Topline
A Tuesday article from Fox News has kicked off a budding
online misinformation campaign buoying the false claim that activist
group Black Lives Matter has come out in support of Gaza’s militant
Hamas leaders amid the ongoing conflict with Israel.
Fox News Host Tucker Carlson was one of several popular conservative
media pundits who condemned the violence that took place Wednesday, but
he also expressed sympathy for many of the "deeply frustrated"
Trump supporters who engaged in a siege on the U.S. Capitol, explaining
that "millions of Americans sincerely believe the last election was
fake," striking a sharp contrast to how Carlson and others have
characterized protesters affiliated with the Black Lives Matters
movement.
Fox News published digitally altered and misleading photos on stories about Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in what photojournalism experts called a clear violation of ethical standards for news organizations.
The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. Another altered image combined the gunman photo with yet another image, making it appear as though he was standing in front of a sign declaring “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/20/hundreds-of-nyc-rioters-looters-have-charges-dropped/
Hundreds of alleged looters and rioters busted last year in protests over George Floyd’s murder by police have had their charges dropped, according to NYPD data — figures ripped as “disgusting” by a local business owner.
Sources in the DA’s offices insisted that in many of the cases, the evidence was not strong enough to secure a conviction. The offices are also swamped with a backlog of cases created by the courts’ prolonged closure during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simple question - aside from the personal feelings of one victim and claims of one former policeman - why is no evidence being reported that charges were dropped in spite of having solid evidence of criminal behavior ?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/17/george-floyd-protesters-charges-citations-analysis
Some prosecutors and law enforcement observers say departments carried out mass arrests as crowd control tactic
In most instances, Detroit officers who wrote
tickets were not at the protests and didn’t actually witness the alleged
crimes, said the National Lawyers Guild and Detroit Justice Center
attorney Rubina Mustafa. Instead of continuing to attempt to prosecute
with shoddy evidence, the city earlier this year dropped
nearly 300 more citations, but has still pursued dozens of charges
against protest organizers. All told, 93% of Detroit cases have been
dropped.
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, a staunch Trump ally, said Wednesday in defending the president against impeachment that Republicans were consistent and condemned all violence from anyone.
“It’s all about politics,” he claimed.
The idea that Democrats did not criticize the violent elements of the BLM and social justice movement last summer is false.
Black activists are coming out strongly against a growing narrative among conservatives that equates the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol with last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests of racial injustice.
Republican lawmakers defending President Donald Trump made the comparison again Wednesday while building their case against impeachment and accused Democrats of being hypocrites with selective outrage. Their comments mark the latest effort by Trump and the GOP to misrepresent the Black Lives Matter movement as an extremist, violent faction tied to anarchists.
“You can moan and groan, but he was far more explicit about his calls for peace than some of the BLM and left-wing rioters were this summer when we saw violence sweep across this nation,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said in defending Trump before the House voted 232-197 to impeach the president for inciting an insurrection.
But the two events were fundamentally different. One was an intentional, direct attack on a hallowed democratic institution, with the goal of overturning a fair and free election. The other was a coast-to-coast protest movement demanding an end to systemic racism that occasionally, but not frequently, turned violent.
Brad Lander, who was once targeted in NYC for his strong defense of Israel, has joined the same den of radical leftists, in the name of power and acceptance of his peers.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-tell-supporters-storm/
Claim
U.S. President Donald Trump did tell supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to gather at the U.S. Capitol and try to convince members of Congress to delay the constitutional process that would affirm Biden's presidency.
Trump did not explicitly tell people to "storm" or "breach" or "break into" the Capitol.
It was a subjective call on whether Trump's use of phrases "you
have to show strength" and "demand that Congress do the right thing"
were meant to condone violence and crimes among right-wing extremists
without explicitly encouraging it.
Those last two findings are crucial because the violence was motivated
by these false beliefs. It’s amazing how easily Republicans can see how
the rhetoric of BLM activists can create a permission structure for
violence, but they become utterly blind to the same point when it comes
to violence at the seat of our government.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/mo-brooks-body-armor-jan-6-rally.html
Then, to prove his point about preparation, he revealed a new detail to me: that because of a tip he’d received about potential violence, he’d been wearing body armor at the very same Ellipse speech in which he encouraged rally attendees to “start taking down names and kicking ass.”
“I was warned on Monday that there might be risks associated with the next few days,” he said. “And as a consequence of those warnings, I did not go to my condo. Instead, I slept on the floor of my office. And when I gave my speech at the Ellipse, I was wearing body armor.
“That’s why I was wearing that nice little windbreaker,” he told me with a grin. “To cover up the body armor.”
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-trump-say-peacefully-patriotically-march-capitol-1561718
The official impeachment resolution points to the moments before the joint session of Congress to certify the election results, Trump reiterated "false claims that 'we won this election and we won it in a landslide'" and "willfully made statements that, in context, encourages and foreseeably resulted in lawless action at the Capitol." These statements include: "if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore."
Donald Trump’s legal team thoroughly distorted his remarks from the rally that prefaced the storming of the Capitol last month, seizing on the one instance when Trump spoke of peaceful protest in his “fight like hell” tirade of anger and grievance.
Trump attorney Michael van der Veen accused House Democratic impeachment managers of showing selectively edited scenes of the violence and Trump’s words Jan. 6.
Yet he ignored the incendiary substance and tenor of that staging speech as well as the president’s words of affection for the attackers later, while they were still hunting for lawmakers and sacking their offices. He ignored the fact, too, that all of Trump’s provocations that day and for weeks beforehand had the lie of a stolen election at their core.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/311146
The haredi community in Beit Shemesh has slammed the city's municipality for demolishing a synagogue while the Torah scroll was still inside it, Kikar Hashabbat reported.
According to the residents, the municipal workers did not even bother to remove the holy books before demolishing the synagogue.
The synagogue, housed in a caravan built four years ago, serves the
community of "Hanikhei Hayeshivot" in Ramah C. Early on Tuesday morning,
municipal workers arrived at the site and completely demolished it.
Endless news cycles and viral social media warn of “breakthrough
infections” in people already vaccinated for COVID-19. These reports
leave the mistaken impression that protections afforded by the vaccines
are not working—and they can fuel reticence among the millions of people
in the U.S. who have yet to get a shot. But such infections are not
only known to occur after COVID vaccination. They frequently happen
following inoculation against influenza, measles and many other
diseases.
Voters in Ohio's solidly blue 11th district opted for Brown, a pro-Israel leader in the Ohio party apparatus with strong ties to the Democratic establishment, over Turner, an outspoken progressive who came to national prominence as a Bernie Sanders surrogate.
Brown thanked her "Jewish brothers and sisters" during her victory remarks, adding how her 2018 trip to Israel gave her insight into the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Turner lost a special primary election for Congress in Cleveland on Tuesday to rival Shontel Brown, a county councilwoman, by a margin of 50-45 percent. The seat was vacated when Marcia Fudge resigned from Congress to become Biden’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. It seemed like a lock for Turner, a former state senator who raised the most money and went on TV the earliest. But then the campaign turned into an intra-Democratic proxy fight between the party’s left wing and “normie Democrats.”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-american-convicted-for-deadly-west-bank-terror-attack/
A military court on Tuesday convicted a Palestinian man with US citizenship of murder, for shooting dead a Jewish student in the West Bank.
The court “convicted the terrorist Muntasir Shalabi, based on his confession, of the crime of intentional manslaughter — equivalent to the offense of murder,” the Israel Defense Forces said.
In addition, Shalabi was convicted of “several counts of attempted intentional manslaughter, and possession of a weapon and obstruction of justice,” according to a military statement.
https://www.kikar.co.il/398162.html
https://time.com/6087311/andrew-cuomo-resign-sexual-harassment-biden/
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced mounting pressure Tuesday to resign, including from President Joe Biden and other onetime Democratic allies, after an investigation found he sexually harassed nearly a dozen women and worked to retaliate against one of his accusers.
“I
think he should resign,” Biden told reporters Tuesday, echoing House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York’s U.S. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten
Gillibrand, all Democrats.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/03/politics/andrew-cuomo-new-york-report/index.html
The New York attorney general's investigation into sexual harassment allegations against Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo found that Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women, Attorney General Letitia James announced Tuesday.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55640437
On 6 January, thousands of Trump supporters gathered at a "Save America" rally organised to challenge the result of last November's presidential election.
They listened as Mr Trump spoke to them on the National Mall, near the White House in Washington DC.
In a 70-minute address, Mr Trump exhorted them to march on Congress where politicians had met to certify Democrat Joe Biden's win. The attack began moments after he took the applause.
Those words have now played a central part in his second impeachment, which lawmakers voted in favour of last month.
So what did he say? Here are five key quotes, followed by some legal analysis from Professor Garrett Epps of the University of Baltimore.
https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-hate-speech
A comprehensive timeline of Trump encouraging hate groups and political violence.
"On last week's show, I asked King Abdullah about the concept that there
would be no stand-alone Palestine state in the future that but instead
his nation, Jordan, would become the de-facto Palestine state," said
Zakaria "I said the idea had been recently mentioned by long time
Israeli diplomat, Dore Gold. I was wrong. Many have talked about that
concept, but not ambassador Gold. I apologize for that error."
Less than 1% of fully vaccinated people experienced a breakthrough infection, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of official state data.
The federal government only reports data on breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death.
According to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 0.004% of people who have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 experienced a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization, and less than 0.001% have died from the disease. That’s about 6,600 severe breakthrough cases out of more than 163 million fully vaccinated people.
But the KFF analysis shows that breakthrough infections of any kind are also extremely rare.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-kamala-harris-late-show-rio-idUSKBN27E34P
Social media users have been sharing a video of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris saying that anti-racism protests will not and should not stop, claiming that it shows she supports Black Lives Matter riots.
Harris condemned violent protests on Aug. 27 after multiple nights of looting and two violent deaths.
She
said, “It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets and I support
them. We must always defend peaceful protest and peaceful protestors. We
should not confuse them with those looting and committing acts of
violence, including the shooter who was arrested for murder. And make no
mistake, we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the
path to justice.” ( here )
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-protesters-bail/
Harris expressed support for a nonprofit called the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), which pays criminal bail and immigration bonds, and encouraged her supporters to donate to it during the protests over Floyd's death in the summer of 2020.
However, Harris did not donate money to the nonprofit before, after, or during the protests, according to its records. Additionally, no evidence shows people who received bail or bond assistance from MFF for arrests during the demonstrations committed more crimes after their initial detainment.
