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The Red Cross is humiliated as it again serves murderers of Jews It succeeded in making its profile invisible while not gaining the release of a single hostage or providing them with any assistance.Mitchell Bard

By on January 23rd, 2025

https://www.jns.org/the-red-cross-is-humiliated-as-it-again-serves-murderers-of-jews/?utm_campaign=

It was a joyous moment to see three female Israeli hostages finally released from 15 months of harrowing captivity. That happiness was tempered by the disgusting spectacle orchestrated by Hamas and enabled by the Red Cross. This humiliating episode highlighted its total failure to assist Jewish victims, evoking bitter memories of its inaction during the Holocaust.

I wrote in November 2023 about the attitude of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from the beginning of the war. On Oct. 7, 2023, the ICRC released a statement expressing concern over “armed violence in Israel and the occupied territories.” This mealy-mouthed response ignored the slaughter of civilians by Hamas terrorists, instead framing the events as mutual violence and subtly implicating Israel.

Days later, the ICRC issued another statement acknowledging “premeditated killings of civilians” but avoided identifying either the perpetrators or victims. In the same breath, it criticized Israeli “bombings in residential neighborhoods,” drawing a false equivalence between terror massacres and defensive military actions.

It took more than a month before the American Red Cross said the ICRC was pursuing “every possible avenue to secure the release of all remaining hostages.” It would remain silent, however, because its experience—ignoring the Holocaust—was that it was most effective if it kept a low profile. Well, it succeeded in making its profile invisible while not gaining the release of a single hostage or providing them with assistance.

For the transfer, they showed up as if they were heroes when they were essentially Uber drivers taking the former hostages a few miles to an awaiting military helicopter.

First, though, they played a part in the grotesque Hamas spectacle in which heavily armed masked terrorists in freshly laundered uniforms delivered and surrounded the hostages. Hundreds of jeering civilians lined the streets celebrating the dehumanization of the women right to the end of their ordeal. Civilians, including children—frequently portrayed as innocent victims of “genocide”—actively participated in the degradation of survivors of the Hamas massacre.

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Brussels: Is the Capital of Europe Crumbling Before Our Eyes? by Drieu Godefridi

By on January 22nd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21327/brussels-crumbling

Brussels has entered a wild-west era of “every man for himself,” in which people try to protect themselves as best they can without relying on the failing “authorities.”

Brussels’ financial situation is also alarming.

[Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration] Nicole de Moor… did acknowledge the problem of the high number of Palestinian asylum-seekers in Belgium, and that they had already been recognized elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless, they demand to come to Belgium: it guarantees them more than any other country in Europe.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, the streets and media of Brussels have witnessed the normalization of unabashed Islamist discourse and Jew-hatred — less and less hidden behind the pretext of “the fight against Zionism.”

When President Donald Trump compared Brussels, Belgium to a “hellhole” in 2016, the statement caused quite a stir, especially in Europe, and was treated with that mixture of contempt, ignorance and denial of reality typical of a certain “elite” in the European Union. Trump had made these remarks in the context of discussions on immigration and security, and suggested that Brussels had changed for the worse over the years, mainly as a result of uncontrolled lawless migratory submersion.

While the facts proved him right at the time, it might be said in 2025 that the Lebanonization of Brussels shows that his judgment was visionary.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Cultural Elites Perverted “Debate” on Israel by Gerald M. Steinberg

By on January 21st, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21338/germany-cultural-elites-israel

Fringe activists and their “positions of moral outrage” continue to be funded by the German government, with high visibility platforms to promote their blatant anti-Israel and antisemitic campaigns.

In the face of poisonous propaganda, the Bundestag resolutions calling for an end to German government funding to “organizations or projects that spread antisemitism [or] question Israel’s right to exist” are important. Implementing them and stopping the support via cultural and academic institutions will not “silence” the voices of hate, but at least the German state will no longer be providing them with resources or legitimacy.

On November 22, 2024, at the National Gallery of Berlin, the American photographer and political activist Nan Goldin asked, “Why can’t I speak, Germany?” With apparently no sense of irony, she spoke at a lectern in front of a large audience, with numerous phones pointing at her, at the opening of her retrospective, titled “This will not end well.” The subject of her talk was not her artistic portfolio but rather her political agenda on Israel.

An enthusiastic audience applauded her outrage and indignation over the “genocide” in Gaza and Lebanon, and her immoral equivalence between the Palestinian population after the October 7 atrocities with pogroms against Jews under the Russian Empire. Goldin’s false claim that “antizionism has nothing to do with antisemitism” was followed by loud chants of appreciation and applause.

The one person who could not speak was the National Gallery’s Director, Klaus Biesenbach, who was shouted down when he attempted to distance himself from her statement, while adding the obligatory and obvious defense of Goldin’s right to express herself.

The “Nan Goldin incident” was widely covered in prominent media platforms, including the New York Times and German press, as well as in social media, almost everywhere repeating her false accusations regarding the ostensible silencing of Israel’s critics. Goldin is one of a number of examples (another is Judith Butler) in which Jewish anti-Israel activists are used by Germans as fig-leaves to claim that their agendas should not be labeled as antisemitic.

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In Ireland Today, the Antisemitism is So Wide and Deep That One Despairs Hugh Fitzgerald

By on January 21st, 2025

https://jihadwatch.org/2025/01/in-ireland-today-the-antisemitism-is-so-wide-and-deep-that-one-despairs?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=in-ireland-today-the-antisemitism-is-so-wide-and-deep-that-one-despairs

The government of Ireland has just announced that it has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Here is that definition: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” Most of those adopting that definition also point to various examples of different ways in which that antisemitism is expressed.

Such a decision — to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism — is always to be welcomed, but given how antisemitic many Irish, including those at the very top of the government, have shown themselves to be this past year, in truly hair-raising pronouncements by the Irish president, Michael Higgins, the prime minister Simon Harris, the foreign minister Micheal Martin, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland Eamonn Martin, and the head of the Anglican Church in Ireland, Canon David Oxley, it’s hard to see that that adoption of the IHRA will do much good with those people still in office.

Ireland is, said one leader of the Irish Jewish community, the “most antisemitic” of all member states in the EU, and this announcement looks to be more of an attempt to deflect criticism rather than a genuine expression of sympathetic understanding for Jews, a tiny and embattled people fighting a seven-front war, who are now experiencing an increase in antisemitism worldwide that has not been seen since the days of the Nazis. More on what has been going on in Ireland that vitiates its pretense of becoming, if not a supporter of Israel, at least not a relentless and obsessive enemy of both the Jewish state and also of Jews, can be found here: “Ireland Adopts IHRA Definition of Antisemitism Amid Row With Israel,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, January 17, 2025:

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Australia is in the grips of an anti-Semitic nightmare How many more synagogues will be torched before the elites take this threat seriously? Hugo Timms

By on January 21st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/21/australia-is-in-the-grips-of-an-anti-semitic-nightmare/

The standard you walk past, as the famous Australian saying goes, is the standard you accept. Unfortunately for Jewish Australians, the standard set by the Labor government when it comes to anti-Semtism could hardly be any lower.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Australians woke to the news that a Sydney childcare centre had been firebombed and sprayed with anti-Semitic graffiti. Last weekend, two masked figures attempted (and failed) to burn down a synagogue. Theses would once have been significant national events. But not so now, in Anthony Albanese’s Australia. They were merely just the latest of several recent attacks on Jewish property.

In December, Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue, in the prominent and historic Jewish suburb of Ripponlea, was burnt to the ground in possibly the most significant act of anti-Semitism in Australian history. Last week, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, two cars were set alight, many more were graffitied with anti-Semitic slogans, and the former home of Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, was doused in red paint.

Anti-Semitism now pervades Australian society. It began, as most of the world now knows, on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, with crowds celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on 7 October 2023. It blossomed into regular, vicious anti-Israel marches, including one mourning the death of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader responsible for the indiscriminate bombing of northern Israel. During that time, protesters have routinely damaged the offices of politicians deemed supportive of Israel – and they’ve done so, for the most part, with impunity. By the time the office of Jewish MP Josh Burns was targeted last June, with vandals deploying an age-old anti-Semitic trope by adorning his photograph with Satanic horns, hardly anyone could claim to be surprised.

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Her name is Emily Damari The left will never live down the shame of staying silent on the racist kidnapping of a British Jew. Brendan O’Neill

By on January 21st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/20/her-name-is-emily-damari/

There is a British woman who survived 15 months at the hands of a neo-fascist militia. A woman who was cruelly deprived of her liberty and dignity by racist monsters and yet who emerged from that hell smiling and defiant. A woman who spent her 28th birthday in the bondage of an army of bigots. A woman who was subjected to the most intolerable persecutions for one ‘crime’ and one ‘crime’ only – she’s a Jew.

And yet if you said her name on the streets of Britain, many people would not know who she was. No one on the ‘anti-racist’ left held a vigil for her. The activists of Antifa raised not a peep of concern for this Jew seized by a racist army. These people see ‘fascism’ everywhere, in every utterance made by Donald Trump, every bristling against mass immigration, every criticism of the Koran. Yet when a fellow Brit was cruelly incarcerated by a movement founded with the express intention of murdering Jews, they said not a word. To them everything is fascism, except fascism.

Her name is Emily Damari. Go and say it to people. Let them know that a British citizen was kidnapped by Hamas and that British ‘progressives’ said nothing. Let them know that this British-Israeli was brutalised by Jew-killers and it made not so much as a dent in the conscience of Britain’s bourgeois left. The people who cry ‘black lives matter’ and ‘trans lives matter’ and ‘Muslims matter’ could not bring themselves to utter these three poxy words: ‘Emily Damari matters.’

Ms Damari was taken from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza in southern Israel during Hamas’s orgy of barbarism on 7 October 2023. She was shot in the hand, causing her to lose two fingers. She was dragged to Gaza where she spent 471 days in the captivity of anti-Semites. She was released yesterday, as part of Phase 1 of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, along with two other women: Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31. I have come ‘back to life’, said Emily on Instagram after her release.

To be clear, Emily was not forgotten. Britain’s Jewish community held vigils for her. Fans of Tottenham Hotspur – the team she supports – campaigned for her release. So did fans of Arsenal. Not for the first time, working-class football fans showed themselves to be the moral backbone of the nation, as our ‘betters’ shamefully looked the other way. It fell mostly to Emily’s heroic mother, Mandy, to keep her daughter’s plight in the headlines. Her dogged campaigning even compelled government officials to break their reprehensible silence and speak on the racist brutalisation of one of their own people.

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Is Global South Going South? by Amir Taheri

By on January 20th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21324/global-south

In Iran itself, even figures within the “southern” system are beginning to realize that their regime may be heading south.

In what is labeled “the Greater Middle East”, another shibboleth that is best avoided, there is an overwhelming desire for social reform, economic development and political participation, in other words for heading “north” rather than “south.”

A new generation of leaders has understood that unless they turn change into an ally, they risk turning it into a mortal foe.

Always anxious to portray the Islamic Republic of Iran in a world leadership position, the official media in Tehran have been trumpeting a three-day visit by President Masoud Pezeshkian to Dushanbe and Moscow as a “significant strengthening of the global south.”

You might wonder what the “global south” is all about.

This is a cliché invented in the 1970s to distinguish “Third World” countries from the two blocs of East and West, without abandoning its sister cliché of “non-aligned world.”

With globalism in decline if not actually moribund yet, the “global south” is gaining new adepts in circles seeking to divide humanity on ideological grounds, with Western democracies cast as villains as authoritarian regimes as choirboys.

Dividing the world on pseudo-geographical lines has a long history. The Roman Empire regarded the Persian Empire on its east as a cultural alternative, if not an existential threat. In medieval times, the concept of the Orient alternately depicted a seductive or a repulsive model for the Occident.

Karl Marx, who pretended to have discovered laws of human history, found it necessary to acknowledge that his analysis didn’t apply to “Asiatic societies,” by which he meant the whole world outside Europe and North America.

The English imperialist poet Rudyard Kipling, a literary giant but a political pygmy, played a similar chord: “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”

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Mark Carney: The Wrongest Man at the Wrongest Time Ever Mark Carney’s bid for Canadian leadership pits a climate-activist banker against a political and economic tide increasingly rejecting the very ideals he champions. By Stephen Soukup

By on January 18th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/18/mark-carney-the-wrongest-man-at-the-wrongest-time-ever/

The politicization of business and capital markets has many fathers. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the most prominent and unrelenting advocates for “sustainability” in investing, is often described as such. Klaus Schwab, the now-retired chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, also often wears that title. So does the billionaire political gadfly Michael Bloomberg; so does R. Edward Freeman, the business professor and originator of “stakeholder theory;” and so do countless others who have worked diligently to advance ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance investing), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and all the other efforts to make business and investing more “socially responsible” or less unfair or…whatever.

Of all those responsible for this abuse of business and capital markets, perhaps no man is more singularly responsible—yet nearly totally overlooked by ESG’s critics—than Mark Carney. Carney is a banking and economic giant. He was the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020. It was in this latter capacity that, in September 2016, Carney gave one of the most important and influential speeches in the history of central banking. Appearing at an event in Berlin, Carney gave a very carefully and very confrontationally worded address, in which he addressed climate change and framed its mitigation in fiscal and fiduciary terms. “A wholesale reassessment of prospects, as climate-related risks are re-evaluated,” Carney intoned, “could destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions: a climate Minsky moment.”

A “Minsky moment” is a market term named for the economist Hyman Minsky, which is used to identify the point at which a bull market has become so speculative and over-leveraged that it hits a peak and then tips over and crashes. What Carney meant by predicting a “climate-related” Minsky moment was that he—and others, presumably—believed that global capital markets were already overleveraged, already well overbought, given the inevitability of climate change. As a result, once investors started to understand the reality of the climate “crisis,” they would come to realize how foolish and speculative their investments in “unsustainable” businesses were, leading to a crash. Or to put it more simply, Carney—the Governor of the Bank of England—was warning global investors and politicians that they either had to force business in general to become environmentally sustainable immediately or could face commercial and economic Armageddon.

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While Canadian Food Banks Collapse, Canada Offers $3K to Gaza Refugees Two million Canadians visited food banks. by Daniel Greenfield

By on January 18th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-canadian-food-banks-collapse-canada-offers-3k-to-gaza-refugees/

Liberals claim that they care about other people, but the real mark of liberal governments is how little they care about their own people.

Times are hard in Canada under the corrupt radical Trudeau government.

As Canadians grapple with astronomical grocery prices, troublingly high numbers of people are flocking to food banks to feed their families. Last March alone, two million Canadians visited food banks—a staggering 90 per cent increase from 2019—and the most recent figures estimate that 12,000 new users access them every month. Food banks aren’t just frequented by unhoused and precariously employed folks anymore, either: now, one in five users has a steady job.

Faced with the deluge of need, community food programs across the country have begun closing their doors due to empty shelves

That means it’s the right time to bring a whole bunch of freeloading ‘refugees’ from terrorist Gaza to Canada.

The Liberal government will provide tax-free grants of $3,000 per adult and $1,500 per child to Gazan refugees arriving in Canada, the Department of Immigration announced Thursday…

Thus far, 4,782 applications have been approved, and 616 Gazans have arrived, typically as relatives of Canadian residents.

“While it is extremely difficult for people to exit Gaza at this time, Canada is making sure necessary support is in place for Gazans as they start to arrive in our country,” the department said.

The government has not disclosed the total cost of the refugee program.

“Canada is the only country in the world with a dedicated pathway for extended family members of its citizens or permanent residents in Gaza,” the department stated in a May 27 briefing note.

That’s not something to be proud of.

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Iran’s Mullahs: Will the EU Ever Wake Up? by Majid Rafizadeh

By on January 18th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21321/iran-eu

Even though Iran keeps increasing its military support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — posing a significant threat to the European Union, the EU policy of appeasing the mullahs persists.

“These drones [in Russia] aren’t just a threat to Ukraine — they’re a threat to every NATO country bordering Russia.” — Henrik F. Rasmussen, executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security, politico.eu, November 13, 2023.

“The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was responsible for at least 11 attempted attacks in Europe between June 2018 and June 2024, making it clear Tehran sees Europe as one of the battlefields in its conflict with Israel and the West, going so far as to partner with organized crime to achieve its ends.” — Oliver Rolofs, Strategic security and communication expert and the director of the Austrian Institute for Strategic Studies and International Cooperation, politico.eu, October 9, 2024.

Europe is bankrolling Iran to devour it.

Even though Iran keeps increasing its military support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — posing a significant threat to the European Union, the EU policy of appeasing the mullahs persists.

The EU blithely continues to trade with Iran, the top state sponsor of terrorism. The Tehran Times bragged in a recent report that the country’s exports to the EU have increased by 28% in just 9 months:

“The Eurostat’s data show that Iran exported commodities worth €799 million to the union in the nine-month period of this year, while the figure was €623 million in the same time span of the previous year, IRNA reported.

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