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WORLD NEWS

Iran’s Attempts to Attack Israel Must Be Confronted by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20702/iran-attacks-israel

Netanyahu’s resolve in the face of so many challenges, from splits in his own war cabinet over the conduct of the war in Gaza to incessant pressure from Washington to agree to a ceasefire, has prompted comparisons with British wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, with Andrew Roberts labelling the Israeli PM “The Winston Churchill of the Middle East.”

There is massive evidence that the Biden administration would like to see Netanyahu removed and that someone more “compliant” to the wishes of the US replace him – a new Israeli prime minister who would not object to Hamas continuing to rule the Gaza Strip after the fighting ends, and rebuild its military to be able to attack Israel again as it has vowed to do. The US would also doubtless like an Israeli prime minister would gladly accept a Palestinian state supervised by Qatar, which has a regrettable but endless track record of promoting and sponsoring terrorists. The Biden administration would apparently like an Israeli prime minister who would agree that a nuclear-armed Iran is exactly what the Middle East needs at this time, and, to that end, has been begging European officials not to object to Iran’s nuclear program.

If the Israelis are smart, they will keep Netanyahu. He has shown time and again that he can stand up to immense pressure from whoever is trying to insert a knife in Israel’s back – whether the Obama administration proposing an Iranian nuclear bomb in 2015, or Senator Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden’s unsubtle efforts to try to get him ousted.

Unfortunately, the only way of seeing all the hostages released is by military pressure.

To prevail against determined terrorist organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah, Israel and its allies need to rally support for Netanyahu, rather than constantly criticize him.

For only by defeating these deadly Iran-backed terrorist groups can there be any realistic chance of peace.

The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism The more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/13/the-west-is-sick-of-the-new-woke-jihadism/

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East. Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur. Nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protestors are not furious over the 1 million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government. Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadi movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.” It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar el-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces, and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war, or the fate of refugees. Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency.

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the U.S. in the last half-century.

Why greens were the biggest losers in the EU elections The EU’s punishing climate policies are facing an almighty public backlash. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/11/why-greens-were-the-biggest-losers-in-the-eu-elections/

In 2019, Green parties achieved their best ever European Parliament election results. They even topped the polls in some member states, including Germany. Europe’s cultural and political elites could barely conceal their delight at the time, viewing the rising support for the Greens as an endorsement of their own managerialist mission to tackle the so-called climate emergency. The EU’s technocrats seized their chance. Within months of this alleged ‘green wave’, Brussels pushed through its Green Deal, which committed all member states to Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, by 2050. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the Green Deal at the time as ‘Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment’.

Things look very different today. As the results of last week’s European elections show, support for Green parties has dropped off a cliff. There were exceptions, such as in Denmark, where the Greens polled well. But overall, their vote fell sharply across the EU. The results are yet to be finalised, but it’s expected that the Greens / European Free Alliance political group has lost 18 of its 71 seats in the European Parliament.

The evaporation of 2019’s ‘green wave’ has also affected the Greens’ centrist fellow travellers – that is, those leftish and centre-left parties who have tended to promote a very green-adjacent agenda. Their European parliamentary group, Renew Europe, is expected to lose 23 of the 102 seats it picked up in 2019.

The collapse in support for the Greens was especially pronounced in the EU’s two key member states, France and Germany. The French Greens’ vote plummeted from 14 per cent in 2019 to just over five per cent this time, only just exceeding the five per cent necessary to gain any seats at all in Brussels. They finished seventh overall.

The German Greens, currently in a coalition government in Germany, arguably the most successful of all Europe’s green parties, fared no better. Their vote fell from 21 per cent in 2019 to just 12 per cent this time.

Notes from the safest place in Europe for Jews Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/notes-from-the-safest-place-in-europe-for-jews/?_sc=NTAyMDI0NiM3NTAyMg%3D%3D&utm_campaign=Evening+Syndicate+Tuesday+6112024&utm_medium=email&utm_source=brevo

This is a perilous time to be a Jew. The world responded to the greatest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust with a surge of antisemitism and sympathy for those who committed the atrocities of Oct. 7, rather than its victims. Israel’s efforts to eradicate the genocidal terrorists of Hamas who launched that attack have not just been opposed but demonized in a way that enlightened liberal opinion did not condemn the orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that occurred on that day.

And while Jews everywhere celebrated the heroic rescue of four hostages this past weekend by Israeli security forces, the same mainstream corporate media that has been acting as Hamas’s stenographers throughout the eight months of the current war reacted by emphasizing the deaths of the Palestinians holding them captive.

Yet as bad as the situation has become in the United States, where elite college campuses have become hotbeds of support for Hamas, it is arguably worse in Europe. It is not just a matter of the governments of Western Europe opposing Israel’s military campaign and seeking to prevent the defeat of Hamas in concert with the Biden administration. Spain, Norway and Ireland chose to reward the Palestinians for their terrorism by formally recognizing their fictional statehood. More than that, a sinister red-green alliance of leftists and supporters of political Islam has created a situation in which Jewish communities throughout the continent feel themselves under siege. Many are choosing not to wear religious markers such as kippahs and Stars of David, and still others have taken off the mezuzahs once affixed to their homes.

But not in Hungary.

Spend a week in that Eastern European country, as I just did, and the one thing you can count on is that you won’t see its landmarks being the site of mass demonstrations of supporters of jihad and Hamas terror, as is the case elsewhere, including the United States. That is something that would be unimaginable right now in America, but the reason is that the Hungarian government has banned pro-Hamas demonstrations. They’ve deemed it an open expression of antisemitism and a threat to public order. Their rationale is to treat pro-Hamas activism as morally equivalent to open advocacy for Nazism, which in Hungary and most other places in Europe is illegal.

The EU has been shaken to its core Europeans have had enough of the Brussels oligarchy. Fraser Myers

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/10/the-eu-has-been-shaken-to-its-core/

‘I cannot act as if nothing has happened’, said a weary, dejected Emmanuel Macron, in an unplanned address to his nation last night. The French president, bruised by an unprecedented showing for the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) on Sunday’s European Parliament elections, immediately dissolved the French parliament and announced snap legislative elections. The first round will take place in just three weeks’ time.

When Macron was elected president in 2017, he promised the French people that they will ‘no longer have a single reason to vote for the extremes’. Pro-EU centrists hailed his apparent defeat of nationalist, populist forces. Seven years later, RN is on course to achieve its best-ever result in an EU election. Marine Le Pen’s party is projected to win double the vote share of the president’s liberal, centrist Renaissance group. Clearly, the French feel that they have more reasons than ever to revolt against the mainstream.

The French are not alone in this. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite two of its leading MEP candidates being dogged by major scandals, came second behind the centre-right CDU. Crucially, it beat all three of the parties in Germany’s governing coalition. The Social Democrats (SPD), led by chancellor Olaf Scholz, suffered its worst result of any nationwide election since the 1940s. According to one pollster, around a million people who supported the left-leaning parties in the ‘traffic light’ coalition have since defected to the AfD. Pressure is now mounting on Scholz to call his own snap election. In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy topped the European polls, exceeding the vote share that swept her into power in 2022’s national elections. Populist, right-wing and hard-right parties, therefore, came in first or second place in all three of the major EU nations.

Even Belgium, at the epicentre of the EU empire, has been struck by the populist earthquake. Prime minister Alexander de Croo announced his resignation last night as his party was beaten to below 10 per cent in Sunday’s federal parliamentary elections and to around five per cent in the European elections – squeezed by Flemish separatist parties. Hard-right parties also came first in Austria and second in the Netherlands.

Europeans Waking Up In the EU elections, a good showing for the good guys. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yes-more-europeans-are-waking-up/

Just as increasing numbers of Americans, in response to such outrages as the disastrous Biden economy and the unending invasion at the southern border, appear to be shedding their distaste for Donald Trump, more and more Western Europeans, mostly in response to mass Islamic immigration, are rejecting their globalist elites and turning to the right. A month ago I wrote here about New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s hysteria about the rise of the so-called “far right” in Europe – an attitude that is, needless to say, representative of legacy-media views. Well, this past weekend – specifically, from Thursday, June 6, through Sunday, June 9 – a great many Europeans, casting their votes in the elections for the 705-seat European Parliament (EP), affirmed their support for that fearful “far right.” Not all of the results, but a great many of them, have proven unsettling both to the leftist poobahs in Brussels and to their minions in the mainstream media, and those results provide at least a smidgen of hope that, when it comes to individual freedom and national sovereignty, the continent of Europe ain’t down yet.

To be sure, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, claimed that her so-called “center” – meaning the heart and soul of the EU establishment – had held the line against the “extremes” – meaning, on the one hand, outright Commies, and, on the other, a tiny number of actual right-wing radicals but mostly just proud patriots who don’t like being governed by unelected Brussels technocrats and don’t like seeing their countries transformed by mass (and largely illegal) immigration. Most commentators, however, appeared to have a very different take on the election results than von der Leyen. The Associated Press, for example, spoke of “strong electoral gains for the hard right” – “hard right,” of course, meaning anyone who seeks to strengthen national sovereignty and put a halt to the ever-increasing power of the open-borders globalists. “Voters across Europe,” observed Douglas Murray, “are fed up with being told not to notice mass immigration or not to object.” And Politico (the European one, not the American one) concluded that “Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.” Hurrah.

Following the lead of Nigel Farage – who presided over the campaign to take Britain out of the EU from inside the EU itself, sitting as a member of the EP for two decades – many of Europe’s right-wing political heavyweights, including Wilders, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen, as the AP put it, want “more power in the European Parliament” precisely so that they “can weaken it from within.” And the election results – which began to be released on Sunday night, Central European Time, after the Dutch voted on Thursday, the Irish and Czech on Friday, and everyone else on the weekend – encourage one to hope that these rebels against EU tyranny may well be able to pull it off, to some extent at least.

A World-Historical Transformation Is Taking Place in Britain, Yet Few Have Noticed Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/06/08/a-world-historical-transformation-is-taking-place-in-britain-yet-few-have-noticed-n4929722

A world-historical societal transformation is taking place before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. Britain, the erstwhile leader of the Western world and the foundation and source of English-speaking civilization, is in its last days as a free society, and will soon become an Islamic state. Yet despite the mountains of evidence that this transformation is taking place, many will still deny that it is happening at all. They may not even admit it when it overtakes them personally.

The English actor-turned-political-activist Lawrence Fox recently noted what was happening: “The Mayor of London is a Muslim. The mayor of Birmingham is a Muslim. The Mayor of Leeds is Muslim. Mayor of Blackburn – Muslim. The mayor of Sheffield is a Muslim. The mayor of Oxford is a Muslim. The mayor of Luton is a Muslim. The mayor of Oldham is Muslim. The mayor of Rochdale is Muslim. All this was achieved by only 4 million Muslims out of 66 million people in England.”

This kind of thing has happened before, but few remember. Back in the days when our schools and universities concentrated on teaching actual facts rather than leftist propaganda, race hatred, and gender fantasy, every schoolchild learned about the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Nowadays one would be hard-pressed to find someone under twenty who knows what a “Norman” was (they were people from Normandy, in northern France, where a large number of Norsemen from Scandinavia had settled), but a few decades ago any random student would have been able to tell you that this conquest was not just a military victory. It heralded the thorough transformation of English society.

The invading Normans were few in number compared to the English, but once they had defeated the defenders, they set about systematically to ensure that England would remain theirs in perpetuity. They removed the native English from positions of political and ecclesiastical power. Norman French mingled with the Old English language, ultimately creating the English language as we know it today. Historian Richard Southern observed that “no country in Europe, between the rise of the barbarian kingdoms and the 20th century, has undergone so radical a change in so short a time as England experienced after 1066.”

Until now. Lawrence Fox continued: “Today there are over 3,000 mosques in England. There are over 130 sharia courts. There are more than 50 Sharia Councils. 78 percent of Muslim women do not work, receive state support + free accommodation. 63 percent of Muslims do not work, receive state support + free housing. State-supported Muslim families with an average of 6 to 8 children receive free accommodation. Now every school in the UK is required to teach lessons about Islam. Has anyone ever been given an opportunity to vote for this?” 

Palestinianism Began with Nazism And Today Is Based on Antisemitism, Sexism, Homophobia and Denial of Human Rights. So Why Is the Left So in Love with It? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20688/palestinianism-began-with-nazism

It was [Hitler’s friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-] Husseini who turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.

Were a Hamas-run state to replace Israel “from the river to the sea”, it would be a theocratic regime closer to that of Iran than to the autocracies of Jordan or Egypt. Jews and Christians would not be allowed to live as equal citizens in such a state. Indeed, in areas currently controlled by Hamas, Christians and other non-Muslim minorities have been ethnically cleansed.

Hamas is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian mullahs….

The real focus of these demonstrations is not on the alleged victims, but rather on the alleged perpetrators. The perpetrators are actually more anti-Israel than pro-Palestinian… It has always been more about identifying with the alleged perpetrators — Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Che Guevara — than with the alleged victims.

It is Hamas, not Israel, that is responsible for much, if not all, of the victimization of Palestinian civilians.

The disproportionate focus on the Palestinians and Israel can be explained only by bigoted hatred of the nation state of the Jewish people and its alliance with the US, and the wish to see them brought down.

The founder of the Palestinian movement in the run-up to the Second World War was a proud Nazi and friend of Adolf Hitler. Haj Amin al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the religious leader of the Muslims in what is now Israel but was then called Palestine, and, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, governed under a British Mandate. It was Husseini who turned the Arab-Jewish dispute from a resolvable conflict over land to an irresolvable conflict over religion.

Husseini decided it was against Islamic sharia law to allow Jewish sovereignty over even an inch of what had previously been Ottoman territory, which he decreed was forever religious Muslim land, part of an endowment, or “waqf,” to be held in trust for Allah. He opposed the creation of any Jewish state, regardless of how small, even if it was part of a two-state solution that offered a far larger percentage of the land to a state for the Palestinians.

The West Keeps Rewarding the Terrorist Group Hamas by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20687/rewarding-hamas-terrorists

Spain, Ireland and Norway recently formally recognized Palestinian statehood…. It is unprecedented in world history for a terrorist group to attack another country, murder its people and take hostages, only to then be rewarded with a recognition of statehood – cordially facilitating its future actions, including against countries in Europe.

We have already seen this April “thousands of protestors” in Germany demanding a Caliphate with sharia law.

The West’s reward also sends a message that… the West will eagerly accept any antisocial behavior rather than stand up for the values of civilization that have defined it for centuries.

The aim of anti-Israel protestors seems to be that stability can only be achieved after everyone has conceded to the terrorists’ demands. Sadly, many politicians, perhaps hoping for votes from wherever they can get them, might be only too happy to comply.

Perhaps Ireland, Norway and Spain would like to offer sanctuary to Gazans from Hamas?

[The] intended beneficiaries of …[Israel’s] enormous sacrifice, have instead been undermining and demonizing Israel every step of the way, especially its fearless Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called by Andrew Roberts “The Churchill of the Middle East,” who now finds himself, courtesy of the unlawful International Criminal Court, with an international warrant out for his arrest.

The only reason countries are recognizing a Palestinian is that they will not have to live next to it. As Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz and former New York City Council president Andrew Stein recently pointed out:

“Consider the fact that no Arab or Muslim nation has been willing to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Perhaps these nations recall that anyone who has tried to help the Palestinians has lived to regret it. When Jordan took them in, the Palestinians tried to overthrow the government of King Hussein in 1970. The attempted coup, known as Black September, ended with the Palestinians being expelled to Lebanon. Once there, a civil war erupted between the Muslims, backed by the PLO, and the Christians, resulting in the PLO being expelled once again, this time to Tunisia in 1982. After Kuwait offered roughly 400,000 Palestinians visas and jobs, and Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990,the PLO sided with Iraq. After the liberation of Kuwait, an estimated 200,000 were expelled and another 200,000 were not allowed back.”

The more countries that will join Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas in its assault by recognizing a Palestinian state, the more power and influence they will have in Europe to double their demands. Wait until Iran has its nuclear bombs and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. They will not even have to use them, only threaten to, as Putin is now doing in Ukraine so that US President Joe Biden will prevent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from winning.

Such actions jeopardize stability not only in the Middle East but even more in Europe. Ireland, Norway and Spain seem to be under the illusion that if they pet the kitty, the kitty will like them. Unfortunately, that is not always the way kitties work. All that cuddling up to terrorists and their promotors really achieves is to weaken the West’s credibility in defending its values, and the way of life we naïvely take for granted in the West.

Islamists Keep Stabbing People. Why Aren’t We Talking About It? Many in the West seem resigned to violence that once shocked us. By Peter Savodnik

https://www.thefp.com/p/islamists-keep-stabbing-people-why?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8HRxfwQcpVV8QELLPrEHJctqzptM1iJC3QPDqCSxKl1j4P-fN8X61VRpr0-

Last week, a 25-year-old Afghan man went on a stabbing spree in a marketplace in Mannheim, in southwestern Germany, killing a police officer and wounding five other people.

In a video of the attack, the man, whose name has not been released, can be seen repeatedly stabbing several people—including the police officer, in the back of his head and neck—until another police officer shoots the assailant.

All we know about the dead police officer is his name was Rouven L., and he was 29, and he was trying to stop an attack on Michael Stürzenberger, a well-known blogger who has been critical of Islam. (Stürzenberger was wounded, but not critically.) 

It took four days for anyone with a uniform or in office to say publicly what was obvious, which was that this had something to do with Islamism. 

“Islam belongs to Germany, but Islamism does not,” Justice Minister Marco Buschmann tweeted Tuesday. “It is a deadly form of fanaticism. There is now clear evidence of an Islamist motive for the crime in #Mannheim.”

This latest violence is part of a gathering storm of Islamist stabbings, riots, and violent demonstrations engulfing the West, with Europe at the center of the maelstrom. 

These include:

—The bishop and priest who were stabbed during services in a Sydney suburb in April. Their 16-year-old attacker, captured on livestream video, shouted: “Allahu Akbar.”

—The four people connected to “violent Islamist extremism” who were arrested in March in Stockholm.

—Mike Freer, a member of Parliament in the UK, who announced his resignation in late January lest he wind up dead. For years, Freer has worn a stab vest because of threats by Islamists. (Freer’s colleague, David Amess, was murdered in October 2021. His murderer, Ali Harbi Ali, had targeted government officials who backed air strikes against Bashar Assad’s Syria.)