Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

In 1948, the armies of seven Arab nations invaded Israel. They failed to wipe out the newly reborn nation,  but Jordan occupied part of Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed its Jews.

Among the former Jewish neighborhoods was a small area named Shimon HaTzadik or Simon the Righteous after a high priest who became famous for talking Alexander the Great out of putting up an idol in the Temple. The Arab Muslim colonists who had occupied the area however called it Sheikh Jarrah after an associate of the Iraqi invader Saladin.

Saladin had invaded Israel some 1500 years after Shimon HaTzadik’s death. His associate settled in Jerusalem and died there. A mosque was built over the house of the invader, Jarrah, which later gave its name to the neighborhood when the Husseini family set up shop there in the 19th century. Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, grew up in the first house in the neighborhood.

Seven years after he got a pledge from Hitler to invade and kill all the Jews, the Islamic leader tried to finish the job with the Army of the Sacred Jihad backed by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood Jihadis. Aside from blowing up the newspaper that would later be known as the Jerusalem Post, the Jihadis performed poorly in battle and fell apart when their commander, another Husseini, was killed trying to cut off Israeli supply convoys to the siege of Jerusalem.

The Jordanians desecrated the synagogues of East Jerusalem, used Jewish tombstones to pave roads, and seized Jewish property through their Custodian of Enemy Property.

In 1956, UNRWA worked with the Jordanian occupiers to settle “Palestinian refugees” in this Jewish neighborhood. The UN agency had been entirely dedicated to caring for the Arab Muslim settlers who had failed in their invasion of Israel and was settling them in violation of international law in the homes of the Jewish residents who had fled the illegal occupation.

Once the UNRWA had “resettled” its “refugees” in homes stolen from their Jewish owners through ethnic cleansing, it deemed them to no longer be refugees. The actual refugees however were the Jewish residents who had their homes stolen by the UNRWA.

The only thing more disturbing than a UN agency collaborating in ethnic cleansing was that after Israel liberated and unified Jerusalem, the illegal Arab Muslim occupiers of the homes not only refused to leave, but their right to remain in homes stolen from their Jewish inhabitants was taken up by the UN and the international community. Not to mention a lot of lawyers.

It took the original Jewish owners five years to even win legal rights to the homes in court. But they didn’t actually get the property back. In an attempt to avoid just the kind of international incident going on now, the Israeli authorities brokered a deal in which the Muslim squatters would pay rent and accept the legal rights of the Jewish owners of the trusts.

The rent on the homes was a fraction of what they would go for on the open market. But even that money was never actually paid. The next three decades were spent trying to evict the illegal Muslim settlers who wouldn’t pay rent or leave.

The recent court decision on evictions, which was used by Hamas and the PLO as a pretext for the war that they had been planning on starting anyway, is the latest in a string of legal decisions over these homes going back 50 years.

These decisions came from independent courts, not the Netanyahu government, in a legal battle that began when he was a college student studying at MIT. There isn’t a single argument for why the Jewish trusts that owned the homes should have lost the right to them when Jordan invaded and seized those homes, or why the UNRWA’s decision to illegally collaborate in ethnic cleansing by settling members of an occupying nation in those homes was legal.

All their arguments come down to shouting, “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” when the only time there was apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem was under Arab Muslim occupation.

Every anti-Israel radical in public office from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the rest of the gang have denounced evictions from ‘Sheikh Jarrah’.

“We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. Israeli forces are forcing families from their homes,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweeted.

“The evictions of Palestinian families must not go forward,” Bernie Sanders ranted.

“The Administration should make clear to the Israeli government that these evictions are illegal and must stop immediately,” Senator Elizabeth Warren declared. Despite being a lawyer, she declined to identify how the Israeli court ruling was “illegal”.

The Biden administration also got into the act.

“We are deeply concerned about the potential eviction of Palestinian families in the Silwan neighborhood and in Sheikh Jarrah, many of whom have lived in their homes for generations,” State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter, a former cheerleader who had falsely accused America of genocide, claimed.

The only way to argue that the homes were “theirs” is by recognizing the legitimacy of occupation and ethnic cleansing, at least when it’s practiced by Muslim invading armies.

The moral principle for which AOC, Sanders, Warren, and the State Department are fighting is that when Arab Muslims drive out the Jews and seize their homes, it’s their property now.

The entire legal basis for the court case by the squatters is their claim that the property had been given to them by Jordan’s Custodian of Enemy Property office. This claim has standing in Israeli courts which chose to wrongly recognize those seizures. And so the court cases have revolved around whether the squatters could ever prove that an illegal occupying power had transferred title to them during its ethnic cleansing campaign. The squatters couldn’t even meet this low bar because they were never given title to the homes, but the vicissitudes of local real estate law aside, there’s still the invasion, the illegal occupation and the ethnic cleansing.

When AOC, Warren, Sanders, Tlaib, Omar, the UN, and the Biden administration treat the occupiers of Sheikh Jarrah as the rightful owners, they’re defending ethnic cleansing.

And it should be called what it is.

The fundamental issue at stake in Shimon HaTzadik and Sheikh Jarrah are crystal clear. Unlike some parts of Israel where territory changed hands in more complex ways, we know exactly what happened and why it happened. And those simple facts tell a story of the UNRWA’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Jews, not just today when it serves as a storehouse for Hamas missiles and an employment agency for Hamas propagandists, but back in the 50s.

Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem after an invasion and occupation. The United Nations, through UNRWA, violated international law by taking part in population transfer by an occupying power which had expelled the indigenous population. This is the charge that the UN and the anti-Israel politicians and media have repeatedly lobbed at Israel.

And they’re the ones guilty of it.

Their Sheikh Jarrah argument is that ethnic cleansing and occupation are moral and legal when Arab Muslim armies do it. It’s that Arab Muslim squatters who moved into Jewish homes in 1956 had gained an immutable moral right to live in them by 1967 that outweighed those of the Jewish trusts which had owned them since the 19th century.

There’s no better way to show the hypocritical double standards of an anti-Israel movement that cries about occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid while practicing those very things.

AOC, Sanders, Warren, the UN, the Quarter, the EU, and the Biden administration are demanding that the Arab Muslim occupation of Jerusalem continue. They are ordering a free country to overturn the legal ruling of a court in case that goes back to the 1970s because they believe that Arab Muslim occupiers have a right to live in Jerusalem… and Jews don’t.

That’s what this was about in 1948. That’s still what it’s about in 2021.

The occupiers cry about the “occupation” and the ethnic cleansers cry about “ethnic cleansing” as they fight to bring back the state of apartheid that drove the Jews out of Jerusalem.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Biden administration took over the government with the wind at its back thanks to Donald Trump. With the COVID vaccines reining in the pandemic and things getting back to normal, all Biden had to do was not get in the way of success. But a lingering Trump Derangement Syndrome, and a leftwing, noisy base eager to complete Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the U.S., have led at home and abroad to actions and policies seemingly calculated to compromise our interests and security and erode our political freedom.

We can start with our southern border. Trump’s initiatives such as building a wall, stepping-up deportations, and striking a deal that kept asylum seekers in Mexico had slowed considerably the number of illegal crossings, leading to a reduction in violence from gangsters like MS-13 that flourished in so-called sanctuary cities; the end of the catch-and-release policy that dumped unvetted aliens into the country’s interior; and limiting the cruel deaths of children on the trek north.

But these successful policies interfered with the bipartisan need for de facto open borders to provide cheap labor for Wall Street, and more voters for the DNC. More important, no matter how successful, such polices were tainted by the “wicked” Donald Trump, the populist bull that wrecked the political establishment’s remunerative china shop. So they had to go.

The result has been a return to the Obama era’s spectacle of children and teens packed into squalid holding pens, increased infestations of cartel traffickers in people and drugs, and two consecutive months of about 175,000 apprehensions of border-crossers each month––the highest in two decades. All reports from those on the ground––from border patrol agents to residents to local government agencies––indicate a serious crisis that will insidiously spread across the country. But president Joe Biden is instructed to say that such influxes happen every year at this time, that Donald Trump left a “Godawful mess,” and that “We’ve now got control” over the ongoing stampede of border-crossers.

Then there’s the paradox of 8 million job openings––thanks to the V-shaped economic recovery that was well underway when Biden took office––many of which can’t be filled. Even the promise of cash bonuses and higher pay can’t attract workers. Why? Because his $1.9 trillion “COVID relief” bill actually does little to alleviate the pandemic’s effects, but a lot for bribing voters with free money, and spreading around payola to blue states and “woke” businesses. One such provision bumped up state unemployment payments by $300 a week, largess that will continue until September.

Unsurprisingly, 44% of small business owners report that they can’t fill vacancies, and one-fourth of the openings have been left unfilled. And though a projected million jobs were supposed to be created in April, the actual number was 266,000. You don’t have to be an economist to know what’s going on. When you can make more money on unemployment than you do working, why work? And why create jobs you can’t fill? That moral hazard should have been considered before doling out more cash.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. Little discussed is the role of the “dark economy,” i.e. the off-the-books cash economy, which includes crimes like drug-dealing and trading in stolen goods. No matter the government program, whether state or federal, that gives people money, millions of the beneficiaries work in the cash economy, where no income tax or payroll tax is deducted from wages. That means the reward for not working goes beyond the extra $300 Biden bucks because it includes extra money from working off the books.

That’s just one of the economic disasters the Biden crew has wrought. Donald Trump, like almost every politician, was not averse to fecklessly spending tax-payer money on sketchy policy. But he also understood that economic growth and job creation had to be nurtured by economic policy. This meant lowering the corporate tax rate, which in the U.S. is one of the highest among the advanced economies, and lowering personal and capital gains rates to incentivize investment in the economy. It means as well pruning away the thickets of regulation that cost $1.9 trillion dollars a year and slow down infrastructure and new business development. On Trump’s watch, policies on taxes and deregulation unleashed an economic boom and record-setting job growth, as well as increased wage growth.

So of course, the Biden conglomerate is planning another $6 trillion of spending, raising marginal tax rates, and rolling back Trump’s cuts of corporate and capital gains tax rates. At the same time, he’s undoing Trump’s reforms of the federal regulatory burden on business. What’s astonishing is that there is copious empirical evidence that these methods of generating revenue, which Biden claims will pay for his extravagant tax-and-spend initiatives, don’t work. And don’t forget, these efforts have already contributed to a rate of inflation 4.2%  higher than a year ago–– and the biggest jump since 2008. Flooding the economy with even more cash is likely to increase inflation.

As for the threats to raise taxes, recently Phil Gramm and John Early showed that raising tax rates doesn’t substantially increase the amount of revenue to offset the costs they exact from the economy. The main reason is that actual tax-rates matched statutory rates for only a small number of taxpayers, as history shows:

The top tax rate of 91% in 1962 applied to families with joint incomes, in today’s dollars, of $3.38 million. After deductions and credits, only 447 tax filers out of 71 million paid any taxes at the top rate. The top 1% of income earners paid only 16.1% of their income in federal income and payroll taxes, while the top 10% paid 14.4% and the bottom 50% paid 7%. This followed the pattern set by the top Depression-era and wartime tax rates. Only three filers out of six million paid any taxes at the top Depression rate and only 13 out of 50 million paid any taxes at the top wartime rate. The top 1% of earners paid 12.6% and 23.5% of their income in federal income and payroll taxes in 1938 and 1945, respectively.

And despite the specious rhetoric about the rich and corporations “paying their fair share,” the data show they already do pay a higher proportion of all taxes than their proportion of income:

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found that high-income Americans already bear a higher relative share of the income-tax burden than the rich do in other developed nations. The top 10% of American households earn about 33.5% of all earned income but pay 45.1% of all income taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes. That progressivity ratio of 1.35 is far higher than the German ratio of 1.07, French ratio of 1.1 and Swedish ratio of 1. As a percentage of their incomes, the top 10% of earners in Germany, France and Sweden paid 21%, 19% and 26% less than the top 10% in America. And the bottom 90% of earners paid 17%, 34% and 21% more as a percentage of their incomes respectively than the bottom 90% in America paid.

This means that the expense of the social welfare and health-care programs in Europe that our progressives hold up as reproach to our stingy ones, is paid for by a regressive tax on consumption that hits the bottom tier of citizens the hardest. We can see a similar phenomenon in California, where plutocrat “woke” obsessions like “clean” energy have led to regulations that affect the poor and working class hardest through some of the highest gas taxes and electricity costs in the country.

Finally, our progressive executive branch is proposing Green New Deal pie-in-the-sky goals like replacing carbon-based energy with “sustainable” and “clean” energy, for example by replacing gas-powered cars with electric ones. We can leave aside the growing consensus that the catastrophes predicted to follow a few degrees increase in temperatures has not been established as a fact. As physicist Steven E. Koonin writes in his new book Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”

But even if catastrophic global warming is true, converting carbon-based energy to “clean” electricity is logistically impossible given the quantities of minerals and rare-earth elements required to make the millions of batteries used in electric cars. As the Manhattan Institute’s Mark C. Mills writes, “A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more than 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. The alternative? Use gasoline and extract one-tenth as much total tonnage to deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery’s seven-year life.” And much of this mining occurs in countries with no concern for child-labor laws or the destructive impact on the environment.

Electric car batteries, obviously, need to be recharged. If electricity production, as is mandated in California, is to replace carbon-based fuels, then wind turbines will and solar panels will have to be manufactured in the millions. But, as Mills explains, “Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of non-recyclable plastic. Solar power requires even more cement, steel and glass—not to mention other metals.” Those materials will also have to be minded or manufactured, which requires energy. And that energy will necessarily come from hydrocarbons whose emissions will cancel the reductions from using “sustainable” and “clean” energy, which in fact is neither.

Even attempting to reach Biden’s goal of replacing hydrocarbons with electricity will destroy our economy without achieving that utopian goal. What a contrast with the Trump administration, which promoted American energy independence and removed some of the regulatory shackles put on the energy industry during the Obama years. Biden instead has shut down the Keystone pipeline, banned fracking on federal land, and shoveled tons of cash to “clean energy” boondoggles, leaving us more dependent on imported energy.

And this is just 100 days of domestic policy. Much of these proposed tax-and-spend proposals as of now look unlikely to pass, but the Republicans can’t get complacent. This is no time to make deals or “bipartisanship” horse-trading. It’s time to fight tooth and nail against these assaults on our national sovereignty and economic well-being.