When attempting to access these now-deleted Holocaust resources, the web addresses reveal they were tagged with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) markers, despite having no relationship to diversity programs or initiatives.

By Jewish Breaking News

The Pentagon is in the middle of an extensive purge of online content after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of all DEI materials from military websites.

Within just weeks of Hegseth’s order on Feb. 26 over 24,000 articles across more than 1,000 sites have been removed.

Historical articles about military contributions from women, people of color, and LGBTQ service members have been wiped clean, including content about Jackie Robinson’s military service during World War II.

But among the most disturbing deletions are numerous Holocaust remembrance and education resources.

Historical accounts that preserved vital testimony have disappeared, including a profile of Holocaust survivor Kitty Saks that described the genocide as “the state-sponsored, systemic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry.”

While photos of Saks showing the Jewish star she was forced to wear remain available in the military’s image database, the article documenting her story has been erased.

The purge has also wiped out content about Holocaust Remembrance Week and first-person reflections from military cadets about Holocaust memorial events.

Curiously, these historical articles appear to have been misclassified in the Pentagon’s content management system.

When attempting to access these now-deleted Holocaust resources, the web addresses reveal they were tagged with “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) markers, despite having no relationship to diversity programs or initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League has taken notice.

“Honoring the memory of the Holocaust and those who survived is not a matter of political ideology — it is a moral imperative and a vital component of education, remembrance, and the fight against antisemitism,” Greenblatt tells CNN.

“The history of the Holocaust, including the liberation of the camps, also reflects the bravery and sacrifice of Allied soldiers — a legacy that should be preserved, not erased. We urge the DoD to reverse this decision and preserve these vital historical records.”

Other content casualties in the purge include sexual assault awareness, such as guides for victim care and prevention strategies.

Suicide prevention resources for veterans and service members have disappeared as well, with pages on suicide statistics and help resources now showing “Page Not Found” errors.

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The letter came amid parallel efforts by veteran career diplomats to steer the Biden administration into a more overtly anti-Israel policy, including a wholesale freeze on arms shipments.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

As the Biden administration grappled with internal unrest over its November 2023 decision to continue arming Israel, a group of State Department “diversity” fellows took the unusual step of authoring their own private “dissent memo” to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, informing him of how they were “actively engaging in resistance” to the policy.

Blinken’s staff, internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, acknowledged that the disgruntled foreign service fellows did not have standing to submit a formal dissent cable.

Nonetheless, elevated the letter through the State Department’s ranks, eliciting promises to grant the fellows a “sit down” so they could air their grievances, according to the emails.

The full-court blitz to pressure the Biden White House into publicly breaking with Israel is generating renewed scrutiny into the fellowship programs as the Trump administration works to root out so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government.

A senior State Department official told the Free Beacon the agency “is reviewing these and other fellowship programs to ensure they are consistent with the president’s EOs and the secretary’s American First foreign policy agenda.”

The fellowship programs in question are the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program and the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Program.

A group of foreign service officers hired under those programs authored the previously unreported Nov. 14 memo, obtained through a Center to Advance Security in America public records request.

Both fellowships court university students for a two-year stint in America’s diplomatic corps. The Blinken-led State Department advertised them as part of an effort to “genuinely enhance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in the federal workforce.”

The programs, according to a November 2022 edition of the agency’s in-house magazine, “have increased the number of Foreign Service generalists from underrepresented groups by 33% and the number of women by 6%.”

The programs also sparked an internal “resistance” against the State Department’s marginal support for Israel under President Joe Biden, according to the internal emails.

As Israel fought for its survival in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, fellows from both programs penned a private letter to the “leadership at the U.S. Department of State” outlining their concerns.

They expressed “profound disappointment and anguish” over continued U.S. arms sales to Israel and accused the State Department of using their “diverse backgrounds as shields to deflect criticism away from the State Department.”

“We are frustrated by the exploitation of our diverse backgrounds as shields to deflect criticism away from the State Department,” the fellows wrote. “Rather than offering prayers for peace, we have been actively engaging in resistance against what we perceive to be an immoral course of action.”

The fellows detailed their participation “in protests advocating for a ceasefire” and said they had already “contacted our members of Congress” to push them into supporting similar policies.

“Despite all this,” they added, “we cannot escape the feeling of complicity in what we consider to be a grave humanitarian crisis.”

Elsewhere in the letter, the budding diplomats said their “collective cognitive dissonance has been overwhelming during these past weeks,” emphasizing that their “silence reflects complicity in the actions of the State Department.”

“Let this letter serve as a collective expression of the despair and aspirations towards peace that we express in solidarity with innocent civilians who have lost their lives in the conflict,” they wrote.

Over the next week, top members of Blinken’s staff forwarded the memo to senior officials. Recipients included Blinken’s chief of staff, Suzy George; his undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland; and his department counselor, Derek Chollet.

Those staffers noted that the fellows “are not eligible to submit formal dissents.” Instead of reprimanding them, however, Blinken’s team said they would “reach out and offer to sit down with them.” They also let the fellows know “that we have brought their letter to the attention of Department leadership,” internal emails show.

On Nov. 21, one week after the fellows sent the “resistance” memo, George noted that Nuland’s team was working “to set up a policy discussion” with the fellows for the following week.

“We will share a copy of the letter with S as well,” George wrote in an apparent reference to Blinken. In another email from that same day, George asked officials to “print and share” the letter with Blinken directly.

The letter came amid parallel efforts by veteran career diplomats to steer the Biden administration into a more overtly anti-Israel policy, including a wholesale freeze on arms shipments.

While Blinken and other senior leaders initially rebuffed these efforts, their willingness to privately negotiate with Israel critics paved the way for the eventual adoption of more hardline policies towards Israel.

And just a month after the fellows sent their dissent memo, Blinken held a private meeting with State Department staffers opposed to America’s support for Israel.

The Pickering and Rangel fellows have historically been selected based on DEI criteria, according to their websites, which include images of past fellows celebrating Pride Month and posing with rainbow flags.

James Fitzpatrick, the director of the Center to Advance Security in America group that unearthed the dissent memo and subsequent emails, said both fellowship programs “should be immediately eliminated pursuant to the president and secretary Rubio’s orders,” which call for the dismantling of DEI initiatives inside the State Department.

“It’s no surprise that the participants of these programs penned a letter to the Biden State Department dissenting from the administration’s policies of providing some weapons to Israel,” Fitzpatrick said.

“These documents show that the bureaucrats who were selected under DEI policies were attempting to organize on federal time and undermine official American foreign policy related to our greatest ally in the Middle East, Israel.”

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Here’s a rundown of USAID spending under President Joe Biden.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

As the Trump administration works to shrink the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and place it under the State Department’s umbrella, congressional Democrats have argued that the move “endangers lives and undermines U.S. national security.”

But away from funding for lifesaving medicines like HIV drugs, funding that is exempt from the State Department’s broader foreign aid freeze, USAID has spent millions in taxpayer cash on left-wing priorities like climate activism—and bankrolled groups linked to Palestinian terrorism.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he will serve as USAID’s acting leader while the Trump administration works to reduce the agency’s spending.

The agency’s career staffers have battled the administration’s 90-day freeze on foreign funding, seeking exemptions that would funnel tens of millions of dollars to agency bureaus that cover issues like “environmental justice” and “LGBTQI+ Inclusive Development,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.

The Trump administration responded by putting scores of those staffers on administrative leave, a move Rubio said came in response to “insubordination.”

USAID “has a history of … deciding that they’re somehow a global charity separate from the national interest,” he told reporters on Monday. “That sort of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid writ large should have.”

Rubio said that the State Department will not gut foreign aid altogether, but rather cut “programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy.”

Here’s a rundown of spending under President Joe Biden that may fit that description:

$1 Million To Make Disabled Tajikistanis ‘Climate Leaders’

In 2023, Biden’s USAID allocated up to $1 million in taxpayer funds on a project to help disabled people in Tajikistan become “climate leaders,” the Free Beacon reported at the time.

The grant notice solicited proposals for a “Disability-Inclusive Climate Action” project in the Central Asian country. The cash was meant to ensure that disabled Tajikistanis were included “in the development of climate change response and mitigation policies.”

USAID championed the funding under its 2022-2030 climate strategy, a $150 billion “whole-of-agency approach” that aimed to create an “equitable world with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Tajikistan grant was centered on ensuring “that climate action by governments and other actors is informed by and responsive to the unique ideas and contributions of persons with disabilities.”

$1 Million for Foreign DEI Programs, Including ‘Indigenous Language Technology’ in Guatemala

Just before leaving office, the Biden administration pushed out more than $1 million in taxpayer-funded diversity, equity, and inclusion programs abroad, the Free Beacon reported.

The funding notice, privately transmitted to Congress just before Christmas, said USAID would “engage with Indigenous-led institutions to implement an Indigenous language technology program” in Guatemala, where nearly 95 percent of residents speak Spanish.

In Kenya, meanwhile, USAID promised to “build a collaborative bridge between U.S. higher education institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities; select Kenyan universities; and the private sector.”

And in Indonesia, the money aimed to help “underrepresented” students “gain access to higher education opportunities in the United States.”

Nearly $100K to a Palestinian Activist Group Whose Leaders Hailed PFLP Terrorism

In November 2022, USAID sent $78,000 to the Community Development and Continuing Education Institute (CDCEI), a Palestinian activist group based in Judea and Samaria.

Its leaders praised a terrorist who murdered a U.S. military attaché as a “hero fighter,” the Free Beacon reported.

CDCEI got the cash to promote “youth participation and accountability in local governance,” USAID said at the time.

Imad Al-Zeer, the chair of CDCEI’s board, attended a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine event celebrating the 52nd anniversary of the terrorist group’s founding.

His deputy chair, Mike Salman, praised George Abdallah, a Lebanese terrorist serving a life sentence in France for the 1982 murder of U.S. military attaché Charles R. Ray, as “the hero fighter George.”

$1 Million to a Hamas-Linked Charity

Just six days before Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, USAID doled out more than $900,000 “to a terror charity in Gaza involved with the son of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh,” a watchdog report obtained by the Free Beacon found.

USAID earmarked the funds for the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a Gaza-based humanitarian group that was said to be “in close cooperation with [the] Hamas regime.”

“Bayader is listed in federal spending data as a sub-grantee for USAID, with the government monies first routed through a sponsoring U.S. nonprofit, which are ostensibly required to vet their sub-grantees,” according to a Middle East Forum report.

USAID would not comment at the time on whether the money was subject to oversight or vetted to ensure it did not benefit Hamas.

$1.5 Million Effort To ‘Empower’ Female Climate Activists in Northern Kenya

In May 2023, USAID announced plans to spend $1.5 million on a program aimed at “empowering” female climate activists in northern Kenya.

The project, the Free Beacon reported at the time, centered on “empowering women to adapt to climate change in northern Kenya.”

Women in the area, USAID wrote, live in “traditionally patriarchal communities” and need training to join Kenya’s fight against climate change.

The funding notice detailed USAID’s efforts to “empower women, improve their participation in decision making, and enhance adaptive capabilities to climate change.” The program also operated as part of USAID’s 2022-2030 climate strategy.

$15 Million for ‘Contraceptives and Condoms’ in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan

In July 2024, Biden’s USAID sent $15 million into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for the distribution of “oral contraceptives and condoms.”

The spending, outlined in a congressional funding notice obtained by the Free Beacon, came roughly three years after the administration’s chaotic withdrawal from the country cemented the Taliban’s resurgence.

The notice acknowledged that “some coordination” with the terror group would be “necessary for programmatic purposes.”

While U.S. law bars the federal government from funding the Taliban, the notice argued that USAID would work with “national authorities” in Afghanistan without “directly benefiting them.”

A Well-Established Vetting Problem

USAID has long struggled to ensure taxpayer cash goes to its intended use. A 2024 inspector general report, for example, found that the agency had issues combating “corruption, abuse, and fraud.”

“One of USAID’s foremost challenges is ensuring U.S. taxpayer funds are used effectively, efficiently, and for their intended purposes,” the report said.

“However, corruption, fraud, and sexual exploitation and abuse undermine the effectiveness of aid, erode public trust, and impede sustainable development.”

The agency also came under fire last year for failing to “prevent the diversion of assistance to Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” according to the report.

In one case, a Syrian national diverted $9 million in USAID funds to an affiliate of the al Qaeda terror group.

The post Disabled ‘climate leaders’ in Asia, ‘indigenous language tech’ in Latin America, and terror sympathizers in the Middle East: Where the Biden admin funneled USAID money appeared first on World Israel News.

Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to Trump’s Office of Personnel Management if they suspect any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days or face “adverse consequences.”

By The Associated Press

President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off.

The moves Tuesday follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs that could touch on everything from anti-bias training to funding for minority farmers and homeowners.

Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and insisted on restoring strictly “merit-based” hiring.

The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by President Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients.

It’s using one of the key tools utilized by the Biden administration to promote DEI programs across the private sector — pushing their use by federal contractors — to now eradicate them.

The Office of Personnel Management in a Tuesday memo directed agencies to place DEI office staffers on paid leave by 5 p.m. Wednesday, and take down all public DEI-focused webpages by the same deadline.

Several federal departments had removed the webpages even before the memorandum.

Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to Trump’s Office of Personnel Management if they suspect any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days or face “adverse consequences.”

By Thursday, federal agencies are directed to compile a list of federal DEI offices and workers as of Election Day. By next Friday, they are expected to develop a plan to execute a “reduction-in-force action” against those federal workers.

The memo was first reported by CBS News.

The move comes after Monday’s executive order accused former President Joe Biden of forcing “discrimination” programs into “virtually all aspects of the federal government” through “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, known as DEI.

That step is the first salvo in an aggressive campaign to upend DEI efforts nationwide, including leveraging the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate private companies pursuing training and hiring practices that conservative critics consider discriminatory against groups such as white men.

The executive order picks up where Trump’s first administration left off: One of Trump’s final acts during his first term was an executive order banning federal agency contractors and recipients of federal funding from conducting anti-bias training that addressed concepts like systemic racism.

Biden promptly rescinded that order on his first day in office and issued a pair of executive orders — now rescinded — outlining a plan to promote DEI throughout the federal government.

While many changes may take months or even years to implement, Trump’s new anti-DEI agenda is more aggressive than his first and comes amid far more amenable terrain in the corporate world.

Prominent companies from Walmart to Facebook have already scaled back or ended some of their diversity practices in response to Trump’s election and conservative-backed lawsuits against them.

Here’s a look at some of the policies and programs that Trump will aim to dismantle:

Diversity offices, training and accountability

Trump’s order will immediately gut Biden’s wide-ranging effort to embed diversity and inclusion practices in the federal workforce, the nation’s largest at about 2.4 million people.

Biden had mandated all agencies to develop a diversity plan, issue yearly progress reports, and contribute data for a government-wide dashboard to track demographic trends in hiring and promotions.

The administration also set up a Chief Diversity Officers Council to oversee the implementation of the DEI plan.

The government released its first DEI progress report in 2022 that included demographic data for the federal workforce, which is about 60% white and 55% male overall, and more than 75% white and more than 60% male at the senior executive level.

Trump’s executive order will toss out equity plans developed by federal agencies and terminate any roles or offices dedicated to promoting diversity. It will include eliminating initiatives such as DEI-related training or diversity goals in performance reviews.

Federal grant and benefits programs

Trump’s order paves the way for an aggressive but bureaucratically complicated overhaul of billions of dollars in federal spending.

The order does not specify which programs it will target but mandates a government-wide review to ensure that contracts and grants are compliant with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance.

It also proposes that the federal government settle ongoing lawsuits against federal programs that benefit historically underserved communities, including some that date back decades.

Trump’s executive order is a “seismic shift and a complete change in the focus and direction of the federal government,” said Dan Lennington, deputy council for the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has pursued several lawsuits against federal programs.

The institute recently released an influential report listing dozens of programs the Trump administration should consider dismantling, such as credits for minority farmers or emergency relief assistance for majority-Black neighborhoods.

He acknowledged that unwinding some entrenched programs may be difficult. For example, the Treasury Department implements housing and other assistance programs through block grants to states that have their own methods for implementing diversity criteria.

Pay equity and hiring practices

It’s not clear whether the Trump administration will target every initiative that stemmed from Biden’s DEI executive order.

For example, the Biden administration banned federal agencies from asking about an applicant’s salary history when setting compensation, a practice many civil rights activists say perpetuates pay disparities for women and people of color.

It took three years for the Biden administration to issue the final regulations, and Trump would have to embark on a similar rule-making process, including a notice and comment period, to rescind it, said Chiraag Bains, former deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Biden and now a nonresident senior fellow with Brookings Metro.

Noreen Farrell, executive director of gender rights group Equal Rights Advocates, said that she was hopeful that the Trump administration “will not go out of its way to undo the rule,” which she said has proved popular in some state and cities that have enacted similar policies.

And Biden’s DEI plan encompassed some initiatives with bipartisan support, said Bains. For example, he tasked the Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council with expanding federal employment opportunities for those with criminal records.

That initiative stems from the Fair Chance Act, which Trump signed into law in 2019 and bans federal agencies and contractors from asking about an applicant’s criminal history before a conditional job offer is made.

Bains said that’s what Biden’s DEI policies were about: ensuring that the federal government was structured to include historically marginalized communities, not institute “reverse discrimination against white men.”

Despite the sweeping language of Trump’s order, Farrell said, “the reality of implementing such massive structural changes is far more complex.”

“Federal agencies have deeply embedded policies and procedures that can’t simply be switched off overnight,” she added.

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There’s no way to escape diversity except by returning to a system based on merit and occasional nepotism, which is still better than a system whose only concept of merit is a combo of toxic politics and correctly colored body parts.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

Is your home on fire because your local fire department is run by three lesbians named Kirsten and there’s no water because that department is also being run by a diversity hire?

Sorry, maybe you should have bought diversity insurance.

The vital infrastructure of yesterday’s cities used to be run by somebody’s brother-in-law while the vital infrastructure of today’s cities is being run by a professional grievance expert with the right combination of skin color, sex, and sexual appetites and makes that brother-in-law, who at least managed to marry into the right family, look like a genius. That’s bad news for you.

Every town, city and state is just one crisis away from melting down like a Somali ice cream cone.

Your power grid consists of solar panels, wind turbines and other technology that could barely power a medieval grain mill on the best of days roped together with batteries stolen by migrants from defunct Teslas, and a few actual leftover power plants paid for with carbon credits for a turbine in Montana.

The power company has a climate plan, an equity plan, and weekly DEI sessions, but it doesn’t have a plan for what to do when the power goes down.

Your government is run by a few kids who spent their college careers demanding safe spaces and complaining about insensitive Halloween costumes and older drunken politicos waiting to die in office who are scared to death of them.

Instead of planning for an actual disaster, everyone spent the last year arguing about Gaza ceasefire resolutions and making plans for when the sea levels are projected to rise in the 2030s.

No one has been inside their actual offices since the pandemic and the only work government officials have done was in pajamas.

The police have been defunded. The few remaining cops don’t answer calls because they don’t want to be featured on the evening news.

The ERs closed because they were filled with migrants using them in lieu of health insurance. The doctors triage by asking for pronouns. And in the event of a major disaster, relief workers screen for Trump signs and offer handbooks about checking your cishet privilege.

How do you cope with all this? Diversity insurance.

Regular insurance covers natural disasters but diversity insurance protects you against the unnatural disaster behind the natural disasters.

Natural disasters are unpredictable, but DEI disasters are extremely predictable so the one thing you know is that whenever a disaster happens, an army of DEI hires will make it that much worse.

If a firestorm breaks out, the DEI hires will have misplaced all the water. If a hurricane strikes, DEI staffers will insist on handing out relief supplies based on the sexual preferences of the recipients.

If the power goes out, DEI hires will make sure that it never comes on again because that would be bad for the environment.

And if an asteroid is headed for the earth, the DEI hires will issue press releases warning that black people will be hardest hit by the total extinction of the human race.

Someday, top government, corporate and emergency positions will no longer be staffed by sociology majors who got into Harvard by writing about the time racist police officers randomly stopped them while they were going 95 miles an hour and smoking pot in a school zone, but until then, diversity insurance is your best defense against every important position being held by DEI morons.

Morons who hate you and view every job, no matter the title, position or mission statement, as an opportunity to deconstruct the parts of Western civilization that don’t directly benefit them.

Until then, there’s diversity insurance. Diversity insurance will insure you against DEI hires.

When crime waves terrorize your neighborhood, everything is on fire, including the fire department, and the economy craters because the only economics training the people in charge of it have is saying “late stage capitalism, am I right” and rolling their eyes, diversity insurance will be there for you.

Diversity insurance can’t stop DEI, but it can heal some of the damage done by DEI.

You may think that you don’t need diversity insurance because you don’t live in New York, Los Angeles, or Minneapolis, but DEI can strike when you least expect it.

Even if you’re in the reddest town in a red state, and you wouldn’t vote for a woke in a million years, companies, including the ones responsible for your water, power and emergency services, are still hiring college graduates from top schools who only know that everything is racist. Especially you.

And even if your town hasn’t been infested yet, the state and federal level is full of them. So is your insurance company. And the private equity funds that control it. And the union retirement pensions that control the private equity funds.

And the DEI hire politicians that control the union pensions that control the private equity funds that control your insurance companies.

Diversity insurance however doesn’t do DEI hires. Unfortunately diversity insurance also doesn’t exist. Insurance is supposed to protect you against possible disasters, not absolutely certain ones.

And DEI is the most certain disaster since the Titanic decided to match wits with an iceberg. Insuring against diversity has worse risk rates than a house built on a mudslide in the middle of an earthquake that is sliding into the ocean just as a hurricane shows up.

It’s easier to insure an 18-year-old driving a Porsche in Chicago than against DEI.

There’s no such thing as ‘diversity insurance’.

And there’s no way to escape diversity except by returning to a system based on merit and occasional nepotism which is still better than a system whose only concept of merit is a combo of toxic politics and correctly colored body parts.

You may not be interested in DEI, but DEI is interested in you and will destroy you. The only insurance against it is destroying it as thoroughly as a DEI hire can destroy your local fire department, police force or a sub sandwich.

Either you destroy DEI or it will destroy you.

The post Diversity insurance for DEI appeared first on World Israel News.

Many glass ceilings were being broken, but there was no one who actually knew how to fight fires.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

The most important thing to know about Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley is that she is the first LGBTQ fire chief in the history of the Los Angeles Fire Department.

It’s also the only thing worth knowing about the woman in charge while Los Angeles burned.

Crowley’s status as the first LGBTQ fire chief appears at the top of her bio on the LAFD site.

It’s what got her on the Kelly Clarkson show under the headline, “Meet LAFD’s First Female & LGBTQ+ Fire Chief” and made her one of the marshals of the Los Angeles Pride Parade (some of whose attendees no longer have homes after the wave of fires.)

But DEI wasn’t done with the LAFD just yet. Not until two other lesbian ‘Kirstens’ were also running the LAFD.

Kristina Kepner, the first lesbian Assistant Chief and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School for Managing Diverse Organizations, was accused of a domestic violence incident involving her girlfriend.

Kristine Larson, who has a degree in Sociology, headed ‘Equity on Fire’, an organization complaining that the LAFD was sexist and racist, was then rewarded with the title of the LAFD’s first lesbian Equity Bureau Chief with a $399,000 salary.

Diversity mandates had led to three lesbians named some version of ‘Kirsten’ running the LAFD.

Meanwhile, Jamie Brown became the LAFD’s first lesbian Training Commander. Her accomplishment was being the only one of the four lesbians running the LAFD who wasn’t named ‘Kirsten’.

Many glass ceilings were being broken, but there was no one who actually knew how to fight fires. Unless it was by asking the fire about its preferred pronouns.

Crowley, Kepner, and Brown were all paramedics, not firefighters. Diversity mandates led to paramedics being referred to as ‘firefighters’ and being promoted to fire captains and battalion chiefs and then to the top echelons of the LAFD.

Paramedics who did not understand how to fight fires were running one of the biggest fire departments in the country.

Around this same time, Janisse Quinones was appointed to head the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, with a $750,000 salary that far exceeded her predecessor. The press release made sure to mention that she was the “first female Latina to lead LADWP as CEO.”

Between all the trailblazing lesbian fire chiefs and the first female Latina CEO, the LAFD couldn’t find the manpower to actually fight the fires on the first day of the firestorm or the water in the hydrants to put them out. Breaking glass ceilings is easy, but putting out fires is hard.

And Kristin Crowley was picked to break glass ceilings, not to actually fight fires.

Even before the worst firestorms in over a decade hit, there were warnings that the DEI LAFD brass had wrecked one of the country’s greatest firefighting services.

The I-10 fire in 2023 spun out of control and the LAFD struggled to cope with what should have been an easy problem. In a Keystone Kops moment, Engine 17 got stuck under the overpass and was destroyed.

No one dared to point the finger at Crowley, a Harvard Business School graduate who earns $439,772 and was prone to reciting Kamalaisms like “I am different, but there’s a lot of difference everywhere in the world” and “we all our different, but that’s a strength of ours.”

Being different had become a major asset at the LAFD ever since it went DEI.

Crowley succeeded Chief Ralph Terrazas, hailed as the first Latino chief who replaced Chief Douglas Barry, the first black chief, and in the ordinary way of things, Crowley will be replaced by the first transgender fire chief who will then have to be replaced by someone even more diverse. Assuming that there is still a Los Angeles to pay them/it/xem a six-figure salary.

None of this has much to do with fighting fires, but very little in LA government has to do with anything except “breaking barriers” and triumphing over obstacles like basic competence.

After complaints that the first Latino fire chief tolerated sexism, he had to be replaced by a woman. And Kirstin Crowley came to work, committed to being the best at rooting out sexism.

After her appointment, Fire Chief Crowley vowed to prioritize a “work environment that is free of harassment, discrimination and hazing” and promised to build a new era of the LAFD through “the creation of systemic equity and inclusion across the LAFD.”

Systemic equity and inclusion doesn’t put out fires. Not unless you drop DEI consultants on them. But the LAFD leadership was too busy with DEI to deal with minor matters like fires.

In 2022, the LAFD under Crowley announced its first Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bureau. It bragged that 70% of the applicants to the department were minorities and 8% were women. Rather than hiring the best, the LAFD was laboriously working to fill diversity quotas.

Mayor Eric Garcetti had promised to bring the number of women up to 5% from 3.5% and now the LAFD is approaching 8%. No one was allowed to ask if this was going to make the LAFD any better at fighting fires now that it was hiring in order to hit a diversity target.

Beyond DEI, every stupid woke idea found a home under Crowley’s regime. After taking over, Crowley debuted the first “electric fire engine” to fight “pollution”, instead it was sidelined by a water leak.

The vaccine mandate ousted some firefighters and suspended others. Last year, with a shortage of firefighters, the LAFD began trying to bring some of them back.

Los Angeles and the LAFD fought the Firefighters4Freedom Foundation group which represented 500 members of the LAFD. Now the LAFD has been reduced to begging for volunteers with firefighting experience.

The DEI LAFD seems to be a whole lot more diverse, but also a lot less competent at deploying manpower than the old organization used to be.

While the LAFD might have lost a whole lot white men who knew how to fight fires, it gained a lot of DEI hires who knew how to pursue diversity, inclusion and all the pronoun stuff.

And while LA might have lost a lot of buildings, it gained a lot of lesbian fire chiefs.

The post The LAFD is run by three lesbians named ‘Kirsten’ appeared first on World Israel News.

The best way to deal with this problem isn’t to give the Secret Service more money and listen to more empty promises, but to shut it down.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

In 2014, a mentally unstable man jumped over the White House fence, overpowered an armed female Secret Service agent, and made it to the East Room before an off-duty agent about to leave for the night finally took him down.

The 2014 incident led to the resignation of the Secret Service’s first female director who had emphasized diversity over effectiveness.

A year earlier, then-president Barack Obama had appointed Julia Pierson, and the move was hailed as a milestone for diversity that would “change the culture” of the excessively male organization. Pierson launched diversity initiatives to recruit and promote women and minority personnel.

“Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own,” Obama claimed when picking Pierson.

A year later he had accepted her resignation because she had failed to keep his family safe.

But the diversity initiatives continued with the number of female agents rising from 10% in 2013 to over 25% today. Along with that there has been a massive turnover in personnel.

During the Biden administration, a sizable percentage of the Secret Service left. In 2022 and 2023 alone, 1,400 of the 7,800 personnel resigned.

This was the largest departure in decades and it took place on the watch of Kimberly Cheatle who returned to Julia’s pursuit of diversity.

There had been a similar outflow of personnel during the first years of the Obama administration, but this time the outgoing agents were replaced by a new body of mostly inexperienced DEI hires.

The recently submitted Secret Service report revealed that “approximately 60 percent of the Secret Service’s law enforcement personnel have less than 10 years of experience with the agency, with approximately 30 percent having less than five years of experience.”

Like most federal agencies, the Secret Service is once again blaming its failures on not having enough money and not enough manpower while once again demanding a mockup model of the White House to train in.

The Secret Service has a $3 billion budget, its manpower and money problems are self-inflicted and its failings in Butler had nothing to do with a White House set.

The Secret Service’s pursuit of DEI makes it hard to find qualified candidates when it also only has a 2% hiring approval rate.

It’s hard enough finding qualified personnel willing to work long hours and risk their lives without also slotting in the Secret Service’s DEIA program to promote recruitment of LGBT, Indian, Asian, black, female and disabled recruits.

The ideal disabled black lesbian Indian agent who also passes physical fitness tests and has no home life may not exist.

The Secret Service can have a ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Special Emphasis Program’ or it can staff up with qualified law enforcement and veterans who can do the job.

After the 2014 intrusion, the Secret Service promised it would quickly staff up and train new personnel. Now it turns out that many of those hires were unqualified and badly trained.

The Secret Service is now asking for more money to hire more people but like most federal agencies, it’s likely to spend that money as quickly as possible and hire the unqualified.

The underlying problem is that the Secret Service has a lot of DEI hires and depends on a limited number of older white law enforcement veterans who actually know what they’re doing.

With a mandatory retirement age of 57 and a program that allows personnel to retire in their fifties, collect pensions and then return to work, ludicrous salaries have become the norm.

The Secret Service salary cap is $221,145. In one survey nearly 40% of agents had hit the cap for working overtime which means that many of the Secret Service personnel are being paid more than some of the elected officials they’re protecting.

After a decade of generous salaries and stressful work, they retire early and are replaced by new hires who are far less qualified.

A decade after it was supposed to be reformed, the Secret Service has only gotten worse.

In 2014, the Secret Service blamed malfunctioning radios that made it difficult to track the intruder. In 2024, the Secret Service once again blamed malfunctioning radios.

With a $3 billion annual budget and a decade worth of time, the Secret Service can’t even manage to solve a problem with its radios. Why expect it to do anything at all?

It doesn’t take a massive fortune or a lot of manpower to handle a protective detail.

When Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu visited D.C. Secret Service “agents said they marveled at what their Israeli counterparts brought — including a portable security camera network that delivered live feeds from key spots in the prime minister’s hotel. The Secret Service has its own mobile camera system. But agents say it is so unreliable it is rarely used.”

Having a mobile security camera network is not some exotic futuristic technology, but the sort of thing a couple of teenagers could put together in a few days on a budget of thousands. It’s ridiculous that Secret Service agents were blown away by what is the bare minimum.

The Secret Service is now promising that it will deploy drones (the Trump assassin had a drone, Trump’s protective detail did not) as if this were some new advanced technology, not something teens can buy and use. And that this time it will finally get its radios working. Hopefully.

We’ve heard of all of this before.

The best way to deal with this problem isn’t to give the Secret Service more money and listen to more empty promises, but to shut it down.

The Secret Service was a clunky makeshift 19th century adaptation to a rash of leftist assassins spurred on by an emotional Teddy Roosevelt in the aftermath of the murder of President William McKinley at a time when federal law enforcement options were few and the alternative was, under Lincoln, employing federal troops.

The Secret Service’s record of preventing presidential assassinations is poor to non-existent. What’s almost as bad is that it can barely function as an organization capable of doing the bare minimum, like hiring, training and deploying personnel when needed during election seasons.

A decade later, the Secret Service is still blaming the 2014 intrusion on Congress refusing to spend millions to build a mockup of the White House to train in when the issue was that the agents failed to keep an intruder from getting onto the grounds and that the armed female Secret Service agent at the door couldn’t successfully restrain him or shoot him.

None of these problems have been addressed. Or are likely to be any time soon.

The Secret Service needs to be shut down and its responsibilities transferred over within a larger federal law enforcement agency that can ‘float’ staff more effectively to avoid maintaining a large overpaid body of agents who are either too many or too few for the job at any given time.

From the Secret Service to the Capitol Police, Washington D.C. is a morass of overlapping federal security forces which are also invariably corrupt and incompetent. Consolidating them under one single police organization would be more efficient and manageable than this mess.

The Secret Service’s law enforcement responsibilities more properly belong within the FBI (which needs its own reforms) and hacking, more than ever, requires a dedicated cyberwarfare with a military component to deal with the attacks coming in from Communist China.

National security requires that presidents and key government officials should be protected by a single organization that is fit for the purpose and is integrated with federal law enforcement.

That organization should have zero DEI. It should also have working radios.

The post End the Secret Service – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.

It let her believe that life was just showing up while embodying the right quotas, smiling a lot and trying to be relatable to the people she’s used to socializing with.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

“Is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?” Kamala Harris asked a month before dropping out of the 2020 primaries.

Five years later the consensus is not that Kamala wasn’t ready, but America still wasn’t.

“Kamala Harris didn’t lose, America did. As a nation, we collectively failed her,” John Pavlovitz, a liberal Christian blogger, damned.

“This election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America,” Cosmo columnist Jill Filipovic argued.

Americans had the opportunity to elect Kamala. And we had failed to live up to her.

“By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” Michelle Obama had warned at a Kamala election rally.. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?”

We were not ready.

“There is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country,” Obama adviser David Axelrod told CNN to explain Kamala’s defeat.

The racism and sexism in America was so bad that Trump won the votes of 1 in 5 black men and a majority of white suburban women.

If only Latino and black men had been able to overcome their racism, and white women their sexism, we could have had Kamala. But as Michelle told us, we were not good enough for her.

Perhaps one day we will be. And Kamala, along with Hillary Clinton, can wait in the wings, sipping chardonnay and listening to selections from Oprah’s book club until we show that we are ready for them to finally come and save us from ourselves.

Decades may pass. Even centuries. But surely one day Americans will finally be ready for a completely inept president.

Until then maybe some other country in the world is ready for Kamala? Finland? Thailand? Somaliland?

But not this land where a jealous nation insisted on voting with their wallets instead of understanding the incredible opportunity before them to elect the first black woman.

Herds of angry liberals wander the aisles of organic supermarkets and wonder how millions of people could have ever put their selfish economic interests ahead of a presidential DEI hire.

America’s selfish founders put their desire for cheaper tea ahead of the glory of being ruled by a mad king who talked to trees and their unworthy descendants want cheaper eggs and beef more than they want to listen to a woman of the right race who speaks in word salads.

It cannot be that Kamala failed. DEI hires can never fail, only be failed. Nothing is ever their fault, only that of the systemic racism of the electoral college, the legacy of oppression in Berkeley and the unfair double standard of being expected to state coherent policy positions.

The Democrats also don’t need to consider how they had managed to alienate a swathe of the American public so broad that it included crypto bros, the Amish, Latino men, Chassidic Jews, the tech industry and the rust belt, the black barbershop and the gay bars of Miami.

All they need to do is accuse them of being racist sexists or sexist racists who should be ashamed.

Telling the American public that they are bad people for not supporting you is not a winning strategy, as Kamala, Biden, the Obamas and the rest of the Democrats found out when they pivoted to accusing Republican voters of being garbage Nazis who want women to die.

But there are different kinds of winning. There’s the kind where you win a popular referendum of the nation’s citizens and the kind where you dismiss the nation as worthless pieces of garbage.

Or as Nikole Hannah Jones of the revisionist 1619 Project wrote, Kamala lost because “racism and misogyny are embedded in the culture”, “anti-Blackness is deeply embedded in Latino cultures” and white women are “enforcing a white ethnocracy.”

“Black people uniquely understand this nation, and how awful it can get” she concluded.

Or to put it more succinctly, Kamala and Jones are awesome and America sucks.

Nominating a widely disliked politician with approval ratings south of spoiled cheese who could never answer the same question the same way twice could be seen as a purity test.

For Kamala Harris, her aides, donors and party, the goal was to win, but for many leftists like Jones, the test was one that we were always meant to fail to justify their burning hatred of America.

Leftist radicalism is part power grab and part test to destruction. Radicals push the country to see how much we will take, not in the hopes that we will genuinely replace Shakespeare with Audre Lorde or agree that being on time is systemic whiteness, but that we will not, and they are suspiciously baffled when we go along with it and then they act as if it’s some racist trick.

Kamala’s defeat is gloriously empowering because it confirms every one of their prejudices.

After a career of failing upward through multiple prosecutorial positions, a brief Senate tenure and an even less well-regarded vice presidency, Kamala finally hit an election where she could not just be promoted based on her identity politics quotient without serious consequences.

And that is where affirmative action usually falls apart. This was where the American people considered the consequences that four years of incompetence in the White House would have on them and refused to give her the job to prove they weren’t racist sexists.

America failed Kamala. It let her believe that life was just showing up while embodying the right quotas, smiling a lot and trying to be relatable to the people she’s used to socializing with.

Now she doesn’t understand what happened.

David Axelrod, Nikole Hannah Jones and the rest of the gang are not entirely wrong. A lot of Americans, including Democrats, who were willing to pander to affirmative action or DEI hires, drew the line at putting Kamala in front of the nuclear button or letting her control the economy.

Equity had a red line. And Kamala was it.

It would have been kinder for Democrats, Republicans and squishies of no particular political denomination not to reward Kamala or ten thousand other DEI hires who fill academia, politics and corporations with positions they are unqualified for to avoid appearing bigoted.

Bigotry is not only refusing to hire people because of their race, but also hiring people because of their race.

Biden made no secret of choosing Kamala because he had promised to pick a black woman. Americans refused to hire Kamala to run the country just because she was a black woman.

White, black and Latinos of all ages and sexes did the right non-bigoted thing by Kamala. But nothing in Kamala’s life had led her to expect to be judged on merit rather than on her identity.

America failed Kamala. Now it will have to find her a nice position telling us we’re all bigots.

The post America failed Kamala appeared first on World Israel News.

FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Helene were not an accident, they were the inevitable outcome of prioritizing ideology over mission, quotas over merit, and race over need.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

“I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell protested to CBS News.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response.

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

Goal 1 of FEMA’s Strategic Plan was to “instill equity as a foundation of emergency management”. FEMA’s Objective 1.1 was also not disaster management, it’s to “cultivate a FEMA that prioritizes and harnesses a diverse workforce”.

FEMA’s leadership was required to make its priority “integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion in delivering the agency’s mission.”

Leading the way in implementing FEMA’s new ideological disaster management was Vice President Kamala Harris who claimed that she had started one of the “first environmental justice units of any DA’s office” when she helped turn San Francisco into a crime zone, and claimed that it’s “communities of color that are most impacted by” weather and natural disasters.

Kamala then argued that “we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity” so that minorities would be first in line for aid regardless of who has the greater need.

FEMA kicked off hurricane season in 2022 with a preparedness campaign contending that black people were more vulnerable to hurricanes because, according to FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks, “black communities are on the frontlines of climate change.”

Hooks, another Biden-Harris nominee, had been appointed deputy administrator despite only five years of experience in emergency management, in order to “infuse equity across our agency” described the campaign prioritizing black people for natural disasters as reaffirming “our commitment to equity”.

But FEMA’s commitment to equity was getting people killed.

“Black and African American communities often suffer disproportionate impacts from disasters. This is something that we must work to change and that starts with how we prepare,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell argued.

A few weeks later, Hurricane Ian became the third most expensive weather disaster and claimed over 150 lives. Most of the dead were white senior citizens. Elderly people living near the coast were the ones actually most at risk.

FEMA had sacrificed their lives for equity.

Instead of atoning for the lives lost, Administrator Criswell doubled down by signing an agreement with the NAACP, a Biden-Harris administration ally, and assured illegal aliens that they could apply for taxpayer-funded aid.

FEMA directed millions to creating “equitable” fire departments and tried to make sure too many white people weren’t applying for disaster aid.

During the devastating fires in Hawaii last year, FEMA was busy running DEI training which falsely claimed white supremacy is “ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S” as part of ‘Goal 1’ and its mandate to make “equity a foundation of emergency management.

The introduction to FEMA’s Building Alliances for Equitable Resilience by Chauncia Willis, a former wellness and diversity coach, urges disaster officials to reach out to “LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, Black Lives Matter chapters”.

The DEI bureaucracy at FEMA had fundamentally tainted its risk calculations. As Freedom Center Investigates revealed in a 2022 investigation, the agency’s National Risk Index had baked in a “social vulnerability” component based on the percentage of minority groups.

A town that is 40% black, 33% Hispanic and 12% Asian is calculated by FEMA as being more at risk than a town that is made up of 23% Italian-Americans, 44% Irish, 9% Jews and 18% Swedish-Americans.

Two towns with the same risk level, but different racial numbers will put the minority town ahead of the non-minority one when it comes to aid to prepare for a disaster.

Asheville, North Carolina, which has an 84% white population and only 4.5% black population, was doomed to be considered lower risk than similar black or minority areas because of the systemically racist algorithms being employed by federal bureaucrats at FEMA.

Administrator Criswell told the media that FEMA couldn’t have been prepared for the historic flooding in North Carolina, but the area has a history of floods going back two centuries.

The Great Flood of 1916 killed 80 people and flooded the area with more rain than ever. Had FEMA studied the history of floods, instead of the history of race, it might have been ready.

But the Biden-Harris administration had illegally mandated racial discrimination across every federal agency with its ‘equity’ executive orders.

The dead in North Carolina are just more of the victims of the systemic racism of equity.

FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Helene were not an accident. They were the inevitable outcome of prioritizing ideology over mission, quotas over merit, and race over need.

A DEI leadership dedicated to enacting DEI has ineptly presided over another natural disaster.

From East Palestine to Ashevillle, the Biden-Harris administration has allowed innocent people to suffer and die because the racist ideology of equity values some lives less depending on their race.

The foundation of disaster management can either be racial equity or disaster response.

FEMA Administrator Criswell, Deputy Administrator Hooks, and FEMA’s DEI bureaucracy have demonstrated that it cannot be both because there’s no room for DEI when people are dying.

The post FEMA’s DEI crippled Hurricane Helene response appeared first on World Israel News.

‘The administration seeks to axe the dedicated program to enable repair of undersea cables in times of emergency, the CSF Program, in order to spend more money on woke nonsense,’ said Sen. Ted Cruz.

By Adam Kredo, The Washington Free Beacon

The Biden-Harris administration is quietly floating a funding cut for a national security initiative that protects America’s underwater infrastructure.

At the same time, it’s asking Congress for millions of dollars for equity and “environmental justice” initiatives, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

The administration recently informed Congress that it wants to strip

$10 million in annual funding for the Maritime Administration’s (MARAD) Cable Security Fleet (CSF), which protects the underwater infrastructure powering America’s connection to the internet.

Hostile nations like Russia and China have repeatedly attempted to sabotage these networks, plunging the American government and military into darkness.

A sizable portion of this funding is being diverted into equity programs as part of the Biden-Harris administration’s push to promote progressive cultural priorities, according to Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas).

This includes more than $1 million to hire 11 full-time staffers dedicated to “diversity and equity priorities” at the Transportation Department.

An additional $6 million is allocated to programs that will “address environmental issues and ‘mitigat[e] the impact of climate change.’”

Another $10 million is slated for the U.S. Marine Highway Program to support “environmental justice,” Cruz disclosed.

“The Biden administration’s decision to defund undersea cable security while increasing spending on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) undermines the strategic defense posture of the United States against our adversaries, like Russia and China, in favor of radically liberal and unpopular social policies,” Cruz wrote in an investigatory letter sent Thursday to the Department of Transportation and obtained by the Free Beacon.

Congress approved $10 million in annual funding for MARAD’s CSF program, which ensures American ships are on standby to deal with any disruption to the underwater cable system.

The fleet acts as a last line of defense “in times of national emergency” should hostile actors succeed in severing the country’s internet connection.

While the money remains available, the Biden-Harris administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal “requests no funding for the program,” according to Cruz.

“But what the MARAD budget does include is millions in additional funding for headquarters operations to implement the administration’s executive orders on race and equity, environmental justice, climate and sustainability, and pandemic response,” Cruz wrote.

“The administration’s request to zero out the CSF program is puzzling considering the uptick in attacks on undersea cables,” the senator wrote.

In May, U.S. officials sent an alert to telecommunications companies, warning them “that undersea cables could be vulnerable to tampering by Chinese repair ships.”

Beijing’s state-controlled ships were obfuscating their international whereabouts, indicating they could be engaged in espionage operations.

“The repeated gaps in transponder data from Chinese cable repair ships and the location of the ships—in the vicinity of cables that are related to national security—raises red flags,” Cruz wrote.

“In spite of all this, the administration seeks to axe the dedicated program to enable repair of undersea cables in times of emergency, the CSF Program, in order to spend more money on woke nonsense.”

In February of this year, the administration designated undersea cables as a key technology “of particular importance to the national security of the United States.”

Shortly thereafter, three cables beneath the Red Sea were cut, causing a communications blackout in Asia and Europe.

It has long been known that Russia has the “capability to cut top-secret cables, connect to them, and jam sensors that detect intrusions,” according to Cruz, who cited a 2018 Associated Press report on the issue.

European officials subsequently warned last year that “Russia may sabotage undersea cables in retaliation for Western support of Ukraine,” a concern shared by the American intelligence community.

“U.S. officials have raised concerns that foreign cable repair ships—on which we will further rely absent the CSF program—pose a security threat because underwater cables are vulnerable to tampering,” Cruz noted.

If the United States relies on an outside nation for cable repairs, that country “could tap undersea data streams, conduct reconnaissance on U.S. military communication links, or steal valuable intellectual property used in cable equipment,” Cruz wrote, adding that Russian ships have already “actively mapped critical undersea infrastructure.”

“The security of undersea cables depends on having access to these ‘trusted’ ships for maintenance and repair of cables, rather than relying on foreign-flagged repair ships sometimes owned by foreign adversaries, which may be recalled to their home countries or otherwise pose risks and reliability concerns during conflict,” according to the senator.

Cruz is asking the Transportation Department to turn over all information about the CSF program dating back to 2021, as well as “all guidance documents referring or relating to DEI” programs.

The senator also wants updated “information on the threat and known attacks by adversaries on undersea cables,” including “an explanation of how the Department and MARAD intend to ensure continuity of undersea communications networks during conflict without an operative CSF program.”

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We must do everything in our collective power to prevent a recurrence of the near-assassination and tragedy that occurred in Pennsylvania.

By Alan M. Dershowitz, Gatestone Institute

Now that the Republican convention ended without incidents, we must get back to considering the implications of the near-assassination of former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump two days before the convention began.

Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle says she will not resign, despite the failure of her agents to secure the rooftop from where the shots were fired at Trump, and despite her refusal to come clean about the causes of the failure.

The Secret Service is being praised for protecting Donald Trump from an assassin.

This praise is justified if one focuses on the bravery of the agents who risked their lives to shield Trump from the immediate threat posed by the shooter after he fired the initial shots, but that well-deserved praise must be accompanied by constructive criticism for the failure to prevent the shooting in the first place.

The would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, came within an inch of succeeding. An armed person should never have been allowed to be at a location from which he could take aim at a presidential candidate.

It is not as if this attack could not have been anticipated and planned for.

It is quite similar to the shooting of then President John F. Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

The major difference is that Lee Harvey Oswald shot at a difficult moving target, whereas Crooks shot at an easier stationary target.

In both cases, there was a failure to secure an obviously dangerous location. One would think that the Secret Service would have learned from their failure in Dallas. They did not.

There must be changes in the protective procedures employed by the Secret Service, especially at large outdoor rallies.

Everyone admitted to the venue is vetted for weapons, but apparently there is insufficient protection against potential snipers shooting from outside the actual venue.

This failing must be remedied before the next rally.

The Secret Service should be devoted exclusively to preventing and responding to attacks on its protectees.

It must get out of the unrelated business of investigating currency counterfeiting and other crimes.

This assassination attempt may well be an outgrowth of the increasing acceptance of violence by extremists on all parts of the political spectrum.

We do not yet know the specific motivation of Crooks, but it is certainly possible that he may have been influenced by the current rhetoric justifying violence as an appropriate response to perceived injustice.

We do know that in addition to possessing a rifle legally purchased by his father, he also had explosives in his car and home.

He was determined to murder Trump, though for what reasons we do not yet know. Although there is no direct evidence of his motive, politically-inspired violence is increasingly common, especially among the younger generation of activists.

Our universities are turning out students who engage in violence and are only rarely punished for it. Some faculty members are teaching that noble ends justify ignoble means.

The result has been physical attacks on fellow students based on political, ideological, and religious disagreements.

It is only a short step from physically attacking those with whose policies you disagree, to shooting at political candidates who support such policies.

An atmosphere of violence has become pervasive and is likely to increase as a result of this nearly successful assassination attempt and the growing divisions over the coming election.

The Secret Service must learn from its mistakes and must redouble its efforts to protect candidates from what are likely to be increasing dangers over the next four months and beyond.

In its press conference, the Secret Service said it was not changing any plans regarding the Republican convention. Nor did it permit any questions regarding the failures that led to the attack.

Even more important, political, educational, religious, and other leaders must denounce violence advocated and practiced by those on their side of the political divide.

It is easy to denounce violence by one’s opponents. It is far more difficult, but more important, to denounce violence by one’s allies.

Social media is filled with extremist left-wing praise for Crooks and regrets that he missed. Had he succeeded, there would likely be blood on the streets.

This is an even more dangerous time than back in the 1960s, when three major assassinations occurred.

We must do everything in our collective power to prevent a recurrence of the near-assassination and tragedy that occurred in Pennsylvania.

We are not doing enough.

The post The Secret Service must be revamped appeared first on World Israel News.

The Secret Service has been badly broken by years of politicization.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

When Biden picked Kim Cheatle, who had been on his security detail as VP, to head the Secret Service, the organization’s chief missions became DEI and Biden coverups.

The Secret Service pledged to bring the number of women serving up to 30%. While female agents are valuable in certain settings and for certain protectees, this did not seem to be a good fit with Trump who needed to be quickly pushed down, secured, and protected.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1812312136305045914

The Secret Service did however get busy covering up multiple attacks by Biden’s dog on its own personnel, including deleting video footage of such an attack.

Dan Bongino, who was a former Secret Service agent, stated that, “I want to repeat, and can absolutely confirm, the USSS Director Kim Cheatle has repeatedly turned down requests for a larger security footprint around President Trump. Despite knowing the threat level is catastrophic.”

Multiple individuals saw the shooter, currently identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, getting into position and climbing on top of a building.

While a Secret Service sniper reacted quickly enough once the firing began, by then one person was dead and former President Trump could have also been killed.

There are fundamental questions to be asked here.

The Biden family has a history of crossing personal and governmental interests with the personnel assigned to them, whether it’s medical or protection details, and Biden picked someone who had worked with him to head the Secret Service.

Once the Secret Service was tasked with also protecting his political opponent, a major conflict of interest arose, and former President Trump was wounded and nearly killed.

Like the FBI, the Secret Service has been badly broken by years of politicization.

Earlier this year there was a petition from within the Secret Service warning of a crisis within the organization.

The document “flags concerns about ‘a number of recent Secret Service incidents indicative of inadequate training,’ a double standard in disciplinary actions, and a vulnerability ‘to potential insider threats’ that could pose a risk to U.S. national security.”

The risk seems to have arrived.

The Secret Service denied full protection to a former president and party nominee, leading to an assassination attempt that nearly succeeded. Was it a massive failure or a near success?

The post Secret Service covered for Biden, exposed Trump appeared first on World Israel News.

Instead of backing up DEI mandates, it needs to overturn and ban them, withholding federal funding from those academic institutions that resist.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

Evidence continues to pile up that antisemitism on American college campuses hasn’t just surged in the months since Oct. 7 but become commonplace.

The disturbing incident this past week at the University of California, Berkeley, where a pro-Israel event for students was stormed and broken up by a violent mob chanting in favor of terrorism (“intifada”) and spewing antisemitic insults was egregious, but just the latest example.

It was echoed by the testimony before Congress by Jewish students from Harvard University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Cooper Union College before the House Bipartisan Task Force on Antisemitism.

The students, in what can only be termed a compendium of horror stories about troubling incidents, have repeatedly said that college administrations have been unwilling to do anything about it.

Both Republicans and Democrats agreed that the situation was not just unacceptable but had created a crisis that could not go unaddressed.

And yet, for all the concern expressed, there is little indication that much is being done about it.

Congressional hearings are important, but will they lead to action to punish the schools?

Absent a major push by a new administration, don’t count on it. And if you’re waiting for higher education in this country to fix itself, then you’re dreaming.

Woke schools won’t change

A number of the elite institutions, especially three, in particular, that came under fire because their presidents disgracefully told Congress back in December that it depended on the “context” if advocacy for the genocide of Jews was against school policy, have made some noises about addressing the issue of antisemitism.

And some are under pressure from Jewish donors like Harvard alum Bill Ackman, who just realized that he has been funding an organization that serves as an incubator for Jew-hatred.

However, expectations for these efforts are low because many of the people who have been put in charge of them are part of the problem.

That’s just one of the issues at Harvard where Derick Penslar, a Jewish scholar who had labeled Israel an “a regime of apartheid” and who had denied that antisemitism was a problem on the campus was made co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force.

First, Rabbi David Wolpe and now the other co-chair of the task force, Rafaella Sadun, resigned from it once they realized the process there was set up to fail.

There is no secret about the source of the problem.

The woke ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), critical race theory, intersectionality and so-called “anti-racism” that has captured academia, as well as much of the rest of American society, swept through the educated classes, convincing them that Israel and the Jews are “white” oppressors who must be resisted.

In doing so, it has granted a permission slip for antisemitism.

Liberal Jews have been ignoring warnings that their willingness to along with liberal fashion was enabling a movement committed to implacable and endless racial division while putting their own children at risk of being targeted by the new orthodoxy.

But to their astonishment—and to the surprise of some more sanguine observers who have been speaking out on the issue for years—recent events have shocked even many who had thought concerns about left-wing antisemitism was just a conservative political talking point to awaken to the danger.

The Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7 and Israel’s subsequent effort to eradicate the terrorists who had committed the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust set off an escalation in antisemitic activity that can no longer be denied.

At Harvard, some hoped that the resignation of its president, Claudine Gay (who was forced out not because she enabled antisemitism but because of revelations about ongoing plagiarism in her scholarship), would make a difference, but that was based on a misunderstanding of the problem.

The issue isn’t one or even a few individuals at the top in these schools. It’s the way their entire bureaucracies and faculty have adopted the woke DEI catechism and intersectionality as a new orthodoxy from which dissent is not tolerated.

This breeds hostile environments for Jews. Yet it also creates a belief on the part of those in charge that expressions of hatred for Israel and Jews are not just “free speech” but approved speech because they are in line with intersectional ideology in which Jews are automatically and falsely labeled as victimizers of the oppressed.

While several schools are now under investigation by the Department of Education for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, who knows how long those probes will take or if they will result in serious consequences?

Meanwhile, the federal government continues to pour billions of dollars into higher education.

That not only helps colleges inflate their tuition bills as part of a vast scam in which a generation of young people is going into debt for expensive degrees that aren’t worth what they cost but also subsidizing a vast array of institutions that may now be doing more harm than good.

Seeking liberal alternatives

This is a problem for all Americans who know that in this case, as with so many other ones, the Jews are the canaries in the coal mine.

In the long run, if universities continue to be run and taught by people who are at war with Western civilization and America, they won’t survive—or at least not in their current form.

Liberal education—and by liberal, I mean studies that are dedicated to the “great books” of the core curriculum that prizes the best of the West in the humanities and not the current poor excuse for learning that focuses obsessively on race and gender—is key to the survival of our university system.

It may be that college degrees, including those from the most prestigious institutions like Harvard that have always been considered a gateway to inclusion in the country’s upper echelon, will no longer be valued as highly in the past.

And that is certainly true for less well-regarded schools whose degrees will certainly be worth even less in the future.

But it is especially difficult for Jewish families, including those that might not have previously thought much about antisemitism when choosing a college for their children but are determined they have the best education possible.

While the woke problem is less awful in some universities than others, so successful has the progressives’ long march through higher education that few can be said to be completely free of it.

Even a well-regarded institution like Hillsdale College is not going to be an option for most Jews because it is avowedly Christian. Nor are Jews who are not Orthodox going to retreat into Jewish enclaves like Yeshiva University or religious schools, including yeshivahs.

This dilemma is what has given some impetus to a movement to provide alternatives to what is currently on offer.

One such new option is the University of Austin, a private school that will admit its first students next fall.

This promising project, which is backed by people like journalist Bari Weiss and renowned historian Niall Ferguson, will offer a classical Western education dedicated to both the genius of Western civilization and the kind of open discourse that is no longer to be found at most schools, especially the most prestigious ones.

And it has gained considerable support in terms of donations and student interest since Oct. 7.

Another such option is the New College of Florida, a state-run institution that, thanks to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has begun the work of changing itself into a bastion of Western thought after its previous leftist leadership essentially put it in danger of closing due to mismanagement.

DeSantis put people like Christopher Rufo, whose work exposing the way critical race theory was ruining American education has made him very unpopular in academia, on its board.

It doesn’t have the prestige of the Austin project, but its value lies not just in what it can offer students. It is trying to provide a model to the nation that will show how public colleges and universities can be saved.

As Bruce Abramson, its director of student admissions, told me, the small school that previously had little in the way of Jewish life is seeking to appeal to Jewish students who want a classical education at a place where they won’t have to worry about woke antisemitism.

That’s an important selling point, and both Austin and New College, each in their own way, are in the vanguard of a movement that is likely to grow because of the demand for what they are offering.

Cutting funding is the only answer

In the meantime, the best and the brightest, including and especially Jewish students, will still want to go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford and the rest of the elite schools simply because they remain the surest path to success even if the value of their education on offer is clearly declining.

If those schools can’t rid themselves of their illiberal and antisemitic wokeness—and there’s no reason to think they can—then some other way must be found to force them to change.

The only possibility is for Washington, which plays such a key role in enabling and spreading the problem through funding policies, to change.

Instead of backing up DEI mandates, it needs to overturn and ban them, withholding federal funding from those academic institutions that resist.

That’s an enormous project that will require a change in power—the Biden administration’s embrace of DEI has created woke commissars throughout the government.

It will also mean a realization within the political class that their expressions of horror about the rise of antisemitism on campus are meaningless unless it is ready to start rolling back the progressive capture of these schools by starving them of the money they have used both to bilk students and to hire an army of DEI bureaucrats who have made the current surge in Jew-hatred possible.

Until that happens, we should expect the tales of Jewish victimization on American campuses once dedicated to liberal thought to continue and grow worse.

The post Can American colleges be rescued from woke antisemitism? appeared first on World Israel News.

The influence of DEI and critical race theory are the cause for the spike in antisemitism.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

We could look at it as just another day in New York, where protests on behalf of one cause or another have been part of the culture of the place for more than a century. But the organized effort to snarl traffic with demonstrations blocking a tunnel and three major bridges by people chanting support for the killing of Jews ought to be treated as more than just another day in Gotham.

The answer as to why this is happening is linked to recent controversies about college presidents who had trouble deciding whether advocacy for the genocide of Jews violates their academic institutions’ rules of conduct. Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, there has been an epidemic of antisemitic incidents throughout North America. Jewish businesses and even Jewish neighborhoods have been targeted for boycotts or harassment. Jewish students are harassed and heckled with vicious antisemitic taunts, most recently during a high school basketball game.

The people committing these antisemitic actions are not right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan—groups that Jews have long feared and whose existence was highlighted by the 2017 “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Va., as well as the synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019. Instead, so-called “progressives” are the ones engaged in behavior that seeks, at the very least, to silence and drive Jews from the public square unless they are prepared to join with those opposing efforts to defeat genocidal anti-Jewish terrorists.

The reason for this is no secret. The pervasive influence of intersectional and critical race theory (CRT) teachings, coupled with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is the cause. These toxic ideas divide the world into two immutable groups: white oppressors and people of color, who are always the victims. It has created an atmosphere in which people who think of themselves as enlightened liberals think it is acceptable to single out Jews for opprobrium and ill-treatment because the woke catechism that is their secular faith falsely labels Israel and the Jewish people as “white” oppressors. The side whose goal is to destroy the Jewish state and slaughter its people are considered the victims, not terrorists who must be defeated rather than appeased.

Peaceful protest or domestic terrorism?

While The New York Times referred to it as a “pro-Palestinian protest,” those who shut down the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges, as well as the Holland Tunnel, on Jan. 8— effectively preventing vehicular access to Lower Manhattan during rush hour on a Monday morning—were doing more than demonstrating support for a cause or inconveniencing tens of thousands of people. They were effectively holding a city hostage and creating circumstances that might have led to the loss of life had there been an emergency of any sort during the two hours they blocked these arteries on which the city’s economy and normal life depend.

That, in of itself, ought to dictate that those involved—125 of them were arrested by the New York Police Department, which struggled to regain control of the situation for hours—would be subject to serious punishment. But there is an aggravating factor that also ought to be taken into account.

They and their apologists claim that they are only doing this to show New Yorkers what Gazans are allegedly experiencing during the war begun by Hamas by the Oct. 7 atrocities. While blocking traffic, they were also voicing chants that were a thinly veiled call for more terrorist attacks on Jews, both in Israel and around the world.

That’s what the “long live intifada” and “globalize intifada” slogans heard at these and other “pro-Palestinian” protests mean. Along with the “from the river to the sea” chant, this is ample evidence that what was going on was an antisemitic protest carried on by a coalition of groups, including some like Jewish Voice for Peace that pose as Jewish, which make no secret about the fact that they share a goal with the Hamas terrorists: the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet. It’s also a goal that can only be accomplished by the genocide of the Jewish people.

That ought to mean that such protests would be treated as hate crimes or at least prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Unfortunately, it’s likely those involved will—like those involved in other recent protests in what they themselves describe as an effort to “flood” various sites, a reference to the “Al-Aqsa flood,” the name Hamas gave its orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping—get the usual slap on the wrist that weary city officials have given to most demonstrators in recent memory.

Much like the crowds that participated in the “mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020, the antisemitic traffic disruptors will likely get off scot-free. In the Black Lives Matter riots, many of those who assaulted cops, destroyed property and looted stores went largely unpunished. Indeed, the Times referred to what happened at the bridges and the tunnel as “peaceful.”

Prejudicial double standards

But just imagine if three New York City bridges and a tunnel were similarly shut down by MAGA red-cap-wearing supporters of former President Donald Trump, protesting efforts to prosecute or throw him off the 2024 presidential ballot. They would almost certainly be labeled as “insurrectionists” and deemed by the U.S. Department of Justice to be “domestic terrorists” whose tactics were a threat of civil disorder not to be tolerated. And the treatment they’d get from authorities would be harsh.

But because endangering New Yorkers while calling for the death of Jews is treated by the chattering classes as merely exercising free speech about a topic on which reasonable people ought to agree to disagree, the protesters will likely be free to terrorize some other thoroughfare as soon as they like.

Similar incidents have happened elsewhere in the country, with highways blocked and businesses that the “pro-Palestinians” associate with the Jewish community subjected to harassment with few, if any, repercussions for those engaged in this conduct.

In Toronto, Canada, “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators were even less subtle about their antisemitism. They have been blocking traffic on a highway bridge in a Jewish neighborhood, causing not just inconvenience but creating an atmosphere of intimidation for its residents. Yet rather than throw these people in jail, the police brought them coffee and doughnuts in a vain effort to “manage” the situation rather than restore public order.

To put that into perspective, this outrage is taking place in a country in which truckers protesting COVID-19 policies by parking their vehicles paralyzing traffic in the capital of Ottawa in what they called a “freedom convoy” were treated as insurrectionists. Their bank accounts and those of their supporters were frozen, and their leaders are being tried now on a variety of charges that could land them in prison, even while pro-Hamas protestors were given kid-gloves treatment in the same city.

It’s all part of the same mindset that led to a private Jewish high school’s girl basketball team withdrawing from a game being played in Yonkers, N.Y., against Roosevelt High School—a college-prep magnet school—after they were repeatedly subjected to antisemitic taunts and rough play by their opponents. One Roosevelt High player screamed at the Lefell School players, “I support Hamas, you f**king Jew.” Roosevelt forfeited the game. One player was suspended a day later, and the coach was fired. But again, just imagine, if one of the Jewish girls or any non-minority had yelled, “I support the Klan” at an African-American player. It would have made the front page of the Times and become a national cause-célèbre. But as of this writing, the Times has yet to even acknowledge it in much the same manner that it was late to account for the antisemitic riot that took place in a Queens high school that targeted a pro-Israel teacher.

These incidents and the growing total of opinion surveys that point to a spike in antisemitic attitudes are not just a result of indoctrination in the intersectional lie about the Palestinian war to destroy Israel being analogous to the struggle for civil rights in the United States. It’s also a product of the mainstreaming of anti-Zionist invective and barely disguised prejudice against Jews in publications like the Times and the willingness of pop-culture outlets like the “Saturday Night Live” show to take the side of those justifying the advocacy of genocide of Jews rather than those calling it out.

The problem is that the people who are committing the growing list of antisemitic acts on the streets and on college campuses are not part of a tiny radical fringe like the tiki-torch-bearing neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville. These demonstrators are educated “progressives” who claim to support human rights and are often connected in one way or another to the elites who run the institutions of academia, the media, the arts and liberal politics. In other words, the new shock troops of antisemitism are people that liberal Jews are used to considering as allies. That’s why it is so hard for even groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be protecting the Jewish community, to stop defending DEI policies that are behind this rise in antisemitism.

Jews cannot afford to look away from the main cause of their current woes. Instead, they must focus on why it is that progressives think that Jews are the one minority group that can be discriminated against with impunity. The community needs to mobilize its resources and demand that political leaders start treating those who are carrying out these antisemitic hate crimes in the name of supposed sympathy for the Palestinians with the harshness they deserve. It must also insist that mainstream publications go back to treating anti-Zionism as a form of hatred against Jews. Only then can we hope to quell this dangerous surge of hate.

The post Don’t look away from the primary cause of an epidemic of antisemitism appeared first on World Israel News.

Universities have failed incredibly in addressing and preventing the spread of antisemitism on campus, says Hillel chief.

The post WATCH: ‘Diversity, inclusion officials have failed to stand up to antisemitism on campus’ appeared first on World Israel News.