The proposed Palestinian elections are part of a scheme designed to deceive the international community, specifically the US and EU, into believing that the Palestinians are serious about implementing major reforms, ending financial and administrative corruption, and engaging in another peace process with Israel.

Not only does Abbas have no plans to depart from the political scene anytime in the near future, he is even said to be considering running in the presidential election.

There is one reason, and one reason only, why Abbas is now talking about holding general elections: to continue milking the cash cow he has in the form of American and European governments. Abbas wants the money to ensure his continued dictatorial rule over the Palestinians.

Abbas is hoping that such an international conference, under the auspices of the United Nations, European Union, Russia and China, would impose a solution on Israel. Abbas has only one solution in mind: one that would see Israel fully withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, including east Jerusalem, and the establishment of a Palestinian state that would undoubtedly be used in the future as a launching pad to wage war on Israel.

The Palestinians live under two dictatorships: one in the West Bank and one in the Gaza Strip. Elections, even if they are held, will not produce new leaders. They will produce Fatah flunkies and Hamas henchmen who bow obediently to their corrupt bosses.

Like most Arab countries, Syria denies citizenship to Palestinians. Children born in Syria to fathers who are Palestinian nationals are considered Palestinians, not Syrian nationals.

Palestinian leaders see no evil or wrong-doing when their people are being killed, injured, displaced, arrested and tortured in an Arab country. The attention of these leaders is solely focused on Israel, which they denounce day and night not only for what it does, but also for what it does not do.

On January 9, Abbas entered the 17^th year of his four-year term. He is again talking about his desire to hold new elections. This charade is played at least once or twice a year so that people will believe that he really wants elections.

The Palestinians do not need new elections. They need new leaders who will guide them out from their longstanding morass into a future of promise and peace.

Al-Azhar, the most respected Islamic university and organization in the Sunni world, is not – by their own definition – a terrorist organization. Yet the question remains. Is al-Azhar truly moderate, or could it be radical? If we fail to establish clear definitions, we can create chaotic situations that result in our asking radical institutions to help us counter radicalism.

It is notable in this context to mention that French President Emmanuel Macron met with the Grand Imam of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, Ahmed Al-Tayeb, and called for all French imams to be trained at the Al-Azhar religious institution. The President of France probably has asked for this form of training without determining if Al-Azhar itself was a radical organization or a moderate one.

Other metrics of Islamic radicalism such as accepting child marriage, considering the lives of Muslims to be more precious than the lives of non-Muslims, and accepting force or violence to impose Islamic religious values upon others can be also included.

Based on these metrics, if any person or Islamic organization fails to reject such abhorrent ideological values, they should not be called moderates. Instead, they should be called what they are: Islamic radicals. We urgently need to detect and expose ideological radicalism before it turns – as it inevitably will – into acts of terrorism.

"Jewish people today on campus can be tolerated, protected or abused. At no point are they treated as equals." — David Collier, Academia, January 18, 2021.

This Jew-hate is cloaked in anti-Zionism, a doctrine that claims the Jewish state, alone among the nations, has no right to exist. It seeks to whip up anti-Israel hatred by focusing on three core lies: accusations of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism.

The government has been working to persuade universities to adopt the IHRA definition, including the threat of removal of funding streams. Often bitterly contested by academic staff desperate to remain unchallenged in their bully pulpits, as of last autumn only 29 of 133 higher education institutions had complied....

Iran... rejoined the global financial system with full legitimacy -- plus billions of dollars flowing into the treasury of the IRGC and its expanding militias across the Middle East. You would think, then, that the regime would be delighted to return to the same nuclear deal, right? Wrong. The mullahs want an even sweeter deal.

Biden already showed his cards by stating that he wants the deal. The regime now knows that Biden seems desperate for a deal, and doubtless sees this as a delectable weakness.

The ruling mullahs also most likely assume that they can extort even more concessions from a Democrat administration, particularly Biden's, because they successfully did so in the past....

Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif... told a forum... that he wants a new deal. "A sign of good faith is not to try to renegotiate what has already been negotiated," he said, adding in the same speech that the US must "Compensate us for our losses." Iran's top judicial body had already demanded that the US pay $130 billion in "damages."

The regime, in addition, is playing another dangerous game, as it did with the Obama administration, to program to extort greater concessions from the Biden administration: It is ratcheting up nuclear threats.

While one looks with alarm at the massive Russian nuclear modernization effort now nearing completion, the disarmament lobby -- such as Ploughshares and Global Zero -- views such modernization as simply a reflection of how the American threat is perceived by the Russians.

There is also little doubt that the Russian Federation's priority investment in nuclear weapons was -- and remains -- aimed primarily to checkmate the United States' conventional weapons superiority, and give Russia a free hand to use its own military power for hegemonic purposes. The same could be said of North Korea and Iran's decisions to go along their respective paths to nuclear breakout.

What brings the issue to the forefront today is that many luminaries of previous administrations who may now be staffing the incoming administration still hold these historically inaccurate views.

A commitment to a "sole-purpose" posture -- or to its equivalent, a "no-first-use" stance -- not only undermines the US nuclear umbrella upon which America's allies have relied for 70 years, it also invites a Russian first strike. Moscow's conventional and nuclear forces are configured for just that kind of operation and are ultimately restrained only by the American nuclear deterrent.

If the United States wrongly assumes that Russia's deterrent serves no offensive purpose, we would be ignoring recent and authoritative evidence to the contrary.... Russia's military posture is fundamentally offensive.... "active defense."

Russia's ability to initiate conventional strikes against its rivals and adversaries is closely backed up by nuclear weapons.

Iran would undoubtedly see even partial unilateral US disarmament as a green light for its nuclear quest. One can imagine what that would lead to in the Middle East.

Moreover, US unilateral acts of altruism, designed to lead by example, will not be reciprocated: states in general, and certainly Russia and China, are, to quote Charles De Gaulle, "cold monsters."

Doctors are warning that as the virus becomes more infectious, even a trip to the supermarket with a mask is risky.

Vaccine supply is not the problem.... The problem is that state and local authorities are bungling vaccine distribution.

Every evening, Governor Andrew Cuomo sends out an e-mail blast blaming the vaccine chaos in New York on inadequate supply from the federal government. It is a lie. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show New York is delivering only 37% of its vaccine supply into people's arms.

All this is proof that the states are failing miserably. It is time for a federal emergency mass vaccination program staged at malls, arenas and other public sites.

On Friday, President-elect Joe Biden announced his plan to improve vaccination rates. It is modest. He promised 100 million shots in the first hundred days of his term. That will not do the job. It is barely half of what is needed.

For the last week, members of Congress did not see fit to spend even one minute tackling the life-threatening virus terrorizing the rest of us.

The "extreme persecution" that Christians experience in 10 of the absolute 12 worst nations comes from "Islamic oppression" or is occurring in Muslim majority nations. These include: Afghanistan (#2), Somalia (#3), Libya (#4), Pakistan (#5), Yemen (#7), Iran (#8), Nigeria (#9), Iraq (#11), and Syria (#12).

"80% of Indian Christians helped by Open Doors say they were passed over for food distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic." — Open Doors, World Watch List.

Considering that for the first time in over a decade, China has made it among the top 20 persecutors in the Open Doors World Watch List — up to #17 from #23 last year — this does not bode well for Christians, who are already "intensely monitored by the state."

Similarly, in Turkey, which rose to #25 from #36 last year, every citizen's "religious affiliation is recorded on the electronic chip of identity cards, making it easy to discriminate against Christians." — Open Doors, World Watch List.

"More Christians are murdered for their faith in Nigeria than in any other country." — Open Doors, World Watch List.

But, what if all the talk about "end of America and "death of the American dream" is based on partial or even total misreading and mis-description of the mini-riot in Washington?

What happened, however, seems to have been less dramatic than what the hate-America had wished.

However, for reasons not yet known, most of the over 2,200 members of the Capitol Police were told to stay home for the day.

The best way to probe that is for the Capitol Police to demand that the District Attorney in DC opens an inquest, collects evidence, hears witnesses....

In other words, American democracy is alive and well, with robust institutions capable of dealing with any political crisis within a constitutional framework.

"If foreign audiences know that a piece of information comes from an official Chinese media source, they are likely to interpret it as 'propaganda' rather than 'news,'" wrote China expert Anne-Marie Brady in 2015...

Fortunately for the CCP, China could rely on large segments of mainstream US media to help it....

The CCP evidently knew the West well enough to calculate that framing the debate [on the coronavirus] in terms of racism would be a highly successful strategy that would play into the divisive issue of identity politics in the US and Europe.

The CCP could not have done it, however, without the media's lack of critical judgment of China's behavior, as well as the media's utter lack of interest in the CCP's quest for global domination and, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, its willingness to achieve it "by any means necessary."

The Lebanese are worried that their country will meet the fate endured by Iraq, Syria and Yemen, where the Iranians and their militia proxies are playing a major role in the civil wars currently plaguing these countries.

The Lebanese are demanding an end to Iranian occupation of their country; they are clearly hoping that the international community will intervene to assist them in freeing Lebanon from Iran's control.

A policy of appeasement or engagement with the mullahs will yield only one thing: blood running even more freely in the streets of Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq -- as well as nuclear weapons.

Even if the deal negotiated in 2015 by the Obama administration were worth the effort, it is impossible to imagine the Iranians willingly recommitting to enrichment levels they have long since blown past. No one believes in their professed "peaceful use" of nuclear energy. So why does a return to the deal make any sense?

The killing of top terror-funding IRGC official Qasem Soleimani by the US military and Iran's relatively toothless retaliatory attack against two US bases in Iraq suggest that the regime fears what an escalation of tensions would mean to its own future more than it desires to stab at the "Great Satan." The regime may finally be on the verge of collapse.

Those sanctions are the only leverage the U.S. really has against Iran, and they may finally succeed, much as the Reagan administration was able to do to the USSR in the 1980s. Now is not the time to reduce or remove them in exchange for paper promises born of a campaign slogan, from a regime whose movements suggest it fears its days are numbered.

Through covert operations, hidden diplomacy, an intense military buildup, and a series of actions designed to throw sand in the gears of the Soviet economy, American policy destroyed the USSR from its fingertips to its heart. Former Soviet leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev have admitted it with grudging admiration. The only ones who were wrong were those in the liberal foreign policy establishment who pretended it was all just a coincidence.

[I]t was Erdogan who in October called Jerusalem a Turkish city. Referring to the Ottoman occupation of Jerusalem (1517-1917), Erdogan said: "It is still possible to encounter traces of the Ottoman resistance in this city that we had to leave in tears during the First World War. In other words, Jerusalem is our city, it is a city from us."

Apparently, the Erdogan regime is hoping to expand trade with Israel and further gain diplomatic support in international matters. At the same time, instead of genuinely trying to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in Turkish society through education and other means, the Erdogan regime has been indoctrinating its supporters with Jew-hatred and actively supporting Hamas terrorists.

There is a concerted effort to tar every Trump supporter with the brush of Capitol mob protester. That is a lie. It is deliberate and malicious. It is a plan to intimidate and silence.

Facebook is purging all content referencing "stop the steal" — although there is ample evidence of voting irregularities and cause for election reform. Twitter is suspending and expelling hundreds of thousands of users. President Trump is among them. Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who leads public cheers of "Death to America!", is not.

Trump gave a speech stating: "if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore." That remark is supposed to qualify as "incitement to insurrection." What a pathetic, transparent lie! Think of the number of times innumerable politicians have invoked "fight" to express encouragement for active public policy engagement. We "fight" for healthcare, justice, human rights, entitlements, civil rights — even peace.

The criminality of Hillary's outlaw email server, the phony Russia Hoax, the fake Ukraine Impeachment, FISA Warrant abuse, the politically contaminated and compromised FBI — that all gets a "pass" — but Trump telling supporters to fight for their country — THAT is impeachable?

Biden did not win in a landslide. Many feel disenfranchised.

What, however, about Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who constantly tweets anti-Semitic and incendiary tweets and whose regime the US Department of State called "the world's worst sponsor of terrorism"? Khamenei, in fact, has become so emboldened on Twitter that, on it, he publicly calls for annihilation of Israel and denies Holocaust.

According to Twitter's "Violent organizations policy": "There is no place on Twitter for violent organizations, including terrorist organizations, violent extremist groups, or individuals who affiliate with and promote their illicit activities... Our assessments under this policy are informed by national and international terrorism designations..."

More shocking, in November 9, 2014 Khamenei posted a tweet laying out how to annihilate Israel "Why should & how can #Israel be eliminated? Ayatollah Khamenei's answer to 9 key questions. #HandsOffAlAqsa". Khamenei actually posted a screen shot exactly detailing the process to destroy Israel. These tweets are still up.

"I kid you not! At a Knesset hearing on Antisemitism, @Twitter rep tells me they flag @realDonaldTrump because it serves 'public conversation', but not Iran's @khamenei_ir call for GENOCIDE, which passes for acceptable 'commentary on political issues of the day'" — Human rights lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky, July 29, 2020.