Palestinians Threaten to Attack US Troops by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20656/palestinians-threaten-us-troops

[The Palestinians] seem confident that if the Biden administration is rewarding them for malign behavior, it is clearly working, so why not keep it up?

The Palestinians are hoping to scare the Americans and prevent them from cooperating with Israel on the future of the Gaza Strip after the war.

The Biden administration did not, it seems, even demand that, in return for the humanitarian aid, the hostages be released or that the terrorists stop launching rockets into Israel.

Apparently, the Biden administration did not even request assurances that the aid would not be seized and diverted by the terrorists.

Hamas has earned at least $500 million from the aid trucks entering the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the war in October 2023, according Ehud Yaari, an Israeli expert on Arab and Palestinian affairs.

[The Palestinians] consider the presence of US troops in the region as another form of “occupation” and an unwelcome intervention in the internal affairs of the Arabs in the Middle East.

As long as supplies are getting into the Gaza Strip, Hamas will not stop fighting or free the hostages.

Because of the Gaza pier, the Biden administration has made it immensely harder to free the hostages and end the war.

More than $300 million has been spent by the Biden administration to construct a floating pier on the coast of the Gaza Strip to aid the local Palestinian population. Rather than expressing gratitude to the US, the Palestinians have publicly denounced the Biden administration and warned Arabs and Palestinians not to cooperate with the project.

They seem confident that if the Biden administration is rewarding them for malign behavior, it is clearly working, so why not keep it up?

The dodgy data behind the DEI crusade The Biden administration’s diversity efforts are based on easily debunked research:John Mac Ghlionn

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/19/the-dodgy-data-behind-the-dei-crusade/

DEI has been pitched to Americans as an effort to foster workplace harmony. But if a scathing new report is anything to go by, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy founded on corporate doublespeak. And the Biden administration has fallen for it.

An exposé published by the College Fix this week reveals that at least 51 federal agencies have justified their DEI policies by citing four studies by McKinsey and Company, an American consultancy firm. These glossy studies – ‘Diversity matters’, ‘Delivering through diversity’, ‘Diversity wins’ and ‘Diversity still matters’ – make the so-called business case for DEI. But critics are now eviscerating McKinsey’s research as shoddy, agenda-driven and riddled with weak data.

Take a new rule from the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, enacted in January last year. This rule expands the application of environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria – used to measure a company’s ‘social impact’ – to government pension funds. Essentially, this means retirement-fund managers now have to put ESG considerations at the heart of their investment decisions. Supposedly, this is because companies with a good ESG score will deliver the best returns. What research is this claim based on? You guessed it: two McKinsey studies that suggest ‘social responsibility’ is the golden ticket to productivity.

Economist Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School, has slammed the Department of Labor for clinging to McKinsey’s dubious work. He argues that the department had ‘already decided’ its preferred policies and ‘searches for any study that will support this idea, regardless of its quality’. ‘McKinsey is a consultancy, not a research organisation’, Edmans concludes. ‘The goal of its papers is marketing rather than scientific inquiry.’

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left by Daniel Greenfield

The secret history of the American Left.

The Left is America’s oldest enemy.

It was here long before the 1960s, calling for the execution of George Washington, plotting to stop the ratification of the Constitution, and collaborating with foreign enemies.

Stolen elections, fake news, race riots, globalism, and socialism aren’t new problems; Americans faced them from the very beginning.

Domestic Enemies reveals the true origins of the Democratic Party and its radicals, who—even two centuries ago—were calling for the redistribution of wealth, the end of marriage, and the use of schools for political indoctrination.

From political battles to street fights, Domestic Enemies takes you into the heart of a century of forgotten struggles between America’s greatest heroes—such as Washington, Hamilton, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln—and radical villains like Aaron Burr.

This is a 1619 Project for the American Left: a history of the Democrats as you’ve never heard it before, told through the political debates, naval battles, race riots, scandals, secret societies, and domestic terrorism that made the Left what it is today.

Learn how the Founding Fathers defeated the Left before, and how we can beat it again.

A Physicist Investigates the Left Reviewing ‘Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab’. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-physicist-investigates-the-left/

“All branches of Leftism, including Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Statism, Marxism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and National Socialism” share a common ancestor, Gary Gindler argues in his new book, ‘Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab’.

Blending political philosophy and a history of ideology, ‘Left Imperialism’ dives into the origins of the globalist leftist movements and their fundamental opposition to American conservatism.

The Left has been on an apocalyptic collision course with America and the free world for its entire existence, but ‘Left Imperialism’ traces its evolution as an ideology from local class warfare to a global movement, from seeking socialism within a nation to global socialism that permeates the world as a network of ideological institutions dominating the planet.

A former Soviet physicist who helped pioneer the Russian internet, Gary Gindler has long been a voice of reasoned political analysis in this country. And in ‘Left Imperialism, he delves into the waves of political change and the larger transformative ideological phenomena behind them.

Gindler focuses his analysis on the supreme power of the state over the individual and the clash of power relations between the government and the governed. From high taxes to state control and then ownership of private enterprises, the power of the state expands, like a balloon filling with air to simultaneously dominate the space within its sphere and to crowd out everything else. Socialism invariably leads to totalitarianism because the assertion of control is foundational to its agenda which requires organizing society through the manipulation of people and institutions in order to achieve its desired economic outcomes.

No compassion for migrants in Massachusetts By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/no_compassion_for_migrants_in_massachusetts.html

The latest news is that migrants were housed with sex predators in shelters, despite claims that they all had been ‘vetted.’
Anyone who opposes illegal migration is always quick to draw the ‘hateful’ and ‘heartless’ label from the sanctimonious left. But here’s what passes for ‘compassion’ for illegal immigrants stationed now in Massachusetts.

According to Fox News:

Massachusetts officials placed migrant children to live among registered sexual predators, an investigation by the Boston Globe revealed.

According to a Boston Globe report, an investigation by the newspaper suggested that the state failed to vet hotels across the state before placing migrant families to live among the alleged predators.

“For the past month, the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities — the agency that oversees the program for sheltering homeless families — has rebuffed the Globe’s requests for information about sex offenders in shelters,” the Globe reported. “The Globe requested the information as part of an in-depth review because the agency’s contracts require hotel providers to screen for sex offenders but not to bar them.”

This comes even as Massachusetts officials, including the governor, insisted to the public that the shelters are ‘vetted.’

Well, they weren’t.

Now the state opens itself to a lawsuit from migrants who have been harmed by the perverts placed in their midst that they said weren’t there, no worries.

The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/20/the-disgrace-and-fall-of-the-american-elite-campus/

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants are Hitlerian. And so few wish for their performance-art antics to become part of their public personas.

Demonstrators claimed they were peacefully acting on behalf of Palestine rather than virulently pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel. But their own bloodthirsty words proved the contrary—to the anguish of embarrassed campus administrators. The latter finally concluded that the overt venom was a bit too much and certainly injurious to their own administrative careers, campus fund-raising, and alumni support.

Note that there was a long hiatus between the slaughter and hostage-taking of October 7 and the entry of the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza to destroy Hamas. Nonetheless, campuses caught fire immediately after the slaughter. A professor at Cornell characterized the Hamas mass murders as “exhilarating.” Efforts immediately followed to harass and embarrass Jewish students, not to protest the IDF in Gaza.

Germany’s Woke Government Wavers as Islamists Declare Holy War By Soeren Kern

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/germanys-woke-government-wavers-as-islamists-declare-holy-war/

The German government’s laissez-faire approach to Islamism has moved the problem into a taboo zone that has strengthened the Islamists.

More than a thousand Islamic extremists recently marched through the streets of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, demanding that the European Union’s most populous and powerful country be reconstituted as an Islamic state governed by sharia. The demonstration, organized by a fast-growing Islamist group called Muslim Interaktiv, was allowed to proceed after left-wing parties in Hamburg’s legislature rejected a petition by right-wing parties to prohibit the event.

During the April 27 march in Hamburg’s multicultural Sankt Georg district, the Islamists — mostly young men, but also women in chadors, hijabs, niqabs, and jilbabs — complained about an alleged surge in “Islamophobia” in Germany since October 7, when Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,000 Israelis.

Amid shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and “There is no God but Allah,” the protesters reminded German authorities of their constitutional obligation to ensure justice for everyone. They then described Germany as a “dictatorship of values” and called for replacing it with a caliphate, an Islamic dictatorship in which there is no separation between state and religion.

The audacious display of Islamist power on German streets cast light on a glaring double standard: On the one hand, the German government continues to trivialize and even express solidarity with the totalitarian challenge to democracy posed by radical Muslims, who openly seek to overturn Germany’s constitutional order; on the other, the government is obsessed with the threats it says are posed to democracy by the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s second-largest political party, whose popularity is largely fueled by voters frustrated with the government’s refusal to crack down on those very same Islamists.

The German government’s laissez-faire approach to Islamism has moved the problem into a taboo zone that has strengthened the Islamists. Some observers argue that if the German government would only take the Islamist threat more seriously, it could instantly solve the populist problem by removing the main issue that makes the AfD so popular.

Who Are the Anti-Israel Campus Protesters?By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/who-are-the-anti-israel-campus-protesters/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Antisemitism, Marxism, and ignorance were all on display at Columbia

New York City — The first thing anyone walking the perimeter of the erstwhile Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” could see was a sign — “WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY FOR PALESTINE” — that hung on the fence surrounding the school’s South Lawn. On the other side of the quad, at the entrance to the encampment — and behind a legion of self-identified Columbia faculty blocking reporters from accessing the occupied zone — were two billboards, one advertising a list of the protesters’ demands and the other laying out the encampment’s “community guidelines.”

“We will remain until Columbia concedes [sic] to our demands,” the sign read. The encampment organizers demanded that the university divest itself from “corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.” They insisted that the university provide “complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.” They would not leave, they wrote, until the university provided “amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian liberation.” Next to the list of demands stood the encampment’s Ten Commandments.

Occupiers are to be “grounded” in solidarity with Palestinians, mindful of their environmental impact (they do, after all, “recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land”), and respectful of physical and emotional boundaries. Members of the encampment should not engage with media or use drugs and alcohol, the guidelines note, but, if mistakes are made, occupiers must “grant ourselves and others grace” and approach “conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.”

At the bottom of the list were a request to contact leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group in charge, to suggest additional guidelines and a reminder to “free Palestine!”

Those two signs and the scene that formed around them demonstrated in real time the strange contradictions of the current campus-protest movement. On the list of guidelines were the therapy-tinged recommendations of being “grounded” and “granting ourselves and others grace”; the rhetoric of decolonization in describing the land as having been stolen from a Native American tribe; and the presumed heroic self-reliance and antiestablishment, sticking-it-to-the-man attitude of “We keep us safe.” The catalogue of demands — not requests, not exhortations — betrayed a sense of entitlement seemingly at odds with the protesters’ self-conception of earnest advocacy for their cause. The wall of professors preventing members of the press — including National Review — from entering served as evidence of the institutional power that the ideologues possess despite their every effort to claim otherwise. And right there, behind the infantry line of the professoriate, shrieking at reporters attempting to enter, in a voice that would later become instantly recognizable, was Khymani James.

Campus Pro-Hamas Encampments: An Omen of Western Societal Demise Few understand the ultimate goal of the organizers. by Joan O’Callaghan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/campus-pro-hamas-encampments-an-omen-of-western-societal-demise/

Since the October 7 Hamas massacre, rape and kidnapping of nearly 2,000 Israelis, Western democracies have been engulfed in what are commonly called “pro-Palestinian protests.” Aided and abetted by a leftist legacy media, naïve and ignorant university students, and spineless politicians at all levels, our city streets and university campuses have become battlegrounds. But battlegrounds for what? Is this really about Israel and Gaza, or is something more insidious going on?

An answer to this question lies in events that took place in Hamburg, Germany at the end of April, where more than 1,000 Muslims marched through the streets demanding that the country transform itself into an Islamic caliphate.

In recent weeks, the focus has been on encampments which have sprouted like toadstools on university campuses. An examination of what goes on in these tent cities might provide us with a glimpse of what the future could hold.

These insurrections are not about Israel, or Palestine, or even Gaza. The end game is anarchy, chaos, and finally a nation defined by Sharia. The methodology is simple – intimidation. We see it weekly in the marches that shut down our streets, take over the public spaces, and overrun our universities.

Therefore, it is not surprising that any attempt to counter the hateful propaganda embedded in infantile slogans, with facts, is met with howls that the “freedom of speech” is under threat. Yet, how much “freedom of speech” really exists in the encampments? Videos taken by visiting journalists are revealing. Media tents have been erected by entrances. Only “approved” journalists may enter or ask questions, and only designated activists may answer. Attempts to speak to the students directly are met with responses that they are not “trained” to speak to the media; then these students direct the questioner to the “media tent.” In cases where unapproved journalists did manage to enter the encampments, they were soon met by an organizer who inserted himself between the journalist and the student to prevent any dialogue from taking place. Tight control over what is said and by whom is the order of the day. Freedom of speech for some, but not for others.

The ‘Butcher of Tehran’ Meets a Mountain One of Iran’s worst monsters goes down. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-butcher-of-tehran-meets-a-mountain/

Thirty-five years after taking part in the massacre of thousands, President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter went down over a mountain. Inside the chopper was the body of the man viewed as the likely future Supreme Leader of Iran along with his Foreign Minister and various other officials of the Islamic terrorist regime.

The Iranian people celebrated the death of the man known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ with fireworks and dances. Many of those celebrating were the women whom he had tormented for so long.

President Raisi was said to have harbored a special hatred for women and he has been held responsible for everything from prison rapes to the torture of pregnant women. The cleric and former prosecutor had overseen the brutal suppression of human rights protests against the Islamic regime as part of a record of his crimes against humanity going back to the 1980s.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran had brought many monsters to power. Raisi among them. One of the Islamic student radicals who turned a nation with freedom and civil rights into a ruthless Islamic theocracy, Raisi also represented the last generation of the revolution. Still in his early sixties, it was expected that he would usher in the next era of the Islamic Revolution.

But within weeks of Iran’s likely arrival at a nuclear threshold, Raisi went down in a Bell helicopter that the United States had exported to Iran back in the era of the Shah. Iran had spent billions on nukes, ballistic missiles and drones but neglected to invest in developing its own civilian aircraft. While the price of putting guns ahead of butter is usually paid by civilians, it was the ‘Butcher of Iran’ and his entourage, including Iran’s Foreign Minister, who paid the price for their murderous obsession with nuclear weapons with their lives.