Displaying posts published in

December 2021

Sorry, Everyone, Hamas is Still a Terrorist Group by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17999/hamas-terrorist-group

First, the document reportedly depicting Hamas as a moderate group that accepts the “two-state solution” is a bluff intended to dupe the international community.

As Mashaal himself explained, even if Hamas accepts a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, that does not mean that it would ever recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Second, Hamas has not renounced violence and terrorism. In fact, it intends to continue the “resistance” and jihad (holy war) against Israel after the establishment of the Palestinian state with the purpose of “liberating all of Palestine.”

Third, the new document did not cancel or change the content of the Hamas charter, which, according to Hamas leaders, remains valid and relevant to this day.

Hamas’s representative in Iran, Khaled Qaddoumi, confirmed…. that the talk about Hamas accepting a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem was in the context of a plan to destroy Israel in phases.

“There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad.” — Hamas charter, Article 13.

Hamas, of course, never misses an opportunity to remind its followers and the rest of the world that it remains faithful to the words of the prophet Mohammed, who said: “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” — Hamas charter, Article 7.

Days after the decision was announced, the Hamas leadership leader said…: “Palestine – all of Palestine – from its [Mediterranean] sea to its [Jordan] river, is for the Palestinian people, and there is no place or legitimacy for strangers over any inch of it.” — hamas.ps, November 29, 2021.

The statements of Hamas leaders show that they dissemble less than many of their own apologists in the West, who claim that they understand Hamas better than Hamas understands itself.

One of the arguments that is being raised against the British government’s recent decision to designate Hamas an extremist terrorist organization is that the Gaza-based movement, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, has changed and now supports the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel.

Opponents of the UK’s decision claim that in 2017 Hamas “softened its stance on Israel by accepting the idea of a Palestinian state in territories occupied by Israel in the six-day war of 1967.”

A Beautiful Black Woman Shatters the BDS Movement

https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/12/03/blue-state-blues-a-beautiful-black-woman-shatters-the-bds-movement/

On one side of the issue stands Miss South Africa Lalela Mswane, stunningly beautiful and beaming, waving from the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv.

Colorado supermarket shooting suspect incompetent for trial Coleen Slevin

https://www.aol.com/news/colorado-supermarket-shooting-suspect-incompetent-204105432-094803629.html

DENVER (AP) — A judge ruled Friday that a man charged with killing 10 people at a Colorado supermarket earlier this year is mentally incompetent to stand trial and ordered him to be treated at the state mental hospital to see if he can be made well enough to face prosecution.

Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, 22, is accused of opening fire at a busy King Soopers in the college town of Boulder in March, killing a police officer, shoppers and several store employees. 

Four doctors have now determined that Alissa is not mentally competent to participate in court proceedings, and he has “deteriorated” over the past couple of months while in jail, District Attorney Michael Dougherty said. Given the consensus, Dougherty requested that Judge Ingrid Bakke send Alissa to the state mental hospital in hopes that medication and treatment will enable him to become competent under the law — able to understand legal proceedings and work with his lawyers to defend himself.

Dougherty did not disclose why the experts determined Alissa is not competent, and the report explaining the evaluation’s finding is not available to the public, only to the lawyers and judge. Alissa’s attorney, Kathryn Herold, said Friday her client has a “serious” mental illness but did not provide details. She also agreed he should be sent to the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo.

Biden’s Doppelganger for the UN by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17998/biden-summit-democracy

[W]hen you lack a foreign policy, why not pretend that you have one by holding an international summit?

To start with, what does Biden mean by democracy?

Biden’s invitation excludes at least 20 long-standing allies of the United States.

… Obama went around the UN and its agencies on a number of issues, including the “nuclear deal” with the mullahs of Tehran, the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, and the public-relations hoax known as “saving the planet”.

The doppelganger may furnish the emptiness for a few days and furnish a rudderless administration with a few favorable headlines. But it will provide no answer to problems the world faces today, problems that cannot be tackled without the participation of all nations within the framework of a world order based on law, not ideology.

What do India, Iraq and the Solomon Islands have in a common?

The answer is that US President Joe Biden has certified all three as “democracies” along with 106 other countries, by inviting them to a virtual “Summit for Democracy” on December 9-10, 2021.

2021 Was the Year of Vindication for Trump One by one, the lies of the past five years are being exposed.  By David Keltz

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/2021-was-the-year-of-vindication-for-trump/

The year could not have started any worse for former President Trump. Thousands of his supporters from all over the country, of all different races and religions gathered at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., to show their support for a president who for four years fought for the forgotten men and women of this country.

They were proud of his many accomplishments.

Even with four years of lies and conspiracy theories about Russian collusion, and a bogus quid pro quo charge involving the president of Ukraine that led to an embarrassing impeachment, Trump still managed to cut taxes, reduce regulations, and preside over the highest labor force participation rate ever recorded in U.S. history, with 157 million Americans working—until the Chinese coronavirus decimated our economy.

Although the Left painted Trump as a sexist and a racist, he started a $50 million initiative to help create employment opportunities for women, offered new mothers the first ever paid family leave plan, and signed a bill that would permanently provide more than $250 million annually to historically black colleges and universities.

Trump rebuilt our military, increased national defense spending, eliminated the ISIS caliphate, negotiated peace treaties in the Middle East, secured our southern border by beginning construction of a wall and through robust law enforcement. He renegotiated unfair trade agreements, stood up to China, and delivered three vaccines and therapeutics during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

He fought for the factory workers in Indiana, the farmers in Michigan, the ranchers in Texas, the truckers in Pennsylvania, the military who kept the peace, and the police officers who kept us safe.

But in the blink of an eye, the real estate magnate-turned-politician was shunted back to Mar-a-Lago after supposedly losing the first ever mail-in ballot election to a 77-year-old feeble and often confused man who campaigned almost exclusively from his basement on the lie that he would restore our national unity. 

The ruling class told us we weren’t allowed to question the outcome of the most bizarre and corrupt election in history, one in which​ tens of millions of ballots were mailed out, without proper safeguards in place to ensure that the identity of the voter could be verified, and where several Democratic secretaries of state illegally changed election laws in defiance of state legislators.

Trump’s 75 million supporters were rightfully outraged, as they saw his election night lead slip away in the wee hours of the morning, while being labeled rubes and conspiracy theorists by the ruling class.

Before Trump had even finished speaking on January 6, and told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard, hundreds of people had already stormed the Capitol building as a riot ensued.

No one who illegally trespassed should be excused from breaking the law. But contrary to false media reports, the only two people who were killed on that day were two unarmed female Trump supporters, Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland. Most consumers of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC are probably unaware of that fact, and probably still believe that Officer Brian Sicknick was killed at the rally by deranged QAnon followers.

Oh, Oh, Omicron! The new COVID variant is an excuse for control—the little frisson that comes with the exercise of power and lording it over other people. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/oh-oh-omicron/

Last week, I dusted off my Chinese-flu soapbox and said a word or two about (cue the scary music) the Omicron variant. It sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel, doesn’t it? A friend told me about a parlor game that the journalist Christopher Hitchens and his pals used to play in which the object was to contrive names for Shakespeare’s plays that sounded like the title of a Ludlum novel. Hamlet was “The Elsinore Conundrum.” I am sorry that Hitch is not still with us to try his hand at the Omicron variant. 

So far, I have to say, it’s been pretty much of a dud—unless, that is, you’re the stock market, which has taken a beating this last week or so, in part because of this new kid on the medical block (there is also that much more toxic financial emergency, the Biden Administration, but that’s for another day). The new variant has also been a godsend for scolds, nags, bureaucrats, and meddlesome so-called public health officials nannies who are just itching for another excuse to lock down your world, introduce new travel restrictions, and impose new testing protocols. 

How will it all play out? TSTS—Too Soon to Say, but I suspect this sequel is going to be a flop at the box office. For one thing, although only recently named, there is abundant evidence that Omicron has been around for months. If it had been previously unnamed, that is perhaps because it is no big deal. The South African doctor who first identified the strain noted that while the virus was possibly more contagious than versions named for letters earlier in the Greek alphabet, symptoms tended to be mild, indeed “very mild.” A typical news report notes that “patients mostly suffered from mild muscle aches, scratchy throat and dry cough.” (Remember colds? Remember the flu?) 

So why the panic? Partly, it is because panic is an antidote to boredom. People are heavily bored. Panic also licenses the people who want to run your life to, well, run your life. “Most Omicron cases so far have been mild,” runs one headline, “but experts say it will take weeks to understand how severe the variant can be.” Ah, “experts”! What would we do without them? 

The OMG! Variant and the West’s Disgraceful Response   While clinicians on the ground met Omicron with equanimity, Western politicians working the pandemic and armed with not much more than ignorance sprung into Brownian motion. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/04/the-omg-variant-and-the-wests-disgraceful-response/

South Africa has practiced and modeled good science and good sense in response to the last COVID panic. Dr. Angelique Coetzee (pronounced koot-see-a) was among the first to alert South African epidemiologists to what has now been named the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Or, as dubbed here, the “OMG! variant.” 

A calm clinician, Coetzee had deduced that what she was seeing in her patients—and successfully treating—was a heretofore unseen COVID variant with attendant mild disease. 

South Africa’s skilled and responsible epidemiologists were quickly alerted and genetic sequencing commenced. And, voilà: A mutation! Also a completely unremarkable occurrence in the annals and course of epidemics. As molecular evolution and virology tell us, viruses—clever little RNA strands that they are—mutate during disease outbreaks without significant impact on the outbreak. 

By the good doctor’s summation, “I’ve seen nothing in this variant that warrants Britain’s extreme response to it.” Ditto that of the rest of the world. 

Coetzee and her colleagues were the ones encountering and treating Omicron. But the cretins at the helm of the international COVID cartel, based in Washington, D.C., had all the answers. Nobody was going to cramp their style, not least a stoic, calm, rational clinician in the thick of it. Ethics and efficacy be damned, travel to and from a poor nation, South Africa, was forthwith suspended. After all, unlike “the world’s factory,” China—free to spread disease with impunity—poor nations are incapable of retaliating.

So, while clinicians on the ground met Omicron with equanimity, Western politicians working the pandemic and armed with not much more than ignorance sprung into Brownian motion. 

Besides, aside from being eminently reasonable and calm, the South Africans were sharing a tidbit the television doctors and the pandemic’s political manhandlers were not keen to share: There were fully vaccinated people among “the new omicron variant sequenced in 77 cases.” 

The Census Bureau released appalling information about the American family By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_census_bureau_released_appalling_information_about_the_american_family.html

The nuclear family has always been the backbone of American liberty and prosperity. However, the latest information from the Census Bureau shows that the nuclear family, if not dead, is on life support. Only the smallest fraction of American children are being raised in traditional two-parent households.

Leftists have been waging relentless war on the nuclear family for decades in ways big and small. The big ways began in the 1960s with women’s liberation and no-fault divorce. While both of those may have relieved women from desperately bad marriages and dead-end jobs, they also served to take women out of their role as homemaker and the child’s primary teacher, often transferring those roles to immigrant women when the children were small and public schools when the children were older.

The welfare state also struck a blow at the nuclear family. Many women will acknowledge that, even if they like or love men, the latter aren’t always easy to live with, a problem that can go far beyond leaving up the toilet seat. Having a regular “paycheck” without the man attached can be a real blessing.

Even worse, welfare is structured so that having a father in the family can depress the woman’s income, and so that, the more children a woman has out of wedlock, the more money she gets. This isn’t money that would sustain the middle-class comforts many of us like but, as I happen to know from acquaintances, not everyone wants the middle-class lifestyle. Many people just want a check that will pay for rudimentary shelter, food, and drugs.

The Clinton Foundation shrivels By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/the_clinton_foundation_shrivels.html

All of a sudden, the Clinton Foundation’s not drawing the revenue it used to draw.

And the difference is staggering.  

According to Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton:

When one of the most recognizable nonprofits in the world loses 75% of its contributions over a four-year period, there are typically investigatory reports written into what has gone wrong. That isn’t the case with the Clinton Foundation. The Foundation received $62.9 million in 2016 but only $16.3 million in 2020, and very few people seem to have notice[d].

That is because most Beltway insiders know the Clinton Foundation’s primary purpose: to serve as a platform for Hillary Clinton’s political operation while lining the Clintons’ pockets by trading influence for money. That is why donations spiked when Hillary was secretary of state and most of the world thought she was destined to become president — and why they cratered after she lost.

How the Ozymandias has fallen. And more to the point, this pretty well leaves the purpose of the operation butt-naked.

It’s always been a political influence-peddling operation.  As Fitton notes, donations spiked when Hillary Clinton was riding high on the hog as President Obama’s secretary of state.  After she left office and lost the 2016 presidency to Donald J. Trump, she got “defunded,” big.  Trump cost the harridan a lot of baksheesh she had been counting on.  Issues & Insights has an excellent chart here demonstrating the trajectory along with a good editorial to go with it.

The New Nuclear Moment By Robert Zubrin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/the-new-nuclear-moment/

Parts of the Left are shifting to pro-nuclear

The past few weeks have seen a radical change in the outlook for nuclear energy. Coincident with the global COP26 conference, major center-left forces have shifted their position from opposition to support. While a year ago French president Emmanuel Macron was calling for cutting the nuclear fraction of France’s electric power from its current 75 percent down to 50 percent (thereby eliminating the world’s only actually decarbonized major electric-power grid), on November 9 he called for “relaunching construction of nuclear reactors in our country . . . to guarantee France’s energy independence, to guarantee our country’s electricity supply and achieve our objectives, in particular carbon neutrality in 2050.” Whereas a few months ago European Union bureaucrats drawing up the “taxonomy” that defines which energy sources would be considered carbon-free (i.e. valid substitutes for fossil fuels) excluded nuclear power, now nearly all except the fanatical Germanic states have reversed themselves. Indeed, the map of pro- and anti-nuclear Euro­pean countries now closely resembles a map of World War II circa March 1945, shortly before the taking of the Ludendorff Bridge broke the last line of organized resistance in the Reich.