REPORT: Barack Obama Is Telling Joe Biden to Quit the 2024 Race Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/01/24/report-barack-obama-is-telling-joe-biden-to-quit-2024-race-n4925803

Earlier this month, we learned that Barack Obama advised Joe Biden on how to beef up his reelection campaign. Now, he appears to have given up all hope for Biden’s struggling campaign.

The former president and other allies of Biden’s have advised him “to quit the 2024 race to save America and the Democratic Party,” according to a report from RadarOnline.

“Insiders snitched that tensions between the two presidents recently exploded after irate Obama rushed to a secret meeting and confronted Biden about his fading chances to fend off surging Republican candidate Donald Trump in the upcoming November election,” explains the report.

Incredibly, Joe seems almost oblivious to the lack of excitement about his campaign and cratering approval ratings. Recent polls show a scant 38 percent of American’s approve of his performance with a whopping 58 percent holding a negative opinion of his work.

Meanwhile, Trump, 77, has seized a lead in some national polls despite being under indictment on 91 charges and openly declaring he wants to be a dictator.

In desperation, sources said Obama bellowed at bumbling Biden to go on the attack — and make sure trusted aides are constantly by his side on the campaign trail to keep them from committing the disastrous gaffes that have defined his presidency.

“The Obamas are convinced Joe’s lost his grip,” an insider confided. “He looks more feeble and clueless every day, and they know he’s lost the confidence of the public.”

“Choose life, and fight for it” Something of priceless value is emerging on the battlefields of Gaza Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/choose-life-and-fight-for-it?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Already numb with grief over the flower of Israel’s youth falling in the war in Gaza, Israelis have been further shattered by the killing on Monday of no fewer than 21 reservists in one deadly incident and three other soldiers the same day.

Not surprisingly, this has increased calls from the public for an end to the war. Even more understandably, the families of the Israeli hostages are becoming ever more desperate about the captives’ likely horrific fate in the dungeons of Hamas, and are stepping up demonstrations calling for a deal to end the war and secure the hostages’ release.

Would that it were that simple. Israel faces a horrific binary choice: to end the threat from Hamas, or end the ordeal of the hostages. It almost certainly can’t achieve both.

Hamas will not give up all the hostages without a guaranteed end to Israeli hostilities and a pledge not to assassinate the Hamas leaders. If Israel were to agree to that, a revitalised Hamas would remain a mortal threat to Israeli lives, more hostages would be taken in future and more Israelis murdered.  

The residents of Israel’s communities near the border with Gaza would be unable to return safely to their homes; nor would the families that have been evacuated from communities near the border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah’s 150,000 missiles are embedded in the civilian population ready for the signal to strike the entire Jewish state and where Hezbollah’s Radwan force remains poised to invade Israel to order to murder and abduct more Jews.

There is hardly an Israeli family that isn’t personally affected by this war. In such a tiny country, almost everyone has family members on the front lines, has relatives or friends who have been murdered or been abducted into Gaza, or knows people in such situations. 

Did the State Department Just Let an Architect of October 7 into America?By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/did-the-state-department-just-let-an-architect-of-october-7-into-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

For the second time since the October 7 attack, the State Department has granted a visa to Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to attend meetings at the U.N. this week in New York. That’s noteworthy, of course, because Iran is a significant backer of Hamas and the rest of the so-called “axis of resistance,” including the Houthis.

Amir-Abdollahian, who arrived today, was quick to meet with another of Tehran’s partners: The Russian foreign ministry posted a picture of him with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is also in town for meetings at the U.N. Security Council this week.

Amir-Abdollahian played a major role in building out Iran’s alliances with regional terrorist groups as the de facto foreign minister of Qassem Soleimani’s Quds Force. In fact, an Iranian lawmaker once called him “another Qassem Soleimani in the field of diplomacy,” in recognition of his efforts to unite Iran’s many terrorist allies throughout the region.

If you buy into the Wall Street Journal’s October 8 report on Iran’s role in planning the massacres in Israel, he’s also a key architect of that terrorist attack. If that reporting is accurate, Amir-Abdollahian attended key planning meetings leading up to October 7, though many analysts have expressed skepticism of the degree of direct Iranian involvement in approving it in the way that the Journal described.

Either way, given Amir-Abdollahian’s close coordination with the Quds Force, the Biden administration has ample reason to claim an exemption to the U.N. headquarters agreement that otherwise compels the U.S. to grant visas to its adversaries. But for the second time since October 7, State has apparently chosen not to exercise that option.

Egyptian Analyst Looks Forward to ‘End of Hamas,’ the ‘Main Obstacle to Peace’ “The Jews have been in this land since the days of the Prophet Abraham. This is their land.” by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/egyptian-analyst-looks-forward-to-end-of-hamas-the-main-obstacle-to-peace/

Magdi Khalil does not mention a “right of return” for Palestinians. Nor does he mention the Palestinian insistence that its future capital must be in east Jerusalem. He thinks it must be left up to the parties to figure out what kind of modus vivendi will be possible. “Egyptian analyst sanity on Lebanese TV: ‘Hamas is the problem, Arabs have to stop thinking Israel will disappear, Hezbollah hijacked Lebanon,’” Elder of Ziyon, January 11, 2024:

He expressed his optimism that a solution would be reached immediately after the end of the war and after the end of Hamas, the main obstacle to peace, “since serious peace talks will begin to reach a demilitarized Palestinian state under security supervision by Israel for years, but there is not yet a qualified party [on the Palestinian side] to enter into these negotiations.”

Magdi Khalil looks forward to the “end of Hamas,” which he describes as the “main obstacle to peace,” and fully accepts the Israeli demand that any Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarized,” with Israel in charge of security “for years.” He recognizes,too, that Israel does not have a partner for peace; the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is not the “moderate’” political force that the Western world seems to think it is. Abbas on only one occasion, during a phone call with Venezuela’s President Maduro, criticized Hamas for the October 7 attack, and then had that criticism promptly taken down. This shows just how “moderate” this corrupt leader, whom 90% of Palestinians want to resign at once, really is. His quarrel with Hamas is not over morality, but over power and money.

‘People of Color’ are ‘Mascots’ for the Global Elites It’s all about class status and superiority. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/people-of-color-are-mascots-for-the-global-elites/

During the World Economic Forum’s annual conclave of plutocrats last week, the attendees enjoyed an exotic display of indigenous culture and their own virtue signaling of their love for “diversity.”  The Catholic News Agency reports, “as part of a plenary session on Wednesday titled ‘Climate and Nature: A Systemic Response Is Needed,’ Chieftess Putanny Yawanawá of the Amazonian Yawanawá tribe . . . performed a shamanic rite.” Resplendent in her tribal garb and face-paint, she stood close to each of the several panel members’ faces, coughed, then blew on their foreheads.

This show captured perfectly the condescending, patronizing attitude of the DEI mentality of the progressive left, who make the world’s real diversity into occasions for cultural slumming, and preening their superior cosmopolitan “tolerance,” at the expense of the POC’s full, complex humanity.

Such displays have for decades characterized the progressive left’s treatment of what they now call “people of color,” that superficial, vague category that simplifies, idealizes, homogenizes, and politicizes the world’s vast, intricate ethnic diversity by turning them into “mascots,” as Thomas Sowell put it in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed. These symbols of the cognitive elite’s lofty virtue and sensitivity are celebrated at the same time Western elites promote energy policies that make it harder for developing nations to improve their lives.

Unpacking Climate Lies

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/23/unpacking-climate-lies/

Much of the U.S. was frosted and frozen by bitter winter weather last week. But this is just further proof of manmade global warming, the media claim. Because even as America freezes, “most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather,” which is merely a “contradiction” that “fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth,” says the Associated Press.

Of course what doesn’t fit “snugly” is ignored. And there’s plenty of that.

For instance, we’ve been assured for decades by all the right people that Arctic ice will disappear due to man’s wanton combustion of fossil fuels. At a United Nations climate conference in 2009, Al Gore, always a gushing font of climate disinformation, said polar scientists had told him, according to CBS News, “that the latest data ‘suggest a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.’”

A couple of months earlier, the BBC reported that “the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as 10 years’ time,” basing this statement on the word of Peter Wadhams, a University of Cambridge “top polar scientist.”

But the reality is that in the middle of January 2024, “Arctic sea ice for this date stands at its highest level in 21 years,” says Climate Change Dispatch.

A Hundred Days after Gaza’s October 7 Part I: Double Helix over Gaza by Gwythian Prins

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20337/october-7-hundred-days

History has the form of a double helix: history is indeed the DNA of living memory. There is what actually happened and there is what people believe happened. They are not the same but they are inseparable….

Hamas had told Israel that it intended to focus on helping its people in Gaza and that it did not want war. Israel, to show good faith, had even provided work permits for thousands of Palestinians to enter Israel every day for better wages than in Gaza. What Israel did not know was that many of them were spies who would tell Hamas exactly where in the villages to attack.

An elated youth called Mahmoud called home to his father and mother in Gaza using a murdered Israeli woman’s phone to boast about how he had just killed ten Jews with his own hands (“oh my son God bless you”… “Mom, your son is a hero”). Part of the recording was played to the judges of the ICJ as part of the State of Israel’s must-see rebuttal of South Africa’s accusations.

Jeffrey Gettleman, in The New York Times on 28th December, published details of the unimaginable mass depravity committed by Gazan men on Israeli women….

Many of the first responses to these events, as with the Holocaust, were denials that such savageries had ever taken place.

Almost four months to the day, and not in a good way, the world has turned upside down.

In a risibly threadbare case, the victim of a depraved genocidal attack was accused at the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague of committing genocide. Lacking evidence of mens rea (criminal intention) that is prerequisite, or indeed any vestige of substantive evidence, South Africa sought to invert the object and purpose of the Genocide Convention of December 1948, which is specific to the “crime of crimes”. The accused is not just any victim, but the Jewish state, whose re-establishment in the May of the same year that the Convention was brought into effect was no coincidence.

Hamas denies it slaughtered civilians on Oct. 7 The Islamist group’s about-face is in part driven by fear of destruction as the IDF closes in, says one expert on the Arab world. David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/hamas-denies-it-slaughtered-civilians-on-oct-7/

Hamas on Sunday released a statement denying its members committed atrocities on Oct. 7.

The denial is a complete reversal for the terrorist group and a total disavowal of its own footage, after it supplied GoPro cameras to its operatives so that they could capture for posterity their horrific deeds on that day.

“Avoiding harm to civilians, especially children, women and elderly people, is a religious and moral commitment by all the Al-Qassam Brigades’ fighters,” Hamas stated in the 16-page document, claiming it only targeted Israeli military sites. (The Al-Qassam Brigades is Hamas’s so-called military wing.)

“We reiterate that the Palestinian resistance was fully disciplined and committed to the Islamic values during the operation and that the Palestinian fighters only targeted the occupation soldiers and those who carried weapons against our people,” it added, saying that its members were “keen to avoid harming civilians” and that any such targeting was by accident.

The claim is astonishing given the hours of footage taken by the organization’s members in which they’re seen shooting innocent Israelis throughout Oct. 7.

Around 1,200 persons, mostly civilians, were killed that day and 253 were forcibly taken to Gaza to be held in abysmal conditions, living on starvation diets and denied medical care.

(The first batch of medicine destined for the remaining hostages entered the Gaza Strip last week. Israel is still waiting for proof that the medicines reached the captives.)

Hamas continues to hold 136 hostages, although a few dozen of them are believed to have died.

Avi Hyman, spokesman for Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, remarking on Hamas’s recent denial, told JNS on Monday that “Hamas is only fooling themselves, if anyone at all.

“What we saw on October 7 was, in the words of the German chancellor [Olaf Scholz], a new type of Nazi. But the thing about the Nazis is the Nazis tried to cover up their crimes at the end of the war, whereas Hamas were Nazis with GoPros. They were filming the whole thing,” Hyman said.

“Why they would think that today, 108 days later, we would believe this nonsense is absurd. But again, we know who Hamas is. We know that they butcher babies and we know they butcher the truth,” he said.

California: where freedom goes to die Gavin Newsom has turned the Golden State into a woke dystopia. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/22/california-where-freedom-goes-to-die/

California was once a byword for liberty and opportunity. The so-called Golden State was home first to the Gold Rush, then to Hollywood and then to the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. Californians have long been proud of that legacy – indeed, during a 2022 debate against Florida governor Ron DeSantis, California governor Gavin Newsom boasted that his state epitomised ‘freedom’. While this might once have been true, under Newsom’s direction, and that of the state’s essentially one-party legislature, California has been transformed into something unrecognisable.

However much one might dislike DeSantis’ sometimes heavy-handed approach to fighting wokeness in Florida, California is unlikely to meet most people’s definitions of freedom. The state government of California now forces shops to have a gender-neutral toy section. It seeks to extract billions as reparations for slavery. It aims to control speech and indoctrinate the young. It is attempting to regulate virtually every aspect of life in the name of ‘saving the planet’.

Maybe it depends on how you define ‘freedom’. California certainly offers freedoms to those on the margins. The homeless, undocumented migrants and petty criminals now have the freedom to commit crimes without much worry of prosecution. Back when Newsom was campaigning to be mayor of San Francisco 20 years ago, he pledged to eliminate homelessness in 10 years. Now California’s homeless numbers are growing not just in San Francisco, but also across the whole state. Overall, California has 30 per cent of the US’s homeless population. The state is hardly a ‘model for the nation’, as Newsom proudly proclaims.

Left out in this freedom equation are the basic rights of ordinary citizens – the people who pay taxes, raise families and rent or buy houses. For them, Newsom’s version of freedom is the ‘freedom’ to suffer the highest crime rate in a decade. For the pleasure of lackadaisical law enforcement, and a deteriorating infrastructure, California’s middle and working classes get the right to pay among the country’s highest state taxes. At the same time, businesses suffer a regulatory tsunami, with over 400,000 rules to adhere to, a number unparalleled in any other state.

Islamists are wreaking havoc in British schools Secular education is under concerted attack from hardline Muslim activists. Frank Furedi

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/23/islamists-are-wreaking-havoc-in-british-schools/

Maintaining authority in the classroom is difficult at the best of times. But it’s even harder when schools are being turned into sites of political conflict. In recent years, many of these conflicts have involved Islamist activists and Muslim parents who wish to impose their cultural and political ethos on the classroom. Their aim is to refashion schools in their own image. Those who stand in the way often court the risk of being accused of Islamophobia.

The battle over the future of Barclay Primary School in Leyton, east London is the latest example of a school under severe pressure from activists and parents. Its troubles began last November, when it asked parents to stop sending their children in wearing Palestinian flags, badges and stickers. This decision was furiously contested by a group of parents and pro-Palestinian activists. They launched a campaign to force the school to reverse this decision. It soon turned into a campaign of intimidation against the teachers and the school authorities.

In the run-up to Christmas, masked men climbed the school’s fence at night to hang Palestinian flags around its perimeter. During the day, protesters gathered outside the school gate and chanted ‘Barclay, shame on you’. There were also arson and bomb threats made to the school and individual staff. The school was forced to close two days earlier than planned before the Christmas break.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Facing allegations of Islamophobia and threats of violence, teachers at Barclay have said they fear for their safety. Police officers have had to be stationed at the school, such has been the level of hostility towards staff. The school has since sent a letter out to parents saying that it might be forced to ‘revert to online learning’ if it feels that it cannot guarantee the safety of children and staff. There are reports that it may even be forced to close.