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Ruth King

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Acts of courage: Amid horror, Israelis rise to occasion: David Isaac

By on October 12th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/acts-of-courage-amid-horror-israelis-rise-to-occasion/

Israelis caught in the murderous rampage by Hamas terrorists demonstrated heroism, determination and fortitude.

As Hamas terrorists made their savage way through Israel’s south, slaughtering more than 1,300 people and displaying the worst humanity has to offer, Israeli men and women carried out countless acts of courage.

For some it was their final act. Kibbutz Be’eri’s 22-year-old paramedic insisted on staying and helping the wounded, then hid for six hours in the clinic’s kitchenette grasping a knife, waiting (like so many) for help that never came. As the terrorists closed in, she texted her last words to her sister, “I love you.”

There was the young couple from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, who hid their 10-month-old twins in their safe room before engaging in a hopeless fight with the well-armed terrorists.

Or the old-timers, former IDF officers, now grandfathers and great-grandfathers, who sped south to engage the enemy, killing dozens.

Doubtless many more acts of bravery went unseen and unheralded

Here are a few that have made it to the headlines:

1. The heroine of Nir Am

Inbal Liberman, 25, saved her entire kibbutz from the gruesome fate of many other kibbutzim in the region.

Serving as military security coordinator of Kibbutz Nir Am since December 2022, Liberman heard explosions on Saturday morning, the day of Hamas’s sneak attack.

Inbal realized that the explosions were different from the rocket attacks that she had become accustomed to. With little time to spare—Kibbutz Nir Am is located just a stone’s throw from the Gaza Strip, just over a half mile—she rushed to open the kibbutz armory.

She distributed weapons to her 12-man security team, made up of other kibbutz members, arranged them along the kibbutz fence and set ambushes for the terrorists.

When the bloodthirsty killers arrived, expecting another easy slaughter, they got the surprise of their lives. The security team gunned down 20—Liberman herself killed five—as the Hamas murderers encountered a wall of fire.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Paul du Quenoy Harvard’s Horror The statement from student groups blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks will further erode the university’s stature, and deservedly so.

By on October 12th, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FHarvards-Horror.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

“In nearly 50 years of @Harvard affiliation, I have never been as disillusioned and alienated as I am today,” tweeted Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers on October 9, when he learned that 34 Harvard student organizations had signed a statement saying that they “hold the Israeli regime responsible for all unfolding violence” in the Middle East and added that Israel “is the only one to blame.” The students’ statement was a direct response to Hamas’s murderous attack on Israeli civilians the day before, which has claimed more than 1,000 civilian lives, injured many more, and saw some 150 Israeli hostages carried off into captivity.

Presumably, Summers felt even worse than he did on February 21, 2006, when he was literally “alienated” from his post as Harvard’s president, resigning amid criticism for having suggested that women inherently might have less scientific aptitude than men. Summers apologized for those remarks, which he made based on empirical data that he said he hoped would be disproved. That did not save him from Harvard’s social-justice warriors, including a majority of Harvard’s faculty, who voted no confidence in his leadership. Instead, Summers’ downfall emboldened his critics, and led him and his successors to make identity politics central to Harvard’s mission.

More than a decade and a half later, only Summers can say whether he is truly surprised that hundreds of Harvard students would blame Israeli children, babies, grandmothers, and hundreds of others—among them at least 14 Americans now confirmed dead—for their own murders, injuries, and kidnappings. Despite his stated outrage, Summers has shown no interest in ending his affiliation with Harvard, as a principled person with such sentiments and bearing some responsibility for the climate at the school might have done.

Current Harvard president Claudine Gay confirmed that such statements are acceptable at what supposedly is the nation’s most prestigious university. Writing after 48 hours of silence, she declared that “our students have the right to speak for themselves,” even if “no student group—not even 30 student groups—speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

After massive public criticism, including from many Harvard affiliates, Gay amended her statement to declare, “I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” She nevertheless qualified her condemnation of Hamas’s “abhorrent” actions, leaving space and consideration for “whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the [Middle East] region” might be. Harvard’s best purpose, Gay continued, would “be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame. . . . I appeal to all of us in this community of learning to keep this in mind as our conversations continue.”

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Matthew Continetti: The Shame of Academe

By on October 12th, 2023

https://freebeacon.com/columns/the-shame-of-academe/

As Israel mourns some 1,200 dead, prays for the release of more than 100 captives, reels from the worst day in its history, and mobilizes some 360,000 reservists, student activists and the international Left have mobilized to defend, apologize for, and appease evil.

Protests, marches, and statements of solidarity for Palestinian “resistance” have bloomed on city streets throughout the developed world and within America’s institutions of higher learning. The actions of these young people, and of the elites who run the schools, are more than appalling. They are evidence of Western confusion and decadence.

Who could have predicted that within 24 hours of a pogrom, crowds would appear in New York, Ft. Lauderdale, Toronto, London, and Sydney denouncing Jews and calling for an end to the Jewish State? Who might have anticipated that the message from academe would be, in so many words, that Israel had it coming?

Amid a backdrop of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs, a New Yorker waved a cellphone displaying the image of a swastika. Londoners chanted “From the River to the Sea,” demanding the elimination of Jews from the Holy Land. A kosher restaurant was vandalized in the same city. Down under, in front of the Sydney Opera House, masked men lit flares and called out “Gas the Jews.”

After the terror attacks against America on September 11, 2001, similar scenes of denunciation and celebration played out in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Now, after Israel’s 9/11, they take place openly and unabashedly in the heart of the West.

Whatever this is, it is not progress. The grotesque tableaux represent social fracture, dissolution, ideological sorting, and weakening of confidence. They are a bad omen. Many of the protesters are young males asking for a fight. The last war with Hamas, in the spring of 2021, was accompanied by a surge of anti-Semitic violence in the United States. The Jewish community must prepare for another hateful backlash when Israel launches its ground campaign to destroy Hamas.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas, with Iran, Have Been Slaughtering Jews for a Long Time by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 12th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20045/hamas-iran-slaughtering-jews

The indifference has reached a point where some Western media outlets and officials continue to label Hamas terrorists as “militants.” The October 7 carnage, during which Jewish women, children and the elderly were brutally murdered, shows that there is effectively no difference between Hamas and the Islamic State (ISIS).

In 2017, Western media outlets published stories arguing that Hamas has recognized Israel’s right to exist by accepting the “two-state solution.” The only problem is, it was not true.

Many in the international media, however, failed to report that the new program also states that “Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea.”

In its charter, Hamas makes it clear that it remains faithful to the words of the prophet Mohammed, who was quoted as saying: “The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O’ Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” (Article 7)

Article 13 of the charter emphasizes the importance of Jihad: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Notably, the new Hamas program did not replace its 1988 charter. In fact, the program repeated Hamas’s commitment to the destruction of Israel through Jihad, but pointed out that since this goal cannot be achieved under the current circumstances, the group is ready to accept a temporary state on any land it obtains as a first stage toward the annihilation of Israel. Hamas, in short, is saying: We will take whatever you (Israel) give us now – starting with a Palestinian state – and we will use this to slaughter you.

Hamas launched its attack on Israel because it does not see a difference between a Jew living in a West Bank settlement and a Jew living in a city inside Israel.

For Hamas and its followers, all Jews are “settlers” and “colonialists,” regardless of their geographical location. Hamas launched the attack as part of its effort to slaughter Jews and obliterate Israel.

It is time for the international community to wake up and realize that Iran and its Palestinian proxy terrorists are as determined as ever to wipe Israel — and America — off the map.

Hamas leaders, including Ismail Haniyeh, Khaled Mashaal, Saleh Arouri, and Khalil al-Hayya, living safely in five-star hotels in Qatar and Lebanon, actually invited reporters to document them during the special prayer they held to thank God for the massacre of Jews. These bogus leaders also evidently do not give a damn about the thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who have lost their lives, homes and loved-ones as a result of Hamas’s thirst for Jewish blood.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Offshore Wind is an Economic and Environmental Catastrophe California project would be one of the most egregious cases of environmental destruction in human history By Edward Ring

By on October 12th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/11/offshore-wind-is-an-economic-and-environmental-catastrophe/

When it comes to “renewables” wreaking havoc on the environment, wind turbines have stiff competition. For example, over 500,000 square miles of biofuel plantations have already replaced farms and forests to replace a mere 4 percent of transportation fuel. To source raw materials to build “sustainable” batteries, mining operations are scaling up, with no end in sight, in nations with appalling labor conditions and nonexistent environmental regulations. But the worst offender is the wind industry.

America’s wind power industry somehow manages to attract almost no negative coverage in the press, or litigation from environmentalists, despite causing some of the most obvious and tragic environmental catastrophes so far this century. Last August I wrote about the ongoing slaughter of whales off America’s northeast coast thanks to construction of offshore wind turbines:

“When you detonate massive explosives, repeatedly drive steel piles into the ocean floor with a hydraulic hammer, and blast high decibel sonar mapping signals underwater, you’re going to harm animals that rely on sound to orient themselves in the ocean. To say it is mere coincidence that hundreds of these creatures have washed ashore, dead, all of a sudden, during precisely the same months when the blasting and pounding began, is brazen deception.”

Nonetheless, when the story can’t be buried, deception is the strategy. Not one major environmental organization, government watchdog agency, or media outlet has called for a slowdown in industrial offshore wind projects. Instead, they repeatedly claim these allegations are misinformation. And from that paragon of truth, FactCheck.org, we get this: “No Evidence Offshore Wind Development Killing Whales.”

Let’s set aside the obvious negative impact on whale populations of tens of thousands of marine surveying and construction sorties into offshore areas where shipping traffic has never before been concentrated, or the impact of noise and explosions on not one site, such as would be the case with a lone oil rig, but on thousands of sites, each one being prepared for an offshore wind turbine. The destruction wrought by wind turbines extends well beyond what it’s doing to whales.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ending Anti-White Discrimination – the Asheville Case By Janet Levy

By on October 12th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/ending_antiwhite_discrimination__the_asheville_case.html

Over the past few decades, two extreme ideas have unfortunately gained wide acceptance: that racism is systemic in America; and that if you are white, you are by default privileged and racist. 

As a result, many young whites are ridden with guilt.  Meanwhile, leftists and radical blacks are advancing reverse racism – active discrimination against those who happen to be white.

No wonder a 2021 Gallup poll found white-black relations at a 20-year low: 57% of the respondents said relations were “somewhat” or “very” bad.  In The War on Whites, author Ed Brodow attributed the downturn to Barack Obama and his focus on racial division.  Harping on white supremacy and privilege fomented animosity and engendered an inquisition against whites, aimed at exorcising unconscious biases through a “racial justice shakedown.”

Examples abound of institutional level discrimination by exclusion of whites, unthinkable a decade ago and sure to provoke widespread outrage if blacks or Latinx were excluded.  Perhaps the most glaring instance is the establishment of quotas by the city of Asheville, North Carolina, for its Human Relations Commission.  Five white residents, represented by attorney Ruth Smith, have sued the city for employing “illegal discriminatory policies and procedures.”

More on the Asheville lawsuit later.  Before that, some other examples of the effrontery with which institutions are testing the waters on anti-white discrimination, perhaps in the hope of normalizing it eventually:

To mark the second anniversary of her inauguration as mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot announced that she wouldn’t be granting one-on-one interviews to white reporters.  Her justification: the City Hall press corps was overwhelmingly white in a city where more than half the people identify as black, Latino, Native American, or Asian Pacific Americans.
In August, retail giant Best Buy released a memo about a mini MBA-style training program for employees from which whites were specifically prohibited.  The social-media blowback was such that its CEO Corie Barry made her Twitter account private.
Last year, Brown University offered an online teacher-training course meant only for black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).  It removed the restriction after a complaint.
The University of Minnesota established a summer internship to prepare students for graduate school that excluded whites and offered stipends of $6,000 to black and Native American students.  The university is re-evaluating the program after a complaint.
In 2021, Cornell University created a BIPOC-only rock-climbing course.  An instructor claimed it wasn’t discriminatory but aimed at making minorities comfortable in a white-centric sport.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

DHS Admits Biden’s Border Crisis Is Making It Easier For Terrorists To Enter America By: Shawn Fleetwood

By on October 12th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/11/dhs-admits-bidens-border-crisis-is-making-it-easier-for-terrorists-to-enter-america/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted in a September report that foreign terrorists are exploiting the Biden-manufactured border crisis to illegally enter the United States.

Released last month by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the “Homeland Threat Assessment” for fiscal year 2024 includes an admission by the agency that international terrorists are looking to capitalize on the Biden administration’s open border policies and the resulting influx of illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border to enter the American homeland. Under the section titled, “Border and Immigration Security,” the report specifically noted how “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”

The agency further acknowledged “individuals with potential terrorism connections” are actively attempting to enter the U.S. thanks to the ongoing crisis. Months before the 2023 fiscal year ended, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had already encountered approximately 160 individuals on the Terrorist Screening Data Set (TSDS), or “watchlist” — more than the 100 or so encountered in the entirety of the 2022 fiscal year. According to the report, “Inclusion in the TSDS ranges from known associates of watchlisted individuals, such as family members, to individuals directly engaged in terrorist activity.”

Despite proclaiming support for a “secure” border, President Joe Biden and his administration have routinely dismantled policies that helped stymie the ongoing crisis. In addition to auctioning off border wall construction materials, Biden moved to gut the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy shortly after taking office. That policy required illegal border crossers seeking asylum to stay in the Latin American country until their court hearing.

It’s estimated that nearly 7 million illegal immigrants have been “encountered” at the U.S.-Mexico border since Biden took office, according to the New York Post. And that doesn’t even include the potentially millions of “gotaways” who evaded capture by CBP agents.

Last month’s DHS assessment was issued weeks before Hamas — an Iranian-backed terrorist organization operating out of Gaza — launched a series of unprovoked and barbaric attacks against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians. The attacks have since prompted concerns that foreign-based terrorist organizations could exploit America’s open border to illegally enter the U.S. and launch similar operations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

You Won’t Believe How Many Times Biden Lied About His Corrupt Family Business By Stephen Green

By on October 12th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/10/11/you-wont-believe-how-many-times-biden-lied-about-his-corrupt-family-business-n1734250

When I first saw the number showing just how many times Presidentish Joe Biden had effectively lied when he said, “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” I was flabbergasted. And until now I have never, ever used the word flabbergasted. Well, maybe (unlike Biden) not never… but certainly not very often.

If only the same could be said about our alleged president and his estranged relationship with the truth.

But then I looked at that number again, thought a bit more about how Biden has spent a lifetime in public “service” telling lies without reservation or hesitation — oftentimes for seemingly no reason — and do you know what I realized?

“Yeah, 29,000 times is about right for this one story.”

I told you it was a big number.

America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the National Archives to dig into Biden’s emails when he was Vice President, which are a matter of public record. Despite Biden’s insistence that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” what the archives showed was something a teensy bit greater than zero.

I’m no calculus surgeon, but I can add up simple rows of figures. And what those figures add up to is 29,067 instances in which Biden effectively lied about “never” having discussed business with Hunter.

But that’s just the icing on the Biden Crime Syndicate’s cake of ick.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

I Went to the Border and This is What I Saw The egregious affront to Americans that must not be ignored. by Jonathan Emord

By on October 12th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/i-went-to-the-border-and-this-is-what-i-saw/

The Biden administration’s open border policy has invited the most violent and lawless to flock to America and enter our country with virtually no impediments.  The unvetted come here neither pledging allegiance to the United States nor relinquishing their citizenship and loyalties to foreign powers.  Our government is giving each at taxpayers’ expense cash, a cell phone, health care, legal help, transportation, and lodging.  NGOs operating almost exclusively on federal grants buy the illegal aliens’ bus, train, and plane tickets to wherever they wish to go across the country.  For upwards of eight months, their livelihood is financed by tax dollars.  Our tax dollars are literally paying for the invasion and destruction of own country.  This massive welfare to the world and without limit grows every second of every day indefinitely into the future.

I just came back from an eye-opening CBP tour of the U.S.-Mexico border (San Diego Sector).  CBP agents who formerly policed the border have been reassigned to human processing, leaving our nation largely defenseless.  Just one of the massive 132,000 square foot human processing centers cost taxpayers $32 million to construct (a huge white tent with detention pods inside) and $9 million monthly to operate.  Along the border, CBP drove me to areas of peculiar national security interest, all left unprotected.

In one, CBP showed me where water sometimes flows from Mexico to the United States.  To accommodate the flows, large drainage tunnels have been constructed out of concrete.  CBP welds onto the openings of the tunnels iron grates.  Cartel agents who carry diamond cutters on their belts regularly cut the grates to facilitate illegal entry of drugs and gangs.  As the clip of me at this border intersection reveals, the tunnels into the United States were open at the time of my visit.

In another area, you can see where the Biden administration ordered border wall construction halted.  That area, the Zone 18 border gap, is wide open.  On the Mexican side there are cartel dwellings.  Before my visit, two illegal aliens crossed onto American soil at Zone 18 between the Mexican side and the wall for the American side, an area CBP calls “no man’s land.”  Cartel members tracked the aliens into no man’s land and shot them for failing to pay their full ransom for entry into the U.S.  One died.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Anti-Racists Should Stop Talking Like Racists Wokesters are pushing the same malignant ideas that MLK fought and died to expose. by Bruce Thornton

By on October 12th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/anti-racists-should-stop-talking-like-racists/

A paradox of the Civil Rights movement is that the driving force behind that great victory––the codification in law, acknowledged by a majority of the nation, that color could not and should not compromise black American’s political equality and unalienable rights––was quickly degraded by the continuation of the pseudo-concept of  “race,” an artifact of racist scientism.

Ever since, our racialist discourse has continued to legitimize and prioritize the idea of  “color” as the most essential dimension of our identities. As a result of this racial essentialism, racism has found a new life in the “woke” ideology of “systemic racism” and “white fragility,” which are predicated on the assumption that all so-called “white” people are indelibly stained with racist animus, even if they don’t know it. This claim is the real “Jim Crow 2.0” Joe Biden talked about in 2022, not the common-sense election reforms he was attacking.

So it is today that the central preposterous and destructive fallacy of racism––that every member of the “inferior” race is in all respects indelibly inferior to every member of the “superior” race––lives on.

This maximalist absolutism was necessary in the old South to protect the justification of slavery as a natural institution reflecting the alleged disparities between black and white. But bans on allowing slaves to learn to read, for example, were a tacit admission that totalizing inferiority was incoherent, since if all people of African descent were inferior, how could they learn to read or be further educated?  And without that “natural” inferiority, on what grounds could slavery be justified?

Next, despite several decades of activist historians claiming to find racism based on appearance as far back as ancient Greece, “race” and “racism” as we know them were a product of the Enlightenment and the scientism it fostered. This is not to say that bigotry and prejudice didn’t exist, and often lead to violence and injustice. But such bigotry was in the main not based on how people looked or the color of their skin.

Indeed, the “father of history,” Herodotus, in his 5th century B.C. work Histories, wrote of Ethiopia that “its men are the tallest, the most handsome, and the longest lived,” and said of swarthy Egypt that “it has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any other place.”

Rather than physical appearance, Greek bigotry reflected a dislike for how other ethnicities lived, their mores, customs, language, laws and, for the Greeks, whether they were free citizens or unfree subjects. The Athenians’ contempt for the Persians, for example, was based on their subjecting themselves to a Great King, in whose presence they had to prostrate themselves and kiss the ground. Even if a Persian was rich, to the Greeks he was still a slave who groveled before a tyrannical master.

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