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Iran says at least 103 people killed, 141 wounded in blasts at ceremony honoring slain general

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.aol.com/irans-state-tv-reports-2-122209945.html

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Two explosions minutes apart Wednesday in Iran targeted a commemoration for a prominent general slain in a U.S. drone strike in 2020, killing at least 73 people and wounding over 170 others as the Middle East remains on edge over Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for what Iranian state media called a “terroristic” attack shortly after the blasts in Kerman, about 820 kilometers (510 miles) southeast of the capital, Tehran.

While Israel has carried out attacks in Iran over its nuclear program, it has conducted targeted assassinations, not mass-casualty bombings. Sunni extremist groups including the Islamic State group have conducted large-scale attacks in the past that killed civilians in Shiite-majority Iran, though not in relatively peaceful Kerman.

Iran also has seen mass protests in recent years, including those over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022. The country also has been targeted by exile groups in attacks dating back to the turmoil surrounding its 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The blasts struck an event marking the the fourth anniversary of the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force. who died in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in January 2020. The explosions occurred near his grave site in Kerman,

Iranian state television quoted Babak Yektaparast, a spokesman for the country’s emergency services, for the casualty figure. Authorities said some people were injured while fleeing afterward.

Footage suggested that the second blast occurred some 15 minutes after the first. A delayed second explosion is often used by militants to target emergency personnel responding to the scene and inflict more casualties.

People could be heard screaming in state TV footage.

Kerman’s deputy governor, Rahman Jalali, called the attack “terroristic,” without elaborating. Iran has multiple foes who could be behind the assault, including exile groups, militant organizations and state actors. Iran has supported Hamas as well as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s regional military activities and is hailed as a national icon among supporters of Iran’s theocracy. He also helped secure Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government after the 2011 Arab Spring protests against him turned into a civil, and later a regional, war that still rages today.

Relatively unknown in Iran until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Soleimani’s popularity and mystique grew after American officials called for his killing over his help arming militants with penetrating roadside bombs that killed and maimed U.S. troops.

A decade and a half later, Soleimani had become Iran’s most recognizable battlefield commander, ignoring calls to enter politics but growing as powerful, if not more, than its civilian leadership.

Ultimately, a drone strike launched by the Trump administration killed the general, part of escalating incidents that followed America’s 2018 unilateral withdrawal from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

Soleimani’s death has drawn large processions in the past. At his funeral in 2020, a stampede broke out in Kerman and at least 56 people were killed and more than 200 were injured as thousands thronged the procession. Otherwise, Kerman largely has been untouched in the recent unrest and attacks that have struck Iran. The city and province of the same name sits in Iran’s central desert plateau.

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US Lack of Resolve Incentivizing China on Taiwan by Lawrence Franklin

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20273/us-lack-of-resolve

Bluntly put, the nations of the Free World have allowed global commerce to be held hostage by the revolutionary group of theocrat terrorists in Iran and their tribal terrorist tool in Yemen.

The primary problem seems to be that so far at least, there has been no attempt to hold the ringleader, Iran, accountable economically, militarily, hold-on-power or any way. This, incidentally, is the same Iranian regime that has lately escalated its enrichment of uranium to near-nuclear weapons capability, and has now moved a warship to the Red Sea.

That is why the Iranian regime has proxies: so that they will do the dirty work and take the hits — while the Iranians tuck into dinner.

You can be sure that Communist China’s leaders are closely evaluating the inadequate US responses to more than 100 attacks on US forces in Syria and Iraq — just since October.

America’s role as guarantor of global freedom of navigation and defender of “Law of the Sea” treaties is taking a hit. The Biden administration continues to dither rather than to act decisively in liquidating the capability of Iran’s proxy, the Yemeni Houthis, who have been effectively blocking passage of commercial ships in and out of the Red Sea, decimating traffic through the Suez Canal. The December 31 counterattack by US naval helicopter gunships, which sank three Houthi attack boats, was a good start but did not solve the problem.

The US military’s Central Command reported that, since November 19, the Houthis have attacked 23 ships. This Iran-backed assault has caused several of the world’s largest shipping companies to suspend voyages through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, a route that normally enables the passage of 30% of the world’s container traffic, 9.2 billion barrels of oil a day, and 4% of the shipping of natural gas.

The shipping giants that are pausing normal operations as a result of Houthi attacks may also be illustrating serious failing confidence in US pledges to protect freedom of navigation in the region. Ships are being forced to haul cargo in a detour around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, a route that lengthens their voyage by about 6,000 nautical miles.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Houthis’ patron, closed out 2023 by launching its seventh drone attack on December 24 on a Japanese-owned freighter in the Indian Ocean.

Bluntly put, the nations of the Free World have allowed global commerce to be held hostage by the revolutionary group of theocrat terrorists in Iran and their tribal terrorist tool in Yemen.

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Heather Mac Donald Onward with Inclusiveness Claudine Gay’s resignation as president is unlikely to change much at Harvard.

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-presses-on-with-inclusiveness

In her parting shot at Harvard, newly resigned president Claudine Gay has provided a reminder of why she never should have been made president in the first place. Gay stepped down today following months of turmoil caused by her reaction to the Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel and by accusations of plagiarism.

Gay got her job because of her race. No white professor, even a female one, would have been elevated to the premier college presidency in the United States on so meager a research record. It is fitting, then, that Gay plays the race card to the end. She lauds her abortive presidency as giving hope to those around the world who saw in it a “vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging.” In other words, without a black president, students “of color” would not be certain of belonging at Harvard. Never mind that for decades Harvard has so enthusiastically sought out black students that it admitted many of them with academic credentials that would have been all but disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians. Now, without a black president, that vision is apparently threatened, even as Gay concedes that Harvard’s “doors remain open.”

Gay’s sense of self-worth is breathtaking. She already has a legacy in mind for her five-month long presidency, the shortest in Harvard’s history. She hopes that her tenure is remembered “as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity.” Before her presidency, in other words, Harvard was deficient in the striving-for-common-humanity department. Never mind that Gay had auditioned for the presidency with a call to infuse the hunt for racism throughout every corner of the university, an academic agenda based on the idea that America remains a perennially white supremacist country.  As president, she was true to her word, introducing what the Corporation euphemistically calls “ambitious new academic initiatives” in “inequality.” 

The mission of a university, however, is the transmission of a civilizational inheritance and the testing of new knowledge. The goal of “finding a common humanity” (or, even worse, of combatting “bias and hate,” as Gay also puts it) serves as a pretext for the therapeutic diversity infrastructure.

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None so Blind as Those who Refuse to See Peter Smith

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/12/none-so-blind-as-those-who-refuse-to-see/

Swerving, deflecting and distracting are symptomatic of our current malaise in the West. No better examples are those which come via commentaries on the plight of Israel and on the persona of Donald Trump. I’ll give a couple of illustrations from The Weekend Australian. It wouldn’t be hard to find a legion more.

Gemma Tognini (“Progressives in lockstep with Hamas ideology”) writes, “This isn’t a conversation about Islam versus Christianity, or Judaism.”

Don’t get me wrong, Tognini is one of the good guys and her article is fine for the most part. But what is this ideology of which she speaks? It isn’t owned by Hamas. It’s called Islam. And while Tognini might not be having a conversation about competing religions. Islamic clerics are, and constantly. They make no bones about it. They want the ummah to predominate in every country. They make no secret of it; apropos.

Hitler made no secret of it. He wanted German hegemony in Eastern Europe. He laid it out clearly in Mein Kampf in 1925-26. Somehow or other, most commentators manage to swerve around the obvious, which would be to take would-be conquerors at face value and instead put issues into a transactional Western Judaeo-Christian framework. It doesn’t work.

Alfred Pennyworth in the movie The Dark Knight (2008) comes to mind: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical … They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Well, one religion wants to ride roughshod over all others. It can’t be bargained with. You can’t bargain with Allah. And the problem Israel has with its neighbours is Islam. Islam can’t abide Jews and, only to a little less extent, Christians and other non-believers; as I expanded on here. Yet we pretend it isn’t so.

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It’s Time to Make Some Examples Noah Rothman

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/its-time-to-make-some-examples/

As anti-Israel protests grow menacingly violent, Biden and his party can separate themselves from the extremists or face the consequences of their inaction.

It’s easier to itemize the conditions that aren’t contributing to a general sense of apprehension among American voters than to list the many sources of our national malaise.

Americans are beset by a “crisis of confidence” in their governing institutions. Economic anxiety abounds. Crises overseas and on the country’s southern border have made geopolitics into a kitchen-table issue in American households. And millions of Americans are increasingly convinced that the country is on the precipice of an outbreak of political violence. Recent events suggest those fears are amply justified. A multiweek campaign of unabated criminal unrest prosecuted by opponents of Israel’s defensive war against Hamas could be nearing a deadly crescendo.

Anti-Israel demonstrators mounted a coordinated effort to block access to two of America’s busiest transportation hubs over the Christmas holiday: New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles International Airport. The attempt to tie up airport traffic is already responsible for violent interactions between protesters and the targets of their harassment. Over the weekend, demonstrators temporarily shuttered JFK’s Terminal 4 as videos taken from the scene showed them releasing balloons near the airport runways — an exercise designed to ground commercial aircraft by imperiling travelers’ lives.

When the protests against the exercise of Israel’s right to its own defense aren’t menacingly violent, they’re a nuisance designed to irritate as many Americans as possible. The protesters are as likely to be found gumming up the works of holiday celebrations — ruining parades, terrorizing tourists, and generally ensuring that “joy is canceled” for most Americans — as besieging the Democratic Party’s political headquarters or even killing their opponents.

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Claudine Gay’s Resignation Won’t Solve Harvard’s Problems

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/claudine-gays-resignation-wont-solve-harvards-problems/

The new year is barely two days old, yet it has already witnessed a surprise conclusion to a sordid controversy from 2023: Claudine Gay has tendered her resignation as president of Harvard University after her unsuccessful testimony before Congress on the subject of campus antisemitism led to a deeper exploration of her questionable academic background and uncovered a stunning number of examples of plagiarism dotting a publication history only a mere eleven pieces long in the first place.

It is a pathetic end for the first black and female president of such an august intellectual institution, but one that all involved — Gay, the university administration, its faculty, and the unruly student body alike — were wholly complicit in bringing about. Gay’s resignation is richly deserved, but it obviously isn’t going to solve the crisis America currently faces on its elite campuses.

At this point, there can be no denying the gravity of the plagiarism accusations against her. All throughout her academic career dating back to her days as a graduate student, Claudine Gay engaged in serial plagiarism in nearly all of her published writing. It is no exaggeration at all to say that Gay was revealed — by the dogged work of researchers like Christopher Rufo as well as Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel here at National Review, among others — to have been a phony scholar, one whose very small and uninfluential body of work was itself appropriated from others in a repeating pattern of indifference to the basics of proper scholarship. Gay seems to have been in the university business for other reasons, and (even more shamefully) her peers recognized and celebrated it: Despite having a negligible record of scholarship — and this before it was understood that what little existed contained instances of plagiarism — she was rapidly promoted by her peers from a tenure-track faculty position to a full professorship with tenure, then made dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, then president of Harvard itself. It is safe to surmise now that none of this happened because of her brilliant contributions to advancing knowledge.

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2024: Do We Hit the Iceberg or Finally Change Course? By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/2024_do_we_hit_the_iceberg_or_finally_change_course.html

It is difficult for any American who loves this country to watch its political, economic, and military “leaders” destroy it.  Part of the political theater propping up the illusion of electoral choice in this Kabuki dance that the State-controlled press calls “democracy” is the lie that officeholders from different parties are at each other’s throats.  More Americans than ever finally see through this convenient fiction and understand that a single Uniparty acts as a guild of political thespians who are the face of a permanently entrenched national security Deep State that runs the show.  

Furthermore, more Americans than ever finally recognize that the United States is not a country that supports free markets but rather a central bank-directed financial cartel that regulates labor, commodities, and transactions so stringently that there is nothing outside of the government’s (or Wall Street’s) economic control.  Taxing Americans’ labor, forcing them to use an inflation-driven paper currency, and encumbering their ownership of real property are not policies for encouraging middle class prosperity; they are chains meant to create debt-anchored, government-dependent slaves.

For many decades, it seemed as if a vanguard of American communists were pushing these destructive policies and operating as a kind of fifth column from within an otherwise pro-America governing class.  Whether that fifth column was always much larger than it appeared or whether it simply succeeded, through strategic patience, in conquering America’s political and economic institutions and converting them to its advantage, there is no question that America’s internal demolition is now an all-of-government operation.

You do not hand a private central bank the power to print dollar bills, unless you expect those dollars to become untethered from any gold standard.  You do not print and spend money without budgetary constraints, unless you never intend to pay down those debts.  You do not engage in such a monetary Ponzi scheme that artificially raises the prices of stocks and real properties while depreciating the common person’s meager savings, unless you plan on precipitating the mother of all economic crashes in the future.  You do not start seeding the idea of a new central bank digital currency, unless you intend to take advantage of that economic crash and transition the whole population onto a mandatory system of government welfare.  

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Hamas Terror Network in Europe A terror plot in Berlin shows the Islamic terror group has a bigger plan. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-hamas-terror-network-in-europe/

Hamas have been described as Nazis and recent arrests shows that the Islamic terror group tried to live up to the name by planning to kill Jews in Berlin.

The first warning that Hamas, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, was preparing to deploy its international capabilities came when Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas spokesman, called for “violent acts against American and British interests everywhere, as well as the interests of all the countries that support the occupation.”

The question of whether this was anything more than empty rhetoric was settled when 7 Muslim terrorists were arrested across Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. While Islamic terrorist plots are nothing new in Europe, these arrests reveal that Hamas has built an international terrorist network across a number of nations in preparation for carrying out attacks.

The official release from Germany’s Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office revealed that four of the Muslim men arrested “have been longstanding members of HAMAS and have participated in HAMAS operations abroad.”

It revealed that Hamas had set up “an underground weapons cache in Europe… created in the past in a conspiratorial manner.” This weapons cache had been set up well before the Oct 7 atrocities committed by the Islamic terror group and the terrorists were activated and told to search for it “no later than spring 2023” making it clear that this was not an attack planned in response to Israel’s bombing of Hamas targets in Gaza, but long before the Oct 7 attacks.

IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Why The Sudden Media Interest In The Biden Border Crisis?

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/03/why-the-sudden-media-interest-in-the-biden-border-crisis/

The fact that the corporate media has finally decided to report on the border crisis is good news. Just don’t mistake it for honest journalism.

After spending three years largely ignoring the border, the mainstream press is suddenly all over it, with headlines blaring about a “surge,” “crisis” and “call for action.” Why now?

Last week CNN reported that a “December migrant surge” at the southern border was the “largest in more than two decades.” Several other news outlets used similar language. The New York Times warned that “surging” Mexico border crossings “push U.S. resources to the brink.” In another story, CNN even described the situation as a “crisis.”

Weirdly, the press is even exaggerating the current “surge.” Consider that CNN story, which says:

“Border authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border this month, marking the highest monthly total recorded since 2000, according to preliminary Homeland Security statistics shared with CNN.”

Except that’s not true. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, illegal crossings exceeded 225,000 in August, September, October, and November of this year, and in six previous months since President Joe Biden took office.

As a matter of fact, illegal crossings have averaged more than 200,000 since Biden moved into the White House.

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The Deadly Rise of Scientism We All Suffer Once You Can No Longer Debate “The Science”

Posted By on January 3rd, 2024

https://johnhabelesmd.substack.com/p/an-essay-on-scientist?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=413102&post_id=140309584&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

One of the greatest challenges each society faces is deciding what constitutes “truth.” Whoever holds that power wields enormous influence and steers the direction of the society for better or for worse.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard.