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Ruth King

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THE QATARI MONEY BEHIND ADVISERS TO FAMILIES OF GAZA HOSTAGES: BARBARA LEDEEN

By on February 1st, 2024

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-influence/2024/01/31/advisers-to-families-of-hostages-held-in-gaza-backed-by-qatari-funding-

Some of the families trying to free their loved ones held hostage by Hamas in Gaza are getting advice from individuals and entities that have received funding from Qatar, Daniel reports — an unusual arrangement given Qatar’s role as one of the chief mediators between Hamas and Israel and that the country is home to Hamas’ political leadership.

— As hostage families work to keep their relatives in the news and urge the Qataris to get Hamas to release them, a consultant working for the Qataris, Jay Footlik, has also met with the families in both Washington and Israel to prep them for their meetings with Qatari officials and also help organize them, according to two people familiar with the matter.

— Footlik’s consulting firm ThirdCircle Inc. has been registered under FARA since 2019 to help arrange trips to Qatar for American elected officials on behalf of the Qatari Embassy, which pays the firm $40,000 per month, according to filings with the Justice Department.

— Footlik, a former special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and liaison to the American Jewish community, told PI his work with the hostage families began because he had a long-standing relationship with Israeli businessperson Eytan Stibbe, who asked for his assistance since Footlik had relationships with Qatar.

— He said that he then contacted Qatari ambassador Meshal Al-Thani and asked if he would meet a relative of several of the Israeli hostages, Avichai Brodutch. Al-Thani immediately agreed and soon asked Footlik to help facilitate direct communication with hostage family members who wanted to meet with Qatari officials, he said.

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China Trapping Biden on Artificial Intelligence by Gordon G. Chang

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20358/china-ai-trap

[N]o, America should not want to enter into any AI agreement with the People’s Republic of China on “nuclear C2” — command and control — or any other matter.

An agreement requiring a human to make launch decisions would, as a practical matter, be unenforceable.

None of China, Russia, or the United States would allow others to pore over millions of lines of their computer code…..

America does not need another feel-good agreement with China. It already has them, especially the Biological Weapons Convention, which has no enforcement mechanisms.

The Chinese regime wants to talk about artificial intelligence largely because it is trailing the U.S. and thinks an agreement would help it catch up…. [and] pave the way for China to access the U.S. technology it does not already have.

“China has signaled interest in joining discussions on setting rules and norms for AI, and we should welcome that,” said Bonnie Glaser of the German Marshall Fund to the Breaking Defense site. “The White House is interested in engaging China on limiting the role of AI in command and control of nuclear weapons.”

“Nobody wants to see AI controlled nuclear weapons, right?” asked Joe Wang, a former State Department and NSC staffer now at the Arlington, Virginia-based Special Competitive Studies Project, which specializes in AI and emerging technologies. “Like, even the craziest dictator can probably agree.”

Call me crazy, but, no, America should not want to enter into any AI agreement with the People’s Republic of China on “nuclear C2” — command and control — or any other matter.

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When and How a Nation’s Luck Runs Out Augusto Zimmermann & Gabriël Moens

By on January 31st, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/australia/2024/01/when-and-how-a-nations-luck-runs-out/

EXCERPT:

“Freedom of speech, thought, movement, religion and association are the pillars of any free society. They cannot be allowed to exist in name alone, but must be protected and strengthened, never suppressed or curtailed. No government should ever have the right to coerce, obstruct, or illegally interfere with the life, liberty, and property of citizens. We are aware that this is a noble aspiration while also anxiously aware that the opposite often occurs in Australia. It is precisely this illiberal development that is addressed and documented in our book.

If this country wants to regain its luck, Australians should be very much involved in the culture wars, questioning the Left’s prevailing nostrums and ever-expanding edicts. The liberal tradition encourages individual entrepreneurship and small business as drivers of the economy and personal responsibility. This form of liberalism also acknowledges the importance of traditional Western principles, values, and culture in the development and preservation of democratic societies composed of free and responsible individuals.

The social engineers who would remake the country impose and enforce anti-vilification laws but do so selectively. In only the past few days we have seen a slather of political leaders on both sides of the aisle demand prosecutions and stiff sentences for parading neo-Nazi clowns. Who among these political grandstanders has also demanded similar treatment for Islamic hate preachers and their equally intolerant congregations? The political castes’ silence speaks volumes. Government agencies have encouraged extreme leftist protests, supported the politicisation of sporting events, promoted cancel culture generally and condoned the teaching of critical race theory in schools. In light of these developments, Morrison’s assertion that Australia is a ‘liberal democracy’ can only be seen as vacuous and delusional.

Too often we have seen the right to religious freedom challenged by the right not to be discriminated against. In a true liberal society religious people should have the right to live according to their own ethos and belief. They should have freedom to create their own institutions without undue government interference. Most important, they should be able to transmit their religious and ethical values to their children.

Another challenge relates to political correctness, which is destroying our cultural heritage. This is one of the most disturbing developments of our time, and yet it is embraced and extolled by our political overlords and the so-called ‘progressive’ elites.

The uncontrolled growth of the welfare state is another challenge. Such growth is problematic because it must inevitably make recipients entirely dependent on the State. Yet more and more Australians look to the government as the solution to all their problems. As Adlai Stevenson, the failed Democratic presidential candidate, reminded us long ago, freedom can only exist in a society where it is entirely safe to be unpopular and citizens are free to think for themselves.

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NYU Professor Suspended after Being Recorded Denying Hamas Atrocities, Denouncing Israel By David Zimmermann

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nyu-professor-suspended-after-being-recorded-denying-hamas-atrocities-denouncing-israel/

New York University recently suspended an adjunct professor, who’s been outspoken about his antisemitic views for years, after a video released online showed him denying that Hamas terrorists raped Israeli women and committed other atrocities on October 7.

In the video, Amin Husain is seen defending Hamas’s actions and denouncing Israel at a teach-in organized by the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at The New School, a private research university located in New York City. The informal lecture took place on December 5, the Free Press reported Thursday.

“Don’t take what the media says,” Husain said in the video, which the Free Press obtained from S.A.F.E. Campus, an organization that combats antisemitism on college campuses in the U.S. “It’s really important. . . . Because these kind of questions try to put you on the defensive. They try to say . . . ‘Oh my God, you’re supporting rapists and people that behead babies,’ both of which, you know, whatever, we know it’s not true.”

“We live in a Zionist city,” Husain added, referring to New York. “No, let’s be real about this, let’s be f***ing real.”

On the same day that the Free Press published the story, NYU announced that Husain had been suspended.

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The Border Crisis Is Biden’s Fault, the New York Times Admits Noah Rothman

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/the-border-crisis-is-bidens-fault-the-new-york-times-admits/

The situation has become so acute that Biden is discovering the ‘options’ he once claimed to lack.

Joe Biden’s latest argument for why the crisis at the southern border isn’t his fault is predicated on the assumption of widespread civic illiteracy.

The yet-unknown terms of a bipartisan deal designed to mitigate the border crisis and relieve the pressure it has put on the nation’s immigration system would, Biden insists, give him “a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.” The president assured voters that, “if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

The specifics in the bill are not yet public, but they do not need to be for observers possessed of a passing familiarity with the executive branch’s authority to know the president isn’t being honest. Biden has taken to insisting that the White House is all out of “options” when it comes to enforcing border security, only for the administration to suddenly discover unexplored avenues of executive power now that chaos at the border has become an acute political liability for him and his party. The president and his administration are not suddenly admitting to the scale of the disaster along the Rio Grande because they want to take ownership of it. They’re doing so to condition Americans into believing the GOP bears more responsibility for that crisis than the president does.

Today, the New York Times got in on that act, but half-heartedly and in an entirely unconvincing fashion. A three-bylined item in the Times casts Biden as a passive observer of the crisis over which he has presided — one that tragically “shattered his immigration hopes.” Moreover, it drafts the GOP into the role of antagonist against Biden’s leading man. Republicans “refused to provide resources, blocked efforts to update laws and openly defied federal officials charged with maintaining security and order along the 2,000-mile border,” the Times insists. Biden’s foremost shortcoming was that he “failed to overcome those obstacles.”

With that throat-clearing out of the way, however, the outlet goes on to explore the ways in which Biden exacerbated one of the growing number of crises consuming his presidency.

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At Least 160 Attacks Carried Out Against U.S. Forces in the Middle East Since Mid-October By Eric Lendrum

By on January 31st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/30/at-least-160-attacks-carried-out-against-u-s-forces-in-the-middle-east-since-mid-october/

The attack against American troops in Jordan on Sunday, which took the lives of three soldiers, was the latest in a series of at least 160 terrorist attacks against American forces in the Middle East since October.

As reported by Fox News, U.S. officials revealed the true total number of attacks following the news of Sunday’s attack, which sparked widespread outrage and has led to calls for retaliation against Iran, which backed the proxy group responsible for the attack. It marked the deadliest attack on American forces since 2021.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, finally back from his controversial unannounced absence due to prostate cancer, issued a statement expressing his “outrage and sorrow for the deaths of three brave U.S. troops in Jordan and for the other troops who were wounded,” adding that “we will take all necessary actions to defend the U.S. and our troops.”

The base that was struck in Jordan is referred to as Tower 22, and houses roughly 350 troops who are stationed there primarily for the purpose of wiping out any remnants of the terrorist group ISIS. Most of the personnel on the base were asleep when the drone attacked.

“We are mourning with Americans across the country today who are mourning the deaths of three souls, three service members who lost their lives,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday. “As we all know, yesterday was a very dark day.”

The attack, and particularly Iran’s culpability, represents the latest escalation in tensions in the region, which began on October 7th when the Islamic terrorist group Hamas struck the state of Israel, killing over 1,400 civilians and launching a war between the two that is still ongoing. Elsewhere in the region, the Houthis in Yemen have begun attacking ships in the Red Sea and disrupting global maritime trade.

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Why is a full-grown man competing against teenage girls in swimming? A 50-year-old professor has been allowed to identify himself into a swimming league for schoolgirls. Lauren Smith

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/29/why-is-a-full-grown-man-competing-against-teenage-girls-in-swimming/

“This is what happens when you let trans ideology run riot.”

First they let men compete in women’s sports. Now they’re letting adult men compete against teenage girls – and wander into their changing rooms.

As hard as it might be to believe, in Canada a 50-year-old man really is being allowed to compete in swimming competitions alongside 13- and 14-year-old girls. Melody Wiseheart, formerly Nicholas Cepeda, is a professor of psychology and behavioural science at York University in Toronto, specialising in children and young people.

Concerned parents tipped off Rebel News, a right-wing website, about Wiseheart in October last year. He was spotted swimming in a competition at the Markham Pan Am recreation centre, representing the Orangeville Otters swimming club.

The next week, to try to stand up the story, Rebel News reporter Davide Menzies confronted several staff members at the recreation centre. Its competition coordinator initially said he could not recall seeing ‘a 50-year-old man’ competing alongside teenage girls. Menzies then presented him with the competition schedule, which showed Wiseheart’s name and age alongside those of nine teenage girls. Only then did the coordinator admit that Wiseheart had indeed been allowed to take part. The Daily Mail alleges that Wiseheart has been competing against teenage girls since 2019.

According to the competition coordinator, Wiseheart has the right to compete in girls’ competitions under Swimming Canada’s ‘trans inclusion’ rules. He has registered himself as female and is thus treated as female. And although the competitions he swims in consist almost exclusively of teenage girls, this is simply a matter of convention. It seems that, since no adult had ever tried to enter a teenagers’ race before, there had been no need to draw up explicit rules. In other words, Wiseheart did not even need to ‘identify’ as a 13-year-old girl to assert his ‘right’ to enter the girls’ competition.

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Liel Leibovitz Opportunity, Not Tragedy The DEI ship at Harvard and other elite universities is probably too big to turn around—it’s time to look elsewhere.

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elite-universities-collapse-presents-an-opportunity

If you’ve ever watched a monster movie, you know the scene. The triumphant heroes walk away, the creature they had just vanquished left for dead behind them. And then, in a furious flash just before the credits start rolling, it opens its eyes and pounces, assuring us that evil never truly dies and that the sequel is coming.

That was the vibe at Harvard University last week. No sooner was its purported plagiarist president, Claudine Gay, forced to step down after struggling to find fault with calls on campus for genocide against Jews than the haughtiest Ivy found itself in trouble again. The university had announced the creation of an anti-Semitism task force, but before it could even convene, some critics pointed out that its co-chairman, history professor Derek Penslar, wasn’t exactly the man for the job.

Penslar, wrote the university’s former president, Lawrence Summers, “has publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state and more.” Harvard, Summers went on, would never appoint anyone who made light of racism, say, to an anti-racism task force, which only proved the existence of a “double standard between anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice.”

Summers and Harvard’s other critics are right about the facts but entirely wrong when it comes to the bigger picture. The problem isn’t really Penslar or Gay, and it won’t be solved by a task force, however honest and well intentioned. The problem is Harvard itself, what it believes, and its commitment to an insidious ideology—best-recognized by its acronym, DEI, for diversity, equity, and inclusion—that is inherently opposed to the notion of free and unfettered exchange of ideas.

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The Incredible Denseness of the Academic Mind Our institutions of higher learning have degenerated into satiric parodies. Bruce Thornton

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-incredible-denseness-of-the-academic-mind/

Dogmatically slumbering in its academic silo, Harvard seems to have missed the hard lessons that increasingly follow from doubling down on illiberal “woke” ideas like DEI. If the fates of Bud Lite, Disney, and left-leaning legacy newspapers and magazines, which are laying off reporters in droves, weren’t enough of a warning, the damage to Harvard’s reputation, donations, and enrollment that has followed the forced retirement of their serial plagiarist and functionally antisemitic president, should have penetrated even Harvard’s dense minds.

But the lessons of experience that the Romans believed even fools can learn, can’t penetrate the incredible denseness of the academic mind, a feature of intellectuals since antiquity. As Cicero once quipped, “There is nothing so absurd that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” But today’s cognitive elite “brights” have gone far beyond even the silliest ancient philosophers. From the long, bloody scientism of Marxism, to the postmodern “higher nonsense” and preposterous intellectual gimmicks like “systemic racism” and “transgenderism,” our institutions of higher learning have degenerated into satiric parodies redolent of Juvenal and Jonathan Swift.

So what does Harvard do in response to the sorry spectacle of their students protesting in support of a sadistic gang of thugs who have sworn to wipe out the Jews; trading in antisemitic lies and slurs redolent of Der Stürmer, and bullying and assaulting with impunity Jewish students? Do they enforce their existing codes of conduct that the students are violating?

Of course not. They confect a “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism.” Yes, they’re going to have a gaggle of profs and administrators and other “stakeholders” sit around and talk about “combating” the very behavior Harvard either ignored, rationalized, or approved. And as the Wall Street Journal points out, “Harvard simultaneously announced a task force to fight Islamophobia, in keeping with the new habit on the left that antisemitism can’t be condemned by itself.”

That must be what they mean by “equity,” which is a cant word for the equality of outcomes––even though historically, hate crimes against Jews comprise more than half of all religion-based hate-crimes, whereas those against Muslims are considerably fewer.

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World Court Advances South Africa’s ‘Genocide’ Case Against Israel Does this case belong in court? Joseph Klein

By on January 31st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/world-court-advances-south-africas-genocide-case-against-israel/

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) decided in its January 26th provisional ruling to move forward with a peculiar case that South Africa brought against Israel, alleging that Israel has been committing genocide against Palestinians living in Gaza. South Africa claimed that it was simply enforcing rights protected by the international Genocide Convention to which both countries are signatories.

The ICJ is enabling South Africa to weaponize against the Jewish State of Israel the Genocide Convention, which was enacted in 1948 when the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Holocaust was still fresh in peoples’ minds. To hurl an accusation of genocide against Israel, where at least one of the nearly 150,000 Holocaust survivors still living in Israel was killed during Hamas’s October 7th attack, is obscene.

Hamas initiated the war with Israel when it invaded Israel on October 7th and went on a genocidal rampage against Israeli civilians. Israel’s military operations in Gaza following that attack are a legitimate exercise of Israel’s inherent right of self-defense, which is recognized in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter when “an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

The ICJ deferred making a final judgment on the merits of South Africa’s genocide claims, which could take months or even years to decide. However, the ICJ issued provisional orders to take immediate effect, which are prejudicial to Israel’s inherent sovereign right of self-defense. Fortunately, the ICJ has no mechanism to enforce its ruling, although technically it is legally binding. Nevertheless, the ICJ’s decision that South Africa has presented a plausible case of genocide against Israel will put increased pressure on Israel to quickly wind down its military operations in Gaza.

While the ICJ did not order an immediate ceasefire, it did order Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this [Genocide] Convention.”

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