Displaying posts published in

February 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home

By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-bibas-shiri-kfir-ariel-yarden

The deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas were too unbearable to believe. Israelis couldn’t accept it until we had no other choice.

Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.

Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. Their remains were returned to Israel after 10 a.m. local time. With them was the body of Oded Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist, and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.

For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.

No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The shadow of history Both the Nazis and Hamas called for the murder of innocent Jewish children.Fiamma Nirenstein

By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-shadow-of-history/

On Oct. 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a chilling speech to Nazi leaders justifying the murder of Jewish children. Eighty years later, on Oct. 6, 2023, Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly issued a similarly horrific order to his followers—not only to kill Jewish children but to kidnap them. This stark parallel underscores the persistent and brutal nature of antisemitic violence, revealing its continued threat in the modern era.

In his speech, Himmler rationalized the mass murder of Jewish families, stating: “I would not consider myself justified if I killed the adults … and then allowed their children to grow up and seek revenge against our own children and grandchildren. We have therefore decided to make this people disappear from the face of the earth.”

This ideology led to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Jewish children during World War II and the Holocaust, many slaughtered in their mothers’ arms or subjected to brutal conditions in concentration and death camps. The echoes of this horror resonate today as Hamas targets Jewish children in its acts of terror. During the attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities, burning families alive, mutilating victims and abducting children, the youngest a 9-month-old baby. These actions were driven by religious hatred, not strategic warfare.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

On the Road to Bulawayo Robert M Kaplan

By on February 20th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/africa/on-the-road-to-bulawayo/

In 1980 Bulawayo was the pearl of Rhodesia. Beautifully maintained, it was well laid out with attractive gardens, public spaces, excellent utilities and competently functioning services. Former residents speak nostalgically of their happy memories.

Try it now (above). Berlin 1945 is not too much of an exaggeration. Buildings are crumbling, closed and shuttered ruins, exuding an air of emptiness, desolation and gloom. The railway station is permanently closed. Giant potholes making the road look like the surface of the moon ensure travel over 20kms is impossible. There are no shoulders and cars just cruise on regardless through the unsigned intersections. Alongside the road sit or lie listless ghost people with pathetic displays of goods. The museum, formerly one of the best in Africa, now has dusty untended cabinets mostly invisible due to the theft of light bulbs.

It is a picture of utter dystopia, African style. In one of the worst examples of vicious irony, a statue of Joshua Nkomo, the leader of ZAPU, has displaced Cecil Rhodes – no doubt intended as a reminder to the locals of the near-genocide of Nkomo’s followers by Mugabe’s North Korean thugs should they have any ideas about protesting their fate.

What produces this oasis of desolation and despair, no different to the state of the rest of Zimbabwe? Forty-five years of rule by ZANU, that’s what, a depressing rebuttal to Ian Smith’s comment that had Rhodesia Front been left to gradually bring in full voting while retaining white expertise and institutional memory there would have been a far superior outcome.

What does this tell us? Every independence or liberation party in Southern Africa, if not the rest of Africa, once in power has held on regardless, running their economies into the ground and producing desolation, poverty and misery for their people that dwarfs anything they experienced in the colonial days. Look at Mozambique, Angola, Namibia where the governing parties have held on, going to any lengths to ensure that no democratic process can evict them, regardless of the desire of the suffering population.

It is not difficult to find how this comes about. These parties are run by unreconstructed Stalinists, hardwired with the National Democratic(!) Revolution ideology. This template is the map for centralising all state institutions, stripping away democratic rights and crushing all opposition to create a one-party state. The results are predictable and appalling. The mass of the population are driven into severe poverty, infrastructure is ruined, the remaining middle class is crushed while the party and its acolytes become enormously richer, stripping the country of every resource they can lay their hands on. It is kleptocracy that dwarfs countries like Nigeria, even Russia.

Consider Zimbabwe. Infrastructure gone, farming ruined – the former breadbasket of Africa now has to import food – and fully one-third of the population has fled to other countries. Mozambique is no better. The government has ruthlessly suppressed all protest after an election it lost. Such is the desolation and poverty that an ISIS group has invaded the oil-rich north, where they have no difficulty finding supporters among the wretched population.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sometimes, Moral Clarity Isn’t Difficult Ben Shapiro

By on February 20th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/benshapiro/2025/02/19/sometimes-moral-clarity-isnt-difficult-n4937126

This week, the world was reminded of the deep and abiding evil that has wormed its way to the center of Palestinian nationalistic culture by the news that the Bibas family — a mother, Shiri; a 4-year-old boy, Ariel; and his 9-month-old brother, Kfir — who had been kidnapped back to Gaza on Oct. 7 had in fact been murdered. Their bodies are to be returned to Israel this week; Hamas held the corpses hostage, and in return received the release of imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

It is instructive to recall the circumstances of the Bibas family’s kidnapping. They were not, in fact, kidnapped by identified members of Hamas. They were kidnapped by Palestinians in civilian dress, who joined Hamas for their murderous spree. For over a year, zero Palestinians apparently revealed the whereabouts of the Bibas family to the Israelis; zero worked to keep them safe or to restore them to liberty.

This fits with a pattern of civilian involvement in Palestinian terror activity: the reality is that the Palestinian terror apparatus is incestuously intertwined with the Palestinian civilian population. That is why released hostages tell of being held by civilian families in Gaza; why terrorists merge so easily into the surrounding civilian population; why the popularity of Palestinian terrorist groups remains sky-high among Palestinians generally. The hard division between terrorist and civilian so cherished by the West simply doesn’t exist in practice in places like the Gaza Strip.

None of this is meant to alleviate the moral responsibility to attempt to distinguish between terror and civilian targets — a task Israel has accepted with more success than any country in the history of warfare, achieving a nearly 1:1 terrorist-to-civilian-death ratio in the heavily urban Gaza Strip. But it is vital to recognize that the Palestinian nationalist cause is itself honeycombed with cancer: that it is rooted not in a desire for an independent state to exist side-by-side by Israel, as the mythical two-state solution has now suggested for decades, but in a desire for the complete extirpation of Jewish life in the Middle East.

Again, Palestinian civilians kidnapped and held babies. They then held their corpses hostage to achieve the release of murderous Palestinian terrorists.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

House Oversight Investigating Underreported Foreign Funding at American Universities By Brittany Bernstein

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-oversight-investigating-underreported-foreign-funding-at-american-universities/

The House Oversight Committee is seeking information from the Department of Education about foreign funding for U.S. colleges and universities as the committee looks to dig into an investigation that had been throttled by the Biden administration.

In a letter to acting Department of Education Secretary Denise Carter obtained exclusively by National Review, committee chairman James Comer and Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) note foreign nations have given more than $57 billion to U.S. institutions since 1981 and voice concern that many institutions have failed to make disclosures for funds received under the Biden administration.

Comer and Foxx accuse the Biden administration of having “rolled back investigations into foreign funding in academia that took place in the first Trump Administration.” 

The committee is now requesting documents and information regarding the department’s enforcement of reporting requirements; Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires institutions that receive federal financial assistance to biannually file disclosure reports with the Secretary of Education. These reports must disclose “gifts received or contracts executed with a foreign source, valued at $250,000 or more, or if an institution is owned or controlled by a foreign source.”

Just 5 percent of U.S. institutions self-report foreign funding, the letter says. The Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel wrote in 2020 that “there is very real reason for concern that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

JAMA Article Promotes “Neurodiversity” in Medical School By Wesley J. Smith

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jama-article-promotes-neurodiversity-in-medical-school/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

This is a delicate matter, but I think it must be confronted. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published an article that urges “neurodiversity” be given “holistic” consideration when accepting students into medical school in keeping with diversity goals. From “Embracing Neurodiversity in Medicine — Building a More Inclusive Physician Workforce:”

The benefits of diversity have long been recognized with respect to persons with minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds, women, persons who are LGBTQ+, and others, and there has been a wide range of efforts to increase the representation of these individuals among physicians. Currently, however, these same programs and institutions do not similarly prioritize neurodiversity, the range of developmental neurocognitive differences that underlie individual variation in thinking, learning, and behavior.

What conditions are we discussing?

The term neurodiversity broadly describes the breadth of neurocognitive variation in a group or population, similar to variation along any other axis of diversity. However, in an organizational context, it frequently refers to the inclusion of minoritized “neurodivergent” individuals who identify as having 1 of a range of neurodevelopmental conditions (eg, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], Tourette syndrome, learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dyscalculia).

This idea seems particularly perilous. Obviously, if someone with a neurodiverse condition has the ability to enter medical school and eventually practice medicine, he or she should not be discriminated against. But because the responsibilities of doctors are so profound, acceptance must not be based on adjusted or “holistic” considerations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tom Hanks, Margaret Brennan, and the European Ministers—Reveal It All SNL, Margaret Brennan, and EU elites mock Trump supporters, yet their own cluelessness only fuels the populist rise they fear. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 20th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/20/tom-hanks-margaret-brennan-and-the-european-ministers-reveal-it-all/

Three recent but completely unrelated events illustrate the deranged hatred of Donald Trump and his supporters continuing now even into a second decade. And yet the venom only further marginalizes the left.

In its too-long 50th anniversary spectacle, Saturday Night Live offered a skit in which marquee actor Tom Hanks did an impression of what the left thinks is a supposedly neanderthal Trump supporter.

The episode was NBC’s tele-version of the recent Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden vocabulary of cheap MAGA disparagement: clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, chumps, dregs, semi-fascists, and ultra-MAGAs.

Most of those stereotyped props were evident in Hanks’ character.

He was wearing a red MAGA hat (real and not the fake versions of Jussie Smollett’s wild and sinister imagination).

Hanks sounded off as a superstitious evangelical, a slow-speaking Southern twanger, and a poorly dressed slob.

And of course, the SNL writers insisted that he play the gratuitous racist. So, Hanks, as a clueless Black Jeopardy contestant, initially refused to even shake the hand of the African-American, assumed intellectually and morally superior, gameshow host.

We are supposed to believe the Hanks caricature is in contrast with progressives—usually represented in society as the bicoastal enlightened, well-spoken, and snappily dressed.

Perhaps the SNL crowd thought the counterpart to Hanks’ MAGA sluggard was the recent hard-left, Democratic standard-bearer—the eloquent Kamala Harris of mesmerizing word-salad fame?

Aside from the reality that Trump captured a record number of African-American male voters, nearly split the Hispanic vote, and made gains with Asian- and Jewish-Americans, he also won massive defections from Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo How DOGE Could Take Down the Department of Education Its initial strikes could be the start of a broader fight.

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-doge-department-of-education

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, one way of measuring the success of an American presidential administration is to tally its accomplishments in its first 100 days. By this standard, President Trump’s second administration is looking quite successful.

Since January 20, the president’s cabinet has pursued decisive action on virtually every political front. But the most high-risk, high-potential initiative has been Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Established in the shell of former President Obama’s U.S. Digital Service, DOGE was charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in an effort to remake the federal government. For anyone else, such an initiative would have seemed quixotic. But for Musk, who has revolutionized multiple industries and thrives in high-conflict management scenarios, a cautious hope seemed appropriate.

Over the first 30 days, Musk’s DOGE method has come to resemble a seek-and-destroy mission. Musk dispatched small teams of lawyers, engineers, and human-resources specialists to government agencies, instructing them to cut wasteful spending and needless, ideological programs. Musk seems to have identified two switches—payments and personnel—that provide the greatest leverage. The DOGE teams have quickly organized a reduction in workforce and cancelled billions of dollars in government contracts, two steps that reduce spending and reverse the process of left-wing capture.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Researchers Clash Over COVID Vaccine Safety R.E. Wermus

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/02/16/researchers-clash-over-covid-vaccine-safety/

EXCERPT

Concerns Over Clinical Studies 

Dr. David Gortler, a former career FDA medical officer, senior medical analyst, and drug safety expert who later served as the senior advisor to the FDA commissioner under Donald Trump’s first term told The Daily Signal, “The FDA has a history of being remarkably political and selective on how it sees fit to both collect and evaluate product adverse events … mRNA injections are far from being a one-off.”   

He added, “The new FDA commissioner [Dr. Marty Makary] needs to have a very carefully thought through clinically and epidemiologically sound strategy on how to overhaul and centralize safety data collection and evaluation going forward.”   

Dr. Robert Chandler, an orthopedic surgeon and graduate of Stanford University School of Medicine, began working on Pfizer-BioNTech’s documents on COVID vaccines three years ago. He told The Daily Signal he saw concerning trends while reviewing preclinical studies. 

“What I encountered was a series of very disturbing items, beginning with the animal studies,” he said. 

Chandler explained that COVID vaccines are genetically active products that contain manmade genetic code (RNA). Synthetic RNA may cause toxicity, leading to a range of reactions such as cancer, inflammation, or autoimmune disorders. 

By February 2021, over 1,000 disease types were reported to Pfizer and the FDA in relation to COVID vaccines, according to Chandler.  

When asked why few in the medical community are seeking market removal of COVID vaccines, Chandler responded, “It’s almost too big to acknowledge.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrat Faces Of Failure Pity the poor Democrats – actually, don’t. by Kurt Schlichter

By on February 20th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/democrat-faces-of-failure/

Pity the poor Democrats – actually, don’t pity them because they are terrible people, and their sorry situation is purely of their own making. They got too used to being in charge, too used to ruling from their throne, and now that they have to get off it they have found that their spindly legs have withered and atrophied, so they hobble around, unable to stand fully upright. It’s funny for us, but it’s an existential challenge for them. What are the Democrats to do? Who do the Democrats have to try to do it with? Their bench is worse than the 2024 White Sox, which is a sportsball metaphor indicating that they’ve got nobody good on their team. And they’ve got no prospects for the future.

Now, this is all great for America, but we need to temper our gloating by remembering that we’re Republicans, and Republicans have a unique ability to squander any advantage they happen to have, so let’s not get too uppity just yet. Yet, we do appear to be in a rare interregnum when Republicans are making smart choices and ruthlessly pressing their advantage, so maybe this is when we run up the score. The Democrats are down, and I say kick ‘em in the gut.

The Democrats have the worst issue set ever. They’re still embracing the same nonsense that helped lose them the election. Complicating it is that they have an opponent with a supernatural power to make his opponents assume the least viable political position possible at any given time simply because it’s the opposite of where he says he stands. Trump has maneuvered these people into deciding that the hill they want to die on is USAID funding of bizarre social pathologies overseas and of the regime media here at home. If there are two things the American people dislike, it’s foreign aid and the pinko press, yet that’s where the Democrats decided to position themselves – as unapologetic Japanese soldiers 40 years after the war fighting to the death to take hard-working Americans’ money and give it to grubby, ungrateful foreigners and the reporters who hate them. The other issues they’ve decided to stick with are just as unpopular. DEI? Everybody outside of a faculty lounge and the Beltway hates it. Trans lunatics and perverts who want to hang out in girls’ changing rooms? Again, there are skin rashes that poll better. Where are the Democrats? All over them. And that was just last week.

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