Displaying posts published in

April 2024

Toward a Jihadist Caliphate by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20583/jihadist-caliphate

Not only are Jews under threat, but Christians and all “unbelievers” in the radical jihadist agenda as well.

Although an “ostrich” mentality towards these genocidal objectives prevails among Western decision-makers, the reality is quite different: The driving ideology behind Hamas’s murderous intent is exemplified by the “Doomsday Clock” located in Palestine Square, Tehran, Iran. Inaugurated by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2017, the clock counts down the time towards Israel’s anticipated destruction in 2040, sixteen years from now. Iran’s barrage of missiles and drones launched at Israel on April 13, 2024, was presumably another step toward fulfilling that destructive intent.

Even though Iran remains essentially responsible for the actions of its agents, it has yet to suffer any consequences despite its direct attack on Israel on April 13-14. All the while, taking full advantage of US appeasement and unencumbered by meaningful sanctions, Iran races ahead with development of nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of eliminating Israel and, thereafter Jordan and ultimately the “Great Satan,” the United States from the world map.

On April 1, 2024, Abolfazl Bazargan, an Iranian international relations expert, made it clear, with a straight face, that “…for the purpose of bringing about peace – you have to create nuclear deterrence, even if only one (bomb).” Peace, however, seems to mean “after jihad has obliterated all opposition and established an Islamic Caliphate.” This objective is couched in rational terms to appease West powers, the sympathetic world leaders, who might be persuaded that it is fair and right that Iran possess a nuclear weapon just as Israel, the US, UK, North Korea, and other nations possess such weapons. The underlying jihadist ideology of world hegemony is concealed under a veneer of rationalism, social justice, victimhood, and fairness.

“It’s a belief that goes a long way in explaining the dehumanization of the Jews: It’s much easier to brutalize and slaughter, the way Hamas did on October 7, if you think that Jews are apes and pigs. In our rational Western way of thinking, all of this is unfathomable.” — Idit Bar, expert on Islamism, Times of Israel, February 2, 2024.

Refusing to directly confront Iran as the source of Middle Eastern terror — and instead rely on diplomatic “conflict resolution” that enables Iran to buy time — amounts to a form of appeasement. At this time, preparation for war is the best deterrence, especially in the current circumstances of a misguided faith in “talking.”

It was an attitude of pusillanimous appeasement by UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Nazi Germany in 1938, with the Munich Agreement, that directly resulted in Hitler’s unrestrained march on neighbouring countries, thus inaugurating WW2. In like mode, US President Joe Biden’s acolytes now appease Iran’s Ayatollahs, an approach that commenced under President Barack Obama. Once again, the consequences for the West and the world at large will be horrendous.

The Social Compact with Canadian Jews Is Broken and Needs to be Restored by Howard Levitt

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20570/canada-jews-social-compact

Given their small numbers and the omnipresence of antisemitism, the Jewish community is reliant on protection from society: the courts, the legal system, the police and public sentiment itself. That is the social compact under which the community is able to thrive — and give back.

But the social compact is now broken…. First, after Oct. 7, even before Israel invaded Gaza to root out Hamas, there were hate rallies….

It quickly became obvious that their targets were not Israelis, but Jews everywhere: in workplaces, unions, universities and on the street….

What is their goal? To intimidate the Jewish community, in the hope that it will capitulate and that its members will forfeit their identities as Jewish Canadians and perhaps even feel forced to leave.

It is not just Jews who are under attack. Our entire civilization is threatened. The chants a short time ago to “shut down Christmas”…. are deliberately targeting the functioning of society.

[I]f there was a ceasefire now, Hamas would regroup and strengthen, as it has after every previous ceasefire, and would still run Gaza. The Israeli hostages would be stuck in Gaza indefinitely and Hamas would, as it keeps promising, repeat the Oct. 7 attacks a second, third and fourth time until Israel is eradicated…. If bad behaviour is permitted, it gets worse.

It is not as if Hamas will somehow reform its ways: its 1988 charter has two main objectives, killing all Jews and the eradication of Israel.

How woke leftists became cheerleaders for Iran We can now see the anti-Israel bigotry behind their phoney pacifism. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/15/how-woke-leftists-became-cheerleaders-for-iran/

How quickly the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ lobby turned into frothing warmongers. No sooner had Iran began its criminal bombardment of Israel than these phoney peaceniks were leaping up and down with delight. This is ‘true solidarity’, said one ‘pro-Palestine’ group in response to Iran’s raining down of missiles on the Jewish State. We can now glimpse the truth behind their fake pacifism. We can see their yearning for war on Israel that they cynically dress up as a campaign for peace in Palestine. It’s not a ceasefire woke Westerners want – it’s the humiliation and taming of the Jewish nation.

Iran launched its felonious assault on Saturday night. It fired hundreds of cruise missiles and aerial drones at Israel. Mercifully, Israel, with the help of Britain, America and Jordan, was able to intercept the murderous fusillade, meaning very little damage was done. But that should not detract from the seriousness of this act of war. This is the first time Iran has attacked Israel directly. Normally, the theocratic tyrants do their Israelophobic bidding through proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. That Tehran has now turned its own war machine in Israel’s direction is profoundly concerning.

And what are our self-styled radicals saying? The kind of people who’ve been clogging up the streets of LA, New York, London and Berlin these past six months to wring their hands over war? They’re not saying ‘Ceasefire Now!’, that’s for sure. In fact, some are saying ‘War Now!’, or at least are making craven excuses for Iran’s attack. A member of the International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America went so far as to offer ‘full solidarity with Iran as it retaliates against the Zionist entity’. From solidarity with Palestine to solidarity with warmongering Islamists: it’s so clearly hate for Israel, not love for peace, that motors these people.

Asa Winstanley, the oddball who runs Electronic Intifada, described Iran’s attack as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ – it’s like Blairism with a Marxian veneer – and said ‘THANK YOU IRAN’. The Palestinian Youth Movement praised Iran for daring ‘to take action to bring an end to genocide [sic]’. The Palestine Solidarity Alliance at Hunter College in New York City offered Iran ‘solidarity’. A professor at California State University said ‘Iran did what all Arabs could not do’ – that is, teach uppity Israel a stern lesson. The cry for peace has morphed into sympathy for war – if it’s war on the ‘Zionist entity’, that is.

ELECTION POLLS

Battlegrounds Trump Biden Spread
Wisconsin 47.8 47.2 Trump +0.6
Arizona 49.0 44.5 Trump +4.5
Georgia 49.4 45.6 Trump +3.8
Michigan 48.0 45.2 Trump +2.8
Pennsylvania 46.2 46.3 Biden +0.1
North Carolina 48.4 44.4 Trump +4.0
Nevada 47.5 44.3 Trump +3.2

Wokester correctness lands USC in a pickle over its pro-Hamas valedictorian By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/wokester_correctness_lands_usc_in_a_pickle_over_its_pro_hamas

“Of all the candidates they had for valedictorian, they had to pick a pro-Hamas fanatic?”

With grade inflation, the University of Southern California had more than 100 applicants to choose from in its quest to find a valedictorian for its coming graduation ceremony in May.

They picked a pro-Hamas militant in a hijab, likely intending to show off their DEI cred. Not surprisingly, they drew protests.

How’d you like to be a Jewish parent of a young graduate at that huge ceremony attended by 65,000, and have to listen to pro-Hamas hectoring along with a heaping helping of antisemitism?

Of course it drew protests. They should have predicted it would draw protests.

‘Don’t!’ – Or Ten Ways to Guarantee a Theater-Wide War How Joe Biden perfected it. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dont-or-ten-ways-to-guarantee-a-theater-wide-war/

On the eve of the October 7 massacres, National Security Advisor bragged in an essay that his Mideast portfolio was “quieter than it has been for decades”. Now we are on the verge of a multifront Middle East war. How did Joe Biden inherit a decades-long regional calm and turn it into a precursor to a gargantuan war?

[1] Talk loudly and carry a twig. Issue hollow Obama-like “redlines” or serial Biden threats to aggressive enemies like the vapid “Don’t!” Witness a U.S. President who works a 3-day week, struggles to read a teleprompter, and shouts more at conservative Americans than at America’s enemies.

[2] Destroy hard-won deterrence. Abruptly pull out of Afghanistan. Abandon $50 billion in weapons to terrorists. Abandon a new $1 billion embassy. Abandon a $300 refitted air base. Abandon thousands of NATO allies, thousands of U.S. contractors, and thousands of Afghan allies. Lose 13 Marines in a horrific scramble to get out, while killing collateral Afghan civilians in a supposedly “righteous strike”. Call the entire American humiliation an impressive withdrawal.

[3] Sit passively while a Chinese spy balloon traverses the continental U.S. Shoot it down only after days of escalating public outrage. Be afraid to call the Chinese out for the Wuhan-lab-generated, gain-of-function Covid-19 virus. Let Chinese diplomats dress down our silent and stunned secretary of state and national security advisor on American soil in Anchorage.

[4] Assure Vladimir Putin that the U.S. reaction to a preemptive invasion of Ukraine would hinge on whether it was a major or “minor” invasion. Delay $100 million in military aid to Ukraine as Putin massed on Ukraine’s borders in hopes such forbearance would be reciprocated. Implore Putin to be more selective in his cyber targeting of U.S. infrastructure and institutions.

[5] Coddle terrorist Iran. Seem eager to resume the Iran Deal. Lift sanctions. Allow $100 billion in oil profits to flow into Iranian coffers. Restore aid to the terrorist Palestinian authority and Hamas. Ignore Hezbollah’s terrorism. Remove the terrorist designation of the Houthis. Mostly ignore over 120 Iranian attacks on American installations. Transfer suspended funds to Iran at the rate of $1.2 billion for each American hostage it took.

When the Dust Settles By Mark Steyn

https://jewishworldreview.com/0424/steyn041524.php

The conventional wisdom of the media and think-tanks agreed its line around the time the two-hundredth drone was shot down: Iran’s assault on Israel was a flop.

A record number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were launched by the mullahs against the Zionist Entity: For the flight from Persia, a drone takes nine hours, a cruise two hours, and a ballistic missile about twelve minutes. Not a single drone or cruise missile made it to Israeli soil. A few of the ballistics penetrated the country’s air space, lighting up the sky over the Temple Mount yet killing not a single Jew. An unlucky seven-year-old girl in a Bedouin encampment in the desert was injured by shrapnel, but for Tehran that’s one lousy return on investment. For purposes of comparison, the usual West Bank bloodletting racked up a higher body count: a fourteen-year-old Israeli shepherd was found shot in the head yesterday.

Meanwhile, after six months in geopolitical Coventry, Israel is once again flush with allies:

(April 14, 2024 / JNS) The United States, United Kingdom and Jordan downed many of the over 300 projectiles launched at Israel by Iran overnight Sunday, while France also played a role in defending the Jewish state against the unprecedented attack.

The Jordanians were mostly concerned to protect their own territory from carelessly targeted incoming, the French are said to have confined their efforts to patrolling the airspace and giving a friendly head’s up, and the British dispatched jets from the RAF base at Akrotiri to take out Iranian drones over Syria and Iraq. Whether any of these efforts were militarily necessary to Israel’s defence, they’re not likely to be politically popular on their respective home fronts. Yet all were eager to be perceived as in on the operation, and their participation is being hailed as the emergence of a new Israeli-Sunni-western regional security force:

Our ‘Woke’ Rackets We know who will pay the bill. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-woke-rackets/

The “longshoreman philosopher”  Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

One of the great causes in our history was the Civil Rights Movement begun in 1954. The people who comprised it made a dignified moral and historical argument against segregation, onederived from Christian ethics and the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and eschewing the parochial identarianism and violence of leftist activists. The results were the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It didn’t take long, however, for that noble cause to become a business, then degenerate into a racket that exploited discriminatory government polices like affirmative action, all predicated on a made-up “compelling state interest” called “diversity”––an Orwellian term that relied on crude racialist, superficial group characteristics, while ignoring the true diversity of individual hearts and minds.

The Civil Rights Movement then became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party and government agencies backed by federal law and enforced by hordes of bureaucrats. Consultants, trial lawyers, administrators, educrats, and diversity “trainers” waxed fat on political power and redistributed taxpayer loot.

Today’s diversity 2.0 DEI cartel has expanded the reach and power of Diversity INC to corporate C-Suites and Boards of Directors, magnifying the corruption. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.” 

This corruption of our constitutional order and foundational principles–– the assaults on the integrity of the First Amendment rights to free speech and religion, or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” the “equal protection of the laws,”and the accountability of power to the people ––is a dire threat to our ordered freedom and political equality, for such debasement relentlessly subjects our republic to regulatory tyranny.

The Failed Experiment with Ending Standardized Testing

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

Heather Mac Donald Kidneys Don’t See Color Meritocratic medicine scores another triumph with a genetically modified pig kidney—but the STEM diversity crusade threatens to replace discovery with identity-driven mediocrity. Heather MacDonald

https://www.city-journal.org/article/kidneys-dont-see-color

On March 16, 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease. The groundbreaking operation was, among much else, a refutation of the STEM diversity crusade, which threatens the medical progress that lay behind the landmark procedure.

Transplant recipient Richard Slayman had endured the usual debilitating effects of kidney failure for years. Healthy kidneys filter toxins and excess fluids from blood and excrete those waste products as urine. When kidneys fail, if no donated human kidney is available to replace them, patients spend hours a week hooked up to a dialysis machine that filters their blood mechanically. Slayman had already spent seven years on dialysis before receiving a human kidney in 2018. That transplanted kidney itself faltered, however, and by 2023, Slayman was back on dialysis. This time, though, he required biweekly visits to the hospital to keep his blood vessels open. He developed congestive heart failure. And he rejoined the more than 100,000 Americans waiting, often futilely and fatally, for a human kidney.

If Slayman’s new pig kidney continues to function, the capacity to transplant animal organs successfully into humans (a process known as xenotransplantation) will be as significant as curing cancer, says nephrologist Stanley Goldfarb. Getting to this point required 125 years of scientific creativity and an ever more complex understanding of molecular biology. None of that development had anything to do with racial identity.

Slayman’s genetically modified pig kidney represents a return of sorts to the origins of transplant science. When surgeons started contemplating organ transplants in the early twentieth century, they initially focused on organs from other mammals, since harvesting human organs was considered problematic at best. The French surgeon Alexis Carrel began a series of transplant experiments on dogs after discovering how to connect arteries to arteries and how to widen narrowed vessels—prerequisites to organ transplantation. For the next several decades, surgeons in France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. transplanted goat, sheep, and monkey kidneys into dying human patients, but the organs (and patients) quickly failed. It would take the evolution of another branch of medical science—immunology—to understand why.