ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Now they won’t even let Jews grieve in peace This week, Columbia students intruded on a vigil for the victims of 7 October – a sick new low. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/09/now-they-wont-even-let-jews-grieve-in-peace/

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were the fundamentalist fruitcakes who would picket vigils for slain American soldiers with technicolour placards declaring ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. Well, there’s a new mob of grief-intruders in town. There’s a new gang of hateful trespassers on other people’s sorrow. They’re not quite as God-bothering, not so homophobic, but they’re every bit as ghoulish. It’s the ‘pro-Palestine’ set on university campuses.

This week, something truly appalling took place at Columbia University in New York City. A vigil for the 1,200 people butchered by the fascists of Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October was noisily interrupted by the Hamas fanboys of the cranky Columbia left. ‘Fanboys’ is not hyperbole. Some were chanting ‘Resistance is glorious!’. This was on Monday, on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom. If you are singing the praises of a ‘resistance’ one year after that ‘resistance’ slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then you are a Hamas fanboy, you are a fellow traveller of fascism.

Jewish students and their allies had gathered to pay tribute to the dead and stolen of 7 October. They prayed for the Jews murdered by Hamas and demanded the release of the Jews Hamas still holds captive. They assembled on Columbia’s South Lawn. They displayed giant milk cartons featuring images of the Israeli hostages and a collection of teddy bears covered in red paint symbolising those who were murdered. Their lamentations were soon interrupted, though. Their murmured grief was punctuated by the shrill cries of Columbia’s legion Israelophobes. ‘Israel go to hell!’, these radical Westboro Baptists screamed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis shows the country how it’s done By Monica Showalter

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/ron_desantis_shows_the_country_how_it_s_done.html

Amid all the shambles, disorganization, delays, and waste seen any time the federal or many state governments gets involved in something, we have Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis to demonstrate what competent leadership looks like.

He’s like a breath of fresh air.

According to TIPP Insights which had an excellent rundown of all the competent things DeSantis actually did — providing fuel, restoring electric power, setting up shelters, and actually yanking open a closed landfill through a wise use of eminent domain so that hurricane debris could be dumped there to clear the roads for first responders:

DeSantis’s 15-minute address was a masterclass on what the government could and should do. Even the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a bitter critic of all governments, would have been impressed [though he would likely have been upset to know that the storm’s name coincided with his].

DeSantis was a picture of quiet efficiency, a master conductor of a disparate orchestra with hundreds of thousands of players. He starkly contrasted with Vice President Kamala Harris, who tried to show leadership on a Zoom call with senior federal officials also preparing for Hurricane Milton.

During the recent hurricane emergencies, DeSantis got immediately involved in protecting the state, having already been prepared for it, and then in help during the storm and after the storm. It’s a big job, given the double natural disasters he’s been dealing with.

But he got to it, and even delivered extra help to other states that didn’t prepare as well as he did, such as North Carolina, delivering massive amounts of temporary bridging so that rescuers could deal with washed away roads and bridges, rescuing the injured, delivering supplies, and getting others out of those areas.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Israel is Innocent of the Accusation of Genocide in Gaza And where the moral responsibility for Palestinian suffering really lies. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-is-innocent-of-the-accusation-of-genocide-in-gaza/

Talk of Israel’s crime of genocide in the war against Hamas in Gaza is ubiquitous. It is treated as an axiom; to question the tenability of Israeli genocide is to act as if one is questioning an invariable law of nature. South Africa has even brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. College protests and global public outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians—with the irrelevant special citation of women and children—are fueled by a misconception about the nature of genocide itself, a crime of which the Jewish state is innocent.

(I say the deaths of women and children are irrelevant in the citation of the alleged genocide because it is a surreptitious way of imputing greater moral value to the lives of women and children than to men. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The death of a man in war regardless of his age is just as tragic as the death of a child. All human lives regardless of sex have intrinsic moral value.)

The word genocide was first coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, to describe the systematic extermination policies of Nazi Germany during World War II. Genocide has been defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It involves preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children to another group.

As an historical fact, it is worth noting that in the years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948, the Arab population of what many refer to as historic Palestine more than quintupled from 1.3 million to about 7.5 million. The Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria has continued to rise from 3.6 million in 2006, to 5.4 million in 2023. One has to point out that when there are far higher death tolls in the Middle East, say, in 2011 where up to 600,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war—a number which many writers state is ten times higher than have died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948—such war outcomes are never labeled as genocides.

There are some important points to be made here. Israel has never had a genocidal policy towards its Arab populations which have grown exponentially in Israel and in Judea and Samaria (also part of Israel). It cannot be accused of genocide in its current war against Hamas in Gaza for several reasons. There is no intent to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza. The responsibility for the war lies with Hamas, which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. No rational war can be fought when an attacked nation is asked to be morally responsible for the civilians of the aggressor region or country. Hamas bears full responsibility for any death toll of its citizens on two fronts.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Free Speech Impediment Meet our nation’s college students: anti-free speech zealots. by Larry Sand

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/free-speech-impediment/

It has now been 60 years since the birth of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. It all started in mid-September 1964, when the school’s dean of students banned tables and political activity along the Bancroft strip, a 26-foot stretch of sidewalk near Telegraph Avenue. Students protested, cops were called in and angry students surrounded the police car. Thousands subsequently joined the crusade, and activist Mario Savio emerged as the leader of the burgeoning Free Speech Movement. The events at Berkeley garnered national attention.

Once again, colleges are ground zero for the free speech issue.But now things have turned 180 degrees, as many studentsactively try to quash speech they don’t agree with.

According to a new survey from the Knight Foundation, 70% of college students say that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence. The survey polled more than 1,600 college students and found that “2024 marks a crisis for free speech on college campuses…”

The poll revealed that more than a quarter agreed that it was more important for schools to “protect students by prohibiting speech they may find offensive or biased” rather than prioritizing allowing students to hear a wide range of viewpoints, including possibly offensive ones.

Another poll, the 2024 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, found that 71% of college students maintain that a professor who expresses “offensive”ideas should be reported to the university. Other eye-opening results include:

• About a third of students want professors to drop uncomfortable readings.
• One-quarter want them to avoid uncomfortable discussion topics.
• A third of students said a professor should be reported for contending there is no evidence of anti-black bias in police shootings.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden Team’s Disastrous Performance on Disaster Relief Putting American hurricane victims behind illegal aliens. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-biden-teams-disastrous-performance-on-disaster-relief/

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been promoted to the position of senior adviser to the president while continuing to serve as press secretary for the remainder of President Biden’s term. Ms. Jean-Pierre proved once again during her October 7th White House press briefing why the most accurate title for her service to the Biden-Harris administration is Chief Propaganda Officer. She resorted to the Biden-Harris administration’s customary accusation of “misinformation” when asked why the Biden administration is providing additional money to Lebanon while North Carolina residents in need are not getting enough federal disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Ms. Jean-Pierre charged that the question asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy was premised on misinformation:

PETER DOOCY: President Biden is fond of saying, “Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value.” If he has money for people in Lebanon right now without Congress having to come back, what does it say about his values — there’s not enough money right now for people in North Carolina who need it. That’s not misinformation.

KARINE JEAN-PIERRE: Wait, no it is, your whole premise of the question is misinformation, sir. Yes, it is…the way you’re asking me the question is misinformation. There is money that we are allocating to the impacted areas, and there’s money there to help people who truly need it. There are survivors who need the funding — who need the funding, and it’s there.

PETER DOOCY: You can’t call a question that you don’t like “misinformation.”

The Biden-Harris administration believes that it can do so by weaponizing the words “misinformation/disinformation” to discredit and even censor any information that contradicts their party line. Vice President Kamala Harris and other senior members of the administration are beating the “misinformation” drum while spreading misinformation of their own. Contrary to their claims that the hard-hit communities in western North Carolina are getting all the federal resources they need, folks on the ground who are suffering say otherwise. North Carolina residents have been without adequate basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and means of communication, for too long. They have been relying primarily on volunteers and each other to deal with the destruction left behind by Hurricane Helene.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of the hurricane season, according to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Moreover, as of October 6th, only nine percent of FEMA staff members were available to deal with Hurricane Milton or any other natural disaster to come, according to the agency’s daily operations briefing cited by the New York Times.

Yet despite all this, Vice President Kamala Harris proudly announced that her administration is sending nearly $157 million in additional assistance to Lebanon to meet the “essential needs” of the Lebanese people.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Try a Little Honesty About Israel Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/10/try-a-little-honesty-about-israel-2/

Both the Harris-Walz presidential ticket and now lame-duck President Joe Biden keep insisting that they are Israel’s best friend.

A snarly Biden recently bragged at a contentious press conference, “No administration has helped Israel more than I have. None, none, none. And I think [Netanyahu] should remember that.”

Yet the thin-skinned and triggered Biden’s prickliness poorly hid—or perhaps revealed—the truth: this current administration knows that it is responsible for the current explosion of the Middle East and the particular dilemmas of Israel.

Biden further revealed his blame-gaming of the Israeli government when asked another loaded question about purported Netanyahu election interference, saying, “Whether he’s trying to influence the election, I don’t know.”

Election interference?

Biden apparently forgot who just flew Ukrainian President Zelensky into swing state Pennsylvania, just as early and mail-in voting there began, to lobby for more aid even as he trashed candidates Trump and Vance to a left-wing magazine.

Recently, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris refused to say whether the Netanyahu administration is even an ally of the United States.

Her Democrat running mate, Governor Tim Walz, could not state whether the Democratic ticket would approve of an Israeli response—by either targeting the Iranian nuclear bomb program or its oil fields and exporting facilities—to some 500 Iranian missiles and rockets that hit the Jewish state.

Another Bob Woodward racy and gossipy tell-all book just appeared. It alleges that Biden despised Netanyahu and has reportedly smeared him to aides: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad f**king guy!”

What are we to make of this Biden-Harris-Walz mess?

It is an election year and one of the closest races in modern memory. Biden and his successors, Harris-Walz, know that support for Israel is a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and critical for Democratic unity.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel in Danger: Enemies Foreign and Domestic by Guy Millière *****

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21005/israel-in-danger

“[Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar wants everyone to be a martyr—except for him.” Now he appears to want to have discussions again on the condition that the Israelis will not try to kill him during the negotiations on a deal. — David Greenfield, CEO and executive director of Met Council, August 28, 2024.

When Israelis clamor for the release of their hostages, they are, unfortunately, just letting Hamas know what a valuable bargaining chip it has – so the price goes up. For Hamas, if the families of the hostages succeed in getting Netanyahu pushed out of office, so much the better: he will likely be replaced by a “peace” coalition who will grant massive concessions to Hamas and allow it to stay in power.

As far as the Biden-Harris administration is concerned, a new Israeli prime minister it hand-picks to replace Netanyahu would presumably agree to US demands to let the Palestinians in Gaza set up a sovereign terrorist state on Israel’s border, from which to continue attacking Israel until it is destroyed. A new prime minister installed by the Biden-Harris administration would also agree to Iran having as many nuclear weapons as it likes. Iran, after finishing off Israel, which Iran’s former President Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani called a “one-bomb country,” could then resume trying to take over its oil-rich neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The Biden-Harris administration also appears to want Hamas to stay in power because that is what Hamas’s patrons, Iran and Qatar (America’s supposed ally) want.

Meanwhile, back in Gaza, the Associated Press reports, “Sinwar wants to end the war — but only on his terms.” These terms include a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, including the “Philadelphi Corridor” border between Egypt and Gaza. That is where immense cross-border underground tunnels are located, allowing the resumption of unlimited supplies of new weapons to be smuggled to Hamas in Gaza, as well as the ideal gateway for Hamas leader Sinwar to escape to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — with the remaining Israeli hostages in tow.

For Hamas and Sinwar, the bottom line for is to stay in power to be able to attack Israel “time and again until it is annihilated,” as one of its officials, Ghazi Hamad, straightforwardly said.

Israel’s opposition political leaders, journalists, trade unionists, and many senior security officials all appear to be walking into a trap that Hamas has laid out for them: having Israeli anti-government demonstrators demand new elections to force Netanyahu out and a US puppet — agreeable to terrorist Palestinian state, Hamas’s continued rule in Gaza, and a nuclear-armed Iran — in.

Hamas, remember, never offered to release all the hostages, only a few, alive or dead. Sinwar will undoubtedly try to string out the negotiations as long as he can – refusing to provide hostage names again, and so on. His job will be to keep as many hostages as long as possible, to buy time for Hamas to resupply and regroup.

For months, Hamas has rejected any agreement, and blamed Netanyahu. They have, of course, been helped by the Biden-Harris administration, which snubbed Netanyahu at the airport in Washington DC in July as well as at his address to the United States Congress. The snubs evidently only succeeded in giving Hamas the impression that the US was done with Netanyahu, that a Hamas victory was in the bank, and that all Iran and its proxies had to do was sit back and wait.

For months, Hamas has rejected every agreement: its leaders apparently think that the pressure on Netanyahu and his government by the Biden-Harris administration would win their war for them. Hamas has now seen that murdering hostages results in even more pressure for Israel to surrender.

“We’re asked to make concessions? What message does this send Hamas? It says, ‘Kill more hostages, murder more hostages! You’ll get more concessions! The pressure internationally must be directed at these killers, at Hamas, not at Israel.” — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to the protestors demonstrating against him, September 2, 2024.

The Biden-Harris administration has, in fact, been funding Israel’s anti-government protests since Netanyahu was elected two years ago, to try to oust him. Shortly after the October 7, 2023 invasion by Hamas, the Biden-Harris administration continually pressured Israel to make concessions and withheld or slow-walked weapons shipments, but never applied even the slightest pressure on Hamas, Iran, or the major funder of all Islamic terrorist groups, Qatar.

In the meantime, Iran appears to be gearing up to take over Sudan. Such an acquisition would complete the regime’s “ring of fire” — a multi-front war encircling Israel.

“Iran is trying to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank by smuggling weapons from Jordan and financing terrorists.” — Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, August 29, 2024.

Worse, this week the Biden-Harris administration announced that it is sending Lebanon an additional $157 million – for “humanitarian relief.” In Hezbollah-speak, that means funding for more weapons to attack Israel. Does anyone really think that the battered Lebanese people will see a cent? This bounty brings the Biden-Harris administration’s prize money for Hezbollah’s war machine to $385 million — all of which will most certainly be diverted to attacking Israel.

Vice President Kamala Harris has repeatedly called for a rapid ceasefire in Gaza – meaning the survival of Hamas – and said that a “two-state solution is the only path forward” — meaning, undoubtedly, a terrorist Palestinian state.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently announced that it “needed more time” to find human rights violations in Israel’s “most moral army in history.” The ICJ seems to be hoping that if they wait long enough, a few violations might turn up.

As Israel turns to the existential danger presented by Iran, it will need all the support it can get, both from its own people and other nations. If they are smart, they will give it.

ELECTIONS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Harris’ Latest Health Care Plan’s Spending Will Bankrupt America

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/10/harris-latest-health-care-plans-spending-will-bankrupt-america/

Those who have suffered through Obamacare, with its soaring premiums, longer waits for care and millions still left without insurance, should beware. Because Vice President Kamala Harris, if elected, has something equally bad in store for you.

Originally, Harris’ put forward a grab bag of “fixes” for Obamacare, which has now been in force for 14 years. Among her recent ideas, according to CNN, include “making permanent the enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies; broadening the $35 monthly cap on insulin and $2,000 annual limit on out-of-pocket costs to all Americans, not just Medicare enrollees; speeding up Medicare drug price negotiations; and working with states to cancel patients’ medical debt.”

All sounds kind of innocent, right? It isn’t. It’s all part of the slow-but-steady move toward Medicare for All, the plan to create nationalized health care in the U.S., and abolish private insurance. It would be a disaster.

Though Harris has verbally backed away from supporting Medicare for All, her most recent idea, unveiled this week, is a dangerous step in that direction:

“The Veep on Tuesday used a friendly interview on ‘The View’ to lay out her plan to require Medicare to cover long-term home care for all seniors who can’t live independently,” the Wall Street Journal opined. “She said the new benefit would help the ‘sandwich generation’ of Americans who take care of children and aging parents. She put no cost estimate on this new taxpayer obligation, but home care on average costs $288,000 a year, so you get the idea.”

“It’s just about helping an aging parent or person — you know — prepare a meal, put their sweater on,” Harris said on the campaign trail. In fact it’s the last piece in a cradle-to-grave Medicare for All system.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Antisemitism Is the Point By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on October 9th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-antisemitism-is-the-point/

What ‘Anti-Zionist’ Really Means

This planet is full of people who just want to kill Jews, and this country has no shortage of people who just want to cheer on the murderers.

I hate to begin your Monday morning with such a bracing statement, but that’s the lesson of the past year.

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs? (Perhaps the students are just following the guidance of billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya: “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs, okay?”)

Russia has kidnapped an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 Ukrainian children over the course of the war, sending them deeper into Russian-occupied territory or to Russia, and a couple hundred have been shipped off to a boot camp, where the Russians are training them to become child soldiers against their own homeland. This is separate from the 11,743 Ukrainian civilians killed during the war through August, the 24,614 injured, and the 168 summary executions of civilians, including five children, committed by the invading forces.

Anybody on campus want to march in the quad about that?

When’s the last time you saw a college campus with a protest against the Taliban and its nightmarish oppression of women? How many college students even know that the Taliban has now banned all women from public spaces — banned their faces, banned their voices?

Anybody seen any campus protests against the Iranian government’s rapidly increasing rate of executions — in August, 29 executions in one day?

Have you seen any college protests against the Houthis’ “partial and limited reintroduction” of slavery and child marriages?

There are ongoing “atrocities against Black African ethnic groups in Sudan — wrenchingly similar to the Darfur genocide here two decades ago.” Nicholas Kristof reports:

After two military factions started a civil war in 2023, one of them — a descendant of the janjaweed called the Rapid Support Forces, armed and supported by the United Arab Emirates — tried once again to drive Black Africans from Darfur. Naima recounted the same pattern I heard from so many people: The militia surrounded her village, lined up men and boys, then shot them one by one.

“We’re going to get rid of this Black trash,” she quoted the Arab gunmen saying.

Then the gunmen went house to house to kill, plunder and rape. Mostly, those they raped were girls and women, she said, but they also raped at least one man.

Do these black lives matter? Apparently not, judging from the lack of reaction of the overwhelming majority of America’s college students.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Well Whaddya Know . . . Hezbollah Wants a Cease-Fire Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on October 9th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/well-whaddya-know-hezbollah-wants-a-cease-fire/

Hezbollah’s No. 2 — who, as I noted earlier, is not exactly tripping over himself to be proclaimed Hezbollah’s new No. 1 — has asserted that the terrorist organization supports the efforts of “Lebanon” to establish a truce with Israel.

Of course, Lebanon’s government is run by Hezbollah, which is run by Iran.

The Jerusalem Post reports that, with Israel having eliminated Hezbollah’s leaders, most of its commanders, and thousands of its beeper-issued jihadists, deputy leader Naim Qassem is now hopeful that “after the issue of a cease-fire takes shape, and once diplomacy can achieve it, all of the other details can be discussed and decisions can be taken.”

It marks the first time Hezbollah has signaled willingness to stop the fighting it started on October 8, 2023, without conditioning a cease-fire on a cessation of the fighting that Hamas started with its atrocities the preceding day. Getting your brains beaten in can be clarifying.

For public consumption, Qassem takes the position that he is supporting a cease-fire initiative being led by Nabih Berri, nominally the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament. And putting on his brave face, he added that “if the enemy [Israel] continues its war, then the battlefield will decide.”

That’s two brave faces in one day. Earlier, Qassem claimed that Hezbollah had “overcome all the blows that have been dealt us,” in conjunction with which the jihadists fired over 100 missiles at Haifa. The attack had no meaningful effect; in the interim, the IDF proceeded with more aerial bombardments of Hezbollah havens south of Beirut.

The battlefield has already decided.