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The specter of anti-Russian nationalism haunts Europe: Russophobic discourse and the rewriting of history is used today both in Ukraine and Poland as a pretext to persecute and even outlaw dissent.

On Tuesday, tragedy struck Richmond, Virginia at the Huguenot High School graduation ceremony when two people were killed and five were injured in a shooting. At around 5:15 p.m. outside of the Altria Theater, where the ceremony was being held, shots rang out, sending the graduates and families into a frenzy. Interim Richmond Police Chief Rick Edwards announced that a 19-year-old has been apprehended and will be charged with second-degree murder.

The deceased were an 18-year-old graduate and a 36-year-old attendee of the ceremony. The other victims included a 14-year-old boy and four men aged 31, 32, 55, and 58. The 31-year-old man suffered life-threatening injuries and the other four were reported to be in stable condition. In addition, more than a dozen people were hurt or treated for panic attacks due to the chaos. Witnesses said they heard around 30 shots and four firearms were recovered at the scene.

John Willard, a neighbor from the 18th floor of a nearby apartment, remembered seeing people running and parents embracing their children tightly. Mayor Levar Stoney promised the police would do all within their power to bring those responsible to justice.

In response, the Richmond school district cancelled all high school graduations for the week and shut all schools on Wednesday. School board member Jonathan Roung described the scene as a “stampede” of people returning to the building. Superintendent Jason Kamras expressed his distress at seeing “our kids get shot” and begged for the community to end the violence.

“I can tell you that if you ask Harris what she’s actually opposed to in the reform, she won’t be able to answer,” said Foreign Minister Eli Cohen.

By World Israel News Staff

During an event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, Vice President Kamala Harris made a dig at potential reforms to Israel’s judicial system and insinuated that Israel’s court should remain in its current form.

“Under President Joe Biden and our administration, America will continue to stand for the values that have been the bedrock of the U.S.-Israel relationship, which include continuing to strengthen our democracies, which… are both built on strong institutions, checks and balances — and I’ll add an independent judiciary,” Harris said to a crowd of thousands in Washington, D.C. on Monday evening.

Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman, a prominent legal scholar who drafted much of the framework for the reforms, was seated in the audience when Harris made the remarks. He did not applaud after the statement referring to the independent judiciary.

In an interview with radio station Kan Reshet Bet on Wednesday morning, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen responded to Harris’ comments. “I can tell you that if you ask her what she’s actually opposed to in the reform, she won’t be able to answer,” he said.

Cohen said during a recent trip to Washington, “I heard comments from [Biden administration] officials [against the reform.] I asked them, ‘What exactly bothers you [about the legislation]?’ And no one knew what to tell me.

“I don’t know if [Harris] actually read the laws. My assessment is that she did not.”

The Biden administration has repeatedly expressed its disapproval of the floated changes to Israel’s legal system, much to the chagrin of some American lawmakers and Israeli politicians.

Biden told media that he was “very concerned” about the reforms and insinuated that he was refusing to invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House due to the ongoing legislation.

The U.S. government has also reportedly funded numerous protest groups involved in organizing the ongoing demonstrations aimed at stopping the reforms and bringing down the current ruling coalition.

The post VP Harris jabs at judicial reform, praises Israel’s ‘independent judiciary’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Why Do We Elect Politicians and Governments that Wage War on Sovereign States?

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, June 06, 2023

The people and their citizens are deprived of the management of their own affairs, the determination of their own …

The post Selected Articles: Why Do We Elect Politicians and Governments that Wage War on Sovereign States? appeared first on Global Research.

The statement from the U.S. did not mention the circumstances in which Tamimi had been shot, nor did it acknowledge that the firefight was initiated by terrorists.

By World Israel News Staff

The Biden administration issued a statement placing the onus of responsibility for the shooting death of a Palestinian toddler during a firefight between terrorists and IDF troops onto Israel in a statement calling for Jerusalem to reevaluate its use-of-force policies.

“We express our condolences to the family of Mohammed Tamimi. We urge Israel to evaluate all use of deadly force that involves civilian casualties and we call on Israeli and Palestinian leadership to take responsible actions to end the conflict,” the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs said in a statement.

Notably, the statement from the U.S. did not mention the circumstances in which Tamimi had been shot, nor did it acknowledge that the firefight was initiated by terrorists.

Last week, two-year-old Mohammed Tamimi and his father, Haitham, were accidentally shot by Israeli soldiers after terrorists fired on a checkpoint near the Jewish community of Neve Tzuf in Samaria.

Initial reports suggested that the pair were shot by terrorists, but the IDF has since acknowledged responsibility for the shooting. The father and son were sitting in a car close to where the terrorists had begun shooting at troops and were struck by errant shots from the IDF as they returned fire.

Haitham Tammimi was rushed to a local hospital near Ramallah, and Mohammed was airlifted to Sheba Hospital in Ramat Gan. After several days in intensive care, the toddler died on Monday.

State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel did not mention that the shooting occurred during a firefight with terrorists, who chose to shoot at troops while they were surrounded by civilians.

“It’s our understanding that the IDF is investigating the incident, and broadly speaking, we urge investigations into any operations that result in civilian casualties,” Patel said on Tuesday at a press briefing.

The Israeli military told the Times of Israel that it was launching a thorough review of troops’ actions and the circumstances surrounding Tamimi’s death.

“The incident is being investigated in depth,” the IDF said. “At the end of the inquiry and taking into account its findings, a decision will be made regarding the opening of a probe.”

The post Ignoring terror context, US blames IDF for Palestinian toddler’s accidental shooting during firefight appeared first on World Israel News.

There have been 91 deaths in the Arab community so far this year, as opposed to 106 for all of 2022.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The police officer in charge of Arab sector crime tendered his resignation Tuesday as an upsurge in Arab-on-Arab violence has swept the country.

Superintendent Natan Bozna, 60, requested to retire, and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai accepted his request, with a police statement saying he would finish his duties “in the coming months.”

The request comes a day after National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir decided, in a meeting with the senior police echelon, to appoint a special project manager within the next two weeks to deal with serious crime and murder cases in the Arab community. The person chosen would be directly answerable to Bozna and the police commissioner.

“I intend to put the fight against crime and the murders in Arab society at the top of the priorities of the ministry of national security,” Ben-Gvir said. “I also intend to allocate enormous resources for this purpose by putting police officers in the field, raising police salaries and establishing the National Guard.”

Ben-Gvir had come into office vowing to eradicate lawlessness all over the country. It is unclear as yet what will happen with the current division Bozna was heading, with the ministry saying it will remain in place and several media reports saying it will be closed down.

“Unfortunately, the resigning deputy commissioner did not succeed in his mission – long before I took office – and even wanted to be promoted, when professional recommendations, especially considering the current situation, did not warrant such a move.”

The 40-year veteran of the force had taken on his post last year. The assessment is that being informed of his non-promotion in the next round of senior police appointments was the trigger for his decision.

There have been 91 deaths in the Arab community so far this year, in comparison with 106 for all of 2022 – which was considered very high at the time. Much of the deadly violence, the vast majority by gunfire, has been blamed on organized crime. Only in nine cases did the police manage to gather enough evidence to indict someone for the murders.

While acknowledging the seriousness of the situation, a senior police official told Ynet that the police have also managed to prevent 29 murders “that were a minute away from being committed, with the bullet already in the chamber on its way to the liquidation.”

According to a Channel 13 report, Bozna had complained to colleagues that his department, launched in early 2021 with great fanfare by then-Justice Minister Amir Ohana (Likud), “had been established without teeth.” He also slammed Ben-Gvir for “not visiting it even once.”

Ohana had said that the new department would recruit more Muslim police officers, build more police stations in the Arab sector, and have a “conflict desk” that would map out points of conflict and be proactive about “putting out fires before they start.” He also envisioned “a board of local leaders, of religious people, of leaders of public opinion, which will work together with the police to prevent these conflicts.”

The soaring murder rate even led Opposition Arab MKs to agree to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, bearing a long list of demands as to how to combat the phenomenon. Netanyahu announced afterwards that a special ministerial committee would be formed under his personal aegis to fight the rising crime in their sector.

The post Police officer in charge of Arab-Israeli crime resigns appeared first on World Israel News.

Germany continues supporting Ukraine despite its involvement in sabotage of energy flows.

“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom,” says group advocating for Jewish and pro-Israel students and staff.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Senior officials associated with the City University of New York (CUNY) were ordered to avoid cooperating with an ongoing investigation into antisemitism on campus, a Jewish rights watchdog group announced in a media statement on Wednesday.

The S.A.F.E. CUNY group, which has advocated on behalf of Jewish and Zionist CUNY students and staff who have been made to feel unsafe due to rampant antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments at the institution, revealed that CUNY officials were instructed to skip critical meetings on the subject.

“For a year, the Chancellor of CUNY [Félix V. Matos Rodríguez] has deservedly taken flak… for skipping out, at the last minute, from not one but two City Council hearings probing CUNY antisemitism,” S.A.F.E wrote on its Twitter account.

“We have just learned from an immaculate source that his absence goes higher than the chancellor. The decision was made above him,” the group continued, adding that they “learned that CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Bill Thompson told the chancellor not to attend the antisemitism hearings.

“If this is true, [New York Governor] Kathy Hochul must get involved in this horrifying antisemitic mess immediately.

“The university requires a complete overhaul, top to bottom. Governor Hochul Must step in. Bill Thompson, Felix Matos Rodriguez, and [CUNY Chief Diversity Officer] Saly Abd Alla must be out,” S.A.F.E stated. “Today. Right now.”

Jewish students and staff have been subject to an intensely antisemitic environment at CUNY for years.

In late May, CUNY’s law school released a video of a commencement ceremony speech in which the speaker accused Israel of “indiscriminate” murder, “raining bullets and bombs,” encouraging “lynch mobs against Palestinians,” and “settler colonialism.”

That marked the second consecutive year in which the law school’s commencement speaker used the graduation as a platform to promote anti-Israel views. Nasreen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist, delivered the May 2022 speech.

Kiswani, the founder of pro-Palestine advocacy group Within Our Lifetime, has repeatedly called for the state of Israel to be destroyed and ‘liked’ an Instagram post praising the Palestinian terrorists who brutally murdered four Israelis with an axe in Elad.

In July 2021, Kiswani advocated for the murder of people who support Israel. “I hope that a pop-pop [of gunfire] is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime,” she said.

The post CUNY ordered chancellor to skip antisemitism probe: Watchdog group appeared first on World Israel News.

The History Wars – internecine academic fights over historical interpretation – have existed for as long as humans have been chronicling events. The most famous recent version of this recurring battle, the Historikerstreit, came in late 1980s Germany and roiled the world of German letters. It involved two divergent interpretations of the Nazi period’s place in German history, but it also reflected arguments over contemporary West German politics. Disputes over the singularity of the Holocaust, the culpability of German society for Nazi atrocities, and the teleological unfolding of German history blended with arguments on German nationalism, potential future reunification, and social and historical guilt. The fracas was erudite, high-brow, and philosophical. Its influence is still felt today, during similar debates over Germany’s role in the world and how historical memory should inform it.

Not all historical disputes are as serious-minded and carefully-argued as the Historikerstreit. In fact, the current version taking over the Anglosphere is much less sober and much more antagonistic than its German predecessor. Instead of a debate over issues of interpretation and context, we are in the midst of a full-bore attack on Anglo-American history as such. This new History War crosses the Atlantic: American history is under siege by revisionist views of the founding, while British history is routinely lambasted as terroristic, genocidal, and morally indefensible. Mobs have destroyed statues, historic names have been changed under activist pressure, and frenzied protests surround any prominent figure who dares espouse a nuanced view of the past. The revisionist idea that Anglo-American history is profoundly evil is now regnant in the academy, the media, and the political left.

It is in this context that Nigel Biggar, renowned ethicist and Regius Professor of Moral & Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, has released his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Inspired to weigh the moral record of British imperialism by the strident efforts to paint it as uniquely immoral, Biggar compiled a complete dossier on the most common revisionist claims, putting them – and the Empire they decry – to the ethical test. A Sunday Times bestseller in the United Kingdom, the book serves as a strong counteroffensive in the Imperial History Wars, working through the myriad moral arguments modern anti-colonialists make against the British Empire and assessing their veracity.

The organization of the book lends itself well to this complicated task. Colonialism is segmented into eight main chapters, each on a distinct critique of the British Empire. There are chapters on imperial motives, slavery, racism, land, cultural assimilation, economics, governance, and the use of force. Since each chapter deals with an overarching issue, the book bounces around chronologically. This could be challenging to follow, but Biggar’s writing is so clear that it works. The author presents the simplistic anti-colonial case, assesses its claims by referencing primary source documents and the testimony of other historians, and enters an informed judgment based on the evidence. The seriousness with which Biggar treats this task is quite contrary to the approach of his opponents: “One surprising thing I have seen is that many of my critics are really not interested in the complicated, morally ambiguous truth about the past.” When reading Colonialism in comparison to the work of its detractors, this is self-evident.

Unlike those critics, Biggar is curious about the complexities of Empire and has a strong moral framework for judging it. In a book which makes moral assessments about colonialism, having such a consistently applied, clearly-stated ethical rubric is necessary. One may agree or disagree with the framework Biggar chooses, but his holding to it allows the reader to fairly assess whether he has proven his claims – and, more importantly, whether the anti-colonialists prove theirs. The book relentlessly hits on the crux of the matter: that context and intentions are vital for making historical moral judgments. Context is key, as is the question of comparison; this is evident in the chapter on economics, which correctly evaluates colonial outcomes against contemporary alternatives, not idealistic utopias. When this is done, anti-colonialist claims collapse.

With respect to intentionality, a factor that imperial critics often deliberately obscure, Biggar provides transparency. Anti-colonialist activists assume – without evidence – the intentions of colonial administrators were uniformly evil and irredeemably bigoted. When the historical record is examined, the reality is far more complex. Biggar shows the aims of these imperial figures were often benign, even when implementation was flawed. A case study involves the controversies over famine relief: administrators sought to ameliorate suffering and rectified early failures. Famine was a fact of life for all of human history, and global relief campaigns were far more difficult to accomplish in the era before air travel. Still, imperial policy tried to reduce famine through irrigation, incentivized farming, and targeted relief efforts – the intentions were good, even if the results were lacking.

One excellent chapter breaks down the Empire’s use of force and whether it was morally justifiable. As with earlier sections, the moral frame being used – in this case the Christian theory of ‘just war’ – is detailed and defended. Contrary to critics who view any and all imperial uses of force as unjustifiable, Biggar lives in reality, where state violence, or the threat thereof, is necessary for the perpetuation of governance. He delves into several highly-criticized events over the history of the British Empire, from the Opium Wars to the Mau Mau Uprising, and weighs the moral claims made about them. The analysis is fair-minded, direct, and thorough. What matters most to Biggar is whether the force used is consistent with a distinct rule of law or whether it is arbitrary and capricious. In this respect, the Empire stands strong, especially when compared to its contemporary substitutes.

Biggar shines perhaps brightest when Colonialism debunks various myths about the Empire which have been promulgated as fact by the anti-colonial left. One such falsehood is of a centralized, London-directed British Empire; this could not be further from the truth. In reality, the Empire was decentralized and the influence of the metropole in the colonies was often quite weak. Biggar explains this reality and usefully focuses on the on-the-ground administrators over the purported decision-makers in London. This reorientation of the imperial story enlightens the reader about the actual powers in the colonies. The light-touch approach of the Empire after the loss of the American colonies in 1783 – in part due to overly-intrusive governance – forced colonial authorities to work with locals, not simply rule them. The interplay between governor and governed created native partnerships that proved highly useful upon decolonization, as they laid the groundwork for competent independent authority.

Biggar also takes on a chronic issue in the Imperial History Wars: the tendency for anti-colonial advocates to wildly exaggerate claims of British perfidy while downplaying the barbarity of native cultures. This hypocritical relativism is anathema to a considered review of the Empire’s morality, and Biggar rightly skewers it.

Critics accuse the British of killing millions by choice or neglect, but these claims are decontextualized at best and invented at worst. In an egregious case of the latter, scholar James Daschuk argues that Canada perpetrated a “genocide” on native people via its deliberate mismanagement of an 1880s famine. Contrary to these explosive assertions, Biggar details the actual famine-suppression efforts and seeks to put the episode into perspective, writing: “the number of native deaths attributable to starvation on the Canadian plains from 1879-1883 was somewhere in the region of forty-five. No, that is not a typographical error.” The other side of the coin, the purposeful indulgence of native atrocities, is deftly handled in Colonialism, particularly in a discussion of the Benin Expedition of 1897. Activists falsely claim that Britain’s intervention was murderous and unprovoked, while excusing the manifest evils of the Benin regime, including widespread, gruesome human sacrifice. Biggar focuses his fire on Oxford archaeologist Dan Hicks and his book The Brutish Museums, which typifies the “ethical schizophrenia” of the anti-colonial mind. In just ten pages, Hicks’s work is thoroughly and masterfully dismantled both philosophically and historically.

The chapters on racism, slavery, and cultural genocide tackle the most commonly-proffered anti-colonial arguments. When discussing the history of British abolitionism, Biggar sums up the failure of anti-colonial arguments perfectly: “The basic problem with the anti-colonialists’ equation of British colonialism with slavery, and their consequent demand for cultural ‘decolonisation’, is that it requires amnesia about everything that has happened since 1787.” Likewise, a tidbit later in the book is a powerful, factual riposte to cries that the Empire was imbued with racism: “in New Zealand the vote was extended to all Māori adult males in 1867, twelve years ahead of being given to their European counterparts, when the property qualification was abolished.” Colonialism is replete with memorable lines that distill essential moral truths, including in the discussion of so-called ‘cultural genocide’, when Biggar posits that “No culture has a moral right to be immune to change or even to survive. … That may be sad, but it was not unjust.”

But Colonialism is not merely a discussion of history and ethics; it has a great deal to say about the current age as well. The historical distortions promoted by anti-colonialists are in service to a contemporary political project, one which is illiberal and anti-Western. Their critiques are based entirely on the desires of the present, not the verities of the past. It is this broader project that Colonialism seeks to expose and attack, a task which the book excels at. The recasting of British history from a source of pride to an infinite well of shame requires society to forget the reality of its past, and it is this forgetting that anti-colonial activists wish to inculcate across the Anglosphere. Biggar cuts to the core of this problem, writing:

If the anti-colonialist narrative were true, Britain should abandon its post-1945 role as a main supporter of the US-dominated liberal world order and settle down instead to emulating penitent, virtually pacifist Germany. But, as this book has shown, the anti-colonialist narrative is not true.

He is correct here; the anti-colonialist narrative is not true. But it is seductive. Cultural self-confidence is what drove the British Empire to abolish slavery, fight and win two world wars, liberalize the international order, and bring prosperity and the rule of law to billions. It is what propelled the United States to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, take on the Soviet juggernaut and prevail, and maintain and expand the British-built liberal world order. The Anglosphere needs a confidence boost if it is to overcome the challenges of the 21st century. In that respect, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism is a welcome shot in the arm.

The post <strong><u>Reckoning with </u><em><u>Colonialism</u></em></strong> appeared first on Providence.

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