The Newswashing of ISIS Bride Shamima Begum by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19428/shamima-begum

ISIS brides were complicit in ISIS’s genocide and crimes against humanity. Never mind that hostages were hung upside down and then burned alive, or locked in cages then lowered into water to drown, or crucified for hours “like Jesus;” or that children were crucified or sold as sex slaves; or that countless others were tortured, raped or lined up to have their throats slit.

The Free Yezidi Foundation recently wrote of ISIS and Begum: “Not only terror death cult, but mass-rape genocidal organization. The decision to join was hers. Her actions contributed to unspeakable acts of brutality, which she would have continued had ISIS, Daesh not been militarily defeated.”

“Ms. Begum, for example, claimed that she was only a housewife and did not participate in any heinous crimes or violation of human rights as an ISIS member. Some portrayed her as an innocent schoolgirl who was brainwashed, uninformed, and simply wanted to return home to Britain…. evidence now suggests that she was in fact a member of the ISIS ‘morality police, a group of ISIS women which was an integral part of ISIS’ terror and atrocity apparatus, and was armed with an automatic weapon on her patrols. The crimes allegedly committed by the morality police include major human rights offenses, including support to ISIS’ slave trade of Yezidis.” — Free Yezidi Foundation, September 19, 2019.

“‘Why are the BBC giving Shamima Begum more airtime?’: ‘Sickened’ viewers slam broadcaster for airing 90-minute documentary that ‘parades ISIS bride as a celebrity’ just weeks after it launched 10-part podcast ‘retracing her steps’. — The Daily Mail, February 18, 2023.

“What we Yazidis expect from the international community is support and solidarity, not digging into our wounds. ISIS criminals must face justice for what they have done and practiced. We expect the West to hold ISIS accountable in court rather than putting them on the cover of their magazine. Such stories are particularly difficult for us as Yazidis because these ISIS women tortured and abused Yazidi women while they were in ISIS’s captivity.” — Activist for Yazidi rights who lives in Iraq, to Gatestone, February 2023.

The question is: Why are some big Western media corporations obviously siding with a genocidal terror group and not with its innocent victims?

“I think this is a slap in the face of all those who suffered in the hands of terrorism, not just ISIS but other death cults such as Boko Haram. This is a spit in the face of all those whose loved ones were murdered, and I do not mean only Yazidis, Assyrians or Nigerians, but all the innocent Westerners who perished to Islamic terrorism such as in France, the UK, the US and elsewhere. Media has utterly lost its moral values.” — Juliana Taimoorazy, founding president, Iraqi Christian Relief Council, to Gatestone, February 2023.

While around 3,000 Yazidi children and women are still being held captive at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization, many in the Western media are portraying a former “ISIS bride” not only as a victim but as a celebrity.

The rewriting of Roald Dahl should disturb us all Philistines and vandals have taken over art and culture. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/19/the-rewriting-of-roald-dahl-should-disturb-us-all/

It’s easy to become inured to the madness of the culture war. Stories of Peter Pan being slapped with trigger warnings or God going gender-neutral are 10 a penny these days. They can sometimes wash over you. Not because they are unimportant – far from it. But because they are so ubiquitous. Every institution from the Wellcome Collection to Splash Mountain has fallen to some flavour of woke regressivism. Language is warped to flatter a few narcissists. Old art works and new are censored at the behest of hysterics. Such cases don’t surprise us anymore, no matter how deranged and illiberal.

But once in a while the authoritarians who make up our cultural elites outdo themselves – and remind us how much is at stake in this thing we call the culture war. The rewriting of the late Roald Dahl’s books is one such story. When the Telegraph revealed yesterday that Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, has made ‘hundreds of changes’ to his beloved children’s books, in line with suggestions from so-called sensitivity readers, the response was one of horror and disbelief. An author beloved by generations of children for his magical, spiky and sometimes sinister work has had his literary edges sanded off. All new copies will feature the newly cleansed text. Dahl’s words and stories will be changed forever, no longer truly his own, all because some weirdo with a red pen thinks they know better. The philistinism, the cultural vandalism, is stunning.

And what is it that so upset them? What is it that made these sensitivity readers conclude that Dahl’s books must be changed, so they ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, in the words of Puffin? The word ‘fat’, for one. That’s gone from every book – sparing the blushes of characters like Augustus Gloop, the fat lad from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Oompa-Loompas are now no longer ‘titchy’ or ‘tiny’. Just ‘small’. They’ve also gone gender-neutral for good measure, with ‘small men’ swapped for ‘small people’. Perhaps most outrageously of all, whole lines have been rewritten and brand new lines added, seemingly to pre-empt any prejudice that might otherwise curdle in the minds of young readers. In The Witches, a line describing a witch posing as a ‘cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman’ now casts her as an aspirational girlboss, ‘working as a top scientist or running a business’.

1 in 45,000 That was the (pre-vaccine) Covid death risk for people under 50 – not 30, 50, and including people with severe comorbidities. Aren’t you glad we shut down the world! Alex Berenson

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/1-in-45000

We have known almost since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic that young people face much lower risks from Covid than the elderly.

But Dutch researchers now have offered what should be the last word on the issue, using data from a national registry to show that even people in their thirties and forties have a risk from Covid almost too low to measure.

The researchers compared the results from a nationwide sample of Covid infections in the Netherlands at several points in 2020 and 2021 to nationwide excess death totals. To determine the Covid death rate, they assumed all the excess deaths resulted from Covid infections.

This method likely overstates Covid deaths. Some extra deaths were likely drug overdoses, suicides, or untreated heart attacks and other lockdown-related health problems. In addition, the sampling technique they used may have understated infections.

Put those issues aside, since they don’t change the most important finding. The researchers determined the death rate from Covid infections was about 1 percent overall in the Netherlands during 2020. (Again, that figure almost certainly is high.)

The researchers then did what governments and Covid hysterics have tried not to do for three years. They explicitly stratified deaths by age, from under 10 to over 80.

The results are… enlightening.

The chart below measures infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the second Covid wave in the Netherlands, in fall 2020. That stretch probably marks the truest measure of Covid’s lethality. It occurred after the ventilator and nursing home catastrophes of the first wave but before the short-lived happy vaccine valley of spring 2021, when the mRNAs sharply reduced infections.

Is Biden A ‘Manchurian President,’ Facilitating Nuclear Cooperation between Iran’s Mullahs and Russia? by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19411/biden-russia-iran-nuclear

The US Congress urgently needs to pass legislation introduced by the Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that will “prohibit the Biden administration from waiving Congressional sanctions that prohibit cooperation on Iran’s nuclear program.”

It is stunning that the Biden Administration is offering Iran’s mullahs sanction waivers for their nuclear program while the Iranian regime is openly getting closer to obtaining nuclear weapons.

“There is absolutely no reason to continue issuing these waivers, which allow Iran and Russia to cooperate on building up Iran’s nuclear program. These waivers were nevertheless renewed in August, because the Biden administration remains obsessed with reentering a nuclear deal with the Iranian regime. Now the administration says it is committed to countering cooperation between Iran and Russia. They should embrace this legislation.” — Senator Ted Cruz, February 3, 2023.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken previously made it clear to US lawmakers that the Biden Administration will not stand in the way of Russia cashing in on the $10 billion contract, as well as Russia-Iran nuclear cooperation.

Biden has already been called “the Manchurian President.” After seeing the Biden Administration’s capitulations to America’s enemies over the past two years, it is important to ask: Has the Biden family effectively been paid to hand over America to Russia, China and Iran?

Not only is the Biden Administration disregarding the escalating Iranian-Russian military and nuclear cooperation, the Administration actually seems to be facilitating these two tyrannies’ becoming more empowered and emboldened.

Recently, the Biden Administration renewed a series of waivers of sanctions that will allow Iranian and Russian leaders to cooperate more closely with each other to advance the Iran’s nuclear program at various enrichment sites. According to the Washington Free Beacon:

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken authorized the waivers on Jan. 31, but Congress was not notified of the decision until late on Feb. 3, after the Free Beacon began making inquiries about the exemptions. Senior congressional sources said the Biden administration is trying to sweep the sanctions waivers under the rug amid renewed concerns about Iran and Russia’s military alliance.”

Judge Tim Kelly’s Court of Contempt The D.C. District Court Judge is anything but impartial in the J6 cases coming before his court. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/16/judge-tim-kellys-court-of-contempt/

Following an armed FBI raid with SWAT vehicles that terrorized his neighborhood and pregnant wife, Zachary Rehl was arrested in March 2021 for his involvement in the events of January 6. A Philadelphia judge ordered Rehl, a member of the Proud Boys, to be released from custody pending trial.

But Joe Biden’s Justice Department immediately asked a D.C. federal judge to keep Rehl in jail indefinitely even though he was not accused of committing a violent crime. Claiming Rehl “abetted” the destruction of government property—“a federal crime of terrorism,” prosecutors wrote—the government argued that no condition of release could keep the community safe from Rehl, a former Marine with no criminal history.

Enter D.C. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly.

“The Court finds that the nature and circumstances of the offenses weigh in favor of detention,” Kelly wrote in his July 2021 order. “[Although] there is no evidence Rehl carried or used a weapon that day, or laid his hands on anyone in a violent manner, he said and did things that are highly troubling.”

After spending two years in jail not convicted of any crime, Rehl is currently on trial in Kelly’s courtroom along with four other Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy—an indictment filed a year after their initial charges. Kelly has kept all five defendants behind bars awaiting trial, repeatedly denying all subsequent motions for release while at the same time granting one delay after another.

Kelly, naturally, is invested in justifying his cruel decision to incarcerate innocent men (yes, the country’s jurisprudence still assumes the presumption of innocence) for two years. Which only partially explains why he is running roughshod over the rights of the defendants.

Appointed to the bench by President Trump in 2017, Kelly spent 10 years working for the Justice Department including the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which prosecutes every January 6 case. He won an award from the FBI’s Washington Field Office, the very same office investigating every January 6 case. This is the sort of professional incestuousness Trump supporters from flyover country confront in the nation’s capital.

Constant Government Lies Spark Resistance Movements By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/constant_government_lies_spark_resistance_movements.html

In the digital public square of social media, I have seen a noticeable uptick in biting memes and political cartoons calling out the U.S. government for its constant lies.  In one example, a cyber-billboard screams, “I don’t know if I’m being distracted by vaccine deaths so I don’t notice inflation, or if inflation is the distraction to Ukraine money laundering, or if Ukraine is a distraction for rampant pedophilia, or if pedos are distracting me from election fraud.” 

 Clearly, that was produced before the great balloon scare gripped the nation.  Ah, but no sooner had China Joe proven once again how unsecured our open borders are by allowing a Chinese surveillance balloon to float above the continent’s nuclear silos than I ran into a cartoon divided into four squares in which the same man was being hypnotized — first by a dangling coronavirus in 2020, then an mRNA “vaccine” shot in 2021, then a Ukraine flag in 2022, and finally an extraterrestrial spaceship in 2023.  Well done, meme masters and internet freethinkers!  Actually, corrupt Senator Harry Reid had started to play the UFO card a decade ago, so perhaps this cycle is just starting up once again.  Uff da.

If you want to know what’s really going on within a society, you don’t run to the national newspapers or interview people with titles.  You get out and talk to the people nobody else would dare seek.  In the Internet Age, you look at what’s being said by ordinary people on unremarkable chatrooms whose opinions are routinely overlooked.  What I see today is a bubbling movement of frustration and anger that is as acidic as anything I’ve come across.  Americans are furiously mad — but noticeably not in despair.  People are not throwing their hands up in desperation; they’re venting their rage at a corrupt system of government that has gotten out of control.  They’re not hiding in the shadows, whispering in hushed tones; they’re screaming at the top of their lungs, just daring the Big Tech censors to blot out their (un)free speech.  They’re not allowing the State’s “politically correct” priests and purveyors of officially sanctioned disinformation to shame them into silence; they’re laughing in the spin doctors’ faces and calling out the government’s mass propaganda for what it is.  That’s refreshing!

War is About More than Big Battalions A reflection on what people are willing to fight, kill, and die for. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/war-is-about-more-than-big-battalions/

Napoleon famously said that “morale is to the physical as three is to one.” More troops and bigger guns don’t necessarily guarantee victory, as Napoleon himself demonstrated. The post-revolutionary French army took on the wealthy great powers of Europe and with the exception of England, inflicted on them defeat after defeat, dominating most of continental Europe from 1804-14. History is full of other conflicts and battles in which the motivations for fighting trumped the greater numbers of the foe. Indeed, the West only exists because twice, in 490 and 480 B.C., the free Greeks defeated the massive, servile armies of the autocratic Persian Empire, preserving the ideals of political freedom and equality.

What people are willing to fight, kill, and die for, then, is three times more significant than the materiel with which they wage war. This means that our culture’s fashionable self-loathing––its “oikophobia,” as the late philosopher Roger Scruton called the hatred of one’s country, its institutions, its history, and much of its people evident in our universities, media, entertainment, and even military establishment––is so dangerous that not only does it erode morale, it signals to our foes that for all our economic and military power, significant numbers of citizens will not risk their lives to defend their country from those who wish to supplant it.

Given this long history showing that the foundational beliefs people fight for is itself a force-multiplier, it’s puzzling to read this paragraph from Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Robert Kagan’s long essay in the Wall Street Journal. After summarizing the 20th Century history of aggressors underestimating the power of the U.S., Kagan writes:

“Are Americans as a people up to a major confrontation with another great power, whether in immediate conflict or a protracted Cold War-like struggle? It would be dangerous for a potential adversary to assume they are not. Whatever condition the American political system may be in, it is not appreciably worse than it was during the 1930s. That, too, was a deeply polarized America, including on the question of whether to intervene in the world’s conflicts. But once the U.S. found itself at war, dissent all but disappeared. If ever there could be a cure for American political polarization, a conflict with China would be it.”

Can the whole world be wrong? A new book is essential to understanding the lunacy over Israel and the global jihad Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/can-the-whole-world-be-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims — has been absorbed by so many people.

Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It’s not just that “intersectionality” demonises the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism.

As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet: “In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine.”

The astonishing story of Mohammed al-Durah illustrates just how perverse this is. On Sept. 30, 2000, the French TV station France 2 broadcast footage from Gaza that apparently showed the 12-year-old al-Durah being shot dead by Israeli fire as he clung to his father during a demonstration.

This iconic picture detonated the second intifada, the Palestinian terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians that murdered more than 1,130 of them and wounded more than 8,000 between 2000 and 2005. The footage incited hysteria across the Arab and Muslim world.

Sen. Fetterman Was Not Qualified to Serve. His Doctor and Staff Lied About It He can’t do his job or any job. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sen-fetterman-was-not-qualified-to-serve-his-doctor-and-staff-lied-about-it/

After hospitalizing him for what staff suspected might have been another stroke, Senator John Fetterman has now been hospitalized with “clinical depression”. This comes after the New York Times reported that the newly elected senator had trouble understanding what people were saying and was trying to avoid interactions.

And it’s a safe bet that we’re being told less than half the story.

Fetterman is not qualified to serve. He can’t do his job or any job. He needs extensive medical care and he’s not able to carry out his responsibilities. Whether or not he was aware of that depends on his mental capacity.

Contrary to Nikki Haley’s recent dumb quip, voters are allowed to elect unqualified people, including shambling wrecks, but Fetterman’s doctor and his staffers, not to mention his wife, would have been aware of his real condition and they lied about it to get through an election. Having lied their way this far, the star of Bernie’s Weekend broke down. That comes as no surprise after Fetterman’s debate performance.

Democrats just pushed out Sen. Dianne Feinstein, she showed up to work every day, and maybe she didn’t remember which votes she had cast or who her colleagues were, but she’s still more functional than Fetterman.

Who Killed Philip Haney? The Mystery Continues Slain DHS whistleblower now under investigation for “contraband” and “possible violations of U.S. Codes.” by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/who-killed-philip-haney-the-mystery-continues/

February 21 will mark three years since Philip Haney, 66, was “found deceased” in Amador County, California, killed by a gunshot to the chest. The victim was not the typical Sierra foothills resident.

Philip Haney was the author of  See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, first published in 2016. The DHS whistleblower also authored Frontpage articles, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” “The Terrorist Ties that Bind,” and “The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America’s Ominous Post-Election Statement.” The expert on Islamic jihad had been punished for doing his job at a high level. This is the man found deceased in Amador County.

In Haney’s RV, the sheriff found numerous thumb drives, a laptop computer, and other materials. Sheriff Martin Ryan turned these over to the FBI, which did not reveal what the devices contained, and the bureau remained silent on the case through 2021. Last year, the Amador County sheriff’s office told Frontpage there was “no new news” about Haney and that the case was closed. A month later, in March, 2022, more than two years after Haney was found deceased, the case was proclaimed a suicide.

Claims that Haney killed himself had appeared from the start, but were steadfastly denied by Haney’s friends, family and members of Congress. In March of 2020, Rep. Steve King said, “I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide.” Rep. Louis Gohmert told reporters “I’d been concerned about his safety, with all the information he knew and people who could’ve gotten in trouble.”  If the case had been pursued as a homicide, potential suspects would have been easy to find.

Philip Haney worked as a field agricultural entomologist in the Middle East, where he began studying Arabic and the Quran. With that background, the UC Riverside alum seemed a good fit for the Department of Homeland Security, but it didn’t turn out that way.

In “DHS ordered me to scrub records of Muslims with terror ties,” published in The Hill on May 5, 2016, Haney said DHS had ordered him “to delete or modify several hundred records of individuals tied to designated Islamist terror groups like Hamas from the important federal database, the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS).”