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March 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorist talking points and the Israeli protest movement Ruthie Blum

By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/terrorist-talking-points-and-the-israeli-protest-movement/

There’s nothing new about the terrorist ghouls in Gaza plagiarizing the Israeli protest movement’s mantras. Slogans from the “Kaplan crowd” are the source of hostage-video scripts, practically verbatim.

That this doesn’t put a dent in the messages conveyed at anti-government demonstrations—a biggie being the threat posed to the country by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is not only shameful. It’s counter-productive where securing the freedom of the captives is concerned.

As recently released hostage Omer Shem Tov recounted on Tuesday to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, “The times we were shown television in captivity, [our captors pointed to] the division among the [Israeli] people. … They speak about how Israel will be destroyed from within, and that’s what gives them strength.”

By now it’s widely acknowledged that though the Oct. 7 massacre had been planned well in advance, Hamas took advantage of the apparent “civil war” in Israel—over the government’s intention to reform the judicial system—to strike when it did. Terrorists who participated in the atrocities said as much to their Israeli interrogators.

Not that this awareness has caused the protest movement to lower the temperature. On the contrary, it has expanded the focus of its hysteria and operations.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump foreign-policy team’s real problem The Yemen attack leak was a bad mistake. But a clueless Steve Witkoff’s embrace of Qatar and rationalization of Hamas betray the president’s realist agenda. Jonathan Tobin

By on March 27th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-trump-foreign-policy-teams-real-problem/?utm_campaign=

It was the gaffe that critics of the Trump administration have been praying for. However it happened, the inclusion of Atlantic  editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a group chat on the Signal App among the administration’s leading defense policymakers about an impending attack on the Houthis in Yemen, was a gob-smacking blunder of epic proportions.

It not only embarrassed participants in the conversion, like Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. It called into question the competence of President Donald Trump’s national-security team and the process by which it communicates and shares information at the highest level.

If, as appears to be the case, it was Waltz’s office that  was responsible for connecting Goldberg to the chat, it’s something he’ll never entirely live down, even if Trump is prepared to forgive him.

But as much as Goldberg’s unwitting scoop deserved the headlines and the endless discussions it generated, it was actually not the most troubling news event of the week for Trump’s national-security team.

The worst administration blunder didn’t involve the group chat about Yemen or any other issue that the president’s critics are obsessed with. Instead, it was the comments of Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to the Middle East, on “The Tucker Carlson Show” podcast. The interview made clear that the person Trump has tasked with conducting negotiations about the war in Gaza and the release of the hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, is utterly clueless about malign actors like Qatar, Iran and its terrorist proxies.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yes, Let’s Give An America ‘Without A Meaningful Government’ A Try

By on March 27th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/27/yes-lets-give-an-america-without-a-meaningful-government-a-try/

Quite a few in this country are madly in love with government. They cannot conceive of life in which we are free agents, liberated from the chains of reckless lawmaking, imperious regulating and stifling bureaucracy. It’s a distorted world view.

And it’s one held by a couple of university academics, who claim “the U.S. government is attempting to dismantle itself,” with the Trump administration setting out “to create an America its people have never experienced – one without a meaningful government.”

Sidney Shapiro, Wake Forest University, and Joseph P. Tomain, University of Cincinnati, who last year wrote the book “How Government Built America,” summarize their thoughts in The Conversation. They write like apologists for statism, a nasty ideology that relies on coercion and interventionism and is the factory setting for those who wish to rule rather than govern within constitutional limits. It’s founded on the belief that says “government knows better than you, in regards to important matters,” and is poisonous to civil society.

The pair complain that President Donald Trump’s “aim to eliminate government could result in” a country “in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.” Do they have any idea how far off they are?

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