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Does Anybody Know What Books Biden Reads? Or If He Reads?

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/30/does-anybody-know-what-books-biden-reads-or-if-he-reads/

Time was when the elite media class obsessed over how many and what books presidents read. But since President Joe Biden took office, they’ve completely lost interest. Do they know something we don’t?

Before Biden, the press loved to ask presidents about their favorite books. What’s on their nightstand? What are they reading on vacation? It has always been treated as a sign of intelligence. A measure of sophistication.

The Daily Beast once compared presidential reading habits to how historians ranked them as presidents. “The results are not surprising—the top-ranked presidents all made our list near the top of presidential readers,” it reported.

The press lavished praise on Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for their book-reading habits. When Clinton was running in 1992, for example, the New York Times reported glowingly that he was “an omnivorous reader.” Obama’s summer reading list was treated as front-page news.

This fixation on presidents’ literary habits usually comes out strongest when a Republican is president as a way to prove they’re dumb.

When George W. Bush was running for president, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “just how much Bush hits the books — or doesn’t — has suddenly become a campaign issue.”

Trump was routinely attacked for his lack of interest in books.

The Atlantic ran a lengthy piece — “The President Who Doesn’t Read” — that began: “Trump’s allergy to the written word and his reliance on oral communication have proven liabilities in office.”

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Who the Israelis Are Releasing in Return for Hamas’s Hostages The Palestinian women and children include attempted killers and violent teenagers.

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-releasing-palestinian-prisoners-hamas-gaza-4d21a9b4?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Hamas continued to release hostages on Wednesday, for a total of more than 100 so far, a bit more than a third of the estimated 240 civilians seized on Oct. 7. In return Israel has freed more than 200 Palestinian prisoners, but nobody should think these prisoners are at all morally comparable.

Hamas is releasing Israeli and foreign women and children abducted in illegal acts of war targeting civilians in their homes. The recently released include grandmothers in their 70s and 80s, Thai guest workers, and more than 20 children under age 12—including preschoolers and a toddler.

By contrast, the Palestinians Israel is releasing were in prison because they were arrested and awaiting trial, or were convicted of violent crimes. Of the 39 Palestinians released Saturday night, Haaretz reports that eight were convicted of attempted murder. Let us introduce you to a couple of them.

There’s Israa Jaabis, a Palestinian woman who in 2015—during a wave of other attacks in Jerusalem—attempted a car bomb that wounded an Israeli police officer. According to the Shin Bet security service, Jaabis yelled “Allahu Akbar” as the officer approached and detonated an explosive device.

Israel also released Maysoon Musa Al-Jabali, who was convicted of attempted murder for her 2015 stabbing of a female Israel soldier; Shorouq Dwayyat, who was convicted of attempted murder after she wrote on Facebook in 2015 of her desire to become a martyr and stabbed an Israeli man multiple times; and Aisha Afghani, who was convicted after an attempted 2016 stabbing attack on Israelis in Jerusalem.

All were adults when they committed their attacks, and all were released this week well before the end of their sentences. Most of the children Israel has released are teenage boys—age 14 and older—arrested or charged in recent years for making explosives or throwing stones or petrol bombs at Israelis.

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THAI HOSTAGE: Hamas Tortured Captive Jews with Electric Cables By Baruch Green

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://vinnews.com/2023/11/29/thai-hostage-hamas-tortured-captive-jews-with-electric-cables/

A Thai hostage who was released by Hamas told Israel’s Channel 12 that the Jewish hostages with him were beaten with electric cables, and that all the hostages were denied adequate food.

Channel 12 also quoted the Thai hostage as saying that Jewish hostages were kept in worse conditions than others.

As reported by the Times of Israel:

“He says there was little to eat for the hostages — a pita a day, sometimes a tin of tuna to share between four, and sometimes a piece of cheese. Held for more than seven weeks, he says they were allowed to shower once.

“We were with Israelis, and they were guarded all the time,” he is quoted saying. “The Jews who were held with me were treated very harshly, sometimes they were beaten with electric cables.”

In addition, it has been reported that Hamas tortured children by forcing them at gunpoint to watch films of atrocities against Israeli civilians during the attack. It also kept some children alone for weeks, and denied hostages sufficient food, water, and sunlight.

Many hostages lost weight, and not unexpectedly, many of the children have shown signs of psychological trauma.

The Red Cross has not been allowed to visit the hostages, nor has it transferred medicines and other needed items to them. In fact, there is no evidence that the Red Cross, which has immense leverage, has made any serious effort to pressure Hamas to allow them in.

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Ireland on the Verge of Establishing an Oppressive Censorship Regime Charles Cooke

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/ireland-on-the-verge-of-establishing-an-oppressive-censorship-regime/?utm_source=

Despite superficial similarities to First Amendment jurisprudence in the U.S., the proposed Irish hate-speech statute would all but guarantee its politicized use.

The ferocious desire of Ireland’s myopic and feckless governing class to crack down on speech that it considers “hateful” seems at last to be reaching fruition. After a riot in Dublin was blamed on “far-right” agitators, the country’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, renewed his push for a stricter set of legal restrictions on the free expression of the citizenry. “It’s now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us,” Varadkar said last week, “that our incitement-to-hatred legislation is just not up to date.” “We need that legislation through,” he insisted, “and we need it through in a matter of weeks.”

When selling its proposal, Ireland’s government is careful to use words that do not appear suggestive of censorship. Far from being about “enforcing politeness or political correctness,” the country’s minister of justice, Helen McEntee, maintained last week, the statute she covets is about preventing forms of “criminal hate speech” that “recklessly incite” or “stir up acts of hostility, discrimination or violence.” “People may hold different views and opinions,” McEntee vowed. Her target, she explained, was instigation.

Rhetorically, this is quite a clever trick — akin to describing welfare spending as “insurance” or defining McCarthyism as “accountability culture.” But a trick it is nevertheless. If Ireland truly wished to crack down on reckless incitement while leaving “views and opinions” alone, it could simply have adopted the American standard of review, which, by design, does precisely that. That, instead, the Irish government has developed a system for the wholesale regulation of debate is telling.

Examined superficially, the guts of Ireland’s law seem similar to the holding in America’s controlling First Amendment case, Brandenburg v. Ohio. If enacted, Ireland’s measure would enable the punishment of speech that is “likely to incite hatred or violence” — which appears to channel Brandenburg’s exemption of speech that is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely” to do so. But this resemblance is a mirage.

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The Aborted War in Israel: Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/the-aborted-war-in-israel/

Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under the circumstances, how could Israel realistically win?
“I ask the question to remind us that, unless and until Israel’s enemies are decisively defeated, the thrum of eliminationist war and the periodic surges of jihadist terror will continue.”

I wish I could be optimistic about Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas in the aborted war, but I am more pessimistic than ever.

I’ve been a pessimist from the start. As Rich Lowry and I have discussed on the podcast, that’s because I’ve never believed Israel’s stated war aims were either politically feasible or reflective of on-the-ground reality — which is much worse than Israel or the Biden administration is willing to acknowledge.

Israel’s principal stated objective is to destroy Hamas. It has analogized this to the Trump-era American objective of destroying ISIS. There is something to this comparison. Contrary to his extravagant rhetoric, Trump did not actually destroy ISIS — it still exists and is a menace wherever it rears its head. Trump did, however, eviscerate ISIS’s capacity to hold territory as a de facto sovereign. This was a significant achievement. (Whether it was accomplished constitutionally is an interesting question.) Yet we shouldn’t overstate the achievement, because (a) terrorist organizations are more effective in pursuing their core competencies of insurgency and sneak attacks than in trying to govern territory, and (b) ISIS is a rebel sect broken off from al-Qaeda, which remains a major challenge, so ISIS would inevitably either fold back into al-Qaeda or rebrand as some new terrorist group — since what catalyzes jihad is the regional predominance of sharia-supremacist ideology, not any particular, transient organization.

The situation with Hamas is similar, and in some ways more vexing.

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Genocidal Hatred of Jews and the West by Guy Millière

Posted By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20188/genocidal-hatred-jews-west

Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.

In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union wanted to gain more influence in the Arab Muslim world, its leaders decided to support what was at the time a sacred cause for Arab leaders: the attempt to destroy Israel. They… chose to invent a “national liberation struggle”…. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with the task of “liberating Palestine,” and the borders of “Palestine” on the maps used by the PLO showed that the goal was to erase Israel from the face of the earth.

Western leftists started vocally to express hatred of “imperialist Israel” and, ironically, the hard-won democratic freedoms they were at that moment enjoying to the fullest: freedom of speech, assembly, education, sexuality, and supposedly equal justice under the law.

The Oslo Accords only made everything worse. By signing them, Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized… that a terrorist organization was somehow the legitimate representative of a people invented fewer than three decades earlier, and that this invented “people” had “rights” and deserved to have territory and self-government.

In reality, it was Israel that decolonized the land from the grip of the British, who governed it from 1917 until Israel’s war of independence in 1948.

The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere…. These demonstrations also show that support for the “Palestinian cause” sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.

[I]f nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of “democracy” of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups — the worst is bound to come.

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Hatred Without Borders Douglas Murray

Posted By on November 29th, 2023

National Review- December 2023

Europe’s cautionary tale

It is 14 years now since Christopher Caldwell published his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. That book asked the interesting, provocative question, “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” — a question that policy-makers in Europe either dodged or answered glibly. It is now 17 years since Mark Steyn wrote his best seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, in which he too addressed the question of demography in Europe.

Those are not the only two books on the subject, of course, but they are among the boldest. For over 20 years, a range of writers from a bewildering array of backgrounds have tried to warn Europeans that there will be a cost to mass immigration from the Muslim world. We have had Thilo Sarrazin, Éric Zemmour, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the late Oriana Fallaci. Almost every country in Europe produced its own prophets or seers. Each in turn had to face the same brickbats of abuse. Sometimes verbal. Sometimes worse.

But as I described in my own contribution to this genre in 2017 (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam), the mass movement of Muslims into Europe has had effects that those who allowed the migration were bizarrely blind to.

For instance, until Valentine’s Day 1989 nobody in Europe knew what a fatwa was. Then suddenly everybody knew, and we learned that large proportions of our populations felt very strongly about novels if they were seen to be insulting the founder of Islam. But the learning can’t have gone very deep, because Muslim immigration to Europe after 1989 continued to grow.

After 2001 we learned that a certain number of Muslims in our midst were not moderate. What was the extremist percentage? Nobody really knew. Or nobody bothered to find out. It might be 1 percent. It might be 40 percent. But why raise the issue? It seemed easier to wish it away. And Muslim immigration continued.

In 2005 we learned that significant numbers of Muslims in the West were willing to take to the street, and that some would even commit murder, over a cartoon if they thought it blasphemous. Tiny Denmark in the north of Europe suddenly found itself a center of the world, with its flags being burned everywhere from London to Islamabad. In the years that followed, mass migration continued. Indeed it sped up.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Former US Diplomat Tries to Rescue Hamas Dennis Ross wants to rescue terrorist leaders. Will it bring lasting peace? by Moshe Phillips

Posted By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-us-diplomat-tries-to-rescue-hamas/

Former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has a plan to rescue Hamas from destruction, and he unveiled it on MSNBC just as announcements were being made that Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

Appearing on “Watch the Beat with Ari Melber,” on November 21, Ross said that “the way to end the war in Gaza” would be for Israel to allow the Hamas leadership to leave the territory in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Ross said he hopes the Biden Administration will promote such a proposal.

Ross cited a precedent: Israel’s decision in 1982, under U.S. pressure, to allow Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to leave besieged Beirut.

Ross forgot to mention what happened after Arafat left Lebanon. He didn’t ride off into the sunset of some quiet retirement. He sailed to nearby Tunis, set up PLO terrorist headquarters there, and embarked on twenty more years of terrorism. Shootings and stabbings. Bus bombings and intifadas. Thousands of Israelis murdered or maimed.

And now Ross wants Israel to repeat that tragic mistake. Once again, he wants to see terrorist leaders rescued, which would leave them free to orchestrate more October 7-style massacres.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

4 Of The Most Morally Bankrupt Lies Anti-Israel Pundits Are Spreading About Hostage Swap By: Tristan Justice

Posted By on November 29th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/28/4-of-the-most-morally-bankrupt-lies-anti-israel-pundits-are-spreading-about-hostage-swap/

Terrorist sympathizers are out in full force spreading fake news about Israel’s treatment of its prisoners, as the country executes a swap with Hamas for hostages taken by the terrorist group on Oct. 7. Here are four of the most outrageous lies circulating on social media.

1. Israel Is ‘Only Country That Keeps Children As Prisoners’

This week, American supermodel Gigi Hadid shared a post to her more than 79 million Instagram followers condemning Israel as “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war.” The post, which has been deleted, claimed Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Mansara was “abducted” by Israeli officials at 12 years old and “has endured solitary confinement despite his severe health condition.”

According to the New York Post, Mansara went on a “stabbing rampage” in East Jerusalem with his 15-year-old cousin in 2015 that left a 20-year-old security guard and a 13-year-old boy with critical injuries. Mansara was convicted of two counts of attempted murder after his cousin was killed in the attack by a police officer.

“He initially received a sentence of 12 years in prison, which was later reduced” to nine and a half years, the Post reported. “During his incarceration, Mansara has repeatedly attempted to harm himself and others. He has been in and out of solitary confinement, drawing the ire of Amnesty International, a nongovernmental human rights advocacy group.”

Terrorist sympathizing aside, Hadid’s post claiming Israel is “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war” is fake news on its face. Roughly 30 children — some of whom still remain in captivity nearly two months later — were taken hostage by Hamas, after the terrorist group slaughtered Israeli women and children in the Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200.

Unsurprisingly, child hostages held by Hamas have been subject to physical and emotional abuse. A 12-year-old was even reportedly placed in solitary confinement for more than two weeks.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Smearing Capitalism by John Stossel

Posted By on November 29th, 2023

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/11/29/smearing-capitalism-n2631747

You must be lonely. The media say loneliness is everywhere in America.

A Los Angeles Times columnist says, “There’s a mass loneliness crisis going on.”

“Capitalism is Making You Lonely,” says Jacobin Magazine.

Vox claims, “Capitalism makes us feel empty inside.”

As usual, the media are just wrong.

In my new video, historian Johan Norberg points out that, “There’s no empirical data that actually shows that we feel more lonely now than we did in the past. … When researchers compare people with previous generations at the same stage of life, they don’t find evidence of increased loneliness.”

“But more people live alone now,” I say. “I would think that would make people lonelier.”

“What they never tell you in the reports,” Norberg replies, “is that people who live alone and spend less time surrounded by other people are also more happy with those relationships.”

In addition, “When people around the world are asked, ‘do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you?’ People in countries (like America) where more people live alone, usually say, ‘yes.'”

But in India and China, more people say they have no one.

“It’s the complete opposite of what people expect,” Norberg says. “In less market-based societies, 20% to 40% say they have no one to count on if they need help. In the richest and most individualist societies, it’s in the low single digits.”

On a YouTube channel with 1.7 million subscribers, a socialist says, “Material incentives of capitalists isolate us from nature, each other and ourselves.”

Norberg replies, “I understand why those charlatans get an audience, because at times we all feel lonely.”

But his new book, “The Capitalist Manifesto,” points out how capitalism makes life better, including making people less lonely.