Displaying posts published in

October 2024

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Defeating Hezbollah Will Strengthen the West by Con Coughlin

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20983/defeating-hezbollah

An Israeli victory against Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon is vital to guaranteeing the security of the entire Western alliance. It will send a clear signal to Iran — Hezbollah’s paymasters — that the ayatollahs’ unremitting campaign against the West and its allies is ultimately doomed to failure.

[A]n estimated 90,000 Israelis being forced to flee their homes, leaving large swathes of northern Israel deserted. Hezbollah has said that those Israelis will not be able to return to their homes, raising concerns that Hezbollah, which had been planning to invade northern Israel, might also be planning to occupy it.

[United Nations Secretary-General António] Guterres, referring to Israel, announced that the war “did not happen in a vacuum.” Ironically, it is Guterres himself who is responsible for creating the non-vacuum that ignited the situation. According to UN Security Resolution 1701, it was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, under the direction of Guterres, that was tasked with “maintaining security and stability throughout south Lebanon….” It didn’t.

Since the IDF launched its military campaign against Hezbollah, Israel has faced the usual barrage of criticism over civilian casualties.

The reality, though, is that the group most responsible for causing casualties is Hezbollah which, like its Iranian-backed ally Hamas in Gaza, has no qualms about putting innocent Lebanese civilians in harm’s way.

Israel’s offensive to destroy Hezbollah, therefore, is very much in the West’s interests in terms of safeguarding its future security, a consideration Western leaders should take on board when seeking to address the deepening crisis in the Middle East.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20983/defeating-hezbollah

An Israeli victory against Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon is vital to guaranteeing the security of the entire Western alliance. It will send a clear signal to Iran — Hezbollah’s paymasters — that the ayatollahs’ unremitting campaign against the West and its allies is ultimately doomed to failure.

[A]n estimated 90,000 Israelis being forced to flee their homes, leaving large swathes of northern Israel deserted. Hezbollah has said that those Israelis will not be able to return to their homes, raising concerns that Hezbollah, which had been planning to invade northern Israel, might also be planning to occupy it.

[United Nations Secretary-General António] Guterres, referring to Israel, announced that the war “did not happen in a vacuum.” Ironically, it is Guterres himself who is responsible for creating the non-vacuum that ignited the situation. According to UN Security Resolution 1701, it was the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, under the direction of Guterres, that was tasked with “maintaining security and stability throughout south Lebanon….” It didn’t.

Since the IDF launched its military campaign against Hezbollah, Israel has faced the usual barrage of criticism over civilian casualties.

The reality, though, is that the group most responsible for causing casualties is Hezbollah which, like its Iranian-backed ally Hamas in Gaza, has no qualms about putting innocent Lebanese civilians in harm’s way.

Israel’s offensive to destroy Hezbollah, therefore, is very much in the West’s interests in terms of safeguarding its future security, a consideration Western leaders should take on board when seeking to address the deepening crisis in the Middle East.

Continue reading →
HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

End of Empire: Careful What You Wish For Mervyn Bendle

By on October 1st, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/civilisation/the-end-of-empire-careful-what-you-wish-for/

“The Future So ended civilization in the once thriving Roman province of Britainnia. The lessons for Australia seem obvious: the collapse of an Imperial order brings only economic and political chaos, death and destruction, and regression into an era of civilizational darkness from which it takes many centuries to emerge, if ever. Perhaps those shrill ideologues, academics, teachers, media propagandists, and other useful idiots demanding the end of American Imperialism, and an ill-defined ‘End of Empire’ should do some historical research or, at the very least, should be challenged to justify their nihilistic demands. The global reality is clear, we live in an increasingly dangerous and uncivilized world where the sole guarantor of our liberal democratic system and way of life is the United States: Make America Great Again!”

The End of Empire For many years it has been de rigueur on the Left to denounce ‘American Imperialism’ and demand the end of ‘the American Empire’, usually in favour of an ill-defined ‘socialist alternative’, or some global socialist system (modelled on the European Union, or the United Nations, or Communist China) or, at an even more extreme level, a global Islamist theocracy (modelled on Iran or the Taliban). Such demands are quite shrill in Australia and are emitted with monotonous regularity by the Greens, the Socialist Left of the ALP, Islamist organizations, the various Trotskyite groupuscules, most academics and teachers in the humanities and social sciences, and much of the media and the arts. But what has been the historical experience when empires die? And, specifically, how has such an event impacted on nations, such as Australia, that exist on the periphery of an empire?

Case Study: Roman Britain  The fate of Roman Britain provides a case study of this traumatic experience. Indeed, it provides a particularly vivid example of what happens on ‘the edge of empire’ when that empire dies, and it is not at all a re-assuring picture. The Fall of Rome and the sacking of the eternal city had ramifications not only for the Italian Peninsula but for all the Roman provinces, which were closely integrated into the Imperial system; as the centre fell apart they found themselves exposed to unprecedented internal stresses and external threats, which they were ultimately unable to resist, plunging into the Dark Ages from which it took a millennium to emerge.

Britannia Perched in the Great Ocean, on the farthest margins of the Empire, by the beginning of the 5th Century, the island province of Britannia had enjoyed some 300 years of the Pax Romana. In that time, its settled and cultivated area had expanded inland from the southern and Channel coasts across fertile and productive fields to the frontiers of Scotland and Wales, beyond which lived ancient tribal societies with little interest in being integrated into an Imperial system, the immensity and complexity of which they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why is the West so anguished over the death of Hassan Nasrallah? Our elites really have no clue that civilisation itself is on the line in Israel’s war with its tormentors. Brendan O’Neill

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/30/why-is-the-west-so-anguished-over-the-death-of-hassan-nasrallah/

Only one word captures the vibe in the West following Israel’s killing of Hassan Nasrallah: anguish. Everywhere you look there is dread over what Israel has done, and fear of what it might unleash. Disquiet drips from every newspaper. You hear it in the trembling timbre of news anchors. You see it in the feverish warnings of ‘anti-war’ types that the Middle East now stands upon the precipice of apocalypse. You hear it in Guardianistas’ shrill damning of Israel as a ‘pugnacious out-of-control force’ that now even takes out terrorists ‘against the United States’ explicit wishes’. Yes, how dare this uppity state defy our masters in the neo-empire?

You see it most clearly in the hectic fretting over a ‘dangerous escalation’. Apparently, in bumping off Hezbollah’s top dog, Israel has sealed the region’s bloody fate. The New York Times agonises over this ‘escalatory attack on Hezbollah’. Jeremy Bowen of the BBC says the slaying of Nasrallah suggests the Middle East is no longer ‘on the brink of a much more serious war’ – it’s ‘tumbling over it’. An expert at the Middle East Institute in DC was positively overwrought. ‘The hinge of history has turned’, he said. Apparently, this ‘unprecedented’ attack – the idea that it’s unprecedented to target your terrorist foes will be news to many nations – is bloody proof that ‘the threshold for all-out war has been crossed’.

Even Israel’s allies have reached for the smelling salts following Nasrallah’s demise. Yes, the Biden administration welcomed his death, but it felt perfunctory: a timid congratulations that masked a deeper unease about what comes next. As the NYT summed it up, Biden issued a ‘measured statement’ that ‘expressed satisfaction’ but then swiftly warned all sides ‘to de-escalate the ongoing conflicts’. Israel is within its rights to expect a tad more appreciation from the US for dealing with the leader of a terror group that assisted in the Beirut suicide bombings of 1983 in which 241 US military personnel were killed.

We are now in the truly surreal situation where privileged Westerners seem distressed over the death of Nasrallah while Muslims in Lebanon, Syria and Iran are dancing in celebration over it. Moneyed genderfluid kids on the manicured lawns of Columbia in NYC might be experiencing pangs of grief, or at least worry, following the killing of Nasrallah. But feminists in Iran, anti-Hezbollah activists in Lebanon and the families of the Syrians Hezbollah helped to butcher when it sided with Assad in the Syrian Civil War are elated. Surely, nothing better captures the moral disarray of the woke of the West than their bitter tears for an Islamist extremist whose Jew hatred, misogyny, homophobia and rank authoritarianism made him the enemy of every Muslim in the Middle East who longs for the thing these pampered Westerners enjoy: liberty.

The Nasrallah angst of our opinion-forming classes is incredibly telling. It speaks to the staggering double standard by which Israel is judged. One wonders if it is historical ignorance or just brazen hypocrisy that means the puffed-up activist class of the US and UK can rail against Israel’s ‘unprecedented’ toppling of a terrorist mastermind even though their own nations have done likewise for decades. From Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, many terrorists have met a grim, just end in recent years. And I don’t recall spittle-flecked rage about it. I don’t remember self-righteous wails of ‘What now?!’. That Israel is pilloried for doing things we do, that killing terrorists suddenly becomes a war crime when Jews do it, is proof of the bigotry that lurks barely beneath the surface of ‘anti-Zionism’.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Matthew Lilley On Race and Admissions, Elite Universities Cannot Be Trusted What the data reveal about schools’ compliance with Students for Fair Admissions

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/on-race-and-admissions-elite-universities-cannot-be-trusted

When the Supreme Court banned the use of race in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, elite universities variously condemned and pledged to subvert the verdict. Now that multiple top schools have announced the racial composition of their 2028 classes, we’re learning what that looks like in practice.

Ending race-based affirmative action was expected to change elite universities’ demographics substantially. Indeed, in SFFA, many of these schools signed an amicus brief arguing that it was imperative that they be allowed to continue discriminating, because race-neutral methods would keep them from admitting classes with—in their view—enough black and Hispanic students.

Yet, in their first admitted undergraduate classes following the Supreme Court’s ruling, several top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, and Duke, have seen little to none of the expected shift in the racial composition. On average, the cumulative black and Hispanic shares of these schools’ incoming classes has declined by just 0.6 percentage points (from 26.8 percent to 26.2 percent), while the Asian share has fallen 2.4 percentage points (from 32 percent to 29.6 percent). Though schools record their demographic data differently—some exclude international students from their calculations, for example—the general pattern indicated by these results is troubling.

We know that elite universities previously discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic students. So, universities like Yale that signed the amicus brief and have seen little change in their demographics after SFFA are either breaking the law now, or they were misleading the Supreme Court when they declared race-neutral methods insufficient to achieve their diversity goals. Which is it? The answer is probably both.

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Department of Justice Sues Alabama to Keep Illegal Aliens on Voter Rolls By Eric Lendrum

By on October 1st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/30/department-of-justice-sues-alabama-to-keep-illegal-aliens-on-voter-rolls/

The Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit against the state of Alabama over its recent purging of illegal aliens from its voter rolls, demanding that non-citizens be put back on the rolls and allowed to vote in November.

According to Fox News, the lawsuit stems from Secretary of State Wes Allen’s (R-Ala.) decision to remove 3,251 people from the state’s voter rolls who have been issued non-citizen identification numbers, meaning that they are recognized by the federal government and still have to pay taxes despite being non-citizens. These numbers are issued by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and also serve to provide illegals with the means of getting driver’s licenses and providing proof of residence in the country.

“I have been clear that I will not tolerate the participation of noncitizens in our elections,” said Allen in a previous statement. “I have even gone so far as to testify before a United States Senate Committee regarding the importance of this issue. We have examined the current voter file in an attempt to identify anyone who appears on that list that has been issued a noncitizen identification number.”

The DOJ is now arguing that Allen is in violation of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, which demands that any state that makes changes to its voter registration lists must do so at least 90 days before a federal election. Allen announced his changes with 84 days left before the election.

“The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, in her own statement. “As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law.”

Continue reading →
ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Three Iranian Nationals Charged for Hacking Operation Targeting Trump Campaign By James Lynch

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/three-iranian-nationals-charged-for-hacking-operation-targeting-trump-campaign/

Three Iranian nationals are facing criminal charges for allegedly hacking the Trump campaign and leaking stolen materials to the media to interfere with the 2024 presidential election and advance the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s agenda.

Masoud Jalili, 36, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri, 34, and Yaser Balaghi, 37, are being charged with allegedly participating in a yearslong hacking operation that targeted dozens of current and former U.S. officials, members of the press, nongovernmental organizations, and campaign officials, the Justice Department announced Friday.

The unsealed indictment against the IRGC-linked operatives includes charges of wire fraud, material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, and aggravated identity theft for the cyber attacks. Each one of the defendants would face a lengthy prison sentence if convicted.

“In August, the Intelligence Community reported an ongoing effort by Iran to compromise former President Trump’s campaign and to influence the U.S. election process,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in remarks delivered Friday afternoon.

“The Intelligence Community further reported that Iranian malicious cyber actors have continued their efforts since June to send stolen, non-public material associated with former President Trump’s campaign to U.S. media organizations,” he added.

The Iranian hackers sent unsolicited emails containing the Trump campaign’s materials to the Biden-Harris campaign around late June after beginning to target the Trump campaign the month before, according to the indictment. Biden-Harris campaign officials did not reply to the emails. Beginning in July, the hackers circulated to members of the media internal campaign materials on the Trump campaign’s potential vice presidential selection.

In carrying out the scheme, Iranian hackers impersonated numerous public figures such as current and former U.S. officials to trick victims into opening spear-phishing emails holding malware. They used multiple techniques to hide their identities such as virtual private networks, fake email accounts, and the accounts of compromised victims to advance the hacking scheme.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Meet Russell Rickford, Who Found Oct. 7 ‘Exhilarating’ Can you guess where he’s teaching? Hugh Fitzgerald

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/meet-russell-rickford-who-found-oct-7-exhilarating/

The New York Post reported Thursday that “the Cornell University professor who last year called Hamas’ depraved Oct. 7 attack ‘exhilarating’ sparked more outrage Wednesday after taking part in an anti-Israel march on campus where protesters chanted, ‘Long live the intifada.’” More on Russell Rickford’s reappearance in the anti-Israel protesters’ ranks can be found here: “Cornell professor who cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack sparks more outrage after marching in anti-Israel protest,” by Carl Campanile and David Propper, New York Post, September 19, 2024:

Associate history professor Russell Rickford walked with dozens of demonstrators as they spewed slogans against Israel, with one Jewish student calling the controversial instructor’s presence at the protest “insane” and another accusing him of “emboldening hate.”

Rickford was the only faculty member accompanying anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators on September 18. The participants were calling for support of an Intifada, a violent “uprising” of Palestinians against the Jews of Israel, akin to the Second Intifada.

Photos and videos obtained by The Post show Rickford clapping along with the chants as he walked with a keffiyeh around his shoulders and wearing an Ivy cap on his head — similar to the hat he wore last year when he made his shocking statements.

Intifada is the Arabic word that in English means “uprising” or “shaking off.”

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intifada has been used to describe violent Palestinian protests against the Jewish state, according to the American Jewish Committee. The White House has previously condemned the phrase.

Protesters eventually crashed a career fair that was held on campus where school officials said they pushed past school police officers — though it does not appear Rickford was part of that disruption from footage posted online.

Continue reading →
IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

State Department Aiding Illegals And the disturbing story of a Munich terrorist’s grandson. by Lloyd Billingsley

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/state-department-aiding-illegals/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is primarily responsible for the invasion of some 10 million illegals, approximately the population of Portugal, with no criminal background checks. Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, charges that the State Department is encouraging foreign nationals to avoid seeking asylum in Mexico and instead enter the United States at “federal taxpayers’ expense.”

The State Department operates the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which funds legal representation and counseling related to immigration proceedings. The PRM channels funds through non-profits and the UN Refugee Agency. Julia Valls Noyes, assistant secretary for the PRM, told Issa that the US government was not funding the non-profits and aiding in immigration activities.

“Your department is responsible for giving us knowingly false information,” Issa told Valls Noyes, pointing out that money is “fungible.” She acknowledged that some presentations would have been illegal but denied that they were funded by PRM. Issa wasn’t going for it.

“All the people involved in this have to be fleshed out,” Issa told a recent hearing. “It’s about not quitting until you have the truth and not quitting until people who attempt to obfuscate or hide have been held accountable.” This deceit has not received the attention it deserves and a key back story about a strange “migrant” also needs to be fleshed out.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

American Liberty In The Balance

By on October 1st, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/01/american-liberty-in-the-balance/

John Kerry, maybe the most pompous politician of our lifetimes, admits that the First Amendment is an obstacle to the Democrats’ hard-left agenda. It’s a deeply disturbing statement perfectly in line with the party’s irrepressible authoritarian urges.

At last week’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings of the World Economic Forum, Kerry, a long-time U.S. senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state for four years of the eight-year Obama nightmare, Joe Biden’s climate czar and a failed presidential candidate, acknowledged that his party wants to censor speech that it doesn’t approve of.

“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence,” he said. “What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”

This was ominously followed by his warning that “there are some people in our country who prepared to implement change by other means.”

His party will take that as a reference to Jan. 6. But the rest of us should understand that he’s saying that Democrats can take power the easy way or the hard way – so just turn it over to us in November and we won’t have to be more coercive than we already are.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democratic senators demand sanctions against ‘settlement’ group By David Isaac

By on October 1st, 2024

https://www.jns.org/democratic-senators-demand-sanctions-against-settlement-group/

Three U.S. Democratic senators have urged further sanctions against “extremist settlers” and their supporters, singling out in particular the Amana (“Covenant”) organization, which works to develop Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

“We cannot allow a reckless and dangerous minority to continue to endanger Israelis and Palestinians alike through theft, arson, intimidation, violence, and worse,” the senators wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

“Targeted sanctions have long been a valuable tool in holding violent extremists accountable for their actions and creating space for peaceful and more rational actors to work,” they added.

The signatories are Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The senators expressed strong support for the Biden administration’s earlier sanctions against Israeli individuals and groups, such as the Lehava and Tzav 9 organizations.

“Amana has a long and well-documented history of supporting extremist settlers who expropriate Palestinian land and threaten Palestinian landholders, farmers, and shepherds. Amana has played a central role in forming and sustaining hill-top outposts illegal under Israeli law, often by granting loans to bankroll their start,” they wrote.

Were the United States to sanction Amana it would join Canada, which imposed sanctions on the group in June under its Special Economic Measures (Extremist Settler Violence) Regulations.

Amana, the settlement movement of Gush Emunim, was established in 1976, becoming a registered association in 1978, to help develop communities in Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Galilee, Negev and Gush Katif (a settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip evacuated in 2005).

Continue reading →