EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. Campuses: Grooming Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20606/us-campuses-grooming-terrorists

For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group….

Those who are chanting “we are all Hamas” on the streets of New York and U.S. college campuses are not helping the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip even slightly. They are being used as human shields by the terrorist group Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel and Jews.” — Loay Al-Shareef, social media influencer from the United Arab Emirates, X, April 23, 2024.

“You would not survive a day in Gaza under Hamas, which demands that ‘infidels’ live with dignity only if they are subordinate to Islamists…. You do not understand Arabic, nor do you know Islam well enough to comprehend what awaits you if Hamas prevails (God forbid).” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“[Y]ou would also be the target of hatred because radical Islamists like Hamas believe in eternal enmity towards Jews and Christians. They interpret the Quranic verse (“O you who believe, never take Jews and Christians as friends,” as timeless, applicable to all Jews and Christians forever.” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“Hamas’ approach, in other words, has been a disaster for Palestinians in Gaza…. If universities cannot instil their students with peaceful, tolerant, and coexistent attitudes, then they have failed as institutions of higher learning.” — John Aziz, a British-Palestinian writer, Jewish Chronicle, April 22, 2024.

“Violence has failed us for decades, and the only way to accomplish justice for Palestinians is through peace.” — Hamza Howidy, Palestinian from Gaza, X, April 25, 2024.

By blocking the three Palestinian social media influences, the SJP, which claims to seek justice for the Palestinians, is proving that it does not care about freedom of speech for the Palestinians and is as intolerant as Hamas and other terrorist groups to criticism.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is a cancer on every university campus.” – Amjad Taha, Emirati researcher and journalist, X, April 23, 2024.

While protesters at Columbia University and Yale University celebrate Hamas and its “resistance” (a euphemism for violence and terrorism), Arabs have been ridiculing the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators on American college campuses. For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, whose members slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 others on October 7, 2023.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Don’t Count on Biden to Protect Planes Over the Baltic Sea By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dont-count-on-biden-to-protect-planes-over-the-baltic-sea/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

What will we do about Russian GPS jamming over the Baltic Sea, which is starting to increase the risk of civilian passenger airliner accidents?

Nothing. We’re not going to do anything.

Someday, after Biden’s prepared remarks have been workshopped to death by U.S. State Department bureaucrats, the president may offer another one of his patented, “don’t… don’t,” warnings that have been ignored by everyone from Hamas to the Iranians to the Houthis.

Any type of retaliation or warning shot, telling Russia to knock it off, is likely to be considered too “escalatory” and “provocative” by this administration.

Biden was shaped by the Vietnam War, and his foreign policy instincts – the ones former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates characterized as “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” – are always to avoid anything that could remotely be considered escalatory, hawkish or aggressive by a foe that is inclined to interpret any U.S. action as intolerably provocative. Remember, Biden’s the guy who urged President Obama to wait on the bin Laden raid, deeming it too risky.

What’s amazing is that Biden takes this hesitant, irresolute stance while simultaneously believing that he’s the toughest guy on the block. “Putin knows that I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over,” Biden declared in 2019. Biden also claims he went nose-to-nose with Putin and told the Russian dictator, directly to his face, that he didn’t think Putin has a soul. Of course, there were no witnesses.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Remember When Bill Clinton Stole the 1992 Election? Rich Lowry

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/remember-when-bill-clinton-stole-the-1992-election/

Too bad Alvin Bragg wasn’t on the case.

The Alvin Bragg case has gotten grander at trial, but also more ridiculous.

The Manhattan DA has a meaningless business-records misdemeanor wrapped within a theory about an alleged Trump conspiracy to defraud the voters by denying them disparaging information before the election and obscuring, after the fact, the payments that were used to do so.

Bragg is accusing Trump, in effect, of stealing the election.

He, thus, joins all the other progressives who have denied the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 election, although he finds the culprit not in Russia (at least not in this case) but in the shady maneuverings around Stormy Daniels.

If this is the standard by which we judge elections, we need to go back and conclude that Bill Clinton wasn’t elected legitimately in 1992, either. The Arkansas governor’s political operation was, in part, an elaborate conspiracy to keep women who alleged to have had affairs with Clinton quiet. Hillary Clinton was an active participant in the schemes. And so, by Bragg’s logic, this Democratic power couple — dominant in the party for a decade or more and still honored today — comprises election thieves.

Clinton had the same underlying problem as Trump — namely, women with embarrassing stories to tell — but the opposite tabloid dynamic; the tabloids were trying to get Clinton, whereas the National Enquirer was trying to protect Trump.

The Clinton campaign fought to silence or discredit women as necessary. Clinton’s operatives had the foresight — there’s nothing like planning ahead — to secure affidavits of denial from women rumored to have had affairs with Clinton. The truth didn’t matter here, of course. They just wanted the exculpatory statements, and the women were usually happy to sign them. Who wants the embarrassment of such matters being aired in public?

More fromRich Lowry

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Protesters Remove American Flag, Raise Palestinian Flag in Harvard Yard

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.breitbart.com/education/2024/04/28/protesters-remove-american-flag-raise-palestinian-flag-in-harvard-yard/

Protesters at an anti-Israel “encampment” in Harvard Yard removed an American flag from University Hall, the central administration building, and flew a Palestinian flag in its place Saturday before university staff intervened.

Harvard students cheer as they replace an American Flag with a Palestinian Flag. Are you paying attention yet?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Video: Masked Woman Tasers Jewish Man at UCLA The horror escalates . . . while authorities watch.

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/video-masked-woman-tasers-jewish-man-at-ucla/

A masked woman lynches this Jewish man and full on tasers him at UCLA. How is this happening??!

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Paper Tiger Hectoring world leaders with idle threats. Kenneth Timmerman

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-paper-tiger/

Mao used to call America a “paper tiger,”  in appearance very powerful, but in reality nothing to be afraid of. That is the way China’s current president, Xi Jinping, views the Biden administration.

How do I know this? Just look at the way the Chinese “welcome” visiting Biden administration officials.

When Secretary of State Tony Blinken arrived in Shanghai last Wednesday, he climbed down from that big beautiful aircraft with “United States of America” emblazoned in huge letters across its sides to the bare tarmac, where minor Chinese officials were waiting to greet him. Not the foreign minister. And no red carpet. That is the Chinese version of a snub.

And Chinese commentators took notice. “Blinken arrives in China and is met WITHOUT RED CARPET. No band or anything,” said an X user with the name “Lord Bedo. “He’s welcomed like a somebody unimportant.” No kidding. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen received the same treatment a few months ago.

On Friday, Blinken met with President Xi in Beijing. His message? To express “serious concern” about China’s support for Russia’s war effort by selling them microchips, machine tools, and other dual-use equipment. “I told Xi, if China does not address this problem, we will,” Blinken told his American media pool.

While that may sound like tough language, what does it really mean? The U.S. will impose sanctions on China if they don’t stop those dual-use exports to Russia. Really?

Russia and China, like their ally, Iran, have become masters at avoiding U.S. sanctions. Following U.S. sanctions on Russian oil and gas over the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s oil and gas exports have continued non-stop, and with increased prices, are earning them more than ever.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Domestic Enemies Daniel Greenfield’s new book reveals the Founding Fathers’ fight against the Left. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/domestic-enemies/

That there’s always more history to learn is one of the many lessons of Daniel Greenfield’s truly magnificent new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight against the Left. In six riveting, eye-opening chapters, Greenfield guides us through untold or little-told stories of leftist perfidy beginning in the days prior to the ratification of the Constitution and concluding in the last years of the Civil War. It is a genuinely remarkable work, which even for many people who consider themselves relatively well-informed students of history is full of one revelation after another – all of which serve to underscore that the far-left phenomena that today seem to portend nothing short of apocalypse (from BLM riots to outrageous election irregularities to the breathtaking efforts by New York officials to destroy Donald Trump’s financial empire) are in fact nothing new.

The late writer Howard Zinn, in his appallingly successful People’s History of the United States (1980), pushed his far-left agenda on naive young readers by, at every turn (and here I adapt from Johnny Mercer’s immortal lyric), fanatically accentuating the negative aspects of American capitalism and liberal democracy and utterly eliminating the positive. Greenfield is the anti-Zinn: whereas Zinn besmirched American liberty at every turn, Greenfield tells the plain truth about far-left challenges to that liberty that have either been whitewashed in most history textbooks, given very short shrift by them, or scrubbed from their pages entirely. The result is a superbly illuminating book that has the drive and urgency of a great political pamphlet as well as the density and detail of a distinguished three-volume historical opus.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Has Chosen The Least Bad Of Bad Alternatives Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/29/israel-has-chosen-the-least-bad-of-bad-alternatives/

History frequently offers insight into present-day events. Far too often that perspective is ignored either because of a lack of knowledge, the mistaken belief that it has no relevance in today’s world, or discomfort over the challenge that that knowledge presents. The war in Gaza does have an historical precedent, albeit one on a far grander scale.

Bear with us as we unpack the analogy …

As the endgame of World War II in mid-1945 became focused on the planning of “Operation Downfall,” the invasion of the Japanese homeland, the decision was made to deploy the first (and last) atomic weapons ever used in warfare. This was not a choice taken lightly and was repugnant to President Harry Truman and many of his advisers. But it was made based on a grim calculus comparing the hope that the bombs would force an immediate surrender (at a cost of more than 100,000 civilian lives), against the anticipated casualties and impact of an invasion of Japan’s home islands.

An article written by one of us (Dr. Miller) last year delves into the background. After experiencing 18,000 dead and 78,000 wounded in capturing Iwo Jima and Okinawa (two relatively small islands), the magnitude of the resistance was understood. And unlike in those battles, a mainland invasion would face troops who could be easily resupplied, making them even more difficult to dislodge.

In that 2023 article, a Marine four-star general and historian is quoted as saying there were no post-invasion plans for the six Marine divisions (each 23,000 strong) in Operation Downfall because they were expected to be decimated and non-functional after invading Honshu to make way for the Army. In other words, it was expected that just to commence the invasion, some 100,000 allied lives would be lost, along with far more Japanese killed. Estimates of subsequent American deaths neared 1 million, with at least 5 million Japanese expected to perish.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

It Would Be Foolish To ‘End Fossil Fuel’

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/30/it-would-be-foolish-to-end-fossil-fuel/

Let’s say tomorrow, or in 10 years or even 15, that by some feat of magic that wind and solar could fully power the global economy. We could then stop extracting oil and the natural gas that’s a byproduct of drilling. Right?

No, it wouldn’t work that way – because it can’t.

Even in a world that ran entirely on renewable energy, it would still be necessary to drill for crude. Why? Because of, as Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock was told 1967’s “The Graduate,” plastics.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire, a family friend, told Ben at his college graduation party.

More than a half century later, none of us can imagine our lives without plastic and other products made from the oil refining process.

We’ve heard the argument that we should be moving toward an economy in which we drop the fuels for transportation and power plants and drill only enough to make plastics and other products of modernity. It’s made by those who believe they’re always the smartest person in the room but don’t know what they don’t know.

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Sheryl Sandberg’s Great Documentary—and the Cataclysm That Continues October 7 was only the beginning of a moral collapse. David Hornik

Posted By on April 30th, 2024

The new one-hour documentary Screams Before Silence by Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta, is one of the major events since October 7. It’s a harrowing, profound, utterly unforgettable film, superbly directed by Anat Stalinsky. In it Sandberg, who came to Israel to get the background for the film, “interviews multiple eyewitnesses, released hostages, first responders, medical and forensic experts, and survivors of the Hamas massacres,” people who have seen some of the worst sights and undergone some of the worst experiences imaginable—or beyond imaginable. Released on YouTube on April 26, Screams Before Silence already totals half a million views and will indelibly engrave the horrors of sexual assault and other crimes, both on October 7 and in its aftermath, among large portions of humanity not hopelessly lost to antisemitic hatred or ludicrous ideologies.

And for that, Sheryl Sandberg must be credited with a tremendous achievement.

Screams Before Silence begins with a visit to a devastated, largely burned-down kibbutz, then takes you to terrifying footage from the onset of the attack on the Nova music festival very early that Sabbath morning at 6:30 a.m., and then—mainly via the interviews—takes you deeper and deeper into hell until you reach its core. It does not show you images from that abyss (“Out of respect for the victims and their families, we chose not to show explicit images in this film”); but you hear the voices and see the facial expressions of people who were there; or who, as first responders, came upon the scenes of horror; or who, as forensic experts, had to deal with the corpses; or who, as hostages, continued to suffer in hell for weeks on end.

To look up—dazed and silenced—from this film and stare around at the world almost seven months later, a world of crazed “demonstrations” on US campuses and attacks on Jews in London, Paris, and elsewhere, is to have the bewildering feeling that what happened on October 7 was really just the inception, the igniting spark, of a global wave of hysterical hatred of Jews and, particularly, of the Jewish state that was already, latently, there, and just needed something like a horrific massacre to set it in motion. The tens of thousands of people bellowing “From the river to the sea…,” “Resistance by any means necessary,” “Globalize the intifada,” and the like know exactly what happened on October 7, and continues to happen in its aftermath in the tunnels of Gaza, and think it’s great.