Day: June 18, 2024

“America is the land of opportunity.” “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” “America is a melting pot.” Those are examples of harmful “microaggressions,” according to Columbia professor Derald Wing Sue, lauded by Oregon’s state government as a “microaggressions expert.”

Now, under a soon-to-be-finalized ethics rule from the Oregon Medical Board, doctors who commit “microaggressions” risk losing their medical licenses.

Under Oregon law, doctors who fail to report “unprofessional conduct” from themselves or a colleague within 10 business days can face severe penalties, including loss of license. The state’s medical board is in the process of shoehorning “microaggressions”—innocently intentioned behaviors interpreted by women or minorities to be subliminal communications of bias—into its definition of “unprofessional conduct,” according to the proposed rule, which the board unveiled in April.

The rule, which has thus far flown under the media radar, expands that definition to include “discrimination through unfair treatment characterized by implicit and explicit bias, including microaggressions, or indirect or subtle behaviors that reflect negative attitudes or beliefs about a non-majority group.” Discrimination, the rule states, is defined as “differences in the quality of healthcare delivered that is not due to access-related factors or clinical needs, preferences, and appropriateness or intervention.”

The proposed crackdown on microaggressions, a concept that germinated at elite Ivy League universities and has since spread to the legal and medical fields, marks the latest example of medical institutions infusing left-wing cultural trends into their work.

At the University of California, Los Angeles medical school, for example, a mandatory “health equity” class taught future doctors that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor” and featured a guest speaker who led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded they bow to “mama earth,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. UCLA launched a probe into the class in April.

For Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a former University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine associate dean who leads the anti-woke medical group Do No Harm, Oregon’s bid to make microaggressions a potential career-ending offense will have a chilling effect on doctors.

“Physicians need to be able to speak frankly and honestly with their patients,” said Goldfarb, the father of Free Beacon chairman Michael Goldfarb. “If they believe that they can be sanctioned because they deliver bad news or make a comment that the patient misinterprets, this will lead to a chilling effect on speech and ultimately lead to deterioration in the patient-physician relationship.”

Such a deterioration means “going down a path that will lead to even further declines in the quality of delivered health care,” Goldfarb added. “I cannot imagine that the physicians in Oregon will be able to tolerate such a ridiculous proposal.”

Oregon Medical Board policy analyst Elizabeth Ross said the board will consider permanently adopting the proposed microaggression rule during a July 11 meeting. The proposal says that rule “may favorably impact racial equity by making discrimination a ground for discipline for OMB licensees” and could prompt “additional board investigations” given the creation of a “new ground for ‘unprofessional conduct.’”

Still, Ross downplayed the rule’s potential effect, saying the board “does not expect this rule to change the way physicians, PAs, or acupuncturists practice because discrimination in the practice of medicine/acupuncture is already considered unethical and prohibited by federal laws and facility bylaws.”

“The board reviews complaints when they are received, and each complaint is reviewed for its unique circumstances on a case-by-case basis,” Ross told the Free Beacon. “If a complaint asserted microaggressions, the Board would review the evidence and facts gathered to determine whether the physician, PA, or acupuncturist was unprofessional in their practice of medicine/acupuncture.”

It’s unclear how exactly the board would define a microaggression or review a microaggression-related complaint—the proposed rule does not provide examples. Oregon’s government has, however, pointed to examples of microaggressions before.

In its 2021 “DEI Action Plan,” for example, the Oregon Department of Administrative Services said posing the question, “How did you get your job?” to a minority constitutes a “racial microaggression.”

The Oregon Department of Transportation’s “Social Equity Foundations” series, meanwhile, cites Sue, the Columbia professor, as a “well-known scholar on microaggressions” and a “microaggression effort.” The series adopts Sue’s three categories of microaggressions: “microassault,” “microinsult,” and “microinvalidation.” It also lists the statement, “Everyone can succeed if they just work hard enough!” as an example of a microaggression.

Sue’s book, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation, is considered one of the definitive texts in microaggression scholarship. One microaggression example listed in the book is the statement, “There is only one race, the human race.”

The adoption of the Oregon Medical Board’s microaggression rule would fulfill a goal identified in the board’s own “DEI Action Plan.” That plan, released in 2023, calls to add “a new definition for unprofessional conduct that includes ‘discrimination in the practice of medicine/acupuncture.’” It goes on to list disciplinary statutes that deal with “grounds for suspending, revoking or refusing to grant license, registration, or certification.”

The Oregon statute under which microaggressions would now be penalized defines “unprofessional conduct” as things like “willful performance of any surgical or medical treatment which is contrary to acceptable medical standards” and “willful and repeated ordering or performance of unnecessary laboratory tests or radiologic studies.” Other examples of “unprofessional conduct” include possessing child pornography and masturbating in front of patients.

The post Oregon Doctors Could Soon Lose Their Licenses for ‘Microaggressions’ Under Proposed Medical Board Rule appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

JERUSALEM—The Biden administration has put potential normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia at the center of its campaign to pressure the Jewish state to end the war in Gaza.

In a speech late last month, President Joe Biden pitched Saudi normalization as a reason for Israelis to back a plan for a permanent ceasefire with Hamas, the dominant Iran-backed Palestinian terror group in Gaza. Instead of choosing “indefinite war” and “isolation in the world,” Biden said, “Israel could become more deeply integrated into the region, including—it’s no surprise to you all—a potential historic normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia. Israel could be part of a regional security network to counter the threat posed by Iran.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in testimony before Congress the previous week that the Saudis had all but agreed to normalization with Israel as part of would-be mega-deal with the United States. Israel just needs to stop fighting Hamas and commit to a “credible pathway to a Palestinian state,” Blinken said. “Israel will have to decide whether it wants to proceed and take advantage of the opportunity to achieve something that it has sought from its founding.”

“What do you want more—Rafah or Riyadh?” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in April, channeling the Biden administration. “Do you want to mount a full-scale invasion of Rafah to try to finish off Hamas—if that is even possible[?] …  Or do you want normalization with Saudi Arabia, an Arab peacekeeping force for Gaza and a U.S.-led security alliance against Iran?”

“This is one of the most fateful choices Israel has ever had to make,” continued Friedman. “And what I find both disturbing and depressing is that there is no major Israeli leader today in the ruling coalition, the opposition or the military who is consistently helping Israelis understand that choice—a global pariah or a Middle East partner—or explaining why it should choose the second.”

Nearly two months after Friedman’s lament, Israelis have remained overwhelmingly uninterested in Saudi or regional normalization if it means trading that normalization for what they consider a premature end to the Gaza war that leaves Hamas intact.

Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, an Israeli Foreign Ministry special envoy and activist for Israeli-Gulf cooperation, told the Washington Free Beacon that most Israelis would like normalized relations with Saudi Arabia, which could have economic as well as security benefits. But “the question is,” Hassan-Nahoum said, “what price do we have to pay?” Hassan-Nahoum noted that the question of Saudi normalization rarely even comes up in the wartime national conversation.

“There’s so much going on that, honestly, Saudi normalization is a bulletin in the news now and again, but it’s not the item on the news,” she said. “Nobody in Israel is really talking about normalization when the price is bending over backward and accepting genocidal terrorists on our borders for the rest of time.”

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly rejected a trilateral U.S.-Saudi-Israeli normalization deal and has publicly rejected the preconditions—saying Israel must achieve “total victory” over Hamas and cannot tolerate a Palestinian “terror state” in Gaza or the West Bank following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and mass abduction of Israelis. Netanyahu’s many critics and rivals have hardly objected, and polls have shown a large majority of the public sees normalization as unimportant relative to Israel’s multifront war against Iran and its terrorist affiliates.

“Normalization, shmormalization, Israelis don’t care about this,” Brig. Gen. (Res.) Jacob Nagel, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told the Free Beacon. “In their top 10 list of concerns, it’s No. 11.”

Nagel, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has been a cautious advocate of Saudi normalization, which he said has the potential to unlock greater regional military and economic cooperation for Israel. But he said Israelis are rightly focused on defeating their genocidal enemies on the battlefield.

“For the past several months, Israelis have continued to experience the relentless rocket sirens, the trauma of the missing hostages, loved ones fighting on the front, and a precipitous spike in terrorism that has killed dozens in Israel since October 7,” Nagel cowrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “Given the very real threats, Israelis overwhelmingly support the war in Gaza and will likely continue to do so until Hamas is no longer able to terrorize the country.”

The Institute for National Security Studies, a Tel Aviv-based think tank, found in mid-April that 89 percent of Israelis, including 95 percent of the country’s Jewish majority, support the war to “bring down Hamas’s regime in the Gaza Strip,” most of them “very strongly.” A survey by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a think tank in Jerusalem, at the end of May showed that 64 percent of Israelis, including 74 percent of Jews, oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi normalization.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem pollsters in late March asked 1,549 Jewish Israelis to rank seven of the country’s “interests” in order of importance. Normalization with Saudi Arabia and “other moderate Arab countries” tied for last place, alongside preservation of Israel’s international image. The top-ranked interest by far was continuation of the Gaza war until “the eradication of Hamas and the return of the hostages.”

Respondents also named Saudi normalization as Israel’s least important diplomatic priority. They said the country’s primary demand of its allies, from a list of seven options, should be continued military and diplomatic assistance from the United States “until the complete eradication of Hamas rule.”

According to the poll, Jewish Israelis are open to Saudi involvement in the governance of post-war Gaza, a possibility both Biden and Netanyahu have raised. A plurality of respondents, 34 percent, said Israel should transfer control of Gaza to “moderate Arab countries,” such as Saudi Arabia. But 23 percent supported annexation of Gaza to Israel, and just 5 percent supported the Biden administration’s plan to put the terrorism-supporting Palestinian Authority in charge of the territory.

The previously unpublished poll was conducted online with a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

“Saudi normalization is a luxury, and that’s how the public treats it,” Nimrod Nir, who led the poll as part of an omnibus survey of wartime public sentiment, told the Free Beacon. “It depends on so many conditions that don’t apply right now. When you can see your enemy with binoculars, it doesn’t help you to fantasize about people who are sitting 2,000 miles away in Riyadh.”

Hamas leaders have said the Oct. 7 attack was intended in part to block growing regional normalization with Israel, and they appear to have succeeded.

In September, a deal for Saudi normalization was by all accounts in the offing and making headlines in Israel. The Saudis were reportedly prepared to largely put aside the Palestinian issue, and a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank in Jerusalem, found that roughly 60 percent of Jewish Israelis believed normalization was fairly or very important, including majorities on the political left, right, and center.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Netanyahu—who signed the Abraham Accords with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in 2020 and campaigned on Saudi normalization in 2022—was on board with controversial planning for the United States to potentially run a civilian nuclear program in Saudi Arabia as part of a deal.

In recent months, however, ministers from Netanyahu’s Likud party have argued that lasting normalization can only come after victory over Hamas.

“Peace is only made with strong people,” Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister turned energy minister and a member of the security cabinet, said in an interview with Israel Hayom in April. “The countries of the region are testing us. That is why we need to continue the war until total victory. This will secure our future and lead to the expansion of additional peace agreements in the future.”

“Of course we want to expand the circle of peace. We haven’t been shy about this,” government spokeswoman Tal Heinrich told Reuters last month. “[But] any peace initiative that jeopardizes Israel’s security is not something that we see as real peace.”

While Netanyahu’s leading political opponents have occasionally criticized him for rejecting Saudi normalization, they have stopped short of demanding he accept the post-Oct. 7 preconditions. Yair Lapid, the opposition leader, and Benny Gantz, a former member of Netanyahu’s three-man war cabinet, have called only for the resumption of negotiations with Saudi Arabia in the name of improving Israel’s relations with the United States and other Western states.

Gantz last month announced six conditions for his continued membership in Netanyahu’s government, the fifth of which was: “Advance normalization with Saudi Arabia as part of a comprehensive process to create an alliance with the free world and the West against Iran and its allies.” But the following morning, Gantz’s fellow National Unity minister Hili Tropper clarified that the political alliance opposes establishing a Palestinian state in exchange for Saudi normalization. Gantz made no mention of normalization in his resignation speech last week.

Matan Vilnai, the chairman of Commanders for Israel’s Security, an advocacy group of left-leaning retired Israeli generals, told the Free Beacon that Israel should immediately accept Biden’s offer of Saudi normalization. Vilnai said the proposal would allow Israel to “have a peace process with the Saudis, advance the Palestinian issue, and at the same time fight Hamas.”

Asked how Israel could continue to fight Hamas after agreeing to a permanent ceasefire with the terrorists, Vilnai suggested a compromise could be found.

“We have to discuss with the Americans, and after the discussion, we will understand what we can do and what we can’t do,” he said.

Vilnai acknowledged that the Israeli public has little interest in such an arrangement. But he said the role of a “real government”—as opposed to Netanyahu’s coalition—is to make long-term strategic decisions and “build” public opinion accordingly.

“Government is not the people in the street. Government is seeing the whole picture. Government is looking to the future,” he said. “Public opinion is very important, but you build it. It does not come out of the sky.”

According to Brig. Gen. (Res.) Amir Avivi, the head of the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a right-leaning advocacy group of Israeli military reservists, it is the Biden administration’s Middle East policy that is being dictated by people in the street—specifically fringe pro-Hamas activists.

“Most Israelis are connected to reality. They understand perfectly well the danger we are facing, and they understand this danger is existential,” Avivi told the Free Beacon.

“The U.S. administration is looking toward the election, and they simply want everything to be quiet,” he went on. “They think: ‘We will make peace with Saudi Arabia and do a very nice event at the White House, and this will bring us to November.’ … They’re basically sacrificing Israel’s security for the purpose of American politics.”

The White House and the Israeli government declined to comment.

The post Israelis Couldn’t Care Less About Saudi Normalization If It Means Hamas Endures appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

How corrupt and incompetent are the Massachusetts State Police?

Trooper Joseph Paul is one of their “experts,” and he was the third MSP knucklehead that the corrupt prosecutors from Norfolk put on the stand to… do something.

Mostly, to even further destroy their frame-job case against Karen Read.

Trooper Paul made $130,000 last year. Yesterday in court he described “debris” as “’bree.” He pronounced “constrained” as “cu-strained.”

Over and over again he said he couldn’t say anything “definitely,” only he always used the non-word “da-finely.”

Here’s just one back-and-forth between Paul and Karen Read’s lawyer, Alan Jackson. Paul was the third consecutive conehead to testify for the State Police, and the fourth cueball chrome dome over all.

(The fourth conehead witness was the jailbird McAlbert brother who only got six months for killing a foreign exchange student after he hired the judge in this case’s brother as his lawyer.)

But everything is on the level. It’s like the end of the movie Chinatown. Forget it Jake, it’s Norfolk County.

Jackson, the defense attorney, asked Trooper Paul – Conehead #4 – exactly who or what he was relying upon to come to his incoherent, preposterous conclusions about the victim’s magic cocktail glass, among other impossibilities.

CONEHEAD #4: “It’s what was told me as evidence.”

JACKSON: “By whom?”

CONEHEAD #4: “The crime scene there, it was glass from the cup.”

JACKSON (incredulously): “Who told you?”

CONEHEAD #4: “It was told to me by the crime scene when I was at my inspection, that initial inspection….”

JACKSON: “So what you meant by ‘that’s what was told to me’ is that the crime scene talked to you?

CONEHEAD #4: “Yes.”

JACKSON: “Did the crime scene say anything else?”

CONEHEAD #4: “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

To repeat, this is the State Police expert. He has an associate’s degree from a community college in “Administration of Justice.”

The defense’s experts, who have yet to testify, were first hired by the FBI.

The witnesses from the FBI may turn out to be boring. But I doubt the jury will be openly laughing at them the way they were at Conehead #4 yesterday.

He first stumbled onto the witness stand late Friday afternoon. He quickly made an impression on the jury when he forgot how long he’d been on the job.

“Eight and a half years,” he began. “I mean, 12 ½ years – sorry.”

Yes, you are. Sorry, that is.

It’s really bad right now for the State Police. They’re no longer called “troopers.” Their new nickname is “Proctors,” as in, “I saw some Proctors heading east going fast on the Pike.”

Until last week, the Boston Globe had been defending the Proctors’ sleazy behavior. One of their blow-in columnists even suggested last Sunday that only racists supported Karen Read. But then, that’s the Globe.

The Globe’s motto is and always has been, “Comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.”

Of course, if Karen Read were a lesbian, or black, or both, the Globe would have long ago turned her into Emmet Till, or Rosa Parks, or both.

Yesterday, though, the newspaper that slobberingly worshiped Rachael Rollins and Monica Cannon-Grant was trying to dig themselves out from under yet another editorial catastrophe.

The headline on their about-face, 180-degree-turn editorial was, “Foul-mouthed, sexist trooper puts the spotlight on State Police.”

Well, better late than never, I guess. Too bad nobody at the Globe had even bothered to follow the Karen Read case, because they would have known that Proctor’s texts were already on the record, months ago.

But it’s so much easier, if you’re a Globe columnist, to just call everybody who’s an American and was raised in Massachusetts a racist.

Like most people, as soon as I saw how moronic Paul was, I’d immediately assumed he must be a legacy. The state police are full of these below-average losers, like the guy who pushed his wife’s head into an unflushed toilet. As a reward, in 2020 he was assigned to fire the combat veteran-Sunday school teacher who refused to get the Fauci jab. His uncle was a cop, so the domestic abuser was golden.

How Proctor is it?

The State Police are a lot like the Archdiocese of Boston used to be. Just ask Father Geoghan.

Sunday afternoon I emailed the state cop flacks, asking them if Conehead #4 was related to Trooper David Paul, who made $306,000 last year. I didn’t expect a response, but within hours I had one.

Shockingly, the answer was no, Paul the Lesser and Paul the Least are not related.

The Proctors also denied rumors on social media that Trooper Proctor, also known as Conehead #2, was once on the security detail of Maura Healey.

That story didn’t seem very likely, for any number of reasons, but the state cops hadn’t bothered to respond to my earlier inquiry.

So the Proctors seem to be trying to do at least a bit better with the civilians.

But then Conehead #4 returned to the witness stand yesterday.

Here he is on his “accident reconstruction,” such as it was:

“When you look at the roadway I think it’s spun around kinda clockwise. It’s possibility that the curb is there and any blunt force object on the ground as the ground is pretty blunt.”

So the blunt force object could have been the ground because the ground is pretty blunt? May we quote you on that, Mr. Conehead?

Jackson asked him at another point how John O’Keefe’s cell phone happened to land under his body? Isn’t it natural, if you’re hit by a 6,000-pound vehicle, to probably not be able to keep control of whatever you’re holding in your hand?

In Conehead #4’s theory, as he was spinning through the air, he kept both his cell phone and his cocktail glass in his hand. Mr. Conehead #4, Jackson asked, how did that happen.

“It just did.”

“Somehow,” Jackson said, “as he landed he ‘tucked’ the cell phone under his body?”

“It just did,” Conehead #4 replied. “That’s the evidence at the scene. I didn’t put the evidence there so –“

“Well,” said Jackson, taking advantage of the obvious opening, “YOU didn’t –“

It’s say to say that Conehead #4 will never testify in court again. Nor will Trooper Proctor nor Sgt. Bukhenik – Coneheads #2 and #3.

It’s the Conehead Farewell Tour of 2024, coming soon to a state courtroom near you, to be followed in short order by a curtain call in front of the feds.

It’s just Proctors being Proctors.

Госдепартамент: Россия не готова к серьезным дискуссиям об установлении мира в Украине https://t.co/kHqyuaB1di

— Голос Америки (@GolosAmeriki) June 18, 2024

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BANGKOK — Thailand’s Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to approve a marriage equality bill, clearing the last legislative hurdle for the country to become the first in Southeast Asia to enact such a law.

The bill passed its final reading with the approval of 130 of the 152 members of the Senate in attendance, with 4 voting against it and 18 abstaining.

Read More: Thousands Celebrate Pride in Bangkok With Historic Marriage Equality Law on the Horizon

The bill now needs the pro forma endorsement of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, followed by its publication in the Government Gazette, which will set a date within 120 days when it becomes effective.

Thailand will become the third place in Asia, after Taiwan and Nepal, to allow same-sex marriage. The marriage equality bill, which grants full legal, financial and medical rights for marriage partners of any gender, sailed through the House of Representatives right before the previous parliamentary session concluded in April.