https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/ Forlorn creatures of habit, our household watches https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/thier-abc/2023/11/the-abc-on-gaza-exactly-as-expected-except-worse/ Australian Broadcasting Company’sTV flagship 7pm News (Victoria) nightly. As I remarked across the dinner table at 6.59pm on Tuesday, “Stand by for Hamas footage of suffering children in Gaza, with no ABC mention that Hamas uses […]
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/09/high_stakes_and_a_simple_choice_150037.html
Bernie Marcus is the co-founder of Job Creators Network, a philanthropist, and the retired co-founder of The Home Depot.
I am 94 years old and like many of you, I am exhausted by politics and saddened by what I see happening to America. I had hoped it was time for me to move to the sidelines and let younger generations continue the fight to preserve America’s founding freedoms and values. But, like so many of us, I realized that I could not let myself walk away; the stakes are just too high.
We cannot let the America we see today be what we leave to our children and grandchildren. Many of our once-great cities have devolved into lawlessness with random violent attacks on innocent people, rampant looting, and large-scale homeless encampments. There are rarely consequences for the wrongdoers because George Soros-elected prosecutors across America refuse to prosecute them.
Moreover, our southern border is unprotected, and millions of people we know nothing about pour into our nation to receive care and benefits that we cannot afford to provide to our struggling military veterans. Worse, many of the border crossers may be gang members who commit violent crimes here. Schoolchildren across America cannot read, write, or do basic math, while our educational leaders tell us that they know better than parents how to raise our children. Working men and women are struggling to provide for their families and must raid their retirement funds just to feed, clothe, and take care of their children. These are just a few of the problems America is facing after three years of bad government policies. They cannot be our legacy.
This should not be a partisan issue. This should be an issue for all Americans – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – that I hope to reach with this op-ed. You enjoy the freedoms and values on which the nation was founded. Sadly, I see these freedoms and values being eroded today as government gets bigger and weaponized against its political opponents.
I wrote this op-ed because of my love for America, not for any financial gain or advantage. I have been retired for 30 years and spend my time engaged in philanthropic causes, with which I have committed to share 90% of my net worth. I was born here and can give testimony about The American Dream. I lost my job and was broke when I was 48 years old. A dear friend of mine suggested that my misfortune presented a great opportunity to build a small business based upon an idea I had shared with him. Only in America, the land of opportunity, could being without a job and broke be a great opportunity. In 1978, my partners and I built four hardware stores, and this small business grew and is known as The Home Depot. We could only have done this in America because of America’s system of free enterprise and pro-jobs growth government policies. The state of America today, especially record inflation, government over-regulation, and the problems of the last three years, would prevent my partners and I from succeeding as we have.
Part of our legacy must be passing on to future generations of Americans our founding freedoms and values, including The American Dream. We must change the current trajectory of the nation and solve the problems created in the last three years. We must also reject calls from some politicians to replace our free market system with big government socialism. Most of them seem to have never had a job outside of government. All they know is making government bigger and more intrusive in the lives of its citizens.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/schools-for-hamas-cide/
While the slaying of some 1,400 Jews by Hamas is a major tragedy in and of itself, other important facets of the story merit attention. For example, a Harris poll taken after the massacre reveals that 51% of American 18-24-year-olds think the murder of innocent Jewish men, women, and babies was justified, and much of this Jew hatred can be attributed to our nation’s schools.
Rethinking Schools, a radical activist outfit established in 1986, whose products are used by 200,000 teachers and are on university reading lists, asserts that educators have a “moral and educational responsibility” to join and teach about “the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.”
Also, a wing of Rethinking Schools, the Zinn Education Project, which has developed history curricula since 2008, is used by 155,000 teachers nationwide. On October 10, the organization declared that the terror, violence, murder, and rape we’ve seen in the past week “is the direct result of decades of Israeli occupation.”
In Oakland, the teachers union has accused Israel of carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing. The teachers union in Seattle passed a resolution in 2021 supporting the same lie. In Virginia, a school board member in Fairfax County has, under the banner of culturally responsive pedagogy, pushed for an explicitly anti-Israeli curriculum.
Also, Black Lives Matter, which has had success infiltrating our public schools, insists that the recent events in the Middle East are a “direct result of decades of Israeli settler colonialism, land dispossession, occupation, blockade, apartheid, and attempted genocide of millions of Palestinians.”
Then there are the colleges. The colleges! Yes, the same cohort of far-left, cultural ignoramuses who can’t define what a woman is and offers classes like “Queering Menstruation” and “Anal 101” are now, not surprisingly, weighing in on the Middle East.
In addition to Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion tenets have become de rigeur on college campuses. The DEI-ists see everything in black and white, labeling white people as oppressors and blacks as the oppressed. While DEI typically concerns itself with USA issues, Israel, too, is on the hook, being tarred as a bastion of Jewish whiteness with a racist commitment to shattering the lives of Palestinians, who are considered people of color.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/hamas-ally-cair-has-been-operating-with-impunity-inside-america-for-30-years/
After Hamas massacred 1,400 men, women and children in Israel last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that the terror group “and its allies” could inspire attacks on Americans “here on our own soil.” He also told the Senate that the FBI is conducting “multiple, ongoing investigations” into people affiliated with the U.S.-designated terrorist group.
What Wray didn’t say is that the FBI has been investigating Hamas’ biggest ally in America for the past 30 years – without filing any charges. Launched in 1994 as a secret front organization to support Hamas, according to declassified FBI wiretap transcripts and FBI testimony, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has, in the decades since, become an accepted member of Washington’s lobbying community. The New York Times and other influential newspapers routinely describe CAIR as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.”
Although it has not repudiated its support for Hamas – which is committed to the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people – CAIR was enlisted by the Biden administration in May to take part in a White House initiative to fight antisemitism.
On Oct. 7, the day Hamas terrorists butchered 1,400 Jews, including 33 Americans – raping many and abducting some 240 others to Gaza from southern Israel – CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, delivered an anti-Israel message in Arabic which seemed to justify what Hamas did. Translated into English, it read: “All Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, Oct. 8 – and every day – in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime [Israel].”
On Saturday afternoon, CAIR helped rally more than 100,000 Muslims in D.C. to instead condemn Israel for supposedly carrying out “genocide” in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Multiple speakers called for the destruction of Israel – and, by implication, the Jewish people there – by demanding Palestinians take all the lands “from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea.”
https://victorhanson.com/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/
https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/09/squeezing-the-worlds-vulnerable-peoples/
The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world’s Jewish people.
The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of 6 million Jews. Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea.” Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.
There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries— Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen—despite hundreds of years of residence.
Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly-500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.
And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide—catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.
Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.
https://barenakedislam.com/2023/11/09/caliphornia-to-absolutely-no-ones-surprise-at-all-the-pro-hamas-activist-who-killed-a-69-year-old-pro-israel-jewish-man-turns-out-to-be-a-muslim-after-all/
Muslim college professor, Loay Alnaji, has been identified as the pro-Hamas activist ‘who killed Jewish protestor Paul Kessler’ with a megaphone that knocked him to the ground when rival rallies clashed in Thousand Oaks, California.
Daily Mail (h/t Charlotte) The man who police have questioned in relation to the death of a Jewish man during a clash with pro-Palestinian protestors is 50-year-old college professor, Loay Alnaji, who teaches computer science at Ventura Community College in California allegedly hit Paul Kessler with a megaphone knocking him to the ground, resulting in a fatal blow to the head.
Records show that Alnaji came to the United States in the 1990s – he had previously taught in the United Arab Emirates. He married Palestinian economics professor Nada Al Hammouri on Christmas Eve 2015. They have three children.
On his Facebook page he has posted several messages in Arabic supporting the Palestinian cause. In his most recent from three weeks ago, he wrote: ‘O Allah, release the captivity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque… Sooner than later……..Oh Allah, don’t deprive us of praying in it before we die… ‘Oh God, give victory to your weak servants in Palestine, and everywhere…O Allah, bind their hearts with the bond of patience and faith..’
Tensions have been growing between supporters of Israel and the Palestinians since Hamas’s October 7 surprise raid on the Jewish state in which some 1,400 people were killed. Alnaji’s stand against Israel’s actions took him to the streets of Thousand Oaks on Sunday afternoon, where the pro-Palestinian group was confronted by another supporting Israel.
Gaza is a knife aimed at Israel. Just look at the map. It’s not an accident.
The Gaza Strip was created by Arab states who attacked and lost to Israel in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-48. It became a narrow festering laboratory where humans were turned into monsters, encouraged and trained to commit atrocities.
Gaza became the anti-Israel terror base, 20 minutes from Tel Aviv. Gaza’s people have got no flag, no citizenship. Their symbol became the UN refugee card known in Arabic as al-Hawiyya.
Egypt kept the refugees penned up in Gaza in poverty and 70% unemployment, refusing them citizenship, denying them statehood and independence.
Lebanon and Syria also kept their Palestinians in camps. They saw the political potential of the refugees, exploited their suffering to harden them as a knife aimed at Israel. Enmity to Israel was the heart of Qawmiyya — Pan-Arab nationalism. Gamal Abdul-Nasser and Hafez Assad built their careers around it.
Whenever Arab leaders failed their people — low literacy, poor health care, general poverty — they distracted attention, wrapping themselves in the flag of Palestinian resistance and pan-Arab nationalism.
Fighting terror from Gaza consumed Israel in its first 20 years. After winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza and Sinai as part of diplomatic settlements, hoping terror would end. Under the 1993 Israel-PLO accords, Israel handed military control in Gaza to Arafat’s PLO. Terror increased. Under Ariel Sharon, Israel, also evicted its civilians from Gaza in 2005. Arab terror rose even more.
Hamas beat the PLO in the 2006 elections after its participation was encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Yes, it was a bad idea. Hamas then violently evicted the PLO. Gaza again became the main terror base against Israel. Its main domestic product was not locally grown flowers and citrus fruit pioneered by Israeli farmers, but rocket-based terror. Hamas called it muqawwama sarwakhiyya — “rocket-propelled resistance.”
Hamas used its state educational and social networks to mold thousands of hate-filled killers. From first grade to summer camps, Hamas gave children rifles and taught them to hate Jews, as detailed in the 36-paragraph Hamas Covenant.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/11/digging_into_ramaswamys_correct_attack_against_nikki_haley_about_tiktoxic.html
Last night, Nikki Haley, showing the wit, tact, and self-control that will, I’m sure, characterize a potential Haley presidency, called Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” after he pointed out that, even as she had attacked him in September for setting up a TikTok campaign site, her daughter had a TikTok account. Her children, she said, are off limits. I’m siding with Ramaswamy on this one, though. TikTok targets America’s youth, so we conservatives should have a presence there. The reality is that TikTok is tik-toxic, especially because it’s corrupting American young people on everything from sexuality to Middle Eastern politics. Since it’s here, whether we like it or not, we ignore it at our peril.
As you may recall, way too late in his first term to make a difference, Donald Trump issued an executive order banning apps from ByteDance Ltd., the Chinese-controlled company that owns TikTok. He did so because he identified TikTok as a national security risk. Within months of gaining the White House, Joe Biden rescinded that executive order, inviting TikTok back into America…and the People’s Republic of China back into the minds of our children. China got what it paid for when Biden entered the Oval Office.
It’s long been known that, within China, TikTok ensures that people see videos about China’s might, patriotism, health and fitness, America’s perfidy, etc. It’s all pro-government stuff, whether social or political. However, in America, TikTok promotes videos about anorexia, steroids, self-harm, LGBTQ+ stuff, with a special focus on transgenderism, and anti-Americanism.
https://www.thefp.com/p/end-dei-woke-capture?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Twenty years ago, when I was a college student, I started writing about a then-nameless, niche ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.
It is possible I would not have perceived the nature of this ideology—or rather I would have been able to avoid seeing its true nature—had I not been a Jew. But I was. I am. And in noticing the way I had been written out of the equation, I started to notice that it wasn’t just me, but that the whole system rested on an illusion.
What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.
People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”
I was an undergraduate back then, but you didn’t need a PhD to see where this could go. And so I watched, in horror, sounding alarms as loudly as I could.
I was told by most Jewish leaders that, yes, it wasn’t great, but not to be so hysterical. Campuses were always hotbeds of radicalism, they said. This ideology, they promised, would surely dissipate as young people made their way in the world.
It did not.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/one-person-injured-in-drone-explosion-at-school-in-eilat/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&
A 20-year-old man suffered smoke inhalation.
By JNS
A drone caused a large explosion at an elementary school in Eilat on Thursday afternoon, injuring one civilian, reported the Israel Defense Forces.
“A UAV hit a civilian building in the city of Eilat, in southern Israel. The identity of the UAV and the details of the incident are under review,” said the IDF.
A 20-year-old man suffered from smoke inhalation and was evacuated to the city’s Yoseftal Medical Center, the Magen David Adom emergency response service said. In addition, paramedics treated five people suffering from anxiety.
