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August 2024

Iran’s Gaza War: Ceasefire? What Ceasefire? by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20884/iran-gaza-war-ceasefire

Hamas is now in dire need of a ceasefire because its leaders want to hold on to power in the Gaza Strip.

If the Biden-Harris administration and its Iranian, Qatari and Egyptian allies manage to impose a ceasefire on Israel, it will be viewed by many Arabs and Muslims not only as a reward for the October 7 massacres, but specifically as a lifeline for Hamas.

Hamas officials, however, were more honest than the Americans, Egyptians and Qataris. These officials were quick to deny any progress in the ceasefire talks and described them as “a waste of time.”

According to reports, Hamas has demanded that the Israeli army completely withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Until recently, Hamas maintained exclusive control over the border, which allowed it to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip over the past two decades.

Hamas, in addition, insists on releasing the Israeli hostages in phases. It clearly wants to hold on to as many hostages as possible as an “insurance policy” to avoid being targeted by Israel in the future. Hamas apparently wants the negotiations over the hostages to continue forever, so it can use the time to rebuild its terror infrastructure and prepare for more attacks on Israel.

In Israel, meanwhile, the plight of the hostages has been hijacked by the political rivals of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They are inciting the families of the abductees to demand a deal with Hamas at any cost, including surrendering to Hamas to end the war, and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

[I]f Israel is forced to relinquish control of the Philadelphi Corridor, it will effectively lose the war. Such a move would mean a return to the pre-October 7 era, when Hamas and other Iran-backed terror proxies controlled the border with Egypt and used it to smuggle weapons and ammunition into the Gaza Strip.

A ceasefire now will just allow Hamas to regroup, rearm and prepare for more attacks against Israel. A ceasefire does not mean that Hamas would abandon its plan to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamist state.

The Biden-Harris administration is, sadly, dead wrong if it believes that a ceasefire will open the door to security and stability in the Middle East. A ceasefire would simply give the Iranian regime and its terrorist allies more confidence, especially when they have nuclear weapons, to pursue their Jihad (holy war) against the Jews and Israel, and then their neighbors in the Gulf.

The Words We Need to Win in ’24 By Joan Swirsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/the_words_we_need_to_elect_trump.html

Living in one of the most far-left communities in the United States for the past many decades, I am intimately familiar with the mindset of the left — the liberals, leftists, progressives, or whatever they’re calling themselves today.

And as the entire world has witnessed over the past eight years, since the man they used to lionize and admire — and rewarded with a 15-year boffo success TV show, The Apprentice — descended the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, a true mass hysteria erupted to denounce, vilify, degrade, reject, and ultimately try to destroy — including with a bullet! — one Donald J. Trump.

Why?

The primary reason was because America had just survived the eight-year hate-America regime of Barack Obama, whose communist leanings had successfully ushered in socialized medicine via Obamacare and socialized education via the Common Core Curriculum — both disastrous contributions to the devolution of America.  The left fully anticipated that presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would spend the next eight years completing the left’s hundred-year mission to turn our dastardly capitalistic system with its allegiance to the horrific Constitution of the United States into the communist paradise on earth they all so fervently believed in…and do to this day!

The Trump Imprimatur

In spite of non-stop harassment, bogus accusations, and vicious lawfare suits, President Trump ushered in — this is the very short list — low taxes, low regulations, low food prices, low gas prices, sky-high employment across all demographics, a challenge to our NATO partners to pay their fair share (which they had never done, but complied with immediately), energy independence for the next thousand years, unprecedented success with peace initiatives via the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and — ta-da — no wars!

It will be amusing to watch this stellar record go up against the Harris-Walz slate, which features virtually not a single policy or action that has benefited America.

Yes, they will have non-stop positive coverage from a craven media, but the Trump team will have what to liberals is the most terrifying lethal weapon imaginable: cold, hard facts!

Just a Few Examples

Five words: Darfur, Yemen, Myanmar, Ukraine, Israel — all raging wars that did not exist four years ago.  These are the sole responsibility of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — and are costing American taxpayers trillions of dollars.

The Myriad Projections of the 2024 Campaign If you don’t want what the people want, you have to project. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/19/the-myriad-projections-of-the-2024-campaign/

Projectionism

Projection is a Freudian psychological term. It describes a particular defensive mechanism, when people, often unconsciously, attribute their own (usually undesirable) behaviors to others who do not have them.

These mental gymnastics are intended to alleviate one’s own guilt or sense of inadequacy at the expense of another.

Sound familiar?

But in the political sphere, projection involves more overt dissimulation. It is increasingly common for leftist candidates or political parties to falsely accuse their opponents of the very destructive behaviors and unpopular agendas that they themselves embrace, but out of political necessity must deny.

Rather than an unconscious Freudian defense mechanism, political projection is usually a conscious strategy of hiding one’s own negatives by fobbing them off on antagonists.

Projection often proves a quite successful ploy.

After all, the political projectionist knows best his own hazardous or off-putting conduct and policies. And so, he can most skillfully attribute just these liabilities to those who have had no experience with them.

Our Leftist Projectionists

The 2024 Harris-Walz campaign is turning out to be projectionist to the core. How?

First: Kamala Harris and her new running mate Governor Tim Walz have long advanced fringe leftist political agendas. (Her “everyone needs to be woke” and his claim that riots happen because society doesn’t prioritize “equity and inclusion.”)

They have been loud in their fringe cultural commentaries, which are not just unpopular but roundly rejected by the majority of the electorate. And they know that if they become open and honest about what they have done, they will likely be defeated.

Second: On a more personal level, both are attacking the behavior and conduct of their rivals as a way of deflecting attention from their own weaknesses on that score.

Thus, this kind of projection, about both policy and personal behavior, is more common on the left because its ideology is fundamentally far more distant from the views of most voters.

Liel Leibovitz Send in the Clowns Columbia’s former president is out, and her successor seems not to have learned a thing from this year’s anti-Semitic demonstrations.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/send-in-the-clowns

Earlier this week, Minouche Shafik, Columbia University’s president, unexpectedly resigned her post. You would think that the departure of an Ivy League leader less than three weeks before the start of the fall semester would be a cataclysmic event, an indication that the institution and its board are ready to account for the series of unfortunate events that led the august school to this low point, a string of catastrophes that began with a temperate embrace of the anti-Semitic marauders who occupied the campus and harassed their Jewish classmates and ended with the shameful resignation of three deans who were caught exchanging text messages disparaging Jewish students concerned about said harassment. You’d expect something close to soul-searching, something approximating an apology, something approaching a promise to do better when thugs brandish the Hamas flag and threaten Jewish students that they’re next on the terror group’s kill list.

Welcome to American academia: what we got instead this week were two statements, one from Shafik and one from her interim replacement, Katrina Armstrong, that are so dazzling in their moral, intellectual, and emotional vacuity that they deserve to be read closely and carefully. Call these twin missives the ur-texts of our academic Armageddon, proof that from the crooked timber of contemporary American higher education no straight thing may ever be built again.

First, Shafik’s resignation. Here is its first paragraph, in full:

I write with sadness to tell you that I am stepping down as president of Columbia University effective August 14, 2024. I have had the honor and privilege to lead this incredible institution, and I believe that—working together—we have made progress in a number of important areas. However, it has also been a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community. This period has taken a considerable toll on my family, as it has for others in our community. Over the summer, I have been able to reflect and have decided that my moving on at this point would best enable Columbia to traverse the challenges ahead. I am making this announcement now so that new leadership can be in place before the new term begins.

Sadness? Appropriate. Progress in a number of important areas? No evidence is provided, but let us, in the spirit of human kindness, nod right along. But then we get to the heart of the matter: “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”