‘Just Blind Hate’: The Persecution of Christians, September 2023 by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20105/persecution-of-christians-september

[O]ne young seminarian, Brother Na’aman, 25, who was on the verge of completing his priesthood training, was burned alive. Police were contacted even before the attack, but came only after the terrorists had fled. — Morning Star News, September 8, 2023, Nigeria.

“They then proceeded to separate Christians from Muslims, apparently based on their names and ethnicity. They opened fire on the Christians, riddling them with bullets.” — acninternational.org, September 21, 2023, Mozambique.

“Today, I have nothing. I saw my house and my place of worship burn in front of my eyes. I was helpless. I saw my [Muslim] neighbours betray us. We have never done them any harm; we always respected them. Then why?” — Open Doors UK, September 6, 2023, Pakistan.

The following are among the murders and abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of September 2023.

The Muslim Slaughter of Christians

Nigeria: As the genocide there of Christians continues, a Sept. 1 report found that “Of the 5,500 Christians who were killed last year because of their faith, 90 percent”—or about 4,950—”were Nigerian.”

On the night of Sept. 7, Muslims torched a Catholic seminary in Kaduna State. Although two priests managed to escape, one young seminarian, Brother Na’aman, 25, who was on the verge of completing his priesthood training, was burned alive. Police were contacted even before the attack, but came only after the terrorists had fled. “It is sad that killings and this type of evil against Christians are still going on in spite of our appeal and pleading to Nigerian government to take measures towards ending these attacks,” said the Rev. John Hayab, chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Kaduna State Chapter Hayab. In a statement he elaborated:

“What is disheartening about this particular attack is the … Parish is located at the heart of Kamantan town…This causes us to wonder some more, ‘Where is the hope, how much more terrible could the situation get?…. [W]e invite the Governor of Kaduna State… [to]ensure that those responsible for the Kamantan evil night are apprehended and made to face the law. Security is everyone’s business; it is disappointing that this kind of unholy activity could be recorded at the heart of the… community, and the criminals will operate unchallenged.”

On Scene at the Pro-Hamas Campus “Walkout”AT Berkeley Steven Hayward

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/author/steven

As noted earlier in the week, I was on campus at Berkeley yesterday to host a guest lecture at the law school from Hadley Arkes about his latest book Mere Natural Law (podcast forthcoming), but yesterday happened to coincide with the “National Walkout” in favor of Hamas called for on college campuses nationwide.

I decided to take in some of the scene down at Sproul Plaza, the main site for campus protest at Berkeley ever since the Free Speech Movement was born at that location back in 1964.

I’ll add that unlike Penn and other elite universities, a clear and unequivocal faculty statement against campus pro-Hamas protests has gained nearly 400 faculty signatures so far—over 10 percent of the faculty. Some excerpts:

Open Letter on Recent Events in Israel and Gaza to the UC-Berkeley Community

On the morning of October 7, Hamas terrorists launched a brutal and vicious attack, entering Israel from Gaza. In villages and towns near the Israel/Gaza border, they murdered by gun, knife, and fire more than 1,000 unarmed civilians, including babies, children, women, the elderly, and entire families, in their homes and on the street.

They went door-to-door annihilating whole families. They killed children in front of their parents and siblings. They abused women, and paraded their mistreated naked bodies. They massacred hundreds of young people attending a nature party in the desert. And they took captive over 150 children, infants, elderly in wheelchairs, women and men, to be used as human shields, and worse. . .

While we individually have many different views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we emphatically agree with President Biden’s characterization of this murderous attack – the purposeful annihilation, rape, kidnapping, and execution of civilians – as a violation of every code of human morality.

Some in our campus community have described these massacres perpetrated by Hamas as “resistance” to be “celebrated” in a “freedom struggle.” This is repugnant and indefensible. For many of us, as we went on social media on Sunday night and Monday morning, it was shocking to realize that literally while Hamas terrorists were going house-to-house seeking to murder as many Jews as they could, some pro-Palestinian organizations on our own campus were gathering petition signatures for statements that celebrated these Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters and rejected any critique of their actions. . .

Unlike the Harvard faculty statement that was signed mostly by faculty from the hard sciences, many of the Berkeley faculty signatories are from the humanities and social sciences, and included the chancellor, Carol Christ, and (the very left) law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

Analysis: ‘Reduction in US oil output under Biden from the Trump trend has cost the U.S. roughly $500 million a day’ By Marc Morano

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/10/26/analysis-reduction-in-us-oil-output-under-biden-from-the-trump-trend-has-cost-the-u-s-roughly-500-million-a-day/

We’ve been warning regularly on these pages that the Biden war on American fossil fuels is not just an economic calamity, but a national security threat as well. We have known for fifty years that terrorist organizations like Hamas are primarily financed with petro-dollars.

Just as Biden has aided and abetted the Russian war machine in Ukraine, he has enriched Middle East oil-producing nations like Iran as well.

Our latest CTUP analysis finds that the reduction in US oil output under Biden from the Trump trend has cost the U.S. roughly $500 million a day. Much of that money has been transferred week after week from American producers to nations hostile to the U.S. and Israel.

Missing Under Biden:

This has helped fund the very missiles being fired on Israel.

Biden’s “green” energy policy is weakening America and strengthening our enemies making the world a much more dangerous place.

The death of Democrat Jewish innocence By Sally Zelikovsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/the_death_of_democrat_jewish_innocence.html
Having strived for centuries in America to be the best of good citizens, Jewish Democrats are discovering that their efforts are not appreciated, with dire consequences.

Jewish conservatives, while considered a bit of an oddity despite growing numbers, are commonly asked Why are so many Jews liberals?

From conservative luminaries like Norman Podhoretz and Dennis Prager to B-team influencers like me, Jewish conservatives have struggled to provide a satisfactory answer. Like any other group, we do not march in lockstep, certainly not when it comes to our religion and definitely not politically. Still, Jewish conservatives readily acknowledge that, like Black Americans, most of us tend to be liberal if not downright progressive and, regrettably, sometimes Marxist.

Books and articles have been written, and theories abound as to why this is, including, among others, the idea that Jews are liberal out of residual devotion to FDR and his pro-unionism; as pushback against the brutality they suffered under right-wing totalitarians like Hitler; and because, when Jews became secular, they replaced their religion with progressivism.

None of these quite hits the sweet spot, but they all resonate to some extent.

Six Myths About Hamas ‘Hamas seeks peace.’ ‘Their rockets are harmless.’ And more lies we’ve been told for years that keep getting repeated today. By Alan Johnson (2014)

https://www.thefp.com/p/six-myths-about-hamas

Alan Johnson gave this speech in 2014, after the 50-day military conflict between Israel and Hamas. We’re publishing it today, lightly edited for clarity, because we believe the myths are still with us and are still poisonous, radically misshaping the Western understanding of Hamas, Israel, and the history of the conflict, especially on the liberal left.

The horror of the 50-day conflict between Israel and Hamas is known to everyone here. You didn’t just watch it on TV. You had anguished conversations with your family and friends at home and in Israel.

You knew it was a legitimate act of self-defense by Israel against the rockets and the tunnels and the antisemitic hate of Hamas.

You knew Israel had offered Hamas “quiet for quiet” day after day in early July, holding back as the Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli civilians.

You knew that no one in Israel wanted this war. You knew Israel accepted an Egyptian cease-fire proposal seven days into the conflict while Hamas rejected it, fired more rockets, and used the terror tunnels to try and murder Israelis.

But on TV, we were presented with something quite different: a motiveless assault by a cruel IDF on Palestinian children. For a week or so, Israel’s right to self-defense was acknowledged. But then, as the number of casualties rose, Israel’s actions were called “disproportionate,” then “unjustifiable.” Then Israel was accused of “deliberately targeting civilians,” and a “slaughter of the innocents.” Before the conflict was over, the terms child killers and war criminals could be heard.

Make no mistake. Israel took a blow to the solar plexus when it came to global public opinion.

We saw several large demonstrations in London: criticism of Hamas was nowhere, but the demonization of Israel was everywhere.

We saw the National Union of Students vote to boycott Israel.

We saw the Labour Party abandon its balanced position. Ed Miliband “differentiated” the Labour Party from the Conservatives, condemning Israel’s necessary ground operation to deal with Hamas’s terror tunnels as “unacceptable and unjustifiable.” He attacked David Cameron day after day “for not condemning Israel’s unacceptable and unjustified killing of civilians in Gaza.” One of his MPs, Grahame Morris, asked the Prime Minister why returning lone IDF soldiers were not being treated in the same way as returning ISIS jihadis.

The low point was perhaps when Labour’s John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister of this country for many years, used his Daily Mirror column, twice, to say Gaza was akin to a “concentration camp” and Israel was akin to the guards.

We saw “Holocaust inversion” everywhere. You know the kind of thing—Bibi morphs into Hitler, the IDF into the SS, and so on.

And we had Vince Cable calling for a review of arms exports to Israel if. . . Israel responded one more time to those Hamas rocket attacks.

The point is this: we mostly lost the war to interpret the war.

Why?

I want to suggest that one important reason was that six myths about Hamas and Gaza took hold. These myths gave people a framework of understanding that hurt Israel, badly. Many people could not see Israel plainly. They could only see the evil caricature constructed by the six myths.

First Myth: The Israeli Blockade of Gaza Is Motiveless and Cruel, and It Is the Cause of the Hamas Rockets.

Thanks, to a Politician Who Did His Job When the IRS visited my home, Jim Jordan actually did something about it. Why couldn’t I call a Democrat? Matt Taibbi

https://www.racket.news/p/thanks-to-a-politician-who-did-his

A new report about IRS home visits has just been released by the House Weaponization of Government Committee, chaired by Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. It outlines disturbing issues, including confirmation that IRS agents making home visits may come without warning, using aliases, and without informing local enforcement agencies of their presence.

One of the cases outlined is my own. My home was visited by the IRS while I was testifying before Jordan’s Committee about the Twitter Files on March 9th. Sincere thanks are due to Chairman Jordan, whose staff not only demanded and got answers in my case, but achieved a concrete policy change, as IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel announced in July new procedures that would “end most” home visits.

Anticipating criticism for expressing public thanks to a Republican congressman, I’d like to ask Democratic Party partisans: to which elected Democrat should I have appealed for help in this matter? The one who called me a “so-called journalist” on the House floor? The one who told me to take off my “tinfoil hat” and put greater trust in intelligence services? The ones in leadership who threatened me with jail time? I gave votes to the party for thirty years. Which elected Democrat would have performed basic constituent services in my case? Feel free to raise a hand.

If silence is the answer, why should I ever vote for a Democrat again?

Amy Klobuchar, You Are the Worst By Matt Taibbi

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/28/amy_klobuchar_you_are_the_worst.html

Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Racket News.

Minnesota Senator and Hindenburg presidential candidacy Amy Klobuchar sent a letter (h/t ReclaimTheNet.org) to Jeff Bezos demanding that he enjoin Alexa from citing “unvetted sources,” specifically Substack and Rumble. No hell is hot enough for this person.

Referring to a Washington Post story complaining that Alexa cited Substack, she wrote: “When asked about the 2020 presidential election, it appears that some answers were provided by contributors instead of verified news sources.”

Amy Klobuchar is the absolute fave of the national media consensus. They love her so much, they speak in italics. “Oh, my God. She’s great. And funny, too!” gushed a cameraman to me in Winterset, Iowa, birthplace of John Wayne, four years ago. He was standing astride an AMY AMY AMY banner in a diner packed with press admirers, who are legion, everywhere. The “funny” legend came courtesy mostly of one joke she repeated everywhere she went, over and over, clinging to the one time Donald Trump bothered to mention her, tweeting about her looking like a “Snow woman.” Funny Amy’s retort?

“I wonder how your hair would fare in a blizzard,” she’d say, in a nasal voice, laugh-snorting at her own joke. In my time following her I heard the joke about five times. By the last I was ready to drive a railroad spike through my foot.

National press tried endlessly to sell the public on “funny” Amy, always emphasizing her geographic origin, as if she were the media’s running mate. The New York Times, in an interview over “dumplings” in which Klobuchar talked about how she thinks about “her own humor and power,” described her act as a “clean, ‘aw, shucks’ approach that conveys her own background as a Midwesterner.” The paper noted: Klobuchar could remember many times when people laughed at her jokes! “She laughs easily… and can recall dozens of her successful zingers.”

NPR did a segment on how “Amy Klobuchar Turns To Humor To Distinguish Herself Among Candidates,” with Mary Louise Kelly abasing herself with the intro, “In the 24-person Democratic presidential field, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has distinguished herself as a comedian.” U.S. News and World Report went with, “How Amy Klobuchar’s Humor Sets Her Apart,” and claimed her ability to “savagely deploy a zinger” would be a “critical element in taking on Donald Trump” (!). Barack Obama gushed that Al Franken was now Minnesota’s “second-funniest Senator,” while the hometown Minnesota Post went with “Amy Klobuchar is Hilarious,” adding — this is real — the following deck:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Amy Klobuchar can legislate, but can she tell a joke? The answer is a resounding “yes” — as in bring-down-the-house, my-stomach-hurts-from-laughing, “yes.”

Stronger Action Needed Against Iran by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20102/stronger-action-needed-against-iran

Removing even just one oil refinery might also “send a message” and persuade Iran’s ruling mullahs to rethink their plans.

The Biden administration, it appears, has been funding both sides of two wars: Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

When the Iranian regime says, “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” they mean it. The US, by trying to bribe Iran not to carry out at least the American part of that threat, has, in reality, been financing Iran’s ability to do exactly that. Instead of neutralizing the avowed murderers of Americans, the US is bankrolling them.

The US needs to resume, even step up, enforcing sanctions to cut off the flow of funds to the Iranian regime. If not, the next war, when Iran has nuclear weapons, will make this one look like one of those five-star hotels in Qatar.

With the Biden administration’s deference towards the ruling mullahs of Iran, its regime — called the world’s “top state sponsor of terrorism” — is so far still the winner of Hamas’s barbaric massacre on October 7. The invaders from Gaza killed at least 1,400 people in Israel, including at least 31 Americans, wounded 4, 500 people, and abducted more than 222 people who were taken back to Gaza as hostages. Thirteen US citizens are still unaccounted for.

Iran has targeted US forces in Syria and Iraq 83 times since January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office.

When the US finally launched retaliatory strikes on Syria on October 26, Iran itself was carefully avoided.

One can only hope that a strong enough message was sent to the Iranian regime and its proxies — Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hizballah, the Houthis in Yemen — many of whose leaders are tucked safely away in five-star hotels in Qatar.

It is shameful that the Biden administration continues to deny that Iran had any role in Hamas’s attempted genocide, while the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah have themselves confessed that their paymaster, Iran’s regime, helped plan the attack.

What Israel Needs from America … and What it is Getting from Joe Biden Netanyahu has known Biden for decades and is quite familiar with his foreign policy incompetence By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/27/what-israel-needs-from-america-and-what-it-is-getting-from-joe-biden/

After the brutal Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, the most horrific attack on Jews since the Holocaust, Israel and the Jewish people need America’s steadfast support.

This means immediate and robust backing from our President and Congress. Israel urgently needs military, humanitarian, and financial aid to destroy Hamas and recover from the October 7 terrorist attack. It also needs America’s support in the information war, which is being relentlessly waged against Israel and the Jewish people by Hamas, other radical Islamists, the global Left, and the mainstream media.

American support for Israel must be unequivocal. There can’t be any daylight between the United States and Israel. If the Biden Administration has differences with Israel on how it plans to respond to the Hamas attack or other issues, it must relay these concerns privately. Any such private communications cannot be leaked to the press.

America also must speak plainly about who ultimately was behind the October 7 terrorist attack – Iran. The Biden Administration must halt its efforts to appease Iran and hold Tehran responsible for this atrocity.

These are the things that a President who is a true friend of Israel would do at this critical moment in its history. Sadly, President Biden’s actions and statements since the October 7 terrorist attack prove that he is far from a true friend of Israel.

The President was widely praised for stating his support for Israel after the October 7 terrorist attack in which he communicated America’s total commitment and support to Israel, that Israel has the right to respond to the slaughter of their people, and for calling Israel America’s most reliable ally in the Middle East. Biden also strongly condemned the Hamas attack as “sickening,” “pure unadulterated evil,” and a “violation of every code of human morality.”

Unfortunately, these statements were followed by a mishmash of contradictory statements, lectures to the Israeli government, and criticism by Biden and his senior officials.

Biden qualified his support for Israel defending itself against Hamas by saying any Israeli attack in Gaza must be governed by the rule of law to protect innocent Palestinian civilians. He also stated that Israel must not be consumed by rage in responding to the Hamas attack.

These are not things a U.S. president should be saying to a close U.S. ally who is at war.

As Israel grieves over the 1,300 killed in the horrendous terrorist attack and braces for the next stage of the war, President Biden has publicly dictated to Israel how to conduct the war and its aftermath. Biden has warned Israel against a full-scale occupation of Gaza. The President also called for the inept and deeply corrupt Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza and said that the Israel-Hamas conflict must end with the two-state solution, a now-dead proposal that all Palestinian parties have repeatedly rejected.

Law Enforcement Must Act against Antisemitism-Fueled Violence and Intimidation Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/law-enforcement-must-act-against-antisemitism-fueled-violence-and-intimidation/

Charlie’s post on the rising tide of antisemitism, as well as the indifference (and worse) to it in the media and on American college campuses, should be required reading. Until perusing it, I had missed the sleight of hand in the New York Times’ coverage of the appalling incident Wednesday at the Cooper Union, where Jewish students were barricaded in a library to protect themselves from a pro-Palestinian mob (many of them, as ever, young white radical leftists). Here’s the part of the Times’ report that stopped me in my tracks:

The tensions inflamed by the Israel-Hamas war that have roiled university campuses in the United States spilled into the Cooper Union in New York on Wednesday, with pro-Palestinian protesters pounding on one side of locked library doors and Jewish students on the other. [Emphasis added.]

In his superb news post on this incident, our reporter Zach Kessel includes the relevant video clip (from a post on X/Twitter by Jake Novak). Have a look at it.

I’ll wait — the clip is just six seconds long.

Now, if you just read the report in the Times, you would naturally assume that there was a locked door separating the pro-Palestinian “protesters” and the Jewish students, with both groups pounding on it. But that’s not what happened. The mob pounded on the door. The Jewish students were, as the Times states, “on the other [“side of the locked library doors”]. But they were not pounding. They were huddled and undoubtedly frightened that the mob was going to break through.

How long do you figure the Gray Lady’s reporters and editors agonized over how to frame the story so that it was literally accurate but still utterly mendacious — the “both-sides garbage” that Charlie aptly describes.

When Rich and I recorded the podcast this morning, I repeated an argument I made on X/Twitter yesterday (here): It’s not good enough for government officials (such as President Biden) to rhetorically condemn the shocking incidents of antisemitism-fueled intimidation and violence. The federal and state governments have civil-rights laws on the books that empower them to prosecute. I discussed one of them on the podcast, Section 241 of the federal penal code, which states in pertinent part:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

The statute has been held constitutional because there is no free-speech right to threaten and intimidate people out of the enjoyment of their basic rights. That kind of incitement, that type of extortionate and intimidating speech, is an inextricable part of mob violence — such that Section 241 provides for potential death-penalty charges or a sentence of life-imprisonment if death results from the threatening conduct, as it sometimes does.

It is atrocious in the United States of America in 2023 that Jewish people are made to live in fear and be intimidated out of enjoying the basic rights we all take for granted — to walk the public streets, move about school and attend classes, attend religious services, wear clothing that signals their adherence to their faith, and so on.