ISRAEL Comments turned off

Try a Little Honesty About Israel Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/09/try-a-little-honesty-about-israel/

Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration.

Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed.

“Progressive Hamas”: Gay and transgendered student protestors in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.

Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.

“Colonists and Settlers”: Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”

But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.

By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.

“Two-state Solution”: When student protestors scream “from the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution. It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying in between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on October 7.

“Occupied Gaza”: Gaza was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An Advertisement for Anti-Americanism Pro-Hamas protesters show who they are. Rich Lowry

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/an-advertisement-for-anti-americanism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_

Most protesters, no matter how deep their disaffection from this country, at least try to hide their anti-Americanism.

That’s not true of the pro-Hamas agitators, who can’t be bothered. Such is their hatred of America — and its symbols, history, and heroes — that they casually engage in profoundly unpatriotic acts of desecration.

In New York City on Monday, on their way to disrupt the Met Gala, they vandalized a World War I memorial in Central Park and a statue of William Tecumseh Sherman at Grand Army Plaza. In Washington, D.C., they’ve vandalized and/or turned into clothes horses for Palestinian flags and garb statues of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Benjamin Franklin, and Andrew Jackson.

En route to the Gala, the pro-Gaza mob stopped to climb and wave Palestinian flags on the memorial to the 107th Infantry and spray-paint graffiti — “Gaza,” “Free Palestine,” and “Let Gaza live.” If there were any doubt about the motive of this shabby act of vandalism, the agitators removed it by burning an American flag at the base of the memorial.

The soldiers of the 107th fought and sacrificed greatly in World War I. If the Central Park memorial, which depicts the soldiers charging into battle, isn’t famous or much noticed on any given day, it is still a significant act of memory that the protesters treated as an ashtray for their tawdry ideological obsessions.

Of course, it is doubtful that many of the protesters know much of anything about World War I, except perhaps that it took place sometime before World War II (assuming that they are aware of both conflicts).

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

RCP Poll Average
46.1
44.9
Trump +1.2

5-Way RCP Average
41.5
38.8
Trump +2.7

Top Battlegrounds
47.7
44.6
Trump +3.1

Wisconsin
48.0
47.5
Trump +0.5

Arizona
48.3
43.3
Trump +5.0

Georgia
48.8
45.0
Trump +3.8

Michigan
46.0
44.8
Trump +1.2

Pennsylvania
47.5
45.7
Trump +1.8

North Carolina
48.2
42.8
Trump +5.4

Nevada
47.3
42.8
Trump +4.5

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deep State Exposed Itself By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/the_deep_state_exposed_itself.html

As I’ve watched the political Uniparty and administrative Deep State conspire to destroy Donald Trump over the last eight years, a tinge of optimism has taken root inside me.  Not only have his tormentors been unsuccessful, but also a growing share of the population see the attacks against him as un-American, vindictive, and dangerous.  There is a heightened social awareness that D.C. is filled with corrupt people who operate the tentacles of government solely for their own benefit and enrichment.

No matter how omnipotent the Deep State appears, this couldn’t have been the outcome it expected.  With every iteration of the “Get Trump” operation, the vultures swirl overhead, eager to nip at his remains and scatter his defenders to the wind, yet the man and his supporters persevere.  Even worse for the D.C. Blob, every time Trump survives, a few more Americans rally to his banner.  Far from ensuring his demise, those who seek to weaken him have made him much stronger.

Think of all the malicious propaganda campaigns that would have surely sunk a less resilient individual.  After Trump’s 2016 victory, Hollywood celebrities desperately urged the Electoral College to disregard the results and install Hillary Clinton as president.  The pop culture industry cynically created the “Me Too” movement as a vehicle for driving him from office.  The Intelligence Community illegally spied on his campaign, blamed his victory on Russian social media trolls, and pushed the lie that he worked for Putin.  The Mueller Inquisition spent two years covering up the FBI’s anti-Trump activities, while doing everything it could to ensnare the president in perjury and obstruction traps.  Members of the military and National Security Council worked with Congress to turn a Biden-Ukraine bribery scandal into a Trump impeachment.  The Department of (in)Justice and too many unethical judges transformed the J6 election integrity protest into an opportunity to destroy lives and take political hostages.  Big-money Democrats have bankrolled countless civil suits against Trump in an effort to bankrupt his entire family.  Corrupt state and federal prosecutors seek to use Democrat juries to convict him on spurious charges and imprison him for life.  Corporate news hosts routinely defame Trump as racist.  Well known historians nonsensically claim that he is an aspiring dictator.  And despite four years of inflation, foreign invasion, and global chaos during Biden’s Oval Office occupation, hyperventilating foreign policy “experts” continue to drum up fear that a 2024 Trump victory will trigger economic collapse and WWIII.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From Campus Intifadas to Pronoun Mandates: Who is Our Common Enemy? Choosing a post-liberal society. Jason Hill

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-campus-intifadas-to-pronoun-mandates-who-is-our-common-enemy/

Some people need to be hit over the head to tie abstractions together under a Conceptual Common Denominator, and that is what we need as we look out at the various maladies afflicting American civilization, from the campus intifada protests calling for both the Islamification of the United States and the destruction of Israel, to the new pronoun mandate for workers, employers and even customers issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as part of the civil rights agency’s first move in a quarter-century to bring its workplace guidelines up to date with legal precedent and evolving social norms. This decision is the consequence of decades of queer scholarship and legal machinations to gain civil rights protection for behaviors once regarded as deviant but now part of a set of mainstream norms that protects trans people not only from being misgendered, but from having to use a bathroom that does not accord with their chosen gender.

The age of nihilism is upon us. We have witnessed the radical queering of America: the tran-sexualizing of students behind their parents’ backs; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that overtly discriminate against white men; Critical Race Theory that reinforces the idea—among others—that structural and systemic barriers still exist to keep blacks outside of public and private institutions; and the decimation of our universities that are now Marxist, anti-American indoctrination centers. This article will not list all the myriad social ills plaguing our republic today. They are well known to our readers.

The detritus, the putrefaction, the moral decay, all the forces of evil were possible because of one conceptual common denominator: liberalism. Everybody got let into the future and all standards were dropped to the lowest common denominator of the cheapest harlot on the block, who was told her inclusion was as valued as that of the righteous man. Every social ballast dragging down humanity was told, You too belong. Even pedophiles have been rebranded as Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) as part of a sinister path towards normalizing pedophilia.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Stop Negotiating With Wolves The consequences of not learning from history and tradition. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stop-negotiating-with-wolves/

Last week an event took place that illustrates the folly of negotiating with passionate ideologues and autocrats with whom there is no common ground for a meeting of the minds necessary for a true agreement. This practical wisdom, based on human experience going back 28 centuries to Homer, has been forgotten by most modern Western leaders and foreign policy hands, who believe that negotiations, non-lethal “engagement,” and persuasion can override an autocratic adversary’s passionate interests and ambitions that by nature conflict with our own.

The occasion was a three-day, humiliating meeting that our Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, attended in China. As Gatestone Institute’s Gordon Chang reported, “China, literally and figuratively, did not roll out the red carpet for [Blinken’s] arrival in Shanghai on Wednesday. Only a low-level official was on hand to greet Blinken as he stepped off the plane.”

Charles Burton of the Sinopsis think-tank told Gatestone, “Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore.”

So much for the “rules-based new world order” that the West thinks the Rest actually follow rather than engage tactically. But that assumption is a delusion, as Beijing has demonstrated even since George W. Bush welcomed China to the World Trade Organization in 2001, whose protocols and rules China has serially violated and gamed. And why shouldn’t it? What have been the material consequences for doing so? Or for ignoring contemptuously our diplomatic statements of  “concern,” or other finger-wagging scoldings?

For example, one of Blinken’s tasks, Matt Pottinger writes in the Journal, during his visit was to repeat Joe Biden’s warning to China two years ago not to provide Russia with materiel and resources to support its war in Ukraine. Biden had also claimed that if Xi continued to do so, “he made sure the Chinese president understood he would ‘be putting himself in significant jeopardy’ and risking China’s economic ties with the U.S. and Europe if he materially supported Russia’s war.”

Of course, nothing significant followed Biden’s stern but empty warning.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

LEE SMITH: WHY IS BIDEN SAVING HAMAS

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/saving-hamas

Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the White House’s statements and actions show that Hamas’ survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army’s tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

A day after the massacre, before Israel’s campaign against Hamas even began, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote that he was encouraging the Turkish government’s “advocacy for a cease-fire.” It makes no difference that the tweet has since been deleted, since the White House has produced no shortage of evidence since that its top priority is to deter Israel from defeating Hamas, by increasing Israel’s vulnerabilities at every turn, and conditioning aid on Israel adopting a purely defensive posture.

The Biden administration has stopped Israel from entering Rafah by demanding it produce plans to protect the civilian population, piously insisting that “even one civilian death is too many.” That would be a hard task in any military scenario, but given that Hamas hides among noncombatants, the White House’s policy openly reinforces the terror group’s political and military strategy.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Campus Kill-The-Jews Riots: Paid Professional Agitators Funded By Democratic Party Big Wigs, Or Well-Meaning Kids? Francis Menton

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-5-7-the-campus-kill-the-jews-riots-paid-professional-agitators-funded-by-democratic-big-wigs-or-well-meaning-kids

Several days ago, after the New York police broke up the kill-the-Jews occupations at Columbia, NYU and other universities, it emerged that close to half of the arrestees were not students or otherwise affiliated with the schools in question. At a news conference on April 30, Mayor Eric Adams adopted the term “professional outside agitators” to describe the main organizers of the protests (“What should have been a peaceful protest, it has basically been co-opted by professional outside agitators.”).

The protests certainly give an appearance of being well-organized and equally well funded. For example, large numbers of identical newly-ordered tents seem to spring up on almost no notice. Did hundreds of young people on shoestring budgets just happen on their own initiative to place orders from the same website at the same time and all pay with their own money? That seems implausible. But if there is professional organization, who are the organizers? And who is paying them? You would think that this is an issue where the public would have a huge interest in knowing the answer — particularly if the answer should turn out to be that the main sponsors of the protests are also big funders of one of the major political parties. But this is a subject where the sponsors have a strong interest in concealing their role as much as possible, and where uncovering and exposing that role takes some significant effort.

Several news organizations have been doing serious digging to get to the bottom of this. In this post I’ll highlight the work of three of them:

The New York Post, which has had a story on this subject nearly every day for the past week and more. Examples include a May 1 piece by Olivia Land (“Notorious anti-Israel protester Lisa Fithian, paid $300 a day to teach activists, spotted among Columbia rioters”); a May 2 piece by Joe Marino, Craig McCarthy and Emily Crane (“Nearly half of anti-Israel protesters arrested at Columbia, City College weren’t students: police”); and a May 5 piece by Chris Nesi (“Radical anti-Israel nonprofit urged rampaging Columbia occupiers to recreate BLM ‘summer of 2020’ riots”);

Tablet, with a piece by Park MacDougald on May 6 (“The People Setting America on Fire: An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests”); and

Politico, with a piece by Shia Kapos on May 5 (“Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors”).

ISRAEL, NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Israel’s Newest Security Threat – Is the US Next? by Robert Williams

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20623/israel-china-security-threat

“The Chinese are imposing a kind of sanction on us. They don’t officially declare it, but they are delaying shipments to Israel…. In electronic products, there are tens of thousands of components, but if even one component doesn’t arrive, we cannot deliver the product.” — Unnamed senior figure in a factory, Ynet, December 24, 2023.

Also immensely disturbing is that “massive” amounts of advanced Chinese military equipment were found in Gaza by the IDF during its military operations there.

“[I]f you set up systems with technology for critical infrastructure, like electricity, energy, water, transport, these are tied to one another. One can be used to bring the other down.” — Harel Manshari, Head of Cyber at the Holon Institute of Technology and research fellow at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism, JNS, January 8, 2024.

China recently hosted delegations from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s ruling Fatah faction, ostensibly to facilitate “unity” between the two factions, all the while pretending to be a neutral mediator interested in peace in the region.

Is the enemy, already inside Israel’s gates, also inside the US?

The Iranian-orchestrated Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 — which resulted in mass rapes, the murders of 1,200 men, women, children and infants; taking more than 250 hostages and firing thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities — has shown that China, which Israel might have thought was an ally, turned out to be, sadly, more of an enemy.

China refused to condemn Hamas and its terrorist invasion of Israel, choosing instead to condemn Israel just a week after the massacre and before Israel had even launched its ground operation in the Gaza Strip.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz My Kingdom for an Adult Amid the depressing dominance of childish and thuggish behavior on campuses, some public officials have emerged to show real leadership.

Posted By on May 8th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-higher-educations-leadership-problem

Now that the tents have been cleared from Columbia University’s campus, now that the NYPD has liberated Hamilton Hall, now that arrests have been made and outside agitators named, it’s time to begin making sense of the Tentifada. Mysteries abound: Who paid for all that matching, high-end camping gear? How did the same violent playbook spread from one campus to the next overnight? And what must we do now that the young collegians have made it clear that there’s more mayhem coming?

Let’s hope that our more astute observers get answers to these questions. But we have a more pressing duty: that of observing how various men and women in positions of power and authority acted when the barbarians stormed the gates.

First up: Columbia president Minouche Shafik. If you knew nothing about Shafik, or Columbia, or modern universities, and wanted to ascertain how the president might meet the troubling moment, you wouldn’t have needed to look past one number: $13.64 billion. That’s the value of Columbia’s endowment as of last June; it’s also, more or less, the Gross Domestic Product of Moldova, Rwanda, and a host of other smallish nations. With so much money at stake, it’s likely that anyone in Shafik’s position would have reacted as she did, with a symphony of bluster, obfuscations, and half-truths designed to make sure that business proceeds as usual.

Testifying before Congress in April, for example, Shafik delivered sweeping, emotive statements, such as saying that “for me, personally, any discrimination against people for their Jewish faith is anti-Semitism.” But when asked whether she intended to discipline Professor Joseph Massad, who celebrated the massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 as “awesome,” Shafik merely said that the errant teacher was “spoken to.” When pressed further about Massad’s employment status, the president replied that she just wasn’t sure.