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Muslim Leaders Who Oppose Terrorism: The New Heroes by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21735/muslim-leaders-who-oppose-terrorism

“You [Israelis] represent the world of brotherhood, the world of humanity, their world of affection, the world of democracy, the world of freedom.” — Hassen Chalghoumi, imam from France and head of the visiting delegation, at a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, July 7, 2025.

When Muslims say they support the Palestinian “resistance,” they are actually voicing support for terrorism and Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against Israelis and others.

Undoubtedly, there are some Muslims who are in favor of these kinds of visits and interfaith dialogue, but they either prefer to remain neutral or are afraid to voice their opinions in public. Muslims should applaud, not condemn, Muslim leaders who reach out to Israel and Jews and speak out against Islamist terror groups, for their own future: they can choose, instead of a life of fear a life of freedom, prosperity and opportunity.

A group of brave Islamic religious leaders from France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Italy and Britain who are visiting Israel this week are being condemned and ridiculed by many Muslims. The leaders are being accused of “treason” and promoting “normalization” with Israel.

The Muslim leaders did not come to Israel to stand against Muslims or the Palestinians. Rather, they came with a message of peace, coexistence and tolerance. They came to Israel out of a belief that interfaith dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims is imperative. Interfaith dialogue, which promotes peace and harmony, is important because it allows people to learn about different religions and cultures, and to appreciate the similarities and differences between them.

These Islamic leaders are heroes because they chose to visit Israel at a time when many Muslims, especially those living in Europe, are waging a massive smear campaign against Israel because of its war against the Iran-backed Hamas Islamist terror group in the Gaza Strip. Muslims who care about their religion should stand up against Islamist terrorists who have hijacked their religion and are committing atrocities in the name of Islam.

The Shadowy Past of the Secret Bank That Controls the World By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/the_shadowy_past_of_the_secret_bank_that_controls_the_world.html

Few people—even diligent media followers—are likely to speak knowledgably about the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). Yet, hidden in plain sight in a 20-story tower (with four more stories below ground level) in Basel, the BIS influences the leaders of the world’s top central banks and controls the global economy. Moreover, it cannot be questioned or held accountable for any of its actions. In his 2013 book Tower of Basel, Adam LeBor, a former reporter for The Economist and author of thoroughly researched works like Hitler’s Secret Bankers, The Last Days of Budapest, and City of Oranges, analyzes the bank’s history to explain how it gained unlimited power.

He also exposes its complete amorality. Thomas McKittrick, the bank’s chief during the war, whom the author calls “Hitler’s American Banker,” kept passing critical information to the Nazi regime. The BIS financed the Holocaust by accepting gold stolen by the Nazis from Belgium and marking it as German, even though a Belgian central banker warned that the gold had probably been melted down and re-stamped with German markings.

Austrian and Czech gold was also accepted as German deposits and kept out of reach. It was common knowledge that, besides gold from the governments of occupied nations, the Nazis were depositing gold stolen by the Devisenschutzkommando (DSK), Hitler’s special squads of treasure-hunting torturers. But that did not matter to the BIS. Kapital über alles, as LeBor titles the first part of the book.

Hunger for profit and disregard for ethics—these seem to be ingrained in the very DNA of the BIS. As recently as 1991, when the Argentinian economy collapsed and the country was $81 billion in debt, the BIS accepted—and thus kept out of creditors’ reach—money that should have rightfully been returned to them. Besides two fund management firms, the creditors were mostly pensioners who had invested in Argentinian bonds. The firms have sued the BIS and brought some attention to its highhandedness.

Iran: Will the West Finish the Job? by Amin Sharifi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21731/iran-finish-the-job

Iran’s suspension of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not a turning point. It is business as usual. Tehran’s decades-long strategy — deny, delay, deceive — continues, and the West still refuses to call it for what it is: a slow-motion march toward nuclear capability…. It has never stopped.

The problem is not that Iran has “suspended cooperation.” The problem is that the West keeps treating each step as if it is a fresh crisis that can still be reversed with enough diplomacy.

Iran will not stop, and diplomacy has an extremely low probability of working for a serious, long-term solution. Forty-six years of sanctions, deterrence, and inspections have all failed. Regime change appears the only realistic solution. It is what many Iranians still risk their lives demanding, what most of Iran’s neighbors would welcome, and what the broader international community would ultimately benefit from.

Iran’s suspension of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not a turning point. It is business as usual. Tehran’s decades-long strategy — deny, delay, deceive — continues, and the West still refuses to call it for what it is: a slow-motion march toward nuclear capability. Some commentators are now warning that Iran has suspended cooperation and may finally pursue the bomb, as if that is not already taking place. Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons for decades. It has never stopped.

Iran started and developed its nuclear program in secrecy, lying to the world for years. It has repeatedly breached agreements and violated international limits whenever it saw an opportunity. It built secret facilities at Natanz and Fordow, buried centrifuges deep underground, and enriched uranium to higher levels while misleading international inspectors. Even when inspectors were allowed in, Iran’s disclosures were at best partial, its cooperation selective. Every so-called “deal” was a “pause” button, never a stop.

Owen Jones embodies the wild-eyed mania of Israelophobia His mad, squirming performance with Piers Morgan proves that Israel hate rots the brain. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/07/owen-jones-embodies-the-wild-eyed-mania-of-israelophobia/

It’s always fun to see a twit have his arse handed to him. And it happened with bells on for Owen Jones on Friday. He’d spent the whole week defending Bob Vylan’s sick chant of ‘Death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury. That gurning punk and the sozzled white brats who joined him in his grim clamour were not actually calling for the death of Jewish people, Jones Gentile-splained in the Guardian. No, they were just calling for the ‘dismantling’ of a ‘military machine’, he said, quoting Bob Vylan’s own explanation. How dumb do you have to be to think that a mob screaming for death actually wants death, Jones wondered from his impenetrable bunker of smugness.

Then he went on Piers Morgan Uncensored. And Morgan had a surprise for him. Do you ‘100 per cent’ believe, Morgan asked, that when Bob Vylan said ‘Death to the IDF’ he did not mean ‘death to individual soldiers’? ‘Yes’, Jones snapped with superb conceit. Then Morgan showed him a clip filmed in May, pre-Glasto, at Alexandra Palace. It showed Bob Vylan calling for ‘death to every single IDF soldier out there’. There it was, clear as it was vile: a punk and his mob whooping with deathly glee at the prospect of every soldier of the Jewish State being wiped out without mercy.

Jones’s face was a picture. He smiled awkwardly, though fuck knows what there is to smile about when you’ve just been rumbled on TV as someone who provides moral cover to mobs that clamour for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers. He went into panic mode. He tried some whataboutery. Israeli officials have said worse about Palestinians, he yelped in desperation. It was an extraordinary sight: a self-styled ‘anti-fascist’ floundering on TV after being exposed as excuse-maker-in-chief for one of the most fascistic cries we’ve heard in this country in years.

In the world of decency, the world not yet lost to the cranial pox of Israelophobia, everyone knew what ‘Death to the IDF’ meant. We knew that if the plummy bigots of Glasto got their way and the IDF ‘died’, then the Jewish homeland would be left to the mercy of the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. We knew that ‘Death to the IDF’ meant death to the Jewish youths who swell its ranks. And to the millions of Jews they are charged with protecting from the Islamofascists in their midst.

How did others not see this? Why did activists who wang on about ‘hate speech’ give a nod of approval to this truly hateful dream of death for Jews? Why did leftists who reach for the smelling salts when a feminist says women don’t have cocks cheer like loons when they saw a crowd call for the violent demise of foreigners? It’s because their hearts and minds have been corroded by Israelophobia. It’s because they are so firmly in the grip of this swirling bigotry that their capacity for reasoned thought, far less kindness, has been all but destroyed. It’s because society’s moral guardrails have collapsed under the weight of their raging animus for Israel, unleashing a neo-medieval delirium that should horrify us all.

That’s what Jones’s performance on Morgan’s show brought home to me: the sheer mania of the bourgeois hatred for Israel. There is much speculation about why Jones seemed so unstable. He appeared frenzied, tormented, almost smashing his glass at one point. This has led some, including JK Rowling, to wonder if he’d partaken of the white stuff before going on air. Actually, Jones has since tweeted, he was on amphetamines for my ADHD. Taking drugs in your 40s for that most middle-class of imaginary malaises? Mate, just pretend you did coke instead of admitting to that.

7/7 and the refusal to confront Islamist terror These commemorations have been a grotesque display of moral cowardice. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/07/7-7-and-the-refusal-to-confront-islamist-terror/

Have we learned the lessons of 7/7? So begins every trite radio and TV discussion today as we mark 20 years since four homegrown jihadists blew themselves up on London’s transport network and took 52 innocent souls with them.

Going by much of the commentary, you’d think this was a purely logistical, security question. There’s a long piece on the BBC website, talking about how the police and the security services were forced to up their game after the London Bombings, the new powers they now enjoy as a consequence, the attendant concerns over civil liberties, etc.

The words ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihadist’ do not appear once in the piece, even as it details the evolving ‘extremist’ threat posed first by al-Qaeda and then the ‘self-styled Islamic State’. There is often a stubborn refusal, a stammering hesitation, to mention what flavour of ‘extremism’ most menaces us – a cowardly tic that was skewered best by Morrissey: ‘An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?’

This attempt to brush over the I-word – to blithely ignore the religious, ideological character of those hellish bombings two decades ago – is everywhere today. The deadliest terror attack on UK soil since Lockerbie – the deadliest terror attack on London ever – is being talked about as if it were motivated by some vaguely defined form of ‘hate’ or ‘division’, rather than a global Islamist movement.

In his official statement today, King Charles says the attacks show the importance of ‘building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding’. What does this even mean? Does Charles, or his spokespeople, even know? Perhaps he thinks a well-timed interfaith meeting might have stopped those suicide bombers.

Back in 2016, the late great comedian Norm Macdonald posted a tweet for the ages: ‘What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?’ Today, as we mark 7/7, what you might call Macdonald’s Law – that any discussion of Islamic terrorism will almost immediately pivot away from the horror at hand and towards largely hypothetical fears of an anti-Muslim backlash – is once again in full effect.

‘For many in the British Muslim community, the tragedy of 7 July 2005 lives long in the memory’, reads a piece in the Guardian. By ‘tragedy’, the writer doesn’t mean those who were slain, had their legs blown off, or had their bodies sprayed with nails and glass, but the ‘feelings of suspicion, isolation and hostility’ experienced by some British Muslims after the attack.

We all know the purpose of articles like this. It isn’t to challenge anti-Muslim bigotry. It’s a brazen attempt to change the subject, from murders to feelings, from the questions the cultural elites would prefer not to discuss, to things that are totally uncontroversial, like racism being bad.

The Judge-Emperor: The Global Coup of the Courts by Drieu Godefridi

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21730/judge-emperor-courts

In the West, it is not the executive that threatens the separation of powers. It is faceless judges lacking democratic legitimacy who legislate on the pretext of judging…. [T]his judicial imperialism… [has] become a judicial tyranny….

These innovations… have gradually established the Israeli Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of all questions, not only legal but also political. Any Israeli citizen — and any NGO, even one funded from abroad — has the right to ask the Supreme Court to overturn any democratic decision…. There is no decision of the Israeli government and parliament that cannot be overturned by unelected judges.

[Marine Le Pen and her supporters] argued, accurately, that the judges were essentially preventing the French people from voting for Le Pen.

There is effectively no longer a single “right-wing” measure that can be adopted in any field by Parliament or the government without being struck down by the Constitutional Council or the courts. When the left loses at the ballot box, it is certain to win in the courts. In France, the judge reigns and the people no longer seem to have sovereignty over anything.

The torrents of universal rules and requirements deriving from articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (e.g. privacy, dignity), and the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights are probably the worst modern example of tyrannical judicial imperialism. The anarchy of immigration in Europe is entirely of its making.

The US Supreme Court decided last week that the district court judges had jurisdiction over specific cases and plaintiffs in their districts — not across the nation.

“The judges of the nation are only the mouth that pronounces the words of the law, inanimate beings who can neither moderate its force nor its rigor.”
— Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Book XI, Chapter VI

From Israel to the United States, via Europe, the judicial coup d’état has become permanent. In the West, it is not the executive that threatens the separation of powers. It is faceless judges lacking democratic legitimacy who legislate on the pretext of judging. Here are four salient examples of this judicial imperialism — which have become a judicial tyranny — and a proposed American solution.

Israel

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Israeli Supreme Court introduced three innovations that revolutionized Israel’s legal and political landscape. First, it abolished the “standing” requirement, allowing anyone to challenge any government decision before the Supreme Court simply because they disagreed with it, even if they were not personally affected by it. This is unique in the Western world. Second, the Court removed the restriction on justiciability, placing all government and administrative actions (including foreign affairs, military actions and the budget) under its control — an extraordinary measure. Third, the Court took on the power to assess the “reasonableness” of government decisions, thus giving itself a political veto over the elected government’s choices.

Do Not Rely on Egypt or Any Arab State to Bring Security to Gaza by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21732/gaza-security-egypt

There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The Egyptians chose to ignore the smuggling as long as the weapons were making their way into the Gaza Strip and not staying in Egyptian territory. After all, these weapons were being used against Israel, not Egypt. The weapons did not pose any threat to Egypt’s national security. In addition, Egyptian military and police officers apparently benefitted by accepting bribes.

By turning a blind eye to the massive smuggling industry, Egypt significantly contributed to transforming the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip into a major base for Islamist terrorism, paving the way for the October 7 attack on Israel.

Egypt never did anything to stop Hamas from staging a coup against the Palestinian Authority and seizing control of the Gaza Strip. Egypt failed to stop the flow of weapons into the Gaza Strip. Egypt does not care about the Palestinians or Israel. It only cares about its own interests, and that is why it would be a big mistake to rely on the Egyptians or any Arab state to bring security and stability to the Gaza Strip.

Since the Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, 2023, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have discovered an estimated 90 tunnels crossing under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The tunnels have been used by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups to smuggle rockets and weapons into the Gaza Strip. According to Israeli military sources, there may be additional tunnels that have not been discovered. There are also concerns that the tunnels could be used to smuggle terrorists into Gaza.

The smuggling, which increased after Hamas’s violent and brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, took place under the watchful eyes of Egypt, if not with its willing assistance.

In Melbourne, the Latest Pogrom Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/anti-semitism/in-melbourne-the-latest-pogrom/

Let it drop in a casual conversation that you’ve spent a lot of time in the United States — half an adult lifetime in my case — and it can be quite the cue for a recitation of misconceptions. Oh, America, so violent, so heartless and cruel to its poor, so racist in closing borders to illegal aliens and deporting those already there! Read Tony Wright’s paint-by-numbers column in today’s Nine rags and you’ll get a quick taste of the shallow silliness that passes for informed commentary in the Australian press.

Or go back a further couple of days and find the same SMH and Age giving opinionista space to a young lawyer’s utter delight that Zohran Mamdani, a red-raggin’ Muslim intent on “seizing the means of production”, has just won the Democrats’ mayoral primary in New York City. Unmentioned was that only 5% of eligible voters bothered to cast their ballots and that Mamdani’s chances of ever being addressed as ‘Hizzoner’ are slim to non-existent. New Yorkers can be quite odd at times, but they’re not that stupid. It’s as if, somewhere over the Pacific, there’s a wrinkle in the time-space continuum that twists, distorts or simply erases news and views flowing our way.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at a church in Wayne, Michigan, where a young man armed to the teeth set out to massacre the congregation at their prayers. He managed to get off a few shots and wound a church elder, but that was it before he was himself cut down by church members who whipped out their own guns and returned fire. It barely rated a mention in Australia’s legacy media, notions of gun-crazy Americans having at it being par for the course, so where is the news in one more volley of shots?

What brings all this to mind is Melbourne’s latest shame, for on Friday night in Trashcanistan on the Yarra a piece of bipedal filth allegedly tried to burn down Victoria’s oldest synagogue and incinerate the 20-or-so Jews inside. Meanwhile, a flying squad of keffiyeh’d thugs invaded Miznon, a Jewish-owned restaurant in the Hardware Lane foodies’ strip, roughing up diners and overturning tables while chanting ‘Death to the IDF’. That the owner/chef is an Israeli was all the reason they needed. (Update: Police have now arrested a NSW man and charged him with various arson-related offences).

It would be shocking were such incidents not now commonplace. In December arsonists destroyed the Adass Israel Synagogue, and only last week, another synagogue, this one in South Yarra, was desecrated with graffiti hailing Iran and demanding ‘freedom’ for Palestine. If you remember Melbourne as once it was, a place where it was safe to be a Jew and the insanity of the wider world’s hatreds seemed so far very away, the response can only be tears.

Not that Premier Jacinta Allan was sobbing. Tears would have interrupted the flow of her boilerplate empathy. “This is disgraceful behaviour by a pack of cowards,” Ms Allan said. “That this happened on Shabbat makes it all the more abhorrent.”

Free Speech vs Personal Safety Peter O’Brien

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/the-law/free-speech-vs-personal-safety/

“Yes, Jewish Australians – even though you have contributed to this nation since the First Fleet and even though your families and friends are being murdered in Israel, and elsewhere, by the very forces these wielders of free speech are promoting – toughen up.”

Free speech has gotten a bit of a run recently, following, inter alia, the Glastonbury kerfuffle and the Wassim Haddad ruling.

Our esteemed editor in chief, Rebecca Weisser, has a powerful piece in the Spectator about Glastonbury, the appalling behaviour of some of the performers, and the crass stupidity of the BBC in allowing some segments to go to air.  She makes some pretty uncontroversial points – indeed, unarguable, in my view.  And yet, she attracted a number of unfavourable comments, a couple of which I reproduce below.

John Jacobsen opined:

Rebecca Weisser’s piece reads like someone clutching pearls while the rest of the world’s trying to have an honest convo. Yeah, some stuff said at Glastonbury was intense—but that’s literally what free speech protects: the right to say provocative, uncomfortable things. You don’t have to agree with the artists, but trying to paint a whole music festival as a jihadist warm-up act is just unhinged. Art is messy. Politics is messy. Get over it. This is like the Trumpification of conservatism. Dumbed down into right-wing “woke”.

And Sirtony added:

If you support free speech, and I do, you have to put up with stupid speech that you find offensive. You, of course, are fully entitled to argue about those views and to say why you find them wrong or offensive. Free speech is useless if we only allow those we agree with to speak. As fashions ebb and flow, what else might be banned that you might actually be sympathetic towards. Stop and think before agreeing to many limits on free speech. Our traditional limits have been on the incitement to violence or the classic shouting “fire” in the crowded theatre not the expression of a political idea.

Is chanting “death, death to the IDF” inciting violence? The argument can be made that it is, but seriously does anyone expect any of these idiots to take on the Israeli military; it is performative nonsense.

The aim of this article is to provide a counterpoint to these opinions, but a couple of specific comments before I proceed.  Firstly, the performers were undoubtedly trying to turn the festival into a ‘jihadist warm-up’ act, and the organisers allowed them to politicize an artistic event. 

Massad Boulos: The Key Architect Behind the Historic DRC-Rwanda Peace Agreement By Yassin Fawaz

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/07/massad_boulos_the_key_architect_behind_the_historic_drc_rwanda_peace_agreement.html

In what may become one of the most significant diplomatic moments in recent African history, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda signed a sweeping peace agreement on June 27, 2025—and they did it in the Oval Office, no less, hosted by President Donald Trump. It’s a deal with real potential to end decades of devastating conflict, but what most people won’t see in the headlines is the man who made it possible behind the scenes: Massad Boulos.

Massad, who currently serves as Senior Advisor at the State Department for Africa and also Senior Advisor to the President on Middle East and Arab affairs, was the quiet force guiding this effort from the start. Notably, Massad’s son, Michael Boulos, is married to Tiffany Trump, underscoring the family’s close ties to the president.

Massad Boulos brings a wealth of cross-cultural negotiation experience to the job. Born into a family with ties across the Middle East, Africa, and the United States, he has long operated at the intersection of global business, diplomacy, and culture.