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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Defending Israel and Western Civilization More Urgent than Ever by Guy Millière

By on April 13th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21548/defending-israe-western-civilization

[A]ll Hamas needs to do to prevent this destruction is return all the hostages it should not have kidnapped in the first place. Amnesty International has served up a remarkable inversion of facts.

“What’s shocking is that people in the Cease-Fire Now crowd don’t appear to have much interest in making any demands of Hamas equivalent to those they make of Israel. They want Israel to stop firing. But do you often hear them insisting that Hamas return the favor? They want Israel to provide Gaza with humanitarian relief in the form of electricity, fuel and other goods. But I haven’t seen those protesters in the street demanding that Hamas provide Israel with humanitarian relief in the form of immediately freeing all hostages…. For Israelis, what ‘Cease-Fire Now’ means is ‘Surrender Now.’ No wonder they decline to heed the call…. Whatever else one thinks of Israel, no country can be expected to sign its own death warrant by indulging those who, if given the chance, would annihilate it.” — Bret Stephens, New York Times, November 21, 2023.

Clearly a massive dark-money problem obscenely exists within far too many universities and cities both in the US and Europe.

It is also important to highlight the unabashedly toxic role of the United Nations…. [T]he United Nations quickly became the world’s leading organization for, among other unsavory practices, propagating hatred of Israel and a general hatred of Jews.

The Palestinian Authority to this day pays its citizens to murder Jews — the more Jews, the larger the payments.

In Europe, organizations that fight anti-Semitism…. Often left-wing, they primarily denounce far-right anti-Semitism, but never far-left anti-Semitism, and never ever Islamic anti-Semitism — currently the only form of anti-Semitism in Europe that attacks and kills Jews. Most Jewish organizations in Europe support Israel, but more often than not advocate for dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and still support the mirage of a “two-state solution.”

The vast majority of Israelis seem finally to have understood that the goal of Palestinian organizations is not to create a state living in peace alongside Israel, but to destroy Israel.

In the mainstream European and American media, the unspeakable October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre in Israel seems largely forgotten. The media rarely describe Hamas as a terrorist organization with genocidal aims. When the word “genocide” is used, even by self-described “human rights organizations,” it is to accuse the victim of the attacks, Israel.

Israel forcibly removed every Jew from Gaza in 2005 – long before the October 7, 2023 massacre. Nevertheless, one of Amnesty International’s current campaigns, “End Israel’s Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” continues to refer to the “occupied Gaza Strip.” Gaza has not been occupied for twenty years; it is not occupied now. Gaza is the theater from where Palestinians are still firing rockets and missiles at civilian targets in Israel.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Trade Morality for Madness By J.B. Shurk

By on April 13th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/democrats_trade_morality_for_madness.html

New York City has a mayoral election later this year, and the two leading candidates right now are former governor Andrew Cuomo and a state assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani.  The latter has gained traction in the polls by promising to build city-run grocery stores that “will operate without profit motive” in order to combat “the outrageous price of groceries.”  Leave it to the residents of Gotham to pin their hopes on either the guy who turned nursing homes into COVID death traps or a proud communist who is blithely unaware of the Soviet Union’s history with breadlines.  

In response to Mamdani’s plan for government-run grocery stores, John Catsimatidis — the über-successful owner of New York’s Gristedes and D’Agostino food chains — has offered the mayoral candidate one of his supermarkets to test his ideas in practice.  The offer comes with one stipulation: The city must eat all shoplifting costs.  

Mamdani does not appear eager to accept Catsimatidis’s proposal.  After all, New York City is in the middle of a shoplifting crisis today, and mayoral-wannabe Mamdani wants to replace traditional policing with a “Department of Community Safety” that empowers “dedicated outreach workers” to handle “the failures of our social safety net.” 

Something tells me that Mamdani’s vision for New York will turn grocery shopping into even more of a nightmare.  His city-run stores will become magnets for mass theft, and responding community “outreach workers” will be more concerned with criminals’ “preferred pronouns” than stopping armed robberies.  Shelves will be empty.  Food prices will go up.  New York City’s budget problems will get exponentially worse.  It’s all entirely predictable, but plenty of Democrats will vote for this government-engineered catastrophe anyway.

Chalk this up to Democrats’ persistent unwillingness to live within the outer perimeters of reality.  When they see grocery prices rise, they blame “greedy” business owners.  When those business owners explain that out-of-control shoplifting is a major cost responsible for price increases, Democrats insist that insurance covers such losses.  When business owners explain that insurance rates have spiked as a result, Democrats blame “greedy” insurance companies.  For a political party obsessed with diagnosing the “root causes” of every societal problem, the Democrat party sure is incapable of connecting the dots between runaway crime and business closures.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It’s Not Easy Being Green Climate alarmism, cloaked in pseudoscience and moral posturing, masks a deeper agenda of power, profit, and control—often at the expense of truth and prosperity. By Roger Kimball

By on April 13th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/13/its-not-easy-being-green/

Writing recently in The Spectator World, Joel Kotkin noted, “The crux of the green dilemma lies in part with the realities of physics as well as geopolitics.” You can say that again. The physics part has to do with “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a very high energy density; solar and wind power, not so much. Kotkin quotes Christian Bruch, the CEO of Siemens Energy, who estimates that green energy “requires ten times as much material to work effectively, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.” The ineluctable pressure of that physical fact leads to subterfuge, fantasy, and outright lying. Kotkin also quotes John F. Clauser, a Nobel Laureate in physics, who tartly observed that “Climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Indeed. In 2019, the commentator Rob Henderson coined the phrase “luxury beliefs,” beliefs that confer social status because only the well-off can afford to entertain them. “In the past,” Henderson wrote, “upper-class Americans used to display their social status with luxury goods. Today, they do it with luxury beliefs.” A belief that we are in the midst of a “climate emergency” is one such belief. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, can pretend that the sky is falling and promise to lead Britain into the promised land of “net-zero” emissions by 2050. But he won’t have to worry about heating his house or the cost of petrol for his car.

Al Gore can lecture the world about “inconvenient truths,” but cynics note that one major effect of his proselytizing on behalf of climate extremism has been to line his own pockets with that other green stuff, US dollars, and plenty of them. In 2000, Gore had a net worth of about $1.7 million. By 2012, he had amassed a fortune of some $250 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Regular readers may recall my fondness for the philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s observation that “environmentalism is school prayer for liberals.” Professor Mansfield delivered that mot more than thirty years ago. It seemed almost quaint at the time. It was, I thought, a comparison that had the advantage of being both true (environmentalism really did seem like a religion for certain leftists) and amusing (how deliciously wicked to put a bunch of white, elite, college-educated leftists under the same rhetorical light as the Bible-thumpers they abominated). Ha, I mean to say, ha!

Well, I am not laughing now. In the intervening years, the eco-nuts went from being a lunatic fringe to being lunatics at the center of power. Forget about Al Gore (if only we could): sure, he was vice president, but that was in another country (or so it seems) and besides . . . I trust that many readers will catch the allusion to Marlowe via T. S. Eliot. Despite his former proximity to the seat of power, Al Gore is relevant these days partly as comic relief, partly as an object lesson in the cynical manipulation of public credulity for the sake of personal enrichment. The collections come early and often in the Church of Gore. Who knew that pseudoscience, wrapped in the mantle of anti-capitalist moral self-regard, could pay so well?

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Don’t Waste Your Time: Iran’s Mullahs Will Not Abandon Their Nuclear Program by Majid Rafizadeh

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21546/iran-will-not-abandon-nuclear-program

Tehran has played this game before: Agree to talks. Make vague promises. Extract sanctions relief. Then quietly continue nuclear development under the radar. This formula has worked for more than two decades. Right now, the only reason Iran is talking is to stall, to promise just enough to prevent America from striking it — “We are almost there!” — to keep its regime and avoid seeing its uranium centrifuges and enrichment sites blasted to rubble. The regime does not want war — but it also cannot accept total nuclear disarmament.

The Islamic Republic has smoothly outmaneuvered every administration. It has accepted deals to avoid confrontation, then quietly violated them. With each round of negotiations, Iran gained what it needed — time, money, legitimacy — and gave away nothing it could not reverse.

Worse, Iranian officials have themselves confirmed what skeptics have long argued: that the regime’s nuclear program was always military in nature. Former parliamentary speaker Ali Motahhari openly admitted in an interview that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities were initially designed to build weapons, not generate electricity. That was not a slip of the tongue. It was a rare moment of honesty from a system built on lies.

[W]orse yet, [the regime] could announce one day that it already possesses several nuclear bombs — and that there is nothing anyone can do about it. Will the world then be forced to live with a nuclear-armed theocracy that sponsors terrorism, oppresses its people, and seeks to export its ideology across the region? That does not sound like a cheery future to accept.

The Islamic Republic has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith. It has lied, manipulated and deceived at every turn. Hoping for a different outcome, unfortunately, is self-deceptive make-believe.

Negotiations only serve to give Iran what it wants: time and space to complete its nuclear project. Axios reported on April 10 that “sources said the Iranians think reaching a complex and highly technical nuclear deal in two months is unrealistic and they want to get more time on the clock to avoid an escalation.”

After watching what happened to Libya after it gave up its nuclear weapons program, and to Ukraine when it gave up its warheads. Iran’s regime could hardly have any intention of abandoning their quest for the bomb. Diplomacy will not stop them. Appeasement will not deter them. The only solution, sadly, seems to be force. If the US and Israel fail to act now, we will soon be facing a world where the Islamic Republic of Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and commands its bombs. Then what?

Negotiations for Iran’s mullahs are simply a sign of strategic necessity. The regime needs breathing room — and, most importantly, it needs to preserve what it sees as its ultimate insurance policy: a nuclear arsenal.

The Trump administration is once again engaging with the Iranian regime, this time in Oman, to encourage it to end its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs the way Libya’s late leader Muammar Ghaddafi did. As US President Donald J. Trump transparently put it: “I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Next Year in Jerusalem Passover reminds us of whose land “Palestine” really is. by Robert Spencer

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/next-year-in-jerusalem/

Passover 2025 begins on the evening of Saturday, April 12, and runs through Sunday, April 20. This is now the second Passover since Hamas brutally massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and a massive propaganda campaign began to convince the world that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state that is illegally occupying land that belongs to the “Palestinians,” who are supposedly the indigenous people of the land.

And so as Jews around the world once again read the Passover Haggadah, which tells the foundational story of their liberation from slavery in Egypt, they will once again repeat the concluding statement of the Passover Seder, just as they have repeated it throughout the ages: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

This indelible phrase is a reminder to the world, if the world were interested in paying attention, of the fact that Zionism did not begin in 1948, with the founding of the modern state of Israel, or in the nineteenth century with the work of pioneering Zionist Theodor Herzl. No, Zionism, the aspiration of the Jews to return to their homeland, is many centuries older than either one, and older also than the “Palestinian people,” a KGB propaganda invention of the 1960s.

Zionism is older than the Ottoman Empire, the now-dead Islamic caliphate that did all it could to prevent the nineteenth-century Zionist movement from attaining its goals. It is older than the United States of America, on which today’s haters of Jews and Israel insist that the Jewish state now depends for its existence. It is older than the religion of Islam, on which, with its deeply rooted hatred of Jews, the “resistance” of the “Palestinian” people is actually based, although Western policymakers steadfastly ignore this fact.

Whose land is it? Well, which people has longed to return there for twenty centuries and more?

Yet as Passover begins once again, the voices insisting that Israel has no right to the land it inhabits, and that the Jews there are white supremacist, colonialist occupiers, are more insistent than ever. As Antisemitism: History and Myth shows, the October 7 jihad massacre was the occasion for a clearly carefully planned recrudescence of Jew-hatred, including the reappearance of ancient lies that most people thought had died in the ashes of Berlin in April 1945. But this antisemitism is, as always, based on lies.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Dos and Don’s of Negotiating with Iran By Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on April 12th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_do_s_and_don_ts_of_negotiating_with_iran.html

Shortly after then-Secretary of State John Kerry concluded talks with his Iranian counterpart that led to the 2015 nuclear agreement, the wizards at Google had already delivered judgment. When I typed in the phrase, “how not to buy a carpet” at Google images, the first result was a photo of the two foreign ministers and their aides, facing each other across the negotiating table in Lausanne.

The ever-smiling Mohammad Javad Zarif told Kerry three times they had a deal, but that he needed to go back to Tehran to run it by the “Supreme Leader.” And three times he came back, demanding more.

Donald Trump called the deal the United States finally signed, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “the worst deal ever” and withdrew the United States from it in 2018. He was right.

The President’s Middle East special envoy, Steve Witcoff, recently admitted that he got “duped” by Hamas during negotiations in Qatar with Hamas-appointed Arab mediators.

Having worked in the Middle East as a war correspondent and investigative reporter for forty years, let me say it straight: if the Arabs managed to dupe Mr. Witcoff, the Iranians are going to take him to the cleaners.

So here are a few “do’s and dont’s” for Witcoff when he travels to Oman this weekend.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Crisis Con Game The climate crisis isn’t just a narrative—it’s the Left’s longest-running confidence game, leveraging fear for our children to loot wallets, liberties, and the public trust. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/the-climate-crisis-con-game/

The technical term is “confidence game.” A crook gains the confidence of a victim (the “mark”) and preys upon their naivety, greed, and/or fear. Ultimately, the duped mark gives their money and/or property to the crook willingly.

Consider this real-world example provided in Connie Fletcher’s 1991 book, What Cops Know: Today’s Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America’s Streets, wherein an anonymous Chicago Police Department (CPD) detective reminisces about a con game he redressed:

“One of the superintendents of the Chicago Police Department—his aunt was taken for $15,000… She was a recent widow, Italian. And during this con, they sent her back to Italy to dig up her husband’s body and take a button off his vest. International phone calls were made between Chicago and Palermo, Italy, continuing the con on this woman, warning her that she must do these things in order to keep her three grandchildren safe. It was five thousand dollars for each grandchild.”

“When I went to the [lead con artist, Louis]… I said, ‘Louis, you cost these people [fifteen thousand] dollars.’ He said, ‘I was taking a curse off their children.’ ‘Louis, come on.’ ‘Listen, are those children safe today?’ ‘Yeah, they’re safe.’ ‘Then it’s off. The curse has been taken off them.’ I said, ‘Why did you charge them [fifteen thousand] dollars?’ He said, ‘It was to take the curse off.’”

While this seems a rather involved scam, boiled down to its essence, it aligns with the experience of another CPD detective: “The best con is the simplest con.” At its stony heart, the con preys upon a grandmother’s love and fears for her grandchildren to extort money from her.

Viewed in its proper light, then, what to make of the Left’s “climate crisis?”

Despite the lack of any remote consensus regarding the alarmists’ proclamations of an impending climate apocalypse, what to make of the leftist “experts” and politicians who implore a concerned public to trust the science—i.e., the selectively chosen science that purports to support their alarmist position and deepens the “mark’s” fears for their offspring and/or planet?

What to make of the left’s incessant warnings of impending environmental doom despite the failure of past dire prognostications to materialize?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump, Trade, and the Tragedy of the Working Class Moynihan’s warnings on family breakdown echo louder than ever, as cultural decay—not just trade policy—lies at the heart of America’s working-class collapse. By Stephen Soukup

By on April 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/12/trump-trade-and-the-tragedy-of-the-working-class/

Last month marked the 60th anniversary of the first serious attempt on the part of social scientists to analyze and evaluate the collapse of the traditional family in American society. On March 1, 1965, the U.S. Department of Labor released a report written by then-Assistant Secretary (and future Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D, NY) on the dissolution of black families in America. That report, “The Negro Family:  The Case for National Action,” was both groundbreaking and enormously controversial. Sixty years later, the study remains groundbreaking. However, its conclusions are, sadly, no longer especially controversial, having been corroborated by endless data spanning decades and extending to every race, culture, and creed in the country. At some point, the rescue of the American family will either become a serious and urgent focus of societal action, or it will prove the undoing of the great American experiment.

Among other things, Moynihan noted in his report the existence and the pervasiveness of black poverty and the correlation between that poverty and the breakdown of the black nuclear family. In an attempt to explain why black economic advancement lagged behind both political advancement and the economic fortunes of other ethnic groups, Moynihan examined reams of data and endless studies on black family life. And what he found—a paradox which came to be known as “Moynihan’s Scissors”—was” that welfare and male unemployment in the black community no longer appeared to be nearly perfectly correlated, as they were in the past and in other populations.

As it turned out, male unemployment was diverging from welfare outlays because the family was breaking down. In other words, welfare made it possible for women—black women, in this case—to survive and raise their children without the children’s father present in the home. In turn, the absence of the father from the home became necessary for the collection of welfare. A vicious circle had been created, and it was exacerbating black poverty tremendously.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Sahel: Emerging Center of Global Islamism The West Is Nowhere to Be Seen by Nils A. Haug

By on April 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21522/sahel-islamism

Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, reveals that the primary instigator of global terrorism during 2024 was the Islamic State (ISIS) and associated groups — such as al Qaeda, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam wal Muslimeen, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and al- Shabaab — together responsible for more than 7,500 deaths.

Although the West is experiencing escalating terrorism in countries such as Sweden, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, the Sahel region evidently remains the “global epicentre of terrorism, accounting for over half of all terrorism-related deaths in 2024.” Here, conflict deaths exceeded 25,000 for the first time, of which nearly 4,000 were directly connected to terrorism.

A perturbing factor is that in Europe, “one in five persons arrested for terrorism is legally classified as a child.”

The consequence is, of course, that with the West’s retreat, ISIS has free rein to action their visions of global influence. They are present in 22 countries at present….

Russia’s Wagner mercenary militia, although rebranded as an “Expeditionary Corps,” continues its predatory activities in the area, offering “governments in Africa a ‘regime survival package’ in exchange for access to strategically important natural resources.”

Covertly obtained Russian documents reveal how the group strives to “change mining laws in West Africa, with the ambition of dislodging Western companies from an area of strategic importance.” The upshot is accelerating anti-Western sentiment, resulting in the local states seeking to expel hitherto entrenched foreign interests.

“This is the Russian state coming out of the shadows in its Africa policy.” Russia’s patent objective is therefore to “seize control of critical resources,” and “aggressively pursue the expansion of its partnerships in Africa, with the explicit intent to supplant Western partnerships.” — Jack Watling, Royal United Services Institute, February 20, 2024.

Currently, the significant strategic, political, and economic benefits in the region are reaped by Russia, China and Turkey. The West is nowhere to be seen.

The center of world terrorist activity and violent death is no longer the Middle East. The “Sahel region of Africa is now the ‘epicentre of global terrorism,'” responsible for “over half of all terrorism-related deaths” worldwide, according to the respected Global Terrorism Index.

The sub-Saharan Sahel is largely unknown to much of the world. It can be described as the large, mostly flat, strip, nearly 600 miles wide, located between the savannahs of Sudan to the south and the Sahara desert to the north.

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ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Dems fight bill to stop illegal immigrant voting despite polls showing voter support 208 Democrats on Thursday voted against the Trump-backed measure that would crack down on noncitizen voting y Deirdre Heavey , Elizabeth Elkind

By on April 11th, 2025

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-fight-bill-stop-illegal-immigrant-voting-despite-polls-showing-voter-support

The House passed the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act on Thursday, with 208 Democrats voting against the President Donald Trump-backed measure that would crack down on noncitizen voting.

The SAVE Act, which passed 220-208, now heads to the Senate, where it will need the support of some Democrats to meet the 60-vote threshold for advancement. Democrats have rejected the bill, despite polling indicating bipartisan support for voter ID requirements. 

A Gallup Poll released ahead of the 2024 election found that 84% of respondents favor requiring a photo ID to vote, and 83% support requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote for the first time. 

If passed in the Senate and signed into law by Trump, the SAVE Act by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, would require voters to obtain proof of citizenship in person before they register for a federal election, and it would remove noncitizens from voter rolls. 

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