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May 2024

Iran’s Mullahs Desperate for Nuclear Weapons, Do Not Believe Anything Else by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20626/iran-desperate-nuclear-weapons

Ayatollah Khamenei’s initial issuance of a fatwa against nuclear weapons coincided with damning revelations in 2002: Iran was exposed clandestinely engaging in nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment, at covert facilities in Natanz and Arak.

These activities flamboyantly violated the principles outlined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which Iran was a signatory.

The timing of Khamenei’s fatwa should only raise questions about its authenticity and underlying motive: it likely an attempt to mitigate international backlash and deflect scrutiny away from Iran’s covert nuclear endeavors.

Iran’s constitution explicitly mandates that both the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are not only tasked with safeguarding the nation’s frontiers, but also with advancing the ideological mission of jihad in the name of Allah. This mission entails the propagation and imposition of Allah’s law worldwide and reflects the regime’s fervent commitment to spreading its Islamic revolutionary principles beyond its own confines.

Such a constitutionally mandated objective underscores the regime’s revolutionary zeal and underscores the potential significance of acquiring nuclear weapons as a means of furthering its ideological agenda on a global scale.

In spite recent claims by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi that Iran harbors no intentions of pursuing nuclear weapons, along with a repeated fatwa from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei supposedly banning nuclear weapons, it would be insane for Western powers naively to accept these assertions at face value.

While some leaders in the West may be inclined to regard such declarations lightly, the international community cannot afford to underestimate the potential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, especially given the deceptive nature of the claims by the regime.

Biden’s unforgivable betrayal of Israel In warning Israel to hold off from Rafah, the White House has abandoned the fight against Hamas. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/09/bidens-unforgivable-betrayal-of-israel/

Imagine if, in 2017, the world told the Kurds to hold off from attacking Raqqa. Imagine if, following their valiant liberation of 2,000 square miles of Syrian territory from the barbaric diktat of the Islamic State, the Kurdish-led forces were told to down arms. To leave Raqqa be. To leave intact the capital of the cruellest pseudo-state the modern world has known. We would have looked upon such a request as lunacy. We might even have considered it an essentially pro-ISIS position. After all, the flipside of telling the enemies of ISIS to cease fire is that ISIS would gain the breathing space to regroup, rearm and revisit its apocalyptic sadism on the people of Syria and beyond.

Well, just such an unhinged demand is being made right now, though of Israel, not the Kurds. From the White House to those whiffy tents on campus lawns, from the leader pages of the liberal press to the Israelophobic pulpits of social media, the cry goes out: don’t attack Rafah. If Israeli forces launch an invasion of that southern Gazan city, in pursuit of Hamas, it will be a bloodbath, the posing peaceniks cry. It would be ‘genocide in action’, insists former Corbynite bigwig John McDonnell. If you do it, President Biden warns Israel, we will stop providing you with certain weapons. In short: leave Rafah be. Which means leave Hamas be. Leave in peace the army of anti-Semites that butchered a thousand of your people – this, fundamentally, is the request being made of the Jewish State by the self-righteous of the Earth.

We need to talk about the cravenness, the outright iniquity, of the Western world’s lofty insistence that Israel back off from Rafah. It is presented to us as a ‘pro-peace’ position, underpinned by a pure urge to save life. But it could just as easily be seen as the antithesis of peace, as a position likely to benefit and even fortify the army of violent bigots that started this war and who seem hell-bent on continuing it. We know that huge numbers of Hamas militants have decamped to Rafah. We know they’re firing rockets from Rafah. We know some of these deadly devices have killed IDF soldiers while others have fallen on Israeli towns, with the intent of slaughtering the Jews who live there. In such circumstances, the cry ‘Hands off Rafah!’ is really a demand that Israel throw its own hands in the air and submit to the violent persecutions of its medieval foe.

The Campus Intifadas Are Not ‘Anti-War Protests’ What the protesters are really calling for. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-campus-intifadas-are-not-anti-war-protests/

In February I wrote about the seemingly strange bedfellows of the red-green alliance – red for progressivism and green for Islam – whose values on many issues seem so diametrically opposed and yet they are united in their determination to dismantle the Western civilization they both see as the obstacle to erecting their differing visions of utopian societies.

This alliance was perhaps never in quite such alarming evidence as in the worldwide, vociferous, and even violent demonstrations of left-wing and Muslim support for the Palestinian people in the wake of Israel’s military retaliation against the terror group Hamas for its barbaric massacre of over 1200 innocents in Israel on October 7, 2023.

The anti-Israel protests have only gathered momentum since February as what David Horowitz calls the “unholy alliance” has intensified its pro-Hamas activism. On April 15th anti-Israel protesters shut down San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, blocked the entrance to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, blocked Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and blocked traffic on Oregon’s Interstate 5 and roads in Philadelphia on a day of coordinated protests and rallies.

Meanwhile, college campuses have become overrun with metastasizing encampments of anti-Israel radicals intent on forcing administrators to concede to demands ranging from university divestment from Israel to full scholarships for Palestinian students to dental dams for safe sex for the encamped protesters. These privileged militants – both students and faculty – bully Jewish students, clash with cops, vandalize school property, replace campus Stars-and-Stripes with Palestinian flags, and chant antisemitic slogans including the genocidal call for “Palestine” to be free “from the river to the sea.”

Anti-War Does Not Mean Anti-War

During the George Floyd-inspired rioting across America in 2020, the left-dominated news media coordinated to spread the narrative that the looting, burning, and vandalizing carried out by Black Lives Matter revolutionaries and their allies were “mostly peaceful.” Similarly, now the media are attempting to whitewash these Jew-hating, anti-colonialist revolutionaries waging campus intifadas across America as merely “anti-war.”

Watchdog: UNRWA Staff Stealing and Selling Gaza Aid for Profit By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/10/watchdog-unrwa-staff-stealing-and-selling-gaza-aid-for-profit/

A watchdog group has claimed that employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) have been actively stealing and selling aid for profit that was meant for use in Gaza.

As Fox News reports, the claim was made on Wednesday by UN Watch, a non-governmental organization (NGO) operating out of Geneva, Switzerland. The group pointed to multiple reports by Palestinian witnesses in a UNRWA chatroom, all of whom claimed that the organization’s staff members are stealing aid meant for civilian use and have been selling it. The witnesses also claim that anyone who tries to report these crimes face retaliation from UNRWA.

UN Watch’s report also accuses UNRWA Commissioner-General Philipe Lazzarini of “turning a blind eye” to corruption in his ranks. Lazzarini had recently demanded that countries begin sending more direct cash payments to Gaza rather than aid, claiming that although “there is more food available, it still does not mean that the food is accessible.”

UNRWA has also been accused of anti-Israel sentiment and voicing support for Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization which carried out the October 7th attack against Israel last year, which led to the deaths of over 1,400 Israeli citizens. The aforementioned UNRWA chatroom is run by former UNRWA employee Haitham al-Sayyed, who was fired in 2016 after he called out the UNRWA for hiding an agency-sponsored map that denied Israel’s existence.

“While Haitham al-Sayyed was supposedly fired from UNRWA, he is still considered by many in the chat rooms as an important figure in the organization who holds sway with the senior administration,” said UN Watch. The report went on to claim that some employees, “frustrated by inaction and even complicity of senior staff in these thefts,” have confessed to al-Sayyed “in the hope that he can get UNRWA’s top officials to listen.”

One UNRWA employee, Mohammed Musa al-Sawalhi, took to the chatroom on February 20th to give his account of several UNRWA employees stealing aid and stashing it in their own houses.

“Eighty percent of employees in the shelters have no morals or dignity,” said al-Sawalhi, who said that the family of one director was captured stealing aid on video.

In response to the bombshell accusations, a spokesman for UNRWA released a statement saying that the group saw this report and are looking at what are very serious claims. We will provide an update when and if we have more information.”

Greta Thunberg and the Greatest of all Heresies By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/11/greta-thunberg-and-the-greatest-of-all-heresies/

The other day, as environmental hero/prophetess Greta Thunberg donned a keffiyeh and joined the pro-Hamas protests in Malmo, Sweden, social media blew up with its usual mix of angry condemnation and fierce support. “How could she?” countless posters tetchily demanded, only to be met, in response, with the equally peevish “How could you?” With a few notable exceptions, most observers missed the obvious point that of course the erstwhile environmental activist was protesting the Jewish “oppressors” and supporting their poor, Palestinian victims; of course she took to the streets with neo-Marxist identitarians to demand “justice” and an end to “colonialism;” of course she has and will continue to embrace every subversive left-wing liberationist cause. How could do otherwise? After all, these causes are all interconnected, if not wholly identical.

Interestingly, some otherwise keen political observers are only now coming to the conclusion that Marxism is not economic in nature but religious and that it does not stand on its own as a unique and discrete phenomenon but is interconnected with all of the other anti-realist, quasi-religious utopian endeavors that have accompanied its rise over the last nearly two centuries. Marxism, for all its destructive murderousness, is but one component—albeit the dominant component—of the enduring effort to update and replace the moral system that was undermined and largely abandoned in the West with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps the greatest and least appreciated analysis of what we would broadly call “the left” is that which appears in Chapter 6 (or 7, depending on the edition) of Hilaire Belloc’s 1938 classic The Great Heresies. It is “The Modern Phase.”

Belloc is careful in his presentation of this heresy to clarify that it is not merely Communism or “Bolshevism” that constitutes this perversion of Catholicism but the broader “Modern Attack.”  Nevertheless, it is clear that he has in mind what we know today as “the left.”  Moreover, it is clear that he sees this “religion of man” and its ill-defined “spiritualism” as both an obvious Catholic heresy and the greatest and deadliest of them all.

Heather Mac Donald Hysterics for Hamas Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos? Heather MacDonald

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Why Gaza and not the Uighurs? The long march through the institutions has reached a familiar target: the Jews Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/gaza-not-uighurs-china-college/

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

Another symbol of that global commerce is the vast number of international students involved in the protests and often leading them. Have you seen objections to that aspect of globalization? No. But then no one ever accused the mob of intellectual coherence.

What is it about Gaza that excites such large, ferocious and often violent demonstrations? Why are there no massive demonstrations about other human-rights atrocities around the world? Why is the campus silent about Hong Kong and the prisons in Siberia? Why such intense focus on Israel, which often bleeds into open antisemitism?

A few reasons top the list. The first is the nature of the hard-left coalition on campus. It centers on two groups, both of which position themselves as righteous victims. The number one domestic victims are African Americans. The number one international victims are Palestinians, plus Muslims more generally. Other victims run the gamut, Native Americans, queers, transgenders and others. White students and increasingly Asian Americans are labeled as the oppressors or victimizers. Their only chance at salvation from their “sin” is to make common cause with the putatively oppressed and follow their lead. Hispanics are rarely part of this coalition, even though their professors are.

The word “sin” is important here. The ideology has the intensity of a religion and the hatred of apostates.

The coalition would crumble if it emphasized positive issues, such as “gay rights in Gaza.” So they focus on common hatreds. Those are what hold the coalition together.

Emerson College head tries to appease anti-Israel students By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/emerson-college-head-tries-to-appease-anti-israel-students/

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Tuesday defended the police against charges by student protesters at Emerson College that officers had engaged in extreme brutality while removing their anti-Israel tent encampment, which had commandeered a city street.

The mayor said a city review found no protesters had been hospitalized. They “wanted to get arrested,” she added.

She noted that the school had offered the protesters rooms to use 24 hours a day but the response of the student organizers was to “keep the tents up to get arrested.”

The mayor’s no-nonsense response contrasted sharply with that of Emerson College president Jay Bernhardt, who has assured the protesters he “could feel the pain.”

His approach has won him little love among the student population, judging from recent meetings.

Many students called on the president to resign at a town hall meeting held on April 29, which centered around events leading up to the April 25 arrest of 118 students by the Boston Police Department. Police acted after protesters at the “Popular University Encampment” at 2 Boylston Place Alley refused to vacate the public street.

Student calls for the president’s resignation echoed a Student Government Association general assembly meeting on April 26, when students unanimously voted no-confidence in Bernhardt, who is Jewish, demanding he resign.

I witnessed Israel choosing life as it fights against a ‘death cult’ By Douglas Murray

https://nypost.com/2024/05/08/opinion/i-witnessed-israel-choosing-life-as-it-fights-against-a-death-cult/

Adapted from Douglas Murray‘s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.

“I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.”

I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza.

I was here in New York on the 7th of October, and on the 8th, I went down to Times Square.

And there were these men and women, waving signs, celebrating the massacre.

They were holding these signs in Times Square, “by any means necessary.”

At a time when we already knew what those means included.

I thought I had to get to Israel as soon as I could, that we were going to see a kind of Holocaust denialism in real time, and therefore I should see with my own eyes everything that had happened.

In Israel, I joined the pathologists in the morgues of Tel Aviv as they were trying to identify the dead.

An unbelievable task, which they do with extraordinary delicacy and religiosity.

I had the great opportunity to witness firsthand Israel’s response, because unlike some countries today, Israel doesn’t just sit back with equanimity when it’s attacked.

Some of the world would like it to do so.

Wars for Survival-Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Israel and Ukraine are fighting wars for survival. Neither wants more land or to impose their values on their neighbors. They are fighting to maintain their independence and to keep their way of life. Iran and its proxies have said they want to annihilate Israel, not shrink its borders. Putin has not gone that far with Ukraine, but the analogy of a camel getting its nose under the tent applies. To the extent that Israel and Ukraine are our allies we have a duty to support them in their existential wars.

Israel is not a colonialist power. Over three quarters of a century it has created a thriving democracy on land from which their ancestors came. Today they combat forces that want to drive them from their land. Former Iranian president Rafsanjani called Israel “a one-bomb state,” that one nuclear weapon could erase Jewish civilization. Palestinians speak of the “River to the Sea,” effectively extinguishing the state of Israel. Israelis fight for their survival. If Rafah is not taken Hamas, a political party elected by Palestinians to govern Gaza, will survive, and threats to Israel will persist.

Ukraine was once part of the Russian empire and later part of the Soviet Union. In 1991 the nation drafted a declaration of independence, which received overwhelming support in a public referendum, and it was recognized as an independent state that year. It now fights to keep its independence. Yet Putin has said that Ukraine is an “aberration that doesn’t really exist.” He considers it a province of Russia and a country whose language should be obliterated. Should we help them? If we do not, does anyone think Putin will stop with Ukraine?