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Ruth King

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Knesset Caucus explores Trump relocation plan as only realistic alternative By David Isaac

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/knesset-caucus-explores-trump-relocation-plan-as-only-realistic-alternative/

The Knesset Land of Israel Caucus, the largest lobby in Israel’s parliament, representing some 80 Knesset members, threw its weight behind U.S. President Donald Trump’s Gaza relocation plan during a special conference it hosted in the Knesset on Sunday.

The conference, titled, “The New Middle East: The Plan for Voluntary Migration from Gaza,” featured numerous speakers, both Knesset members and activists.

“It’s amazing how issues that would have sounded completely absurd a few years ago … have today become the consensus,” said Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, chairman of the Religious Zionism Party. “We were thought of as crazy, delusional. It turns out that the crazy people are the knowledgeable realists,” he added.

“I was in the United States last week and they asked me on several occasions what I thought about President Trump’s plan. I told them… ‘It’s the only plan that is realistic for peace, for security. The only one—there is no other way,” Smotrich said.

Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana of the Likud Party said that the world had sadly become “accustomed” to the two-state paradigm as the only solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

He noted the idea had been tested with the 2005 disengagement, in which Israel evacuated some 8,000 Jews from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. Israel was rewarded with terrorism and thousands of rockets fired at its cities, culminating in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacre.

Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, one of the co-chairmen of the Land of Israel Caucus, and chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, agreed that “those who thought that the Oslo Accords would bring us a new Middle East were doomed to failure from the outset.”

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The Long Shadow of Hillary Clinton Much of the Ukraine problem can be traced back to the failed presidential candidate. by Alan Joseph Bauer

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-long-shadow-of-hillary-clinton/

While one cannot blame all of the world’s problems on the former first lady and senator, much of the trouble in Ukraine is related to her actions.

Volodymyr Zelensky was once a comedian. One of the hallmarks of great comedians is their ability to read the room. When my high school had a very ugly and contentious merger with its sister school (New Trier East and West), a traveling group from Second City came to perform. One of the comedians was asked about the merger, which had made its way into the local papers. He whipped out his Kipling and, without losing a beat, stated, “East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet!” He was met with wild applause by the crowd.

The president of Ukraine did not know how to read the Oval Office on Friday. Zelensky supposedly was coached by Obama retreads Susan Rice, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and others. If the story is true and they told Ukraine’s president to be tough with Trump, he got some bad advice. One of the strangest features of American governance is the potential for whiplash changes in policy. In dictatorships or even European-style coalition rule, things either remain unchanged or change at a glacial pace. The winner of Germany’s recent elections promised to deal with the problems of large-scale immigration. Once he saw that he could form a coalition without AfD, he said the status quo wasn’t so bad. But not in America. When you change parties, policies can spin around 180 degrees in a second. Somehow, the Obama brain trust tried to convince Zelensky that it was just like the days of Biden, though it was not.

If one wanted to trace a useful starting point for the destruction of Russian and Ukrainian armies, I would suggest the day after the 2016 election. Without evidence, Hilary Clinton and John Podesta claimed that Donald Trump was a Putin stooge and that through Russian interference in the US election, he was elected president. If you could get the ex-secretary of state away from her glass of Chardonnay for a few minutes, she would no doubt repeat the same: the election was stolen from her, and Vladimir Putin was the culprit. These claims had profoundly negative repercussions in the world. The first was the “Russian Collusion” investigation that wasted two and a half years of the Trump administration. Nothing was found, and the millions spent on Robert Mueller’s dream team were wasted, other than it hamstrung the president and supercharged the support, often bipartisan, for Ukraine, a country known for widespread corruption.

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Tulsi Gabbard Warned About What Was Happening in Syria In fact, anyone could have seen it coming, except the willfully ignorant. by Robert Spencer

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/tulsi-gabbard-warned-about-what-was-happening-in-syria/

During her Senate confirmation hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said this about the situation in Syria at the time: “I have no love for Assad or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them ‘rebels,’ as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, ‘al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.’ Syria is now controlled by al-Qaeda offshoot HTS, led by an Islamist jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and who was responsible for the killing of many American soldiers.”

At this point, it is abundantly clear that Gabbard was right, and Sullivan was wrong. Al-Qaeda is not on our side in Syria, and the toppling of the Assad regime has not brought “democracy” or peace to the country. Instead, as Greek City Times reported Saturday, “hundreds of Christians, including Greek Orthodox, and Alawites have been killed after clashes broke out on Thursday in the Latakia and Tartous regions on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, according to a human rights monitoring group.”

This was likely an understatement of what was really happening: “The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said on Friday that more than 225 people have been killed since Thursday. However, this is believed to be a gross underreporting, with activists on the ground, such as Coast Youth Forum, believing the death toll could be as high as 1,800, mostly Alawites, but also Christians.”

And so Fox News reported, also on Saturday, that Gabbard’s “warning of a terrorist takeover in Syria looks to be coming true amid reports that al Qaeda-linked terror forces aligned with Syria’s interim new president—a former al Qaeda terrorist—are being accused of massacring Alawites as well as members of the country’s dwindling Christian community.”

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Net Zero Is A Big Fat Zero For Economic Growth

By on March 10th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/03/10/net-zero-is-a-big-fat-zero-for-economic-growth/

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions was going to save the planet at no cost. Turns out it’s an economy wrecker, which is more feature than bug for many a climate alarmist.

Kallum Pickering, chief economist at Peel Hunt, a London-based investment bank, took on the claim of Labour Party British Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who said that pursuing net zero greenhouse gas emissions didn’t require a deceleration of economic growth. What he found was “sad to say,” but he stands by the facts.

“The result of the UK’s decarbonization efforts appears to be weak economic growth, stalling living standards, high energy prices and deindustrialization – without denting rising global emissions,” he wrote last week in the Telegraph.

“Net zero is strangling our economy,” says the headline over Pickering’s column, because “limiting available electricity has stifled productivity.”

On the Peel Hunt website, Pickering explained that data from 189 countries indicated there is “a strong positive correlation between living standards and energy consumption – showing a clear link between falling energy capacity and weak productivity in the UK.” He notes that “the decline in UK electricity supply, which started in 2006, coincided with the start of structural weakness in productivity growth.”

Bluntly put, without cheap and reliable energy, which is what we get from fossil fuels, an economy turns sclerotic. Which is why the political left works so feverishly to end gas and oil. As we have said so many times before, the agenda behind cutting greenhouse gases is in actuality an assault on capitalism, which, as the legendary Milton Friedman famously said, is the only economic system that has enabled the masses to escape from “grinding poverty.”

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Gazans Leaving Gaza? By No Means Off the Table P.David Hornik

By on March 10th, 2025

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

President Trump’s talk about a removal of Gazans from Gaza—while transforming the coastal enclave into prime beachfront real estate, a Riviera on the eastern Mediterranean no less—struck many as outlandish. But many in Israel have taken the idea—at least the kernel of it, not necessarily with Trump’s trappings—seriously, and efforts are underway to get it off the ground.

Late last month, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer—close confidant of Prime Minister Netanyahu—reportedly “held a ‘tense’ meeting with a senior Egyptian official…in Jerusalem.” The topic—or at least one of them—was moving Gazans into the vast, sparsely populated Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian official

relayed that Cairo is alarmed by calls from Israeli politicians to push Palestinians into Gaza and stressed that Egypt views any such effort as an existential threat….

According to the sources, Dermer responded by maintaining that the Egyptian people are not as opposed to taking in Gazans as the Egyptian government is.

Alarmed by the answer—in addition to disagreeing with it—Egyptian officials have since sought to arrange a meeting for Dermer with some of the country’s more senior leaders in Cairo in order to further make the case against the relocation of Palestinians into the Sinai.

Unlike Jordan—a small country that already has a large, restive Palestinian population and is under a concerted effort by Iran to undermine its foundations—Egypt has a population of 107 million, while Gaza’s population comes to two million, and no one is suggesting a total population transfer. Egypt’s adamant opposition to taking in Gazans can be seen as a severe case of NIMBYism—even as, of course, Egypt officially intones the proper phrases about the “Palestinian cause.”

For now, Egypt’s President Sissi is turning a cold shoulder to Trump’s overtures for a White House meeting—where Sissi’s NIMBYism just might get exposed to a wide public.

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Do Not Be Fooled By Hamas’s ‘Long-Term Ceasefire’ Ploy by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 10th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21461/hamas-ceasefire-ploy

As part of the deception, according to the IDF report, Hamas was working to convince Israel that it was interested in calm and was working for economic prosperity. The IDF investigation concluded that Hamas had planned the October 7 attack for more than 10 years.

Today, everyone knows that the talk about a long-term truce was nothing but a smokescreen to conceal Hamas’s real intention of launching its October 7 attack against Israel.

Hamas anyway is not known for honoring ceasefire agreements…. On July 26, 2014, Hamas announced a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire at 14.00. Hamas violated its own ceasefire a short time later.

For Hamas, a hudna is a temporary break from war — it does not indicate a desire to end it and achieve peace. While Hamas was talking, for ten years before October 7, 2023, about its desire to reach a long-term truce, it was busy preparing for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

It is plainly uninformed to believe that Hamas would ever lay down its weapons and agree to end its jihad (holy war) against Israel.

The Trump administration is advised to listen to what Hamas leaders say in Arabic to their own people, and not what they tell US officials during secret meetings in Qatar. Earlier this month, for instance, senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri, speaking in Arabic, reassured his people that his group rejects demands by Israel and the US to disarm…

A ceasefire deal will allow Hamas to remain in power and prepare more massacres against Israel. The only solution for the current crisis is for Hamas to disarm, cede control over the Gaza Strip and leave the Palestinian arena.

Adam Boehler, the US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, stated on March 9 that he did not rule out the possibility of reaching a long-term truce between Israel and the Iran-backed Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. He also did not rule out the possibility that Hamas would agree to lay down its weapons, saying:

“I think there’s an answer here, and I think the answer is that Hamas lays down their arms. We exchange prisoners, and they [Hamas] go into a long-term truce, where they don’t fight, they’re not part of any political party, and that gives us lots of cooling-off time.”

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The Statesman Among Us by Nils A. Haug

By on March 9th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21457/the-statesman-among-us

The concept of Zionism has received adverse publicity in the press of late, especially thanks to slogans by supposedly pro-Palestinian activists in the West vilifying Jews. These supposedly pro-Palestinian activists are actually just antisemites; they have never proposed a thing that would make Palestinian lives better. Anyhow these activists call Jews “Zionists” to avoid having themselves labelled as Jew-haters.

Due to a fundamental clash of irreconcilable ethical religious principles – that of Torah versus Islamic Sharia – it appears that only Israel’s overwhelming military strength, command of technology and will to protect its country from tyranny can deter the nation’s Islamist enemies.

While combating a hostile local media that support what Netanyahu terms the “deep state”, health issues, personal slights, legal charges — many seemingly politically fabricated in the midst of an existential war by antagonistic state jurists determined to assert their control over elected politicians — Netanyahu presses on, not only on a mission to save Israel from fundamentalist terrorism, but ultimately, by extension, the West itself.

There does not appear to be anyone else in Israel who could have done a better job against the almost inestimable odds than those Netanyahu has been forced to overcome since October 7, 2023.

The words describing the crucial role of Queen Esther of ancient Persia apply equally to Israel’s statesman, Netanyahu: “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?”

Great statesmen are generally recognized as such only after dire events faced by the nation have settled, and his strategy is seen to have succeeded. Once the threat to the nation has passed and fresh democratic elections eventually arrive, the statesman is often replaced as leader and a new prime minister or president is appointed to lead the nation into a better future – a future created through the efforts, wisdom and courage of his predecessor. This is what transpired with that great British leader, Winston Churchill.

In an effort to avoid the increasing likelihood of war in Europe in 1938, the UK’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, travelled to Munich to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. When Chamberlain returned, victoriously displaying a document signed by both Hitler and himself purporting to resolve the geopolitical issues at stake, hopes were high that the UK could avoid involvement in yet another horrific war so soon after the “Great War” twenty years earlier. Chamberlain proudly, waving the document, declared that the signed paper would guarantee “peace for our time.”

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POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on March 9th, 2025

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

Psalm 41

This week’s compilation by Michael Ordman reminds one of Psalm 41:

“The LORD will sustain him on his sickbed and restore him from his bed of illness.”

Israel’s contribution to world health is nothing short of astonishing. Here are a few examples: 

1.“Potential goldmine” for new antibiotics.

2.Sheba is eighth best hospital. (TY Nevet) Israel’s Sheba Medical Center increased its position from ninth to eighth on Newsweek’s ranking of the best hospitals in the world

3.Saving lives after surgery. Nora Nseir is the founder and co-CEO of Nurami Medical (see here previously) explains Nurami’s latest groundbreaking product, which is able to to regenerate meningeal tissue after complex brain and spinal cord surgery.

 4.Reducing side-effects of cancer therapy.

As part of 2025 National Defibrillator Day, Magen David Adom volunteers set up over 500 training stations across Israel. They showed 35,000 members of the public how to recognize the signs of cardiac arrest, locate and operate a nearby Automated External Defibrillator, and call 101 for assistance.

And that’s just one week in a nation beset by enemies and terrorism. Read it all. rsk

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The vindication of a heretic Jay Bhattacharya is right: ‘scientism’ is a menace to truth and liberty. Brendan O’Neill

By on March 9th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/07/the-vindication-of-a-heretic/

He might not be as brash as Elon Musk. He might not wield his sword of reform with as much gleeful abandon as Donald Trump does his. Yet Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s pick to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is nonetheless fighting an essential fight. His target? Scientism. The tyrannical trend whereby ‘science’, in his words, ‘stands on top of society and says “You must do this, this and this or else”’. He wants to restore science’s older, nobler goal of providing people with ‘knowledge and freedom’. Everyone who values reason should hope he succeeds.

Bhattacharya gave us a glimpse of his beliefs at his Senate confirmation hearing this week. In his humble, professorial style – anyone hoping for a rerun of RFK’s fiery confirmation hearing will have been sorely disappointed – he outlined his plans for the NIH. He wants it to be a freer, more open-minded place. For too long, he said, scientists at the NIH and elsewhere have displayed a ‘lack of tolerance for ideas that differed from theirs’. Now, under me, there’ll be ‘a culture of respect for free speech in science’, he promised.

That Bhattacharya is even heading to the NIH, never mind taking it over and shaking it up, is extraordinary. He was a target of its invective once. In 2020, he went from being a ‘low-profile researcher at Stanford University’ – in the snooty words of the Guardian this week – to being a headline-making heretic. His blasphemy? He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which posited that ‘focussed protection’ of the elderly and vulnerable might be a better way to combat Covid-19 than the blanket shutdown of society.

The stake was readied. Insults flew. He was damned as ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘fringe’. That last slight came from the NIH itself. Its then director, Francis Collins, fired off an email in October 2020 branding Bhattacharya and his ilk as ‘fringe epidemiologists’. Collins called for a ‘quick and devastating’ rebuttal of their dissenting declaration. That shameful cry for scientists to act like a latter-day priestly elite, to go out and issue ‘devastating’ edicts against the Barrington apostasy, is no doubt what Bhattacharya had in mind when he told the Senate that the NIH has become infected by ‘a culture of cover-up, obfuscation and a lack of tolerance’.

Now, amazingly, the heretic is taking power. The man on the ‘fringe’ is off to the beating heart of scientific endeavour: the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, with an annual budget of more than $47 billion. The only thing being ‘devastated’, Mr Collins, is the old NIH that you and others helped to turn into a political machine. But Bhattacharya’s mission is less one of personal vengeance than of scientific restoration. He told his hearing that he wants to bring back ‘the very essence of science’ to the NIH. And what might that be? ‘Dissent’, he said.

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Elite Holdouts Will Keep Wokeness Alive By David Reaboi

By on March 9th, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/elite-holdouts-will-keep-wokeness-alive/

While we’ve since learned that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s legendary quip about the outcome of the French Revolution being “too soon to tell” was the result of a mistranslation rather than a zen-like sweep of history, there’s something wise about taking the long view.

The defeat of some of the most obvious excesses of “wokeness” — both in policy, through a flurry of Trump executive orders, and among the public, as seen in recent polling — is certainly cause for celebration (and, for those of us who’ve been on the battlefield in large or small capacities, a sense of accomplishment). Perhaps the greatest sign of its waning power in the public consciousness is that it has, finally, become ridiculous; its association has traversed the distance from earnest righteousness to a source of mockery.

The Right should be cautious, though, as political and social battles are rarely (if ever) won for all time. “Liberalism” and “Progressivism” are two labels that required multiple rebrands across several generations due to failing fortunes with the public — and yet maintained enough elite support to return, just as powerfully as before.

Those of us on the Right understand that what’s now known as “wokeness” isn’t new or a heretical deviation; rather, it is the necessary outgrowth of the Left’s assumptions and assertions about the world, inseparable from its conception of “progress.” Most ordinary Americans, though, are busy with their lives and haven’t traced the Left’s radicalism as it lurched from college campuses in the 1970s into the mainstream of elite consensus.

The Right’s smarter activists understand that, since its inception, the Left fails when its excesses are made flesh. For example, women’s sports and childhood medical transitions were crucial battlegrounds in the war against “wokeness,” as they exposed the radicalism of gender ideology in ways that didn’t require lengthy philosophical explanations. Even in defeat, Americans need to be shown the horrors of childhood medical transitions just as the victorious Allies needed to remind the world of the Nazi death camps: the fight was a righteous one, and the enemies deserved destruction for what they’d done.

Given enough time and distance, however, a period of revisionism always arrives, and the battle must be taken up anew.

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