The unpredictable eruption of the Syrian volcano – which could emit molten lava well beyond Syria and the Middle East – sheds light on the following 1,400-year-old features of the radical/fundamentalist segment of the complicated, brutal and frustrating inter Arab/Moslem reality, which are currently menacing every pro-US Arab regime:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/no-room-for-jews-in-jihad-cities/
Gideon Falter, the head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was standing on a London street watching a pro-Hamas mob pass. A Metropolitan Police approached him and warned him not to move. “At the moment sir, you are quite openly Jewish. This is a pro-Palestinian march. I’m not accusing you of anything, but I am worried about the reaction to your presence.”
Then the officer threatened to arrest the “openly Jewish” man if he did not leave.
Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley defended the officer’s targeting of a Jewish man and described the “actions and intent of the officer” as being “in the best tradition of British police trying to prevent disorder.” The UK government expressed “confidence” in Rowley.
In Montreal, Rabbi Adam Scheier, the head of the largest Conservative Jewish congregation in the city, was shopping with his family when a pro-terrorist mob chanting slogans against Canada and Israel marched up the street “flanked by police protection”.
“The police approached me and asked me and my family to leave the area,” Rabbi Scheier describes. “I asked why we were given this directive, as we had not exchanged even one word with a protester. The only thing I am guilty of is shopping in downtown Montreal… while wearing a kippah.”
“The policeman explained to me that he was fearful of a ‘fire starting between the two sides.’ Apparently, my presence is deemed a sufficient provocation for removal, while their hateful chants are allowed to continue.”
In Toronto, Ezra Levant, a journalist and the founder of Rebel News, was arrested while filming a Hamas rally in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto which promoted Yahya Sinwar, the dead leader of Hamas and displayed red triangles: a symbol for the call to murder Jews.
Police accused the Jewish journalist of breaching the peace and arrested him “in the interest of public safety” while claiming that his presence was “inciting the crowd”.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorks-government-is-the-real-villain-in-the-daniel-penny-trial
Now that Daniel Penny has been acquitted of the absurd homicide charges against him, perhaps New York City and State officials can be put on trial. They are responsible not only for the death of Jordan Neely, the drug-addicted schizophrenic whom Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Penny of recklessly killing, but for the assaults on and killings of hundreds of New Yorkers by mentally ill vagrants whom politicians allow to roam the streets. Yet according to Bragg and his office, it was Penny who needed to be imprisoned, for the safety of city residents, for having protected his fellow citizens from a potential murderer.
For now, the heroic male virtues of chivalry, self-reliance, and initiative have been vindicated, in the face of government’s effort to snuff those values out. How much longer those traits will survive under elite pressure remains to be seen. New York officials should take the Penny acquittal as a wakeup call, however. Their authority may be slipping away, a development adumbrated by last month’s national election results.
The Daniel Penny homicide trial was a travesty of justice. On May 1, 2023, a psychotic, wildly gesticulating vagrant burst into a New York subway car as it travelled beneath Manhattan’s SoHo district. The new arrival, Jordan Neely, started screaming that he wanted to return to jail and was ready to die. Some eyewitnesses recalled that the 30-year-old Neely threatened to kill the straphangers.
The passengers were terrified, and rightly so. New York’s seriously mentally ill residents are time bombs who regularly explode. They push subway riders in front of moving trains; above ground, they club, shoot, and stab their victims. Three weeks after the May 1, 2023, subway incident, another street denizen slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, paralyzing her for life. This November 18, a 51-year-old vagrant with the inevitable long rap sheet and seeming immunity from extended incarceration went on a stabbing rampage throughout Manhattan, slashing to death a 36-year-old construction worker, a 67-year-old man fishing in the East River, and a 36-year-old woman sitting on a park bench. As recently as December 1, a screaming female pushed a 43-year-old man onto the subway tracks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She has not been apprehended, but it is a virtual certainty that she, too, has had numerous run-ins with outreach workers and the police that resulted in no long-term confinement.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/10/bidens-pardon-a-smokescreen-for-corruption/
Joe Biden has carefully cultivated his image as an empathetic man of the people. In reality, his career has been marked by a relentless pursuit of wealth for himself and his family. His son Hunter Biden was central to these schemes, operating as the family “bag man” for various influence-peddling operations overseas.
As such, Joe Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter is not an act of mercy or justice or even paternal loyalty but a cynical maneuver to shield both Hunter and Joe Biden from responsibility.
Its brazenness has moved even Joe Biden’s most ardent defenders to condemnation.
Double Standards and the “Rule of Law”
After all the pious talk invoking the “rule of law” during the years-long prosecutions of Donald Trump, Hunter’s pardon shows that there has always been a parallel set of rules, through which the powerful and politically favored can escape scrutiny. This case is also a reminder of how the rule of law can be perverted not only by being too harsh but also by being too solicitous.
The media have feigned shock at his pardon, but they should have known better. Even before he was facing charges, Hunter’s job as a highly paid board member of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, was absurd on its face. He had no relevant skills or qualifications justifying a $50,000 monthly salary—except, of course, his last name.
Similarly, the revelation that Hunter involved his father in business meetings with individuals from Kazakhstan and other foreign nations gained little traction among the media or official Washington. The media even dismissed the infamous “10% for the big guy” email found on Hunter’s laptop, which strongly implies a quid pro quo arrangement between Hunter and his dad.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21194/israel-icc-arrest-warrants
A whistle-blower told [ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim] Khan that he knew about the sexual misconduct and Khan responded in apparent shock that he, Khan, was “finished and will need to resign.” Instead of resigning, however, he reportedly threatened both the whistleblower and the victim to not press the matter further. And then he decided to announce the application for arrest warrants….
Why, by the way, did both Khan and ICC President Piotr Hofmanski meet with Qatar’s ambassador to the Netherlands last year? Surely Qatar had nothing to do with influencing the decision to issue the arrest warrants?
The ICC arrest warrants are the final proof that the entire international system is beyond broken. Between South Africa’s baseless case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant by the ICC, justice, accountability and the upholding of international law lie in shambles, as the obsession with the world’s only Jewish state continues for the benefit of the world’s actual war criminals.
What is remarkable is that no arrest warrants to date have been issued for any of the following actual war criminals….
“The ICC is a kangaroo court and Karim Khan is a deranged fanatic. Woe to him and anyone who tries to enforce these outlaw warrants. Let me give them all a friendly reminder: the American law on the ICC is known as The Hague Invasion Act for a reason. Think about it.” — US Senator Tom Cotton, X, November 21, 2024.
On November 21, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and, apparently to pretend to look “balanced,” three Arab terrorists, one of whom was dead.
ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, originally a British barrister, appealed to all ICC member states to do the court’s bidding and arrest Netanyahu and Gallant, and said in a statement:
“[T]he judges of the International Criminal Court have found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each [Netanyahu and Gallant] has committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts, as a direct perpetrator, acting jointly with others. The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that they are each responsible for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against civilians as a superior.”
https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/09/bidens-paranoid-pardons-and-leftist-morality/
Pardoner-in-Chief
Joe Biden has now established two precedents in presidential history.
First, he “pardoned” his own son Hunter.
No prior president has ever tried that shameless act, which is an affront to the entire hallowed notion of “equality under the law.”.
Second, he did so in a way that no president has rarely, if ever, pardoned anyone.
Hunter, a convicted federal felon awaiting sentencing, was gifted by his father a blanket exemption from federal prosecution over the entire past decade (2014-2024).
Biden thus exempted Hunter from a series of much-discussed past criminal activities and provided further pardons for any federal criminal exposure occurring over the last ten years—yet to turn up.
Given the Biden suppression of the justice system and the media’s complicity in hiding the Biden family’s criminality, it is quite possible that in the next few years, disinterested prosecutors might finally expose Hunter Biden’s long-suppressed, sordid career. And that could mean possible criminal exposure for three generations of Bidens.
Third, in the remaining waning 40 days of his now nonperforming presidency, Biden threatens to establish yet another presidential precedent. He contemplates issuing pardons to a variety of controversial cronies, bureaucrats, and officers—even though none of them have yet been indicted or even are under federal investigation.
Worse, Biden completed his shameless trifecta by breaking his serial pledge, voiced at least six times, and most prominently as a 2024 campaign plug, unequivocally not to pardon Hunter Biden.
That performance-art braggadocio was serially greeted—by design—with glee in the media.
On spec, the vow supposedly contrasted Biden’s “reverence for the rule of law” with a purportedly legally insubordinate Trump.
Biden would put the law above family. Trump, in contrast, was supposedly chronically questioning the morality, fairness, and legality of his own five criminal and civil indictments over the campaign cycle—some of them (i.e., Bragg, Smith, Willis) demonstrably with the full knowledge of, if not coordinated by, the Biden White House.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21193/arabs-muslims-hamas
As far as Hamas leaders are concerned, the involvement of Iran’s other proxies in the Jihad against Israel has been insufficient. Hamas leaders were hoping to see Arab and Muslim armies march on Israel and fulfill their dream of replacing it with a jihadist terror state.
They are also aware that Iran wants to use them to expand its control over the Middle East. Iran already occupies three Arab countries – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, and until last week, Syria as well – and has brought nothing but death and destruction to the people there.
The “betrayal” of Hamas by Arabs and Muslims is a sign that these people are committed to stopping the Iranian regime from using them as puppets in its plan to destroy the “Zionist entity” and take over the Middle East.
For Hamas leaders, the involvement of Iran’s other proxies in the Jihad against Israel has been insufficient. Hamas leaders were hoping to see Arab and Muslim armies march on Israel and fulfill their dream of replacing it with a jihadist terror state. They were also hoping that the Arab and Muslim masses would revolt against their governments and replace them with regimes that support the annihilation of Israel and serve as puppets in the hands of Tehran’s mullahs. Pictured: Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, meets with Ismail Haniyeh, then leader of Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah, on July 30, 2024 in Tehran. (Photo by the Supreme Leader’s Press Office via Getty Images)
Fourteen months after the Iran-backed terrorist group, Hamas, attacked Israel, murdering 1,200 Israelis and wounding thousands more, Hamas has finally acknowledged that it has been abandoned by many Arabs and Muslims.
When Hamas launched the October 7, 2023 assault on Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip, its leaders were hoping that many Arabs and Muslims would join the fight to murder as many Jews as possible to eliminate Israel. Hamas officials expressed hope at the time that the October 7 atrocities would prompt the formation of a large Arab-Islamic battlefront against Israel. The hope was that the Iran-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon would launch a similar invasion of Israel, that Iran would unleash thousands of ballistic missiles against Israel, and that tens of thousands of Muslims would invade Israel from Jordan.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-historian-writes-in-the-lancet-that-slavery-is-at-the-bottom-of-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_
The medical establishment continues on its march to irrelevance. In the current edition of The Lancet, a Yale history professor named Timothy Snyder inveighs against what he apparently sees as totalitarianism of contemporary health policies. Frankly, it’s mostly gobbledygook. Take the lede, from “Health and Freedom“:
We are free as bodies, or not at all. And so health care is a right, one of the most basic. Huh?
Snyder then castigates all of Western civilization as essentially thousands of years of continual tyranny:
Plato put us all in a cave. In the darkness of the succeeding two millennia and more, western philosophy has had trouble seeing—and feeling—what needs to be seen and felt. A long history of empire and slavery, from that moment to this, teaches us that freedom is negative, a matter of being at liberty to oppress other bodies.
In that way of regarding the world, fear replaces care: the fear we believe we must instill in others, and our own fear that we will lose our dominion. And, of course, most people are not free at all, even in this fearful sense. If we understand what is wrong with this philosophical tradition and this history, the right to health care becomes undeniable.
I don’t try to instill fear in others. And I see people caring for each other all around me. How about you?
Snyder reminds us, in his fashion, that we are not islands. True. But really — this?
No one can become an individual without help. And in order to remain free, we must know ourselves—the task, par excellence, that cannot be achieved in solitude. We all go through life with a piece of metaphysical spinach between our teeth. If we think we know everything we need to know about ourselves, we are wrong, and therefore vulnerable to those who see how we can be manipulated. And, of course, the most tempting error is precisely the belief that we did it all ourselves and will do it all ourselves.
And that leads us to . . . slavery!
https://quillette.com/2024/12/08/hatred-and-indifference-in-modern-australia-antisemitism-synagogue-ripponlea/
Two days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, I was sitting at my desk in the Sydney Central Business District. Zoe, my colleague, stood up from her desk with a worried look. Holding her phone, she told me that the New South Wales Board of Deputies had received a police warning: the safety of Jews in the city could not be guaranteed. The message she had just received was encouraging them to leave.
That message, combined with the knowledge of an upcoming pro-Palestinian protest in the city, made me feel something that I’d never felt before as an Australian citizen. I felt queasy as I remembered other times when Jews had felt safe in their own cities—then suddenly no longer.
It was during that moment of fear that I realised what antisemitism really was. Not being Jewish myself, I had never had a personal connection with the Holocaust. My knowledge of antisemitism was purely theoretical and abstract. It was a phenomenon I had read about in books, seen in films and documentaries, but it hit me that day like a slap to the face. I realised that antisemitism is two things: active, vicious hatred and cool institutional indifference towards that hate. And it was that institutional indifference that made me feel afraid.
The vicious hate manifested that night when a mob congregated on the steps of the Opera House chanting “where’s the Jews,” “fuck the Jews,” and “fuck Israel.” But what unnerved me was the indifference of authorities who had permitted this celebratory march from Sydney Town Hall in the first place. This was compounded when only one person was arrested at that rally where flags were burned—and that was a bystander carrying an Israeli flag.
Since that day, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has followed the model of indifference shown by the NSW Police. He says “antisemitism has no place in Australia,” while anti-Israel protesters freely demonstrate in front of synagogues. He takes no responsibility for surging attacks on Jews while simultaneously undermining the world’s only Jewish state. While Albanese might not be personally antisemitic, his intentional paralysis speaks of something more damning.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/08/why-young-british-jews-are-leaving-for-israel/
For most British teenagers in their final year of A-levels, thoughts are now turning to choosing universities, attending open days and organising accommodation. But for a growing number of young British Jews, these familiar rites of passage are being replaced by more urgent concerns: joining the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) or volunteering in Israel.
The change in the priorities of young British Jews shows how much their world has changed since 7 October last year. First, Hamas’s brutal slaughter of civilians in Israel provided a horrifying wake-up call. And then the subsequent surge in anti-Semitism in Britain and Europe made it clear that many supposedly tolerant institutions are anything but.
‘I had always intended to join the IDF’, 17-year-old Thalia Cohen tells me. ‘But the events of 7 October solidified my decision. I want to help Israel defend itself and make sure something like that never happens again.’
Orli Miller completed her sixth-form studies this year. Visiting British university campuses since 7 October has transformed her view of the UK. ‘I visited one of the universities I’d applied to, and I was deeply unsettled by what I saw’, she recalls:
‘Posters of hostages taken by Hamas had been torn down. I realised this wasn’t an environment where I’d feel comfortable or supported. As a Zionist, I knew I’d be much happier in Israel, where I can align my actions with my beliefs without fear of judgement.’
Orli initially applied to serve in the IDF but was turned down on medical grounds. But rather than return to a university campus in the UK riddled with anti-Semitism, she chose to sign up for Sherut Leumi, Israel’s alternative national-service programme. Participants get to work in a wide range of areas, including healthcare, nursing homes and in disadvantaged communities.
