ISRAEL Comments turned off

4000 Hezbollah terrorists injured, 200 critical, 11 killed by exploding pagers; no comment from Israel By Akiva Van Koningsveld, JNS

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://worldisraelnews.com/4000-hezbollah-terrorists-injured-nine-killed-by-exploding-pagers/

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, a main stronghold of Hezbollah.

More than 4,000 Hezbollah terrorists were wounded and at least eleven were killed across Lebanon on Tuesday when their communication devices exploded, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad confirmed.

Approximately 200 Hezbollah terrorists were in critical condition in 100 different hospitals, Beirut’s health minister announced about three hours after the explosions were first reported at 3.30 p.m. local time.

A Reuters journalist saw 10 terrorists bleeding from injuries in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya, which is the main stronghold of Hezbollah. A security source told Qatar’s Al Jazeera that explosions occurred across Lebanon—not only in Beirut but also in the Beqaa Valley and the south.

Senior Hezbollah officials were said to have been wounded in the blasts. Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was also wounded in one of the explosions, Tehran’s semi-official Mehr outlet reported.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The issue that isn’t being addressed in the campaign The woke takeover of the academy, culture and government is the driving force behind the surge in antisemitism and the war on the West. Rolling it back is imperative. Jonathan Tobin

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/the-issue-that-isnt-being-addressed-in-the-campaign/?_sc=NTAyMDI0NiM0Mzc2OQ%3D%3D&utm_

It didn’t make it into either presidential debate conducted this year. Nor is it on any of the top 10 lists of issues most important to Americans in 2024, such as the one produced by the Pew Research Center. But those who think that woke ideologies, which have captured so much of America’s education system, as well as the government bureaucracy and even the arts, pose only a minor threat to America’s future are mistaken. 

As much as any other topic, the fate of this wildly successful movement will determine what kind of country Americans live in for decades to come. And as fateful as the decision will be for the entire electorate as to whether the government should take the initiative in rolling back the woke tide, it will be especially important for American Jewry.

If there is one thing glaringly apparent since Oct. 7, it is the surge in antisemitism, primarily fueled by the political left’s widespread belief that Israel is a “settler/colonial” and “apartheid” state. Added to that is the ultimate expression of “white” supremacy—a label that has been extended to cover all Jews who support it and even those who don’t. 

The reason for this enthusiasm for radical movements that see Zionism as a form of racism is the way it fits neatly into the mindset of critical race theory and intersectionality, which divide all of humanity into two eternally warring groups: people of color who can only be victims, and “whites” who are always oppressors.

This same set of beliefs has inspired the widespread adoption of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rules throughout the education system and virtually every other sector of American society. Moreover, this woke catechism was officially incorporated into every government department and agency by President Joe Biden on his first day in office in January 2021. That means that along with all the other woke commissars dominating admissions and discipline in higher education, as well as much of corporate America, and casting and programming choices in arts organizations, they are now also present throughout the federal bureaucracy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

But No Boycotts on Russia, China or Iran: The Staggering Hypocrisy of Starmer, Trudeau and Scholz by Robert Williams

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20945/but-no-boycotts-on-russia-china-or-iran

[T]he UK government announced that it is imposing an “immediate” weapons embargo against Israel. The statement followed almost a year of relentless attacks on Israel, not only by Iran’s proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — but by Iran itself, and probably several tons of unverified propaganda by Hamas that Israel is supposedly committing “war crimes.”

Even South Africa is seeking to extend the deadline for presenting evidence against Israel at the International Court of Justice, for lack of evidence of its allegations of genocide. So far, all evidence points to Israel being “the world’s most moral army.” Meanwhile, the same cannot be said for the entities attacking it.

The UK suspended “around 30 licences for items used in the current conflict in Gaza which go to the IDF, from a total of approximately 350 licences to Israel” allegedly because of Hamas-induced fear that they “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.” [emphasis added]

Hamas, on the other hand, continues to receive Britain’s support: Although UNRWA has proven itself to be identical with Hamas, with roughly 10% of its members proven to have been terrorists or with ties to terror groups, and having used its entire Gaza infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, for the purpose of facilitating terror and missile attacks against Israel and its civilians…

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in his announcement of the weapons embargo to the House of Commons, said, “in July, I told this House that this government’s priority in the region would be to advance the cause of peace” — apparently because nothing spells peace more than emboldening terrorists.

The UK government worries about Red Cross access to terrorists who participated in the most gruesome crimes, while the ICRC’s blatant lack of interest in the Israeli hostages held by Hamas did not even merit a mention by Lammy.

The UK’s arms embargo appears to represent nothing so much as pure racist perfidy. Lammy completely ignores the extreme lengths to which Israel has gone to avoid civilian casualties, as well as the huge amounts of humanitarian aid it has facilitated into the Gaza Strip.

Spain has also suspended arms export licenses to Israel since October 7. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said the Gaza war “made us realize the importance of a fair and lasting solution” to the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Fair and lasting, evidently, means siding with terrorists. It is particularly unbecoming of Spain, after 60 years of having combated the terrorist group ETA, to throw the first stone.

By contrast, Germany is massively arming Qatar, which, alongside Iran, is the most significant backer of Hamas, and effectively every other Islamic terrorist group.

What will be the result of the embargoes? Western leaders claim to want de-escalation, but placing Israel under arms embargo only serves to strengthen and empower Qatar, Iran and Iran’s terrorist proxies — which in turn can lead only to further destabilizing the Middle East, particularly after Iran regime succeeds in acquiring nuclear

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Islamists and the woke left are the enemies of civilization’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the calls to criminalize ‘Islamophobia’.

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/islamists-and-the-woke-left-are-the-enemies-of-civilisation/

The new UK Labour government has declared war on free speech. Within weeks of gaining power, it scrapped a law upholding free speech in universities. In early August, following rioting across England, it announced plans to tighten the regulations on online speech. Perhaps most troubling of all, Keir Starmer is also considering writing a broad definition of ‘Islamophobia’ into law, which would make it almost impossible to criticise Islam and even Islamic extremism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali – writer, activist and author of Prey: Immigration, Islam and the Erosion of Women’s Rights – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the importance of free speech in the battle against Islamist extremism. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Why do you think politicians – even those who would define themselves as ‘liberal’ – are so willing to adopt a phrase like Islamophobia?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: I think it has to do with guilt about the past. When it comes to the Jews, many European countries did not protect them from Nazi persecution, so there’s definitely a sense that we don’t want to do the same to our Muslim minorities. When I was living in the Netherlands, this was a very potent argument. The Dutch felt extremely guilty about the fact that, in proportion to the Dutch population, more Jews were removed from their homes and sent to concentration camps, than in any other country in Europe. So there’s definitely a sense of ‘let’s not repeat history’. But this is also what makes me so angry, because the Islamists – and to a certain extent, the leftists – will exploit this. They will exploit what is essentially the goodness of human beings, a desire to ‘do right this time round’, in order to do wrong.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We need to talk about the violent hatred for Donald Trump Two assassination attempts in two months? This is a crisis of civilised norms. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/16/we-need-to-talk-about-the-violent-hatred-for-donald-trump/

The BBC says the latest suspected attempt on the life of Donald Trump is proof that ‘political violence’ is the ‘new norm’ in America. It’s half right. There does seem to be a ‘new normal’ over there, but it’s not some abstract thing called ‘political violence’. It’s not some broad-strokes brutish contempt for all rulers of society. It’s more targeted than that. It has one politician in particular in its crosshairs. If there’s a new normal in America, it would appear to be a new normal of an increasingly militant culture of grievance against the 45th President of the United States, now aspiring to be the 47th: Donald Trump.

There’s a palpable reluctance in the MSM today to discuss the Trump-specific nature of recent acts of political terror. Many would rather wring their hands over ‘gun culture’. ‘The secret service didn’t fail Trump on Sunday’, says MSNBC of the latest suspected assassination attempt: ‘America’s gun culture did.’ Commentators agonise over the fact that the alleged would-be assassin involved in yesterday’s fracas was in possession of an AK-47. That’s the crazy thing, they say. Others focus on the poison of ‘polarisation’. The Beeb says it’s a mix of a ‘coarsened’ national discourse and an ‘epidemic of gun violence’ that has made attacks like yesterday’s ‘inevitable’.

Of course, questions can be asked about the easy availability of lethal weapons in the US. Even supporters of the Second Amendment feel iffy that fruitloops can purchase Soviet-invented assault rifles and rock up to a Florida golf course with one in the car. And public life is increasingly frazzled at the moment. Politics feels like a screaming match between opposing poles stone deaf to one another’s concerns. And yet, today’s focus on ‘gun culture’ and ‘polarisation’ feels like a displacement activity: a focus on the method of the violence (guns) and the backdrop to the violence (polarisation) in an effort to avoid looking into the eye of the violence: the strange, swirling contempt for Trump.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem: The Coming World Crisis

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/10/the-coming-world-crisis/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

The U.S. faces a choice between courage and cowardice

The 31-year-long apparent peace that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse ended on February 24, 2022, when territorial conquest once again became an instrument of the revisionist powers. Yet history, particularly that of the globe-spanning violence that preceded World War II, reminds us that once crises begin to cluster, they tend to worsen and become a worldwide eruption of violence.

In this respect, democracies today are in a situation similar to that of the 1930s. The folly of the century preceding the ’30s was not precisely appeasement — the strategy that grants an aggressive adversary limited, albeit significant, gains to satiate its appetite for expansion — but rather a lack of recognition of the systemic inevitability of contestation and conflict. The threat today, similarly, is not appeasement but the avoidance by democratic political leaders of strategic reality. War is coming, sooner or later. Democracies must prepare for a long-term struggle. And much as in the 1930s, we do not have the luxury of time or a head start.

It is more helpful to speak of a world crisis than of a world war, given the linguistic vagaries of “warfare,” a word that has a legal as well as a moral-political definition. The idea of world war is restrictive. What we term the First World War saw combat in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia. But the conflict’s focal point was Europe, with relevant but limited skirmishing in the Middle East and Africa and almost no military activity in Asia after early 1915 because of the limited resources Germany could deploy beyond Europe. Was the First World War, then, not properly a world war? It involved every major power at the time. It was, moreover, the first modern conflict in which two major-power participants — the U.S. and Japan — were not European. Thus we might term the conflict a world war despite its focus in Europe.

This, however, raises a more important question of definition — that of time. The First World War stemmed from what may be termed the First World Crisis. Prior to the mid 19th century, international politics was nearly synonymous with European politics for the simple reason that technological, political, and military advances in Europe made the European powers incontestably dominant over any major actor elsewhere. The European wars that occurred between the 15th and 19th centuries, culminating in Napoleon’s bid for continental dominance, had global implications. The grand strategy of Napoleonic France included, at minimum, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: France’s objective was to stress Britain’s link with its invaluable imperial possession, India, an end that it never achieved. Yet the central issue of the Napoleonic Wars — the structure of European and, by implication at the time, world order — was settled on European battlefields, in the European littoral, and at negotiating tables with dozens of European diplomats hashing out the details after the fighting was done. By the early 20th century, changes in the international power distribution could transform a European crisis into a world crisis.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Violence Is Not Symmetrical Noah Rothman

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-violence-is-not-symmetrical/

Political media are constantly on the lookout for right-wing violence, to the exclusion of the menace on the left.

The city of Springfield, Ohio, is besieged. Bomb threats and shooting scares have disrupted municipal events and closed schools for days on end. The disorder has been attributed to the addled Americans who pay overly close attention to the Trump campaign’s rhetoric, which has recently been focused on promoting the claim that Haitian migrants are absconding with local pets and eating them.

This outbreak of menace fits within a rubric the mainstream press can intuitively process. Donald Trump’s supporters are forever “inspired to violence.” They are uniquely susceptible to suggestion, both from the Republican presidential nominee and his acolytes. The MAGA faithful are quick to threaten, harass, and intimidate Trump’s critics and pursuers. As a Reuters analysis published last year asserts, America is “embroiled in the most sustained spate of political violence” since the 1960s. But while some primarily nonviolent criminality can be attributed to left-wing activists, the “attacks on people — from beatings to killings — were perpetrated mostly by suspects acting in service of right-wing political beliefs and ideology.”

The second attempt on Donald Trump’s life, which took place on Sunday afternoon, is just the latest event to call this ponderous assumption into question. The alleged would-be assassin appears to be in some important ways similar to the gunman who shot off a portion of Trump’s ear and killed Corey Comperatore in Butler, Pa., in July. His efforts to advocate on behalf of Ukraine’s cause — going so far as to try to join the fight against Russia’s invaders (he failed) — suggest a desire to make himself a part of a mission grander than himself. While the July 13 shooter’s motives have not yet been firmly established, reports indicating that he considered any target of opportunity, including Joe Biden, suggest that he, too, sought out notoriety. Unlike Trump’s assailant in Pennsylvania, however, the would-be assailant in Florida left a paper trail suggesting that he was a highly impressionable figure radicalized in the support of progressive causes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden-Harris Admin Launches Investigation of RFK Jr for Whale Incident 30 Years Ago The total weaponization of the federal government is happening. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-launches-investigation-of-rfk-jr-for-whale-incident-30-years-ago/

Kamala claimed that if Trump wins, he’ll weaponize the government against his political opponents. That’s the most obvious case of projection since the Kinsey report. The Biden-Harris administration uses every part of the government to run investigations of its political opponents on the most implausible of pretexts.

Like trying to put Trump on trial over a law created to stop the KKK from wearing masks on highways.

Or an investigation of RFK Jr over something that happened decades ago.

In 2012, Kick Kennedy, RFK Jr’s daughter, told a story to Town and Country Magazine about something her dad had supposedly done when she was six years old.

Kick’s taste for the extreme was fed by her dad’s eccentric environmentalism. Exhibit A: When she was six, word got out that a dead whale had washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Bobby — who likes to study animal skulls and skeletons — ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York. “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick recalls. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”

Since Kick was supposedly born in 1988, this would have happened in 1994. Or 30 years ago. (RFK Jr describes it as being 20 years ago so maybe my math is off or his daughter’s age is.)

No one cared. Certainly no one launched investigations of RFK Jr.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Deadly Get-Trump Climate Continues Will the Left stop sending unambiguous messages to would-be assassins? by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-deadly-get-trump-climate-continues/

Just two months after the failed Trump assassination attempt of one Thomas Matthew Crooks, we witnessed on Sunday yet another foiled one by Ryan Wesley Routh—a would-be assassin and anti-Trump/radical pro-Ukraine War social media addict. Somehow he too once again got within relatively easy shooting range of ex-President Trump.

Is there a continued pattern here of lax Trump Secret Service protection, coupled with a general social media and televised climate that equates Trump with Hitler and lowers the bar of the assassination?

That is, are we sending unambiguous messages to would-be assassins that a) lots of Trump-hating people would welcome an assassination attempt and canonize the wannabe assailant; b) it would not be that difficult to pull an assassination off given security laxity and incompetence; and thus c) we will likely witness a series of such unhinged attempts?

On August 14, almost exactly two months ago, I predicted the following:

If Donald Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump—without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination—what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign?

Is the message that if a 20-year-old amateur sniper can brazenly and visibly for nearly an hour breach all Secret Service security perimeters to shoot eight times at the president, hit him in the ear, kill one innocent bystander, and wound two others, then almost any future, more-experienced serious shooter could match or exceed the ability of that disturbed amateur to get close enough to Trump to fire more than eight shots at his head?

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media’s Criminal Misreporting on Crime

Posted By on September 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/17/the-medias-criminal-misreporting-on-crime/

‘President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

That was ABC News’ David Muir “fact checking” Donald Trump during his debate with Kamala Harris.

Two days later, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the results of its national crime victimization survey, which showed that the number of victims of violent crime was 41% higher in 2023 than in 2020.

There were almost 170,000 more rapes, 300,000 more robberies, 1.4 million more assaults, 300,000 more claims of domestic violence, and almost 400,000 more crimes with a violent weapon.

This wasn’t a surprise. That same survey showed a significant jump in crime victimization in 2022 – something we noted in this space back in July. (“Now They’re Gaslighting Us About Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’”)

And in January,  the Council on Criminal Justice, which tracks crimes in 39 cities, found homicide rates were 18% higher in 2023 than in 2019, aggravated assaults up 8%, gun assaults up 32%, and carjackings up 93%.

Meanwhile, polls keep finding that the public thinks crime is getting worse.

But instead of trying to understand the mismatch, the press just treated the public like idiots.