear goals and backed by prudence and power and the clear willingness to employ that power if necessary, the U.S. just might prove able to walk and chew gum at the same time. And, if we do it right, we won’t have to step in it when we do.

The post Russia and China at Once: Ukraine, Taiwan, and the Challenge of a Two Front War appeared first on Providence.

Post Content

The sudden loss of a beloved son, father, and doctor has left family and friends in shock and grief. On Tuesday, authorities located Dr. John Forsyth’s body after he vanished last week.

The 49-year-old ER doctor and father of eight from Missouri had just gotten engaged three days prior and finalized his divorce from his first wife days later. Richard Forsyth, John’s brother, reported him missing on May 21 after he failed to show up for his 7 p.m. shift at Mercy Hospital in Cassville.

The last person to hear from John was his fiancée, with whom he texted around 7 a.m. the day he vanished. John said his shift was over and he’d see her “a little bit later” but then suddenly stopped responding. Surveillance video captured him walking to his luxury RV in the hospital parking lot, where he stayed while working his shifts.

John planned to visit family and friends in Idaho and Utah beginning May 22, including his second-oldest daughter, who had just returned from a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

When authorities located his car, they found his passport, wallet, and two phones, along with his RV and car keys, still inside. The Infiniti was situated in a yard waste site, about 700 feet from the Cassville Aquatic Center entrance. His laptop, as well as two additional cell phones, were left behind in the unlocked RV.

Police conducted a canine and ground search of the 90-acre park around the recreation facility; however, they found no trace of his whereabouts.

Richard said his brother was the embodiment of punctuality and called it an immediate red flag when he didn’t report for his shift. As the family got the devastating news of their beloved John’s passing, Richard told Fox News Digital, “We were too late.” He suspects foul play, and more details from a detective are expected Wednesday, leaving behind unanswered questions and an irreparable hole in the hearts of his family and friends.

Meir Tamari, a 32-year-old husband and father of two young children, was the second person in the family to be murdered by a Palestinian terrorist. Relative Benjamin Horgen discusses the tragedy with i24News.

The post WATCH: ‘We were supposed to grow old together’ – terror victim, father of 2, laid to rest appeared first on World Israel News.

Billionaire Harlan Crow’s firm advocated for rolling back the very wetland protections the Supreme Court just gutted. The obvious conflict of interest raises questions about not just the ruling’s legitimacy but the entire court’s.

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, left, talks to Chief Justice John Roberts during the formal group photograph at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on October 7, 2022. (Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Despite being caught in a swirling corruption scandal, the Supreme Court continues to rule on cases and issue far-reaching decisions that shatter years of precedent to rewrite the country’s laws. For the moneyed interests who have spent big to financially influence the courts, this is very much according to plan. The court’s latest bombshell ruling shows just how handsomely the effort is paying off.

Last Thursday, in a 5-4 ruling on the Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency case, the Supreme Court dramatically narrowed the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act in an act of judicial activism so brazen, even the Donald Trump–appointed Brett Kavanaugh accused the court of “rewriting” the law and failing to “stick to the text.” To do so, justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, simply disposed of the statute’s deliberately broad coverage of wetlands that are “adjacent” to “waters of the United States,” redefining that word as meaning “adjoining” — a different word with a different meaning — and claiming that only wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to protected waters were covered by the Clean Water Act. Environmental groups say it will take away protections for more than half of the country’s 118 million acres of wetlands.

That decision — widely criticized for its linguistic games and overturning of long-standing precedent  — is directly tied up in the corruption scandal that has embroiled Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas in particular.

A Crow’s Tentacles

First exposed by ProPublica in April, Thomas was revealed to have failed to disclose decades worth of generous gifts from right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow, the chairman and former CEO of Crow Holdings. The long-standing financial relationship between the two men — which has included not just lavish holidays and pricey private-school tuition for the boy Thomas raised as his son, but even purchase of real estate — has already led to calls to impeach Clarence Thomas.

As HuffPost reported last month, a trade group chaired by Ken Valach, currently the CEO of the development platform of Crow Holdings, was directly involved in the Sackett case, pouring cold water over Thomas’s claim that Crow’s gifts weren’t a conflict of interest because the billionaire had no business before the court. The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), a trade group that counts three of Crow’s companies as dues-paying members, filed an amicus brief in the case, calling for the rollback of regulations they viewed as stifling housing construction. The NMHC has been a long-standing opponent of more expansive interpretations of the definition of “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) covered by the Clean Water Act, which among other things can hinder, delay, and or even outright block developers’ plans if they might have an adverse impact on surrounding wetlands and other local water bodies.

But this already serious conflict of interest goes even deeper. The NHMC, whose board of directors Valach has served on since 2015, is a founding member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition (WAC), an alliance of various corporate trade groups dedicated to weakening the WOTUS definition, whose members span industries ranging from fossil fuels and mining to farming and real estate.

Since 2019 alone, the WAC has spent a total of $260,000 lobbying on one thing and one thing only: “waters of US rulemaking,” or, as it put it in one filing, “federal legislative and administrative developments concerning the scope of federal regulatory authority over water bodies.” Not surprisingly, it wasted little time in, by its own words, “applauding” the Sackett ruling the day it was announced for halting “decades of attempts to expand the federal government’s power over private land.”

The organization submitted a public comment in February 2022 about the Joe Biden administration’s planned expansion of the WOTUS rule, in which its objections to the administration’s proposed changes echoed the arguments Thomas and the rest of the court’s right-wing justices used in Sackett. The new rule’s “approach to adjacency” — where federal jurisdiction applied to wetlands “with only intermittent shallow subsurface connections,” or which were simply “reasonably close” to waters already covered by the federal government — raised “implementation concerns” via its “vague terminology,” the comment stated.

The NHMC and WAC aren’t the only trade groups with links to Crow’s companies that have weighed in on the issue. Take the Real Estate Roundtable (RER), of which Crow Holdings CEO Michael Levy has been a member since 2017. The RER has likewise submitted amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on the Sackett case in the past, albeit before Levy was a member, and it collaborates with the EPA via the agency’s the Smart Sectors program, through which, in the RER’s words, it “advocates for balanced environmental regulations” on issues that include wetlands programs under the Clean Water Act “that trigger land-use permitting requirements.” The WOTUS rule is among the suite of issues the RER has consistently lobbied on from 2014 to 2019, spending millions of dollars per quarter in the process.

There’s also NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, a developer trade group that Crow Holdings has numerous links with. Clark Machemer, a senior managing director in the industrial group of Crow Holdings’ development arm, sits on NAIOP’s executive committee and was a trustee of its political action committee in 2022, a position that, in the organization’s words, requires pledging a yearly donation of $5,000 and allows one to “guide the agenda of the PAC and approve financial support allocated to elected officials and candidates.” Machemer has donated another $5,000 to NAIOP-PAC this year, according to an April filing, suggesting that he continues to serve as a trustee.

Besides this, Matt Kurucz, a managing director at the same development platform of Crow Holdings, is described as an “active member” of the NAIOP National Forums Groups — a networking platform for commercial real estate professionals that convenes twice a year — as well as a member of its Chicago chapter. Meanwhile, NAIOP’s Massachusetts chapter counts among its member companies Trammell Crow Residential, Crow Holdings’ multifamily development firm, and Crow Holdings has been one of the “grand sponsors” of its New Jersey chapter’s annual commercial real estate awards gala every year since 2019.

NAIOP similarly wasted no time in “commend[ing]” the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett, which it called a “victory for NAIOP” members, while noting it had been “an issue on which NAIOP has been active on behalf of commercial real estate.” This was despite the fact that frequently changing the WOTUS definition was one of its main gripes in its own 2022 public comment.

NAIOP, too, has spent a cumulative total of millions lobbying on issues that include the WOTUS definition and federal jurisdiction over wetlands, from the first quarter of this year going all the way back to the first quarter of 2014, when it also lobbied for bills outright barring the EPA and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) from expanding the scope of protected waters without Congress’s say-so.

Everything Permitted

But even besides this public paper trail, that Crow and his businesses will benefit from this ruling is hardly a secret. Crow Holdings’ projects have often faced delays and regulatory obstacles due to their possible impact on local wetlands and other water bodies.

As reported by HuffPost, last year the industrial branch of Crow Holdings applied for authorization from the US Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act to build a one million-square-foot warehouse facility in Gordon County, Georgia, which was tipped to cause “cumulative adverse impacts to 6.87 acres of wetland.” A search of the USACE permitting database shows that Crow Holdings Industrial has another permit pending, applied for in Chicago by NAIOP member Matt Kurucz, for water quality certification under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which determines whether or not a project that may cause discharge into waters of the United States can get a permit.

In 2020, Crow Holdings Industrial also requested an approved jurisdictional determination from the USACE on whether the water bodies on New Jersey’s Raccoon Island fall under the WOTUS definition. The final decision determined that eleven wetlands making up nearly 136 acres that are adjacent to protected water bodies fall under federal regulation, with eight of them directly abutting those water bodies or artificially separated from them by roads — something that may have disqualified them from federal protection under the court’s rewriting of the Clean Water Act last week. Since then, development of the site appears to have passed on to another company, Floodgate Road LLC, which is planning a series of warehouses on the land.

This is far from the first time Crow Holdings has had to navigate regulatory hurdles surrounding wetlands to get its projects off the ground. A proposal by the firm to create speculative warehouse space in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, last year faced opposition in part due to the numerous wetlands on the proposed space, with the local planning department pointing to this when recommending against the project’s approval. An ultimately successful apartment complex project in 2008 that involved filling 4,800 square feet of wetlands was delayed by a legal challenge from locals over its environmental impact.

Similarly, a development proposed by Trammell Crow Residential was voted down unanimously in 2006 by a local planning board, which pointed out that the company’s site plan sat on a wetland buffer zone and was likely to drain water from the wetlands. Little wonder, then, that both Trammell Crow Residential and Commercial have been clients of Wetland Studies and Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm that helps companies with Clean Water Act permits — and which is listed as a “benefactor” of NAIOP’s Northern Virginia chapter. (Firms that donate $6,500 qualify as “benefactors” to the organization).

Whether through quicker approval of projects, fewer regulatory restrictions to wade through, or by neutering the ability of local residents to oppose controversial projects, it’s not difficult to see how the Supreme Court decision that Clarence Thomas just provided a pivotal vote for will end up serving his benefactor’s business interests.

Bang for Buck

As former conservative activist Rob Schneck outlined to Politico, the purpose of lavishing Supreme Court justices with expensive gifts and opulent dinners isn’t to sway them toward a particular political philosophy. Clarence Thomas was a conservative long before he met Harlan Crow for reasons entirely unrelated to the billionaire’s thinly veiled bribery.

The point, Schneck explained, was to create what Politico termed an “ecosystem of support” that would encourage them to be bolder in their judicial activism. Sometimes that would benefit the benefactors by opening the door to imposing their personal, regressive social vision on others. Sometimes it would benefit them by directly assisting their personal business interests, as it has in the Sackett case, which will make it easier for Crow’s companies and other real estate developers to disrupt and damage wetlands without legal or regulatory challenge.

Yet the clear, monumental conflict of interest involved in Sackett and the obvious unseemliness of ultrarich donors plying justices with luxurious gifts should not just raise questions about the legitimacy of this ruling. It should also feed further questions about the legitimacy of an entire Supreme Court mired in ethics issues.

“I love the Bible,” said Mira Husaisi, who hopes to compete in the international Bible competition when she’s a little older.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Mira Husaisi is not your ordinary 11-year-old girl. A member of the Druze community, she just tied for second place in the Jerusalem Bible quiz, which was held in the capital in honor of Jerusalem Education Week.

In an interview with Channel 12, Husaisi said she had several reasons for taking on the arduous task.

“I love the Bible, to learn about a new culture and its history,” the girl explained. “When I study, I remember that the Druze culture is very close to Judaism: we believe in Jethro, who is an important prophet to the Druze, that’s how I knew part of the story of Moses. Studying the Bible combines my roots and the environment I live in.”

Besides using the computer “a lot” and reading the relevant chapters among the 24 books of the Bible, she credited her friend, Ayala Saadon, for helping her “understand the material and all the culture” during the “exhausting preparations” for the quiz.

“We worked a lot together,” she said, and the work paid off, as the two together took second place among the 20 finalists in the contest.

Mira’s mother Rada told Channel 12 that she had been “very excited” that her daughter was competing and that both girls, “who had amazing teamwork,” had “reached a respectable place.”

Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon celebrated Mira’s accomplishment, calling it “a great honor that a student of Druze origin and her friend win second place.”

“The victory of Mira, the Druze student, and her friend Ayala in coming in second symbolizes more than anything the diverse and excellent Jerusalem education which, beyond pedagogy, also instills many values, including universal values of heritage and history,” he said.

Husaisi lives in the Beit HaKerem neighborhood of the capital, but her family is originally from the northern Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel.

The youngster said that she sees a future for herself in Bible studies, but in the shorter term, “if I have the opportunity, I would love to take part in the International Bible Quiz.”

The global variation of the competition takes place every Israeli Independence Day among high schoolers from Israel and Jewish schools abroad. Candidates are tested in several rounds throughout the year to determine who will go on national television to answer questions on minutiae of the Bible in front of a live audience, including the prime minister of Israel.

The post 11-year-old Druze girl takes 2nd place in Jerusalem Bible quiz appeared first on World Israel News.

The data shows a large drop in Jew-hatred in Ukraine, which the ADL suggests may be due to the country’s Jewish president.

By Menachem Wecker, JNS

The latest installment of the antisemitism index “Global 100,” which the Anti-Defamation League released on May 31, ostensibly has good news for Ukrainian Jews.

Jew-hatred in Ukraine declined from a record 46% index score in 2019 to 29% in 2023, “potentially driven in part by the popularity of the Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose approval ratings have risen dramatically over the last few years in response to his defiance in the face of Russian military attacks,” per an ADL release.

“The dramatic improvement in antisemitic attitudes in Ukraine seems linked to the popularity of President Zelensky, a leader who is both proudly Jewish and public about his heritage,” stated Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of ADL. “While the survey findings do not directly address questions of causality, there’s no doubt that having a Jewish president who is being praised for his response to Russian aggression seems to have affected perceptions of Jews among ordinary Ukrainian citizens.”

But whether the drop in antisemitic views in Ukraine is “potentially driven” by, or there’s “no doubt” that it “seems” to be affected by its Jewish president, the ADL survey paints a picture in which Ukraine is more antisemitic than Russia almost across the board.

Ukraine’s level of antisemitic beliefs, 29%, is higher than Russia’s, 26%, per ADL data. And whereas 36% of Russian respondents say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the country where they live, 38% of Ukrainians agreed with that antisemitic trope. And, according to the ADL survey, 19% of Ukrainians agree that “the Holocaust is a myth and did not happen,” compared to 17% of Russians.

Although not as dramatic as Ukraine’s 17 percentage-point drop from 2019 to 2023, Russia too saw a drop in its index score in that period, from 31% to 26%. And Russia’s index score was lower than Ukraine’s every year in that span. Ukraine’s score was 38% in 2014 (Russia was 30%), 32% in 2015 (compared to 23% in Russia), 46% in 2019 (compared to 31% in Russia) and 29% in 2023 (Russia was 26%).

In Ukraine, 53% of respondents agreed with the country’s most common anti-Jewish stereotype—“Jews have too much power in the business world”—while a smaller number of Russians, 44%, agreed with that country’s most common antisemitic stereotype, “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind.”

Ukrainians were also likelier than Russians to say that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country in 2014 (44% to 36%), 2015 (40% to 48%), 2019 (47% to 39%) and 2023 (38% to 36%).

One exception was the 27% of Russians who had not heard about the Holocaust, compared to 18% of Ukrainians. But among those who were aware of the Holocaust, denial was more common among Ukrainians (19%) than Russians (17%).

The survey is based on responses from 6,569 European adults, conducted between Nov. 8, 2022, and Jan. 30, 2023. Of that number, 1,000 of the interviews were with Ukrainians and Russians.

The post Ukraine more antisemitic than Russia: ADL survey appeared first on World Israel News.

I went to the right-wing populist National Conservatism Conference in London. I found a self-consciously “post-liberal” right grappling with the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and divided between pro- and anti-Thatcherites.

Home Secretary Suella Braverman speaks during the National Conservatism Conference at the Emmanuel Centre in London, May 15, 2023. (Victoria Jones / PA Images via Getty Images)

It was a sunny morning in May. On my way out the hotel room, I reached into my bag, took out my copy of Stuart Hall’s The Hard Road to Renewal, and chucked it onto the bed. After strolling down Whitehall and past Big Ben, I arrived at the Emmanuel Centre.

Inside the grand rotunda, a gray-haired man named Christopher DeMuth welcomed the audience. As if talking to God, he looked up and assured the crowd of British and American conservatives that “Thatcher would approve of what we are doing here” and promised to share his “spicy stories” about Ole Maggie during the evening cocktail hour. Coming from a guy who headed the American Enterprise Institute from 1986 to 2008, DeMuth’s glorification of Thatcher was no surprise. What else was a self-described “old Anglophile American conservative” supposed to do?

The next day, in a panel on economics and conservatism, Juliet Samuel, a popular young columnist for the right-wing Times, declared, “A specter is haunting the conservative movement. It is the specter of Margaret Thatcher.” Highlighting the utter failure of Thatcher’s neoliberal economic agenda, Samuel concluded, “It is time to bury Mrs. Thatcher once and for all.” Sorry, DeMuth. Turns out those odes to the Iron Lady might not be so welcome here after all.

For the past four years, the National Conservatives have gathered in Washington, Orlando, and Rome, bringing together conservative politicians, public intellectuals, and young fellow travelers to forge the ideological future of the Right. This was their first meeting in London, and it featured a veritable who’s who of prominent Brexiteer and Donald Trump–supporting icons from both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to DeMuth and Samuel, speakers included former UK cabinet secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, UK home secretary Suella Braverman, Hillbilly Elegy author turned Ohio senator J. D. Vance, Hillsdale College professor Michael Anton, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts.

But none of these figures loomed as large as Margaret Thatcher, whose legacy haunted the proceedings and threatened to undermine the organizers’ efforts to project a sense of unity against the Left.

The National Conservatives, or NatCons as they are sometimes called, routinely proclaim that they represent a new era of conservatism, one that opposes the “establishment” across the political spectrum. Yet as the clash between the pro- and anti-Thatcherites suggests, what that means — other than railing against the “woke left” — is not entirely clear.

Over the next three days, as I watched and listened to these debates over Thatcher’s legacy, I began to understand that their disagreements were not really about economic policies or any other policy for that matter. Instead, they were about the ultimate meaning and purpose of conservatives’ existential battle to reclaim their authority and right to rule from the Left.

The End of Thatcherism and the Rise of the Anti-Liberal Right

In 1979, the year Thatcher was elected prime minister, British scholar Stuart Hall penned “The Great Moving Right Show,” a short but incisive essay where he attempted to explain the nature and ascent of Thatcherism. Trying to make sense of some workers’ support for Thatcher’s neoliberal economic agenda, Hall argued that Thatcherism successfully invoked the populist language of the “nation” and the “people” to bind segments of the working class to an ideology that undermined their economic interests.

Exploiting discontent with a social democratic state that had compromised with corporate interests, Thatcherism promised to destroy the false authority of social democracy and replace it with the true authority of the nation. Hall called this “authoritarian populism.” His prescient analysis, later included in 1988’s The Hard Road to Renewal, foretold the hegemony of neoliberalism in British, American, and indeed global politics.

Thatcherism promised to destroy the false authority of social democracy and replace it with the true authority of the nation.

In 2016, when Donald Trump railed against Wall Street and declared the system was “rigged” on behalf of wealthy elites, he poked a hole in this neoliberal consensus on the Right, despite going on to pass the biggest corporate tax cut in decades. Trying to formulate a stable ideological paradigm out of Trump’s mercurial ways, the intellectual leaders of National Conservatism have branded their movement in opposition not just to Ronald Reagan’s and Thatcher’s brand of neoliberalism but to liberalism itself.

Yoram Hazony is one of these “post-liberal” leaders. In 2019, the Israeli American philosopher started the Edmund Burke Foundation, which hosts the NatCon conferences. In his introductory remarks in London, he declared, “We’ve tried liberal individualism, and we know that it doesn’t produce anything human.” As its name suggests, the National Conservatives want to dislodge the Right’s misguided prioritization of individual freedom and replace it with a renewed commitment to “the nation.” “When Britain is weakened and confused, I feel confused,” said Hazony. “When Britain is strong, it strengthens the entire West.” For Hazony and other NatCons, the restoration of the traditional nation and the traditional family are inherently linked. As Hazony told the audience, this “requires a reordering of your personal life — getting married young, having children, many of them, and raising them to serve the nation.”

‘When Britain is weakened and confused, I feel confused,’ said Hazony. ‘When Britain is strong, it strengthens the entire West.’

Like Thatcherism, National Conservatism is at its core a battle for authority. In attempting to supplant the false god of liberal individualism with the true god of family and nation, Hazony and the NatCons aim to wrest authority from the illegitimate progressives and the establishment right in order to restore the authority of genuine conservatives. Many speakers drew explicit connections between the war on “wokeness” and the reclamation of legitimate authority. Calling them “pretended citizens,” Kevin Roberts argued that “the woke elites” have “influence, not authority.” Characterizing them as “children playing dress-up in their parents’ clothes,” he declared, “they don’t so much lead or govern nations as they occupy them.”

Katharine Birbalsingh, the self-branded anti-woke teacher, turned this crisis of authority into a bit of reactionary performance art when she smiled broadly and warned the Oxbridge audience that they were about to get disciplined. “You put your kids in private schools, but in many ways, they’re worse. The more privileged the school, the more woke it is.” Declaring that “adult authority is dead,” she urged these conservative elites to take back their right to rule, warning that “any organization that isn’t explicitly fighting left-wing ideas will become left-wing.”

Families Values and Market Freedoms

This invocation of traditional moral authority against the Left’s destructive influence is nothing new in the conservative movement. Moral panics around the erosion of parental authority have been fueling the culture wars for decades. As sociologist Melinda Cooper has shown, “family values” were central to both Thatcher’s and Reagan’s neoliberalism.

When it comes to the market, however, the NatCons explicitly tap into a different paradigm of moral authority. In their quest to dismantle the welfare state, Thatcher and Reagan linked the traditional authority of family and nation to the moral tenets of market fundamentalism, grounding their arguments in Victorian defenses of a capitalist moral order. The NatCons have revitalized an alternative intellectual tradition that runs from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk and is much more critical of bourgeois authority. By elevating this tradition, they have not only threatened to knock Thatcher and Reagan from their pedestals but have also disrupted the broader ideological balance that has held the modern conservative movement together since the days of William F. Buckley.

Conservative political theorist Russell Kirk in 1962 (Wikimedia Commons)

In the old paradigm, the free market was the central instrument of efforts to restore conservative authority. In the new paradigm, the market is subordinated to the cultural order, and the two are not necessarily harmonious. Hall might have seen this as a shift from authoritarian populism to populist authoritarianism. Regardless of what we call it, this new framework is helping to buttress some significant policy transformations on the Right.

Against the establishment right’s support of immigration in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly every speaker at the NatCon conference argued for the need to restrict immigration to protect the integrity of the UK’s borders and culture. Braverman, herself the daughter of immigrants from Kenya and Mauritius, recently unveiled a proposal to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. In contrast to Reagan’s and Thatcher’s opposition to “big government,” several speakers acknowledged that the government must play a more central role in protecting civilization against what NatCon’s UK chairman, James Orr, called the “new priesthood” and “new inquisitors” of woke zealotry.

On most matters, none of the speakers disagreed about the need to subordinate freedom to nation. But whenever the freedom of markets came up, Thatcher’s ghost loomed large. In his opening remarks, Hazony expressed support for a tack away from neoliberal fiscal and trade policies. “I agree with Hayek and Friedman about the dangers of planned economies,” he acknowledged, but “policy should be based on one thing only — what is good for the British people, and if that is protectionism, then that is the policy.” But when Rees-Mogg — a Brexiteer with an investment scheme in Ireland worth £‎100 million — got up to speak right after him, he celebrated free trade and deregulation, calling for “supply-side” reforms and a stricter monetary policy. Thatcher would indeed approve.

While the older generation’s persistent attachments to Thatcher’s free-market fundamentalism were on full display, the desire to move beyond neoliberalism seemed particularly potent among the younger speakers, especially the women. Star Tory backbencher Miriam Cates and “reactionary feminists” Mary Harrington and Louise Perry all blamed neoliberalism for the challenges of having and raising children today. Conservative columnist Ed West pointed the finger at aging boomers for hoarding home ownership and driving up real estate prices, effectively locking the next generation out of middle-class stability.

While the older generation’s persistent attachments to Thatcher’s free-market fundamentalism were on full display, the desire to move beyond neoliberalism seemed particularly potent among the younger speakers, especially the women.

Such remarks reflect a broader sense of anxiety within the professional classes, which are facing the generational downward mobility that four decades of neoliberal economic policy have wrought in the United States and the UK. But more often, in NatCon philosophy, as in anti-liberal conservativism more broadly, anxieties over the ruling order are ultimately expressed not as a material crisis but instead a cultural one. Citing Finland as an example of a nation with a generous welfare state and a rapidly declining birth rate, Cates explicitly argued against economics as the prime factor. “No,” she insisted. “The biggest factor is societal value.”

Several speakers then linked the crisis of neoliberal motherhood to the demographic cliff in Western nations. Perry invoked birth control as a “sterility meme” and warned of civilizational collapse if birth rates remained in the basement. Similarly, West’s critique of the neoliberal housing bubble was less about affordability than about cultural reproduction. “There is a strong link,” he explained, “between high rents and left-wing voting.” The crisis, he underscored, is “not just economic. It is spiritual.”

Listening to these talks, I realized that the tensions between the pro- and anti-Thatcher camps were probably not insurmountable after all. The younger critics of free-market fundamentalism had made a point of channeling their critiques back into the culture wars, effectively sublimating the conflicts between them and the older generation. And that flexibility is what draws someone like former socialist Frank Furedi into the NatCon movement. As Furedi put it, “The difference between me and Margaret Thatcher is far less than between me and the other side of the culture war.”

Unpopular Authoritarianism

In 1979, Stuart Hall warned readers that, because Thatcherism exploited genuine discontents with the corporate state and real attachments to the nation, it could not be easily dismissed as “false consciousness.” Something similar could be said of the NatCon movement. Just as Thatcher profited from popular discontent with social democracy in the 1970s, so do National Conservatives profit from popular disillusionment with neoliberalism today. But while Thatcher aimed to destroy the welfare state, the NatCons don’t really aim to destroy the neoliberal economic order. For the Oxbridge right seeking to reassert its cultural authority, the fact that the NatCons probably won’t do much, if anything, to address economic discontent is not just beside the point. It is the point.

So despite the professed claim to bury Thatcher, populist authoritarianism is potentially a way of saving Thatcherism from itself. Although young conservatives have rendered neoliberalism uncool, they have yet to truly disrupt the reigning neoliberal order. The older Thatcherites should be thankful.

Despite the professed claim to bury Thatcher, populist authoritarianism is potentially a way of saving Thatcherism from itself.

But while Thatcher could confidently proclaim to be fashioning a new “common sense” in 1979, the same cannot be said of the NatCons today. For all their attempts to echo this refrain, it is hard to see how the NatCon ideology will win popular support. In the United States, survey after survey shows that secularism continues to rise while religious affiliation continues to decline, that low-income voters tend to be culturally conservative but economically progressive, and that affluent suburban voters tend to be the reverse. Meanwhile, a broad majority of all voters support higher taxes on the wealthy, investment in infrastructure, and universal health care.

Given these electoral trends, it’s not clear how incorporating critiques of neoliberalism into the culture war makes for a majority coalition. Just as in the 2022 midterms, when the GOP failed to live up to its promise to deliver a shellacking to the Dems, a few days after the conference, UK Conservatives lost a host of seats in the so-called Blue Wall they had built in 2016. For the time being at least, despite their populist rhetoric, the NatCons remain rather unpopular authoritarians. Regardless of what Ole Maggie might think, today’s democratic majority can surely approve of that.