ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Drawing the Line Between Terrorist and Journalist Observers . . . or willing participants? by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/drawing-the-line-between-terrorist-and-journalist/

A U.S.-based media watchdog group issued a report last week exposing a half-dozen Arab photo-journalists who accompanied Hamas terrorists in the early hours of October 7 on their killing spree in Israel, documenting their atrocities.

All six of the photo-journalists whose work Honest Reporting examined were employed by major media organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press. Reuters heralded one photo, showing a lynch mob brutalizing an Israeli soldier they had dragged out of a tank, as its “image of the day.”

An AP photographer took a video of himself in front of the burning Israeli tank, glorifying that he was seeing it with “my own eyes.” He was wearing nothing to identify himself as a member of the press, and appeared to be part of a celebratory crowd.

Another AP reporter snapped close-ups of Hamas terrorists dragging a terrified and bleeding Israeli civilian to a vehicle for transport as a hostage to Gaza.

Others captured the initial breaching of the Israeli border fence, the torching of Israeli homes, and the capture of female hostages.

The report earned cringing excuses from all four news organizations, ranging from the expected “just doing their job,” to embarrassed denials that they had embedded their reporters with Hamas.

Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that the Department of Justice open a national security investigation into the four media outlets “to determine whether they or their leadership committed federal crimes by supporting Hamas terrorists.”

The six photo-journalists “almost certainly knew about the attack in advance, and even participated by accompanying Hamas terrorists during the attack and filming the heinous acts,” he wrote.

As someone who has reported frequently from Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan, and with Palestinian guerrilla fighters in the Bekaa Valley, I can tell you: the Palestinians control information tightly, just like any other totalitarian. They want to control the “narrative.”

I write about several instances where I succeeded in evading Palestinian attempts at control in my latest book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies. It was always a challenge; often, it was dangerous. The Palestinians a long history of punishing journalists who do not comply with their demands.

But these six “photo-journalists” were not seeking to get around the Hamas narrative to report independently. They sought to glorify Hamas and its atrocities.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

On the Moral Rehabilitation of Gaza Moral lessons from World War II. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/on-the-moral-rehabilitation-of-gaza/

As the war between Israel and Gaza rages on, some inevitable questions must be raised. If Hamas, an indisputable rogue organization that governs a region which exists more like a plot of land in a state of nature than as a civilized geographic entity, is not totally obliterated (which, with sentimental calls for ceasefires and daily pauses in aerial bombings and ground incursions on Israel’s part, seems unlikely), then can Hamas be politically rehabilitated? What would such rehabilitation look like? Or should we be thinking of more robust and radical solutions such as global incarceration whereby a country is evicted from the community of nations and radically contained militarily?

The most draconian form of global incarceration of a state or region is the permanent disbandment of a state into regional disembodiments, sedimentary fragments chiseled into the mortar bodies of larger states with no chance of it ever recovering its political solvency. It is the absolute disappearance of a state without necessarily terminating the lives of its former citizens. It includes but is not limited to the deracination of its political culture, the destruction of its political institutions and its mores, customs, and norms. Radical assimilation and/or extreme containment are the political concomitants and the direct corollaries of this mandate. Global incarceration of a state or region is the death of its political life and its capacity to generate and regenerate life as it was once capable of doing. An incarcerated state or region is not just a neutralized state – it is a neutered state.

On the slim chance that a heavily compromised, Hamas-governed Gaza exists, what might it look like, and how would it come about?

Here it might be helpful to look to history for political and moral guidance. Japan and Germany in World War II were countries that went through political rehabilitation and, with the aid of the United States, had their entire identities reconstituted. In the case of Japan, a heavily influenced U.S Constitution was foisted on it with great success, albeit via warfare. Sometimes rehabilitation requires war. Sometimes it requires firm diplomacy, or economic sanctions, or military intervention, or absolute regime change. What is essential about rehabilitation in the political sense is that there is adaptation to a code of normative behavior to which the rogue state must adhere. The rogue entity adapts to the norms of a civilizational order.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Liel Leibovitz Anti-Semitism Is a National Security Threat It’s time policymakers paid attention.

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitism-is-a-national-security-threat

Here’s a partial summary of what it was like to be Jewish in America this past month.

In Los Angeles, an elderly Jewish man was struck on the head by a pro-Hamas protester and later died of his wounds. In New Orleans, a Jewish student who tried to stop a classmate from burning an Israeli flag was attacked and had his nose broken. In Manhattan, a Jewish woman was assaulted and sustained injuries to her face and neck after she confronted two passersby tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli citizens. The list goes on.

How should we think about these attacks?

We could see them as further proof of our political culture’s descent into incivility and rage. We could note that they’ve been made possible, at least in part, by a movement to defang our police and turn our largest cities into ungovernable danger zones. We could say that the $4.7 billion in Qatari cash that poured into American universities between 2001 and 2021 might have helped transform our formerly fine institutions of higher learning into breeding grounds for feverish, bigoted ideology.

Each of the above is true as far as it goes. Ultimately, anti-Semitism animated these attacks. And anti-Semitism is not only a threat to Jews but also to America’s national security.

Look only at spreadsheets, and the statement seems absurd. The number of American Jews murdered in domestic terror attacks is blissfully low, and the perpetrators, for the most part, are white supremacists, not ISIS enthusiasts. But take a deeper dive, and a more troubling picture emerges. Because if the past ten years—to say nothing of the past 2,000—taught us anything, it’s that what begins with the Jews soon metastasizes, and that agitation about events unfurling thousands of miles away has a nasty way of bubbling over and spilling into American backyards.

Consider Tashfeen Malik, who, together with her husband, killed 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California in 2015. Or Mohamed Barry, who, a year later, slashed four diners at an Ohio restaurant with a machete. Or Omar Mateen, who in 2016 killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Or Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose explosive devices claimed three lives and wounded 281 people at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Or Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov, who, on Halloween 2017, rented a truck in New Jersey, drove it to lower Manhattan, and used it to mow down pedestrians in Hudson River Park, killing eight.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Two Words Describe Biden’s Presidency: Reckless Endangerment

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/17/two-words-describe-bidens-presidency-reckless-endangerment/

This week we’ve been treated to three government reports that all point in the same direction: Disaster.

Interest payments are through the roof. Real wages continue to fall. And a record number of illegals crossed the border.

That’s just the domestic news. As of this writing, Americans are being held hostage by Iran-supported Hamas terrorists who killed nearly two dozen other Americans when they invaded Israel. Our military forces face increasing Iranian-sponsored attacks in Iraq and Syria. While President Joe Biden lets Iran off the sanctions hook for another four months.

The worry isn’t just whether Biden – the architect of these disasters – will be voted out of office next year. It’s whether the U.S. can survive until then.

Start with the terrible news on the home front. On Monday, the Treasury Department released its monthly financial report, and it was alarming. In October alone, the government made $76 billion in net interest payments – a 77% increase from a year ago and a 153% jump from two years ago.

The Treasury report projects that gross interest payments will top $1 trillion this fiscal year. That will be more than we plan to spend on defense, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or any non-defense domestic discretionary program. And that’s if all goes well, which it rarely does.

MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Goes Full ‘Enemy of the People’ Reporting on the Arrest Made in the Death of Paul Kessler: Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2023/11/16/cnn-goes-full-enemy-of-the-people-reporting-on-the-arrest-made-in-the-death-of-paul-kessler-n4923991

Despite undergoing myriad personnel changes at all levels in the last year or so, CNN is still woefully CNN. 

Here is some background on this story from my colleague Rabbi Michael Barclay: 

An arrest has been made in the death of Paul Kessler, the Jewish man who died in a counter-protest a week and a half ago in Ventura County, Calif. The charge of manslaughter has been leveled against Loay Alnaji, and there is still an ongoing investigation into the possibility of a hate crime. There will be a press conference on Friday morning, and officials will hold a private meeting with local clergy beforehand.

This is a story that, predictably, the mainstream media tried to ignore and send down the memory hole. My good friend Jennifer Van Laar stayed on top of it from the beginning over at our sister site RedState. Once local law enforcement made the story impossible to ignore, the leftmedia approach was to be as vague as possible about the facts because the hacks have a pre-approved list of potential hate crimes that they can be offended by. A raging anti-Semite assault on a Jewish man isn’t on that list. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Resonating Message to Iran: Your Oil Exports Fuel Genocide. Stop Now or Face a Violent Oil Closure & Resultant Iranian Bankruptcy by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20151/iran-oil-exports

As Imperial Japan of 1940 pursued a strategy of aggression and murderous destruction in China, the United States sought to confront Tokyo with a strategy of economic restrictions, trade embargoes, and the threat of frozen financial assets.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) said at the time it was not his intent to bring Japan to its knees but to its senses.

There are lessons from policies and strategies forged nearly 85 years ago that need to be learned and applied as it becomes evident to those even in deliberate denial that Iran remains the malevolent force in the Middle East, masterminding the recent carnage inflicted by Hamas on Israel.

Under FDR, the Commerce Department created a task force of specialists that identified key commodities they believed were vital to Japan functioning as a society and important to their military. From rubber and petroleum to chromium and silk, Japan’s imports and exports were analyzed within the context of their war-making capabilities. The U.S. Treasury would also deploy their analysts to track Japan’s cash reserves, including their tens of millions of dollars that, even then, was a crucial global currency for international trade.

Today, the United States is facing an Iran that has used diplomatic guile, terrorist surrogates, and hidden cryptocurrency transfers to handle everything from paying for imports to funding those who will do their bidding in Gaza and Syria. They are a sophisticated and ruthless enemy. Yet they are strategically vulnerable if America and her allies are prepared to use that most potent of weapons: economic sanctions.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Urgently Needed: An Economic and National Security ‘War Cabinet’ by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20149/economic-national-security-war-cabinet

In World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill formed a wartime cabinet to unify the UK to fight the threats the country faced.

In 2023, the political leadership of Israel formed a war cabinet to confront and defeat Hamas.

In light of the recent, stark warnings given by the Five Eyes security leaders on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and so many others, it is time for the U.S. to propose an economic and national security “war” cabinet to coordinate, strategize, and implement plans to address the China challenge as well as the national debt’s impact on our ability to confront it.

Voters in a small Michigan township ousted their entire township board over the board’s support for building a Michigan-taxpayer subsidized, Chinese battery manufacturing plant in their midst. History might not remember them as among the first Americans to take a stand against the creeping Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence growing in the United States, but their vote should serve as a historic and valiant wake-up call for all Americans and their leaders.

How then should their leaders respond to the valid concerns over the threat posed by the CCP’s efforts in America?

The Israeli government’s political response to the barbaric Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 shows one potential avenue of response to Communist China’s rapidly increasing national security threat – critically, before a crisis or an attack forces a response.

Later on the day of the attack, leaders of four of Israel’s opposition parties issued a joint statement in which they said, “In times like these, there is no opposition and coalition in Israel.” The statement reinforced the unity of nearly all political parties in Israel to defeat the existential threat posed to Israel by Hamas and Iran.

On October 11, a war cabinet was formed. There was a unity of purpose to protect the Israel today and in the future.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

As he hosts China’s Xi, Biden delivers pitiful 2024 reelection platitudes that Republicans can’t seem to beat By Miranda Devine

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/11/15/opinion/as-he-hosts-chinas-xi-biden-delivers-pitiful-2024-reelection-platitudes-that-republicans-cant-seem-to-beat/

It took the arrival of a Chinese dictator for San Francisco to finally clean the filth off the streets — at least temporarily.

Sure, they had to erect cages around the sidewalks to keep them clear until President Xi Jinping leaves California, but better to be seen as a prison than a pigpen.

It’s all theater, of course.

The Chinese and other Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders know that after the facelift, San Francisco will revert to a feces-encrusted slum, as the zombies are released from wherever they have been hidden.

Everyone has seen the videos of addicts bent double in suspended animation or zonked out on the ground among the used needles and human excrement.

TikTok algorithms make sure those videos are seen.

Ahead of Xi’s visit, Chinese media outlets had great sport trashing San Francisco as “garbage city,” “ruined city,” “fallen city” and a “total failure.”

Apart from being an avoidable tragedy, America’s deadly drug crisis makes us an international laughingstock, the marker of a civilization on the fast track to hell.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Hamas Big Fish Who Got Away Israel had an opportunity to kill Mohammed Deif in 2003, and Yahya Sinwar was in prison until 2011

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hamas-big-fish-who-got-away-79184d1a?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden warned Israel not to be “consumed by rage,” even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “mighty vengeance” against Hamas. But revenge isn’t the only anger at play, or even the most corrosive. The fury that’s eating Israel’s war cabinet is regret. No matter how the military responds, there’s a sense that it’s too late.

“We blew it,” Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant, now Israel’s defense minister, told me following a Sept. 6, 2003, airstrike on Hamas leadership. (I was a Washington Post reporter.) Eight senior Hamas commanders, including bomb makers and developers of Qassam rockets, had met for lunch on the ground floor of a Gaza home. It was a rare daylight appearance of Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s shadowy military leader.

“The terrorist dream team” is how Avi Dichter, then head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, described the guest list at the time. Mr. Dichter, Gen. Gallant and other Israeli security officials in the 2003 war room plunged into hours of debate about what size bomb to drop in Gaza, weighing the risks of civilian casualties.

Palestinian children were playing outside the home. It was “a tragic dilemma,” one general said, a lose-lose decision of the sort they had argued and anguished over many times before. Mr. Dichter advocated for an all-out assault. The defense minister at the time called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” In the long run, several argued, it would save Israeli and Palestinian lives.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

$10 Billion More for Iran Biden renews a sanctions waiver that helps fund terrorism.

Posted By on November 17th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-10-billion-biden-administration-sanctions-iraq-israel-hamas-72bfc33a?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

After the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas, which is armed and funded by Iran, many Americans wanted to know: Would President Biden still release $6 billion to Tehran? All six Senate Democrats up for re-election in competitive states joined Republicans in calling on the President to freeze the money.

Under pressure, the White House relented, signaling that it will block the $6 billion—for now—but evidently not because it has changed its mind on the wisdom of financing Iran. On Tuesday the State Department reissued a sanctions waiver that gives Iran access to more than $10 billion.

The waiver, first issued in July and now renewed for another four months, allows Iran access to revenue from Iran’s electricity shipments to Iraq. The State Department says this is necessary to keep the lights on in Baghdad. That oil-rich Iraq remains dependent on Iran for gas and electricity is its own scandal, but the excuse doesn’t wash.

The July waiver was part of an unwritten nuclear agreement with Iran. Giving Iran access to these billions could never pass Congress, so Mr. Biden bypassed it. The idea was to quiet the region until after the 2024 U.S. election.

How little peace the money has bought is clear. Even on the nuclear front, new United Nations inspector reports show that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium continues to grow, Reuters reported Wednesday. Iran now has enough for three nuclear bombs.