Violent Anti-Israel Demonstration Comes to Toronto Leon Kushner

https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/2021/05/violent-anti-israel-demonstration-comes.html

Last night I attended an anti-Israel demonstration at downtown Toronto’s city hall. I thought it was important to show a pro-Israeli presence there. While Israel continues to be attacked on all sides by rockets as well as by Israeli Arabs attacking their long time Jewish neighbours inside Israel, we must show our support of our brothers and sisters in Israel. As one of the greatest commentators of the Torah, Rashi, once said: “If not now, when? ”

Turns out I walked into a wasp nest. There were tens of thousand of pro-Palis with Hamas, Hezbolla, Fatah and other terrorist groups and about 100 pro-Israelis counter demonstrating. One can see our small group in the middle, sandwiched between 2 larger groups of anti-Israel protesters. 

Here is a good aerial shot of Nathan Phillips Square in front of city hall where this all started from our local Toronto news CP24: (I’m in there somewhere.)

CP24 News video at the scene

It started peaceful enough. I was watching fellow supporters dancing with Israeli flags and listening to them sing peaceful and uplifting songs like ‘Am Yisrael Chai’ which means the Nation of Israel Lives. The others shouted ‘From the River to the sea Palestine will be free’ which means they want to destroy Israel from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

Conned by Khan Muslim terrorists pretend reform – and the West eats it up. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/conned-khan-raymond-ibrahim/

The degree to which Muslim terrorists can feign remorse for their crimes and convincingly pretend to have reformed—while secretly despising and plotting to murder non-Muslims—was on recent display.

After his prison evaluators had determined that Usman Khan, who was serving time for terrorist-related activities, had reformed and repented of his ways, they freed him early, in December 2018.  Less than a year later, however, he murdered two people, a man and woman, and injured three others at Fishmongers Hall near London Bridge. 

During a recent inquest, the Rev Paul Foster, a prison chaplain, admitted that he was one of those to have been “conned” by the falsely “remorseful” Khan.

Foster said that “Khan had engaged positively with programmes looking at his offending and the impact of his crimes.”  Khan, moreover, “had conversations with me about wanting to change and make a fresh start—to pay more attention to the ripple effect of his actions.”

The April 24, 2021 report continues:

Mr Foster also said Khan had spoken “openly and emotionally” during a discussion session with a victim of crime.

He added: “We were being presented with a lot of positive things about his behavior—even some of the prisoners were telling me… in one instance a chap lost his son to a murder and Usman was the person at his door offering his condolences and asking if he could help.”

The chaplain described one session with Khan in which he professed “some shame” about the impact his crime had on the Muslim community.

“He appeared to show remorse for what he had done,” Mr Foster said.

In the end, it was all a charade.  During the inquest, Foster expressed shock on learning that, during the same time period that Khan was feigning repentance, so too was he the “main inmate for radicalising others and had been involved in ‘forced conversations.’”

Why Israel is the Victim The lies behind the terror.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/why-israel-victim-frontpagemagcom/

Editors’ note: Below is the text of David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Why Israel is a Victim. Frontpage editors have deemed it vital to run the pamphlet in our pages today, since it reveals the history that explains Hamas’ current terror against Israel – and the international community’s outrageous bias against the Jewish state.

The Gaza Strip is a narrow corridor of land, 25 miles long and about twice the area of Washington, D.C. situated between the State of Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, and has a small southern border with Egypt. When the U.N. created the State of Israel out of the ruins of the Turkish Empire, in 1948, eight Arab countries launched an attack on the infant regime with the stated goal of destroying it. The attackers included Egypt whose tanks invaded Israel through the Gaza land bridge. In its defensive war against the invaders, Israel emerged triumphant but did not occupy Gaza.

In 1949, Egypt annexed the Strip. In 1967, the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser massed hundreds of thousands of troops on the Israeli border with Gaza and closed the Port of Eilat in an attempt to strangle the Israeli State. Israel struck back and in a “Six Day War” vanquished the Egyptian armies and drove them out of Gaza. After the war, Israel refused to withdraw its armies from Gaza and the West Bank because the Arab invaders, which included Iraq, Jordan and several other states refused to negotiate a formal peace treaty. In the years that followed, a few thousand Jews settled in Gaza.

By 2005 they numbered 8,500, a tiny community compared to the 1.4 million Palestinian Arabs. While they lived in Gaza, the lives of the Jewish settlers were in constant danger, particularly after the formation in Gaza of one the world’s leading terrorist organizations, Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state “from the [Jordan] River to the Sea.”

After the rejection of the Oslo Peace process in 2001 by Yassar Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians launched four years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The attacks were led by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an arm of the Palestinian Authority. As a result of the Palestinian rejection of the peace process and the unrelenting terrorism, the Israeli government decided that a secure peace could probably not be negotiated with its Palestinian antagonists. It therefore built a fence along its borders both on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent further infiltration by suicide bombers, a measure which dramatically reduced the attacks. The Israeli government further decided to remove all Jews living in the Gaza Strip and to withdraw the Israeli Defense Forces which protected them. By September 2005, the Israeli government evacuated every Jew who had been living in the Gaza Strip.

The ‘Israel Is a Monster for Bombing the Associated Press’ Office Building in Gaza’ Narrative Just Collapsed

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/05/16/israel-shared-intelligence-to-us-showing-hamas-operated-inside-building-where-ap-aljazeera-had-offices-n2589525?utm_campaign=inarticle

I can’t believe this has to be said, but if you operate out of the same building as a vicious terrorist organization, you’re putting yourself at risk. When that terrorist organization starts lobbing rockets at innocent people in Israel, pushing things towards the brink of war—the danger grows. It’s the nature of journalism in a hot zone. It’s nothing new. The Associated Press operated in Nazi Germany. We’re talking about this because Israel launched an airstrike that leveled a building in Gaza that also contained Al-Jazeera and Associated Press offices. Katie wrote about it yesterday. There’s been outrage. There have been allegations that Israel violated international law. And the news coverage has been predictably trashy (via NBC News):

Press freedom advocates have condemned Saturday’s Israeli airstrike on a Gaza building that housed offices of foreign media, including The Associated Press and Al-Jazeera.

After it was struck by missiles, the 12-story al-Jalaa tower, which was also home to apartments and other offices, collapsed in giant cloud of dust, disrupting coverage of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip that has escalated last week, claiming dozens of lives.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths, and journalists and other tenants were safely evacuated after the Israeli military gave an advance warning of an imminent strike.

Israel’s military has defended targeting the tower, saying that Hamas had a military intelligence office in the building and used journalists as human shields. It has not provided evidence of the intelligence operations in the building, and the AP cast doubt on the claim.

Police Investigating Mother’s Day Assault on Military Vet Who was Called ‘White B*tch’ in Parking Lot

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/landonmion/2021/05/16/police-investigating-mothers-day-assault-on-military-vet-n2589529

Louisville police are investigating an attack in a Kroger parking lot that left a disabled military veteran with a broken nose after an altercation on Mother’s Day.

Pamela Ahlstedt-Brown was beaten after she addressed the occupants of a car that were blocking her from leaving her parking spot, Wave 3 News reported.

I get out and I say, “Do you guys need any help?” and she said, “F*** you, you white b****.” I said, “Hold on, you don’t even know me.” I said, “That’s fine. If you don’t need anything, that’s fine. I’ll get back in the car.”

She said the passengers of the vehicle were four black women and that after their aggressive comments, they proceeded to throw a cup at her and beat her. 

She said she was in a fetal position during the attack, trying to protect her eyes.

Strangers were able to intervene and break up the incident, but not before Ahlstedt-Brown suffered a broken nose.

Royal twit: Prince Harry declares our First Amendment ‘bonkers’ By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/royal_twit_prince_harry_declares_our_first_amendment_bonkers.html

Prince Harry seemed determined to outdo Meghan Markle on the obnoxious celebrity front. The oafish royal on the lam from his U.K. duties, who’s now set up shop here to live the billionaire lifestyle, is now, like a lot of them, telling us how to run our country. He’s calling our First Amendment ‘bonkers.’

Kid you not.

According to the London Spectator (hat tip: Daily Caller), citing a podcast interview that Prince Harry made with the Davos-like Aspen Institute:

I’ve got so much I want to say about the First Amendment as I sort of understand it, but it is bonkers. I don’t want to start going down the First Amendment route because that’s a huge subject and one which I don’t understand because I’ve only been here a short time. But, you can find a loophole in anything. You can capitalise or exploit what’s not said rather than uphold what is said.

Translation: Harry doesn’t have a clue. He’s as baffled as Mad King George, that guy who got quite the write-up in our Declaration of Independence of 1776, about the idea of free speech. Like the Duke of Wellington, who had an issue with people moving about freely as ‘escaping all proper control,’ Harry’s gone back to the era of bad royals trying to tamp down the public. Yet he also has the hypocrisy to do it while he insists on living with us.

Josh Hawley’s Book Debuts As Top 10 Bestseller Despite Cancellation Attempts  By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/14/josh-hawleys-book-debuts-as-top-10-bestseller-despite-cancellation-attempts/

Sen. Josh Hawley’s new book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech” is selling at rapid rates following a cancellation attempt by Simon and Schuster in January for his stance on election integrity.

According to Publishers Weekly, Hawley’s book ranks sixth in the nation for hardcover frontlist nonfiction. Since the book was released on May 4, Hawley has sold nearly 21,000 copies and shows no sign of slowing down. In its first week on Amazon’s “Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week” list, Hawley’s book ranked number 15.

The Washington-based Regnery Publishing company made a deal with Hawley shortly after New York-based Simon and Schuster canceled their deal with the senator one day after the Capitol riot due to a “pressure campaign organized by leftist activists.” Their reasoning for pulling back on the deal, Simon and Schuster claimed without evidence, was that Hawley is linked to the storming of Capitol because he publicly questioned the 2020 election results.

Hawley’s book outlines how corporate America uses its influence to “cancel me and to cancel or control the speech, the communication, even the ideas of millions of Americans—all Americans, in a sense, because what the woke capitalists want, along with their allies in government, is to preserve their power over American politics and society.

Neurotic America: Masks Today, Masks Tomorrow, Masks Forever

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/17/neurotic-america-masks-today-masks-tomorrow-masks-forever/

A number of retail chains announced last week they are not requiring fully vaccinated customers to wears masks in their stores. Not everyone was happy to hear the liberating news, though. Our country, once a bulwark of the strong and daring, is becoming a land of the fainthearted.

Minutes after The Hill tweeted Friday that Trader Joe’s was no longer demanding that its customers self-suffocate, at least those who’ve been fully vaccinated, the scolds and skittish school marms took their shots before running to hide under their beds.

“Not good,” said one, without explaining why it’s not good.

Other responses included: “I’ve only been there once and it looks like it will be my only time for a while,” and “I will not be going to #TraderJoes 4 a long time.” Many concurred: They’ll also avoid Trader Joe’s. One commenter said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever go back again. All that was missing was Joe Biden calling Trader Joe’s executives Neanderthals and Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claiming the stores are “America’s No. 1 Death Destination.”

Certainly everyone is free to express their opinions about masks, and everyone is also free to decide to shop elsewhere if they don’t like the Trader Joe’s policy. Yet the response concerns us. Will enough Nervous Nancies and Timorous Toms boycott Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Costco and others that have liberalized their mask policies to force the companies to backtrack on their decisions (which will help restore the humanity dignity that was ripped away by mask rules)? Will they actively picket in front of stores in an effort to bully executives into yielding to their neuroses, fixations, and superstitions? 

Can Freedom Survive the Narratives? We live in the age of supercharged story lines, most of which are demagogic nonsense. By Lance Morrow

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-freedom-survive-the-narratives-11621185599?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPTS:

Yet more than 100 years later, in a decisively changed America, President Biden annulled the interval between 1903 and 2021 and pronounced Georgia’s new voting law to be “Jim Crow on steroids.” It was demagogic nonsense. The Georgia voting law bore no more resemblance to Jim Crow than Mr. Biden bears, let us say, to Neil Kinnock.

In all this, there’s the fallacy of stopped time. When fabulating Bidenites, reporters at the New York Times and others on the left refer to “systemic racism,” they mean to conjure the sum of all American white people’s badness going back four centuries to 1619; and, when all that meanness is assembled in one trope (slave owners Washington and Jefferson and Lee and Stonewall Jackson on their bronze horses) to lay it before white America as indictment.

There is no difference between 1619 and 2021. There was no Civil War, no civil-rights acts of 1964 and 1965, no President Obama. White guilt comes with the white skin; the evil is frozen in time—like the sin of Adam, like the woolly mammoth in the glacier. Race trauma is sanctified—permanent, outside time.

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.

Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.

Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.

Facebook’s ‘Fact Checks’ Suppress Debate The social-media site seeks to discredit a review of my book on climate science. By Steven E. Koonin

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-fact-checks-suppress-debate-11621194172?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This paper published Mark Mills’s review of “Unsettled,” my book on climate science, on April 25. Eight days later, 11 self-appointed “fact checkers” weighed in with a 4,500-word critique on the website ClimateFeedback.org. Facebook is waving that fact check as a giant red flag whenever the review appears in anyone’s feed.

By branding Mr. Mills’s review with “very low scientific credibility,” the company directs its billions of users to a website that claims to discredit the review and, by direct implication, my book. This action adds to the growing suppression of open discussion of climate complexities.

ClimateFeedback bills itself as “a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage.” Its modus operandi is to label necessarily brief media statements as misleading or inaccurate, often because they lack context. While acknowledging that “global crop yields are rising,” for instance, they add the untestable claim that yields might have been greater absent human-caused climate change. The gang of enforcers who “fact checked” Mr. Mills’s review included professors from Stanford, UCLA and MIT.

The oddest element of Facebook’s action is that the “fact check” doesn’t challenge anything I wrote in “Unsettled,” but rather provides “context” for Mr. Mills’s statements.