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Ruth King

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Resistance or Terror: The Importance of Dosage by Amir Taheri

By on October 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21011/resistance-or-terror-the-importance-of-dosage

However, it is hard to see how the October 7 attack could be categorized as an act of resistance by freedom-fighters… For Hamas, October 7 was a war of choice, not a war of necessity, and its goal wasn’t just to terrorize a real or imaginary foe but to murder as many non-combatants as possible.

Terror is used to persuade or force an adversary into doing something you want or stop doing something you don’t want and sadly, in many instances it works. However, if an act of terror transcends certain boundaries, it could produce the opposite of what the terrorist hoped for. In other words, it is all a matter of dosage.

Without the “Al-Aqsa Storm” raid, no Israeli prime minister, let alone Benjamin Netanyahu, who happened to have hit the nadir of unpopularity, would have dared to launch a total war aimed at flushing Hamas out of Gaza and Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

Sinwar isn’t the first victim of unintended consequences and won’t be the last either.

In hindsight, it seems that the late leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, understood the importance of dosage in terror and/or resistance.

This is why initially, to the surprise of some, Nasrallah refused to enter the danse-macabre opened by Sinwar.

We may never know what persuaded or forced Nasrallah to abandon his usual caution and join an adventure beyond his control. My guess is that he didn’t jump, but was pushed. Your guess as to who pushed him.

These days, my two favorite bookshops in Paris and London are devoting a full shelf to books on or inspired by Hamas’s “Al-Aqsa Storm” October 7 invasion of Israel.

Some of these books offer various accounts of what happened on that day and could be classed as extended reportages of the kind news magazines offered in the good old days of print journalism. The most interesting of these, Trey Yingst’s Black Saturday, which broadens its scope to offer a portrayal of the subsequent war in Gaza. Because the author is a television reporter, his fast-paced reportage often resembles a newsreel. That, however, does not prevent him from offering often deep insights into the mind-sets of the two adversaries.

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United Nations’ Material Support for Terrorism: Allegedly Gave $1.3 Billion to Hamas in Cash, Presumably for Weapons Corruption and Bias Have Reduced the UN to Irrelevance by Con Coughlin

By on October 13th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21013/united-nations-terrorism

Gavriel Mairone, the attorney who is representing the plaintiffs, argues that these shocking allegations demonstrate that, for more than a decade, UNRWA’s aid distribution network was involved in widespread fraud and corruption. The lawsuit claims this scheme not only enriched Hamas but also funded terrorism, playing a pivotal role in the October 7 attacks.

The first damning evidence of the UN’s complicity in the worst terrorist atrocity committed in Israel’s history emerged after Israel’s military reported that 450 workers employed by UNRWA were “military operatives from Hamas and other armed groups” and has shared this intelligence with the United Nations.

The dossier of “a UN crime against humanity” and its demonization of Israel is too long to list, but one can get a glimpse of it…

A better idea, given the body’s recent woeful record on its handling of the Middle East, would be to demolish the entire infrastructure of this corrupt and institutionally biased body.

Accusations that the United Nations funded Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure by transferring $1.3 billion to the organisation, some of which was used to finance the purchase of weapons used in last year’s October 7 attacks, will only add to the view that the UN is no longer fit to fulfil the role for which it was originally intended.

A lawsuit filed in US Federal Court by victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks makes damning accusations against the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) that it was involved in orchestrating a large-scale money laundering operation from which the terrorist organisation benefitted.

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One Year After Oct. 7, American Voters Face Stark Foreign Policy Choice As Americans prepare to choose our next leader, the contrast between the failed foreign policies of recent Democratic administrations and the successful approach of former President Trump is striking. By Josh Hammer

By on October 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/one-year-after-oct-7-american-voters-face-stark-foreign-policy-choice/

Within minutes of Hamas jihadists breaching the Israeli border on Oct. 7, 2023, and commencing the largest slaughter of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, Western leftists and other defenders of the genocidal Palestinian-Arab cause rallied around a talking point: “This did not occur in a vacuum.” The claim, blithely offered by armchair revolutionaries without even acknowledging the many hundreds of butchered babies, sadistically tortured families, raped women, and young music festivalgoers taken hostage, was that Israel had somehow impelled the horrific rampage on its own civilians. Those with a functioning moral compass recognize this as obvious terror apologia.

Reflecting back one year later on the Hamas massacre and the current Middle East imbroglio in which Israel is now fighting a seven-front war, however, I wonder whether the terrorist apologists may have had a point. That is not to suggest that these moral monsters were in any way whatsoever correct to justify, defend, or praise a pogrom so barbaric that it would have made Heinrich Himmler blush. But the mini-jihadists were correct to suggest there was a broader geopolitical context to the massacre—just a totally different one than what they had in mind. The actual relevant context was the weak, failed, and Iran-emboldening foreign policy of former President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris.

As Americans get ready to select our next commander-in-chief, the stark contrast between the failed foreign policy of successive Democratic administrations and the successful foreign policy of the interregnum Republican administration, that of former and perhaps future President Donald Trump, is instructive.

The basic Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy doctrine is simple: Reward America’s enemies and punish America’s friends. Obama famously sought to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, America’s most dependable and national interest-aligned Middle East ally. He removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office—a symbolic slap in the face to the United Kingdom, with which America has (had?) a “special relationship.” He emboldened the Islamist fanatics in Tehran, bamboozling a skeptical American public with his wretched nuclear accord and even secretly sending $400 million in wooden pallets of cash to the mullahs. The Biden-Harris administration has doubled down on every count: It has been the most anti-Israel administration since Israel’s founding in 1948, it has lavished the mullahs with billions in ransom payments and sanction waivers, and it has continued the Obama-Biden administration’s mollycoddling of America’s Chinese Communist Party civilizational arc.

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Fake Crowds, Fake Ads, Real Ridicule: A Week of Failures for Harris-Walz What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. By Roger Kimball

By on October 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/fake-crowds-fake-ads-real-ridicule-a-week-of-failures-for-harris-walz/

If I may start with an understatement:  It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris.  First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.  Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked.  But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.

That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network.  As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”

Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”  The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally.  But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.

And that was not the worst of it.  A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted.  As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”

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Why Therapy Is Broken Eleanor Cummins Everyone is telling one another to “get help,” but few acknowledge that the practice is often flawed.(Published September 26, 2022)

By on October 12th, 2024

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-therapy-is-broken?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

An hour a week in a shrink’s office is increasingly treated as a prerequisite for a healthy, happy life. There, we imagine, friends learn new coping skills and enemies realize the errors of their ways. Everyone is “healed.” Therapy has been marketed as a panacea for all kinds of issues, from fixing a bad personality to ending racism. Refusing to seek treatment becomes a red flag, while fluency in “therapy-speak” is all but mandatory. Professional help has even infiltrated our leisure hours: Reality TV shows like Couples Therapy, podcasts from This Is Dating to Where Should We Begin?, and “therapy in a box” card games, some actually designed by psychoanalysts, abound.

Unfortunately, as anyone who’s actually tried it can tell you, therapy often sucks.

Anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of people who go to therapy report some benefit—but at least 5 percent of clients get worse as a result of treatment. (For people from marginalized groups, harmful outcomes may be even more common.) The remainder report no clear benefit at all. Plenty of would-be clients go once and, feeling alienated, never return. Others keep trying, even as it becomes clear they aren’t really getting what they need, whatever that is.

But the American mental health care system has hardly acknowledged the existence of bad therapy, let alone taken steps to fix the problem. Instead, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the demand for therapy soaring, the American Psychological Association and other organizations seemed to prioritize the quantity of available appointments over the quality of any resulting therapy. The rise of app-based mental health care, like BetterHelp and Talkspace, has only made this landscape harder to navigate.

The result is that everyone is telling everyone else to go to therapy, but “nobody really creates space to have dialog about, ‘OK, if it doesn’t work, let’s talk about why,’” says psychotherapist Ben Fineman, cohost of the Very Bad Therapy podcast with Carrie Wiita. That’s partly out of fear of uncertainty, which therapists dislike as much as anyone, and partly because reforming mental health care is complicated. But ignoring these shortcomings is only perpetuating the suffering therapy promises to heal.

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Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier-Reality Is Linda Goudsmit

By on October 12th, 2024

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

CHAPTER 40: The Art of Using Technologies to Alter Human Cognition: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28110/chapter-40-the-art-of-using-technologies-to-alter

CHAPTER 41: Your Brain Is the Battlespace: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28111/chapter-41-your-brain-is-the-battlespace 

CHAPTER 42: Quantum Computing Empowers Technocracy, Transhumanism, and the Managerial Unistate: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28112/chapter-42-quantum-computing-empowers-technocracy

CHAPTER 43: Ideological Subversion, Communitarianism, and the 15-Minute City: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28113/chapter-43-ideological-subversion

CHAPTER 44: The American Reformation: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28114/chapter-44-the-american-reformation

CHAPTER 45: Every Conspiracy Begins with a Theory: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28115/chapter-45-every-conspiracy-begins-with-a-theory

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Betraying the Free World? by Majid Rafizadeh

By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21008/betraying-the-free-world

The only country in the Middle East consistently pressured to make concessions “to avoid escalation” was the victim of October 7, Israel.

The rapacity of Iran’s regime, which apparently feels free to launch attacks on U.S. troops at will — especially after enjoying massive amounts of US generosity — is breathtaking.

The Biden-Harris administration also infused the regime with “closer to $60 billion” — which most likely funded its militias; its terrorist proxy organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; its expansionist agenda as far away as Venezuela, and its oppressive domestic policies, to which, for decade, the U.S. has turned a blind eye. When widespread protests take place in Iran, citizens bravely rise up against the regime, only to be brutally crushed — without so much as a glance from the U.S.

Iran, taking its cue from the Biden-Harris administration’s road-siding of Israel, proceeded, not surprisingly, to escalate its campaign against it. If there are no serious consequences, why stop?

Israel now finds itself fighting for its survival on multiple fronts. Thanks to the seeming lack of support from the Biden administration, Israel alone must fend off Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the UN, much of Europe, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, professionally whipped-up Western university campuses and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The dangerous reality that unfolds when a once-reliable ally is abandoned, is that enemies can become increasingly aggressive so long as no one stops them.

The message being sent is that allies will be left to fend for themselves, and enemies of freedom and democracy can go ahead and demolish them with impunity.

The Free World, once a beacon of security, is left vulnerable, isolated and under siege.

An ally, a true friend, is someone upon whom you can depend in times of crisis, especially when under attack. Throughout history, alliances have been formed on the basis of mutual support and protection. Yet, one could strongly argue that no administration in the history of the United States has left its allies in such a vulnerable position as the Biden-Harris administration.

Iran, no longer content to merely act through its proxies, has taken direct and aggressive action against America’s long-term ally, Israel, by attacking not only Israel but, through its proxies and militias, U.S. troops in the region more than 160 times just since October 2023 — whenever it deems fit. Iran-backed Hamas terrorists murdered 43 Americans in their October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cold Comfort from Norway Rachael Kohn

By on October 12th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-middle-east/cold-comfort-from-norway/
Norway’s pride in its democracy has been tainted by the May recognition of Palestine

Norway, the home of the Oslo Accords and the Nobel Peace Prize, is proud of its democracy. Every May 17, as the country emerges from its long dark winter, the capital is alive with marching bands and colourful parades of young and old dressed in their elaborate national costumes, to mark the day in 1814 when the country’s constitution was passed. It also signalled the end of 434 years of Danish rule, which by all accounts was so benign that most Norwegians did not seek independence. (Even then, Norway was given as a prize to Sweden, which attacked and defeated Denmark for backing Napoleon, but that’s another story that lasted until 1905.) Ten years ago the bicentenary of the 1814 constitution was a huge affair.

Not to let Norway’s political pride fade, in May 2024 an even greater celebration was mounted to commemorate 750 years of the country’s democratic origins. How it jumped from 1814 back to 1274 is a story briefly told on a series of billboards that stand in front of the Parliament (Storting) in Oslo. In this version, the Landslov, Norway’s first nationwide code of law, issued by King Magnus VI between 1274 and 1276, established a centralised authority for the first time over a population of perhaps 500,000, scattered across a land divided by high mountains, deep rivers and long dark winters. Consisting of four regional law books and covering marriage, property and inheritance, as well as the rules of royal succession and Christian laws, the Landslov attempted to exert control over the isolated farms and impoverished hamlets which were still vulnerable to the remnants of Viking overlords whose rule had formally ended in 1066.

How the Landslov is construed as the origin of Norwegian democracy comes down to the notion that everyone was effectively under the same law, which emphasised the qualities of “justice, truth, peace and grace, as opposed to fear, monetary gifts, hostility or alliances”. What is excluded from the narrative erected in front of the Parliament is that the Landslov attributed these virtues to the Christian laws it promulgated, which contained a prologue that emphasised the Christian faith and reflected the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Fourth Lateran Council. The Landslov would be administered through what had been local assemblies that were then turned into courts of law enforcing the new law code.

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Tal Fortgang Lying by Omission Ta-Nehisi Coates declined to provide critical context about Israel and Palestine in a CBS News interview.

By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/lying-by-omission

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent appearance on CBS News has ignited yet another round of controversy. This time, the firestorm surrounded the network’s Tony Dokoupil, who dared to ask Coates challenging, if obvious, questions. Those who treat Coates as a modern-day prophet claimed that the anchor’s behavior crossed the line into insensitivity, and even racism.

What followed was ritual humiliation. CBS subjected Dokoupil to what can only be described as a struggle session, bringing in DEI consultants to “educate” him on the acceptable bounds of discourse and the proper body language to maintain when talking to an exalted minority guest. This is the state of modern journalism: the slightest challenge to the progressive narrative results in swift reeducation efforts.

A review of the substance of the underlying exchange, and the baffling explanation Coates offered in defense of his unfairness toward Israel, illuminates why there has been such a rush to reframe his CBS appearance as a hostile confrontation.

Dokoupil’s first comments and question challenged the broadside against Israel contained in Coates’s new book, The Message. “The content of that section” on Israel, noted Dokoupil, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates . . . a very talented, smart guy, leave out so much?” Dokoupil asked. In a book largely about Israel’s security practices and their supposed excesses, the anchor pressed, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?” These are crucial questions that Coates must have anticipated receiving from even a friendly interlocutor. Dokoupil offers one more natural follow-up for the author, who cannot find the slightest justification for Israel’s security measures: “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

Coates’s response was puzzling, but revelatory:

I would say the perspective that you just outlined—there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. . . . I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly, in my interviews, whether there is a single network [or] mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. . . . The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine . . . those were the stories that I have not heard.

In these few lines, Coates channels rhetoric that he has employed throughout his career—a nebulous invocation of marginalized peoples (here, Palestinians) and a claim that their members are denied a platform in the American public sphere.

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Israel at war: democracy in action The common cause uniting citizens with the armed forces has been key to Israel’s military success. Mike Hume

By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/08/israel-at-war-democracy-in-action/

How does Israel do it? When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated the head terrorist of Hezbollah two weeks ago, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that ‘We are winning’. And he was right.

A year after the darkness of 7 October, the message from Israel is: let there be light! The IDF has crushed Hamas in Gaza, delivered hammer blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and shaken the terrorists’ sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots.

So how has Israel – a small state of fewer than 10million people, surrounded, as Daniel Ben-Ami analysed on spiked, by genocidal Islamist enemies and isolated on the international stage as never before – had such military success?

No doubt superior military technology, both imported and homemade, has played its part, alongside the sort of intelligence and chutzpah required to blow up personal pagers in terrorists’ pockets.

The most important factor, however, is surely the active commitment of a large part of the Israeli population to the war effort. It is a people’s war, supported by millions who identify with and have a stake in the Jewish State, and view its existential struggle against the Islamists as a fight for their own heritage and future.

Anybody who supports democracy and freedom should be unequivocally on Israel’s side. As the sole democracy in the Middle East, and the sworn enemy of Islamist terrorists, Israel is on the frontline of the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism.

Even more than that, Israel is an example to us all of what can be achieved if you fight for what you believe in and take the people with you. The support of the Israeli demos – the people – means that Israel is not only fighting for democracy. Its war effort is real democracy in action.

This idea might come as a surprise to those who get their news about the Middle East solely from the mainstream media. The only Israelis who ever appear on the TV news here, in between the constant coverage of suffering Palestinians, are those protesting against the Israeli government and demanding an end to the war.

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