ISRAEL Comments turned off

Tal Fortgang Holding UNRWA Accountable The UN agency has been inciting and facilitating violence through Hamas-linked affiliates in Gaza.

Posted By on July 5th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unrwa-israel-hamas-gaza

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has long played a counterproductive role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The agency has perpetuated the crisis by redefining refugee status exclusively for Palestinians—keeping alive the notion of a “right of return” that many interpret as a path to Israel’s destruction—and by distributing educational materials that glorify terrorism against Jews.

Recent revelations have exposed the extent of UNRWA’s involvement not just in inciting violence but in facilitating it through Hamas-linked affiliates in Gaza. Israeli intelligence reports indicate that UNRWA staff directly participated in the October 7 attacks, including hostage-taking and the abduction of dead bodies. On social media, some of the agency’s teachers celebrated the attacks, and its facilities reportedly housed Israeli captives. Most alarming, UNRWA infrastructure—funded by international donors—was allegedly used to support Hamas’s tunnel networks and command centers.

Victims of the UNRWA-Hamas alliance have filed suit in U.S. federal court, seeking redress from the agency for allegedly aiding and abetting Hamas before, during, and after the October 7 attacks. Under U.S. law, federal courts are authorized to hear civil cases brought by noncitizens for injuries resulting from violations of international law or U.S. treaties, as long as some element of the violations occurred on American territory. But Siman Tov v. UNRWA, a case filed in 2024, raises a novel and disturbing question: What happens when violations of international law are committed not by a rogue actor but by an agency of the United Nations itself? The case underscores the unprecedented nature of UNRWA’s alleged entanglement with Hamas—and the legal and moral challenges that follow.

UNRWA moved to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming immunity under the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, which gives the UN “immunity from every form of legal process” unless explicitly waived. The Biden administration filed a statement supporting the immunity claim. Though the Trump administration has been rhetorically tough on UNRWA, it has yet to reverse the government’s stance.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian state: advancing or undermining US interests? Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on July 5th, 2025

http://bit.ly/4eIrJAf

The US position on the proposed Palestinian state – just like on any other issue – should be driven by US interests, and not by pro-Israel or pro-Arab sentiments, nor by an honest broker state of mind.  

Would a Palestinian state advance, or undermine, US interests?

*The US State Department’s deeply rooted attachment to the proposed Palestinian state – just like Western conventional wisdom’s attachment – has been largely a derivative of the Palestinian Authority’s peaceful talk, when communicating with Westerners. However, the moderate talk is replaced by (anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli and anti-US) hateful talk when the Palestinian Authority communicates with its own school children and mosque worshippers as well as with audiences in Arab countries. While communications with Westerners represents a 1,400-year-old dissimulation (Taqiyyah) tactic aimed to mislead the West into advancing the Palestinian strategic position, the Palestinian school curriculum and official mosque sermons constitute the most authentic reflection of the Palestinian worldview.   

*The State Department and Western conventional wisdom have also forged their position on the proposed Palestinian state based upon speculative alternate reality – an ostensibly reformed Palestinian government.  This position has been systematically frustrated, since the 1993 Oslo Accord, by Middle East reality. This reformed Palestinian government would, supposedly, refrain from terrorism, hate education and incitement. It would, allegedly, embrace peaceful coexistence, adhere to democracy and human rights, abide by good-faith negotiation, and abandon its intrinsic ideology, which predates the 1948 and 1967 wars. This ideology has focused on terminating the existence – not the shrinking the size – of the Jewish State, mandating the elimination of “the infidel and illegitimate Zionist entity” from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea.

*However, contrary to the State Department, Arab leaders take lightly the Palestinian talk. They are aware of the fact that in the Middle East one does not pay custom on words, and therefore, there has been an unbridgeable gap between Arab talk and Arab walk (especially on the Palestinian issue). Therefore, Arabs pay much attention to the Palestinian intra-Arab walk, which has become the role model of intra-Arab subversion, terrorism, ingratitude and treachery.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is Trump Abandoning the Iranian People and Guaranteeing War? by Robert Williams

Posted By on July 5th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21710/abandoning-the-iranian-people

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of prisoners might be at risk of executions.” — Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization, June 26, 2025.

Iran… has reportedly executed 1,700 people in 2025 alone — and it is not even August.

US President Donald J. Trump deserves every credit for bombing the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan uranium enrichment plants. However, forcing Israel to terminate its “Operation Rising Lion,” just as it was finally giving the Iranian people a glimpse of hope for freedom in the course of destroying Iran’s nuclear program and its key institutions of oppression, was a terrible move. It left Iranians abandoned to a gruesome fate under a regime that had been likely weeks away from facing total destruction. Why? For another 46 years of “fake talks”?

The Trump administration cannot thank Qatar enough for “helping” to negotiate every transition. Qatar is doubtless delighted to help, to make sure that none of its well-funded clients gets hurt. Qatar does not want regime change in Iran. Qatar has also promised Trump more than a trillion dollars in investments in the US.

By rescuing Iran’s regime, is Trump signaling to the people of Iran that actual peace in the Middle East might be just a dream; that more than 90 million Iranian people are seemingly not worthy of the same freedom that other nations have and that they should suffer unspeakable persecution forever?

Throughout the war, most Western leaders aside from Trump, from their comfortable clubs, called for “ceasefires” and “de-escalation”, while Israel was fighting for its existence — and theirs. Would they have preferred to wait for the ballistic missiles Iran was launching at Israel to be nuclear-tipped?

Iran’s mullahs are not going to put their country back in shape: they are going put their nuclear weapons program, war machine and private militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), back in shape. The mullahs must be congratulating themselves on how much better it is to be America’s enemy than its friend.

Trump’s newfound generosity towards the Islamic Republic of Iran — whatever happened to “maximum pressure”? — will only allow it to strengthen its hold on power, rebuild its terrorist proxies, establish additional terrorist sleeper cells in the West, continue arming Venezuela, all while the Iranian people will see neither freedom nor prosperity. In addition, it will guarantee further war later on, not only in the Middle East, but also in the West.

The day after Israel began to strike Iran on June 13, the Islamic Republic ratcheted up its crackdown on the captive Iranian people The only activity at which Iran’s regime seems to excel is brutally attacking its innocent, unarmed population.

Since then, at least 1,295 people have been arrested on security-related charges, including “espionage for Israel,” according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. In addition, it noted, “at least 301 individuals were detained nationwide for sharing content, expressing opinions, or participating on social media.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Making July 4th Great Again In only a few months, Trump has corrected his predecessors’ Titanic course of our ship of state. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on July 5th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/making-july-4th-great-again/

In the postwar period, the rise of the New Left and its “long march” through the institutions accelerated the erosion of patriotism, particularly among those who spent time in universities. Love of one’s country joined faith as a malign superstition, while sexual restraint and virtue became cultural shorthand for repression, ignorance, unsophisticated gullibility, and fascism. The United States was transformed by the left from the “shining city on a hill” to a cesspool of tyranny, racism, oppression, philistinism, and heartless greed.

But this year Donald Trump’s spectacular successes at home and abroad, the fruits of his Make America Great Again movement, has restored Constitutional order, common sense, and tradition to our government.  Now the “vibe,” as the kiddies of all ages say, is triumphantly patriotic, and the celebration of our nation’s birth, of freedom, and of political equality, is once again exuberant. And our exceptionalism is obvious to all except the enemies of freedom.

Earlier, there were moments of renewal. Ronald Reagan’s presidency marked a powerful pushback against the left’s collectivist trends and policies, and reform of our foreign policy of cringing accommodation of our enemies and rivals. With wit and passionate resolve, Reagan challenged the self-loathing clichés of the cognitive and cultural elites, slaughtering whole herds of their foreign policy, economic, and culture war sacred cows. Most important, he shocked the world and befuddled the foreign policy clerks by engineering the collapse of Soviet communism, freeing millions from tyranny.

But the rot of self-loathing had spread too wide and deep in our culture. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 should have swept away the juvenile leftist conceits and ideologies, and the policies which continued to fail at home and abroad. But the left-leaning Democrats, many of whom blamed the racism and oppression of America for 9/11, attacked and undermined the policies of the Bush administration, which initially aimed at preventing another heinous attack.

ANTI-SEMITISM, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Love Island USA: does Gen Z have an anti-Semitism problem? Jewish contestant Elan Bibas’s social-media accounts have been flooded with Israelophobic bile. Hannah Kotkin

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/love-island-usa-does-gen-z-have-an-anti-semitism-problem/

The seventh season of Love Island USA is taking America by storm. Already, it’s the second-most watched streaming show on television this summer, with a whopping 1.2 billion minutes viewed across the first nine episodes of the series. But it isn’t just the young, attractive singles that have caused a stir recently. It now seems the mere presence of a Jewish contestant is enough to cause controversy.

Last week, a show usually known for providing vapid entertainment took a surprisingly sinister turn. Rather than oohing and aahing over the abs, tattoos and five-inch inseam swimming trunks of the six men, social media erupted with rage. The vitriol was directed at Elan Bibas, a 24-year-old Jewish Canadian who had arrived at Love Island’s ‘Casa Amor’.

Love Island might only be a TV show, and one aimed at a young demographic at that. But such is its popularity that the commentary around it, particularly when it turns hateful, cannot be ignored. In some ways, it reflects the thinking of a generation.

The show’s concept is simple. Attractive singles are sent to an island – in this case, somewhere in Fiji – and must remain ‘coupled’ or face expulsion. The winning couple nets $100,000.

The combination of skimpy outfits and raunchy challenges – examples include ‘kissing booths’ and truth or dare – has proved particularly addictive for a Gen Z audience. The timing of the show is also deliberate: it’s currently summer break in the US, which means students are free to tune into the show on the six nights of the week that it airs. Its booming young audience has developed an almost parasocial relationship with the contestants. Bibas has now found himself at the centre of this cultural phenomenon – not, however, in a pleasant way.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Karen Diamond: killed by ‘anti-Zionism’ The burning of Jews in Boulder, Colorado speaks to the lethal intolerance of Israelophobia. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/02/karen-diamond-killed-by-anti-zionism/

A woman has died following a savage racist attack. She was doused in a flammable liquid and set on fire by a man barking bigoted insults in her face. She later succumbed to her injuries, her precious life extinguished in a 21st-century lynching by fire. But you will not see blacked-out squares on Instagram for this victim of racist violence. The left will not march. No hashtag will trend. Few hands will be wrung in woke circles over this most hellish assault. Why? Because the victim was a Jew.

Her name was Karen Diamond. She was 82 years old. She was one of 29 people who gathered at Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado on 1 June to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. Their small, prayerful assembly was intruded on in the most sickening fashion by one Mohamed Sabry Soliman. He is suspected of having splashed the gathering with petrol before wielding a homemade flame-thrower to try to immolate them. It’s 2025 and they’re burning Jews again.

Thirteen people were injured. Karen Diamond’s injuries were too severe to survive: she died last week, as revealed in court documents filed this week. What made this act of savagery especially heinous was the age of the victims. The eight people hospitalised were aged 52 to 88. The oldest, Barbara Steinmetz, was a Holocaust survivor, having fled Nazi Europe as an infant in the 1940s. She escaped Hitler’s flames, but not the flames of the rabid ‘anti-Zionism’ raging in the West in 2025.

Officialdom has expressed grief over Diamond’s tragic yielding to the fires of Jew hate that swept Pearl Street Mall four weeks ago. The City of Boulder has extended its ‘heartfelt condolences’ for the loss of this good, long life to an ‘anti-Semitic attack’. But you will search in vain for commentary from ‘anti-racists’. The activist classes are shamefully and horrendously mute. Opinion-makers who pose as ‘anti-fascist’ seem blissfully unbothered by this fascistic horror that entailed the death by fire of a Jew. There will be no ‘George Floyd treatment’ for Karen Diamond.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In the End, Everyone Hated the Iranian Theocracy The new reality in the Middle East. by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-the-end-everyone-hated-the-iranian-theocracy/

It is hard even to digest the incredible train of events of the last few days in the Middle East.

Iran had been reduced to an anemic, performance-art missile attack on our base in Qatar — the last Parthian shot from a terrified regime, desperate for an out — and a ceasefire.

Iran would have been better off not launching such a ceremonial but ultimately humiliating proof of impotence.

Even worse for the theocracy, Iran’s temporary reprieve came from the now magnanimous but still hated U.S. President Donald Trump.

So ends the creepy mystique of the supposedly indomitable terror state of Iran, the bane of the last seven American presidents over half a century.

For Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, it was hard to swallow that U.S. bombers got their permission to fly into Iranian airspace from the Israeli air force.

A good simile is that Trump put a pot of water on the stove, told Iran to jump in, put the lid over them, then smiled, turned up the heat — and will now let them stew.

As postbellum realities now simmer in Iran, the theocracy is left explaining the inexplicable to its humiliated military and shocked but soon-to-be-furious populace. All the regime’s blood-curdling rhetoric, apocalyptic threats against Israel, goose-stepping thugs, and shiny new missiles ended in less than nothing.

A trillion dollars and five decades’ worth of missiles and centrifuges are now up in smoke. That money might have otherwise saved Iranians from the impoverishment of the last 50 years.

How about the little Satan Israel, to which Iran for nearly 50 years promised extinction?

Israel had destroyed Iran’s expeditionary terrorists, Iran’s defenses, its nuclear viability, and the absurd mythology of Iranian military competence. And worse, Israel showed it could repeat all that destruction when and if necessary.

So, the most hated regime in the world crawled into the boiling pot because it looked around in vain for someone to void Trump’s ultimatum for a cease and desist.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Final Court Showdown Begins Over Whether Trump Can Get These Gang Members Out of Here The real issue at the heart of this battle. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/final-court-showdown-begins-over-whether-trump-can-get-these-gang-members-out-of-here/

It’s a grim sign of the times that Old Joe Biden’s regime can open the door to millions upon millions of illegal migrants without a peep from the courts, but as soon as President Donald Trump tries to remove them, our self-anointed moral superiors in the judiciary burn the midnight oil to come up with pretexts to stop him. Trump has been trying to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the legal foundation to remove Venezuelan gang members, but several courts, including the Supreme Court, have stymied him. Now, the final showdown has begun in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 states that “whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government, and the President of the United States shall make public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed, as alien enemies.”

This law has the admirable directness and simplicity that was characteristic of statute-making in an earlier, less complicated age. The extract above continues for a lengthy paragraph, and then the Act goes on for a couple more, but that’s it. If a similar law were drafted in 2025, it would be 700 pages long.

The Alien Enemies Act has been the law of the land for 227 years, even if it has been ignored from time to time. The Trump administration contends that the Act allows today for the deportation of members of the lethal Tren de Aragua gang, which constitutes a “hybrid criminal state.” Trump issued an executive order on March 15 stating that Tren de Aragua was “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” That certainly seems to be the case. Tren de Aragua members didn’t come into the country hoping to get jobs and become “Maryland dads.” They came here to traffic in drugs and engage in other crimes. If that isn’t a “predatory incursion,” what is?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California’s ‘Perfect Dictatorship’ The Dems’ model for the nation – sustained by illegal voters. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/californias-perfect-dictatorship/

Mario Vargas Llosa, who passed away in April at the age of 89, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. Ten years earlier, the Peruvian novelist (The Time of the Hero, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, The War of the End of the World ) gained global attention for speaking the truth to power. In a 1990 conference organized by Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa proclaimed that “la dictadura perfecta” was not communism, the USSR or Fidel Castro. The “perfect dictatorship” was Mexico.

As the Peruvian understood, a dictatorship is not a nation where there are no elections. A dictatorship is a country where one party never loses, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) dominated Mexico since the 1920s. In a practice known as el dedazo, PRI presidents picked their successors, following up their choice with fake elections. In the US state of California, Democrats have established a perfect dictatorship of their own.

Democrats have been in power in Sacramento since 2011 and now hold all major elected offices: Governor (Gavin Newsom), Lt. Gov (Eleni Kounalakis), Secretary of State (Shirley Weber), Attorney General (Rob Bonta), State Treasurer (Fiona Ma) State Controller (Malia Cohen), Insurance Commissioner (Ricardo Lara), and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Like all state Democrats, these officials enjoy the support of an imported electorate.

For years, Pew Research pegged the number of illegals in the United States at 11 million. A recent study by scholars at MIT and Yale – conducted before the massive influx under Biden – estimated more than 22 million. So the 11 million figure likely underestimates the number in California alone. In 2019, when state attorney Xavier Becerra announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration, he displayed a sign citing “over ten million immigrants” in California – “immigrants” being code for false-documented persons illegally present in the USA. With illegals, California’s approach has been two steps forward, no steps back.

Under California’s “motor voter” scheme, the DMV automatically registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ian Kingsbury George Mason University’s Disastrous President Gregory Washington has backed racially discriminatory DEI programs and failed to address campus anti-Semitism.

Posted By on July 3rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/george-mason-university-president-gregory-washington-dei-anti-semitism

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, among others, have come under fire or been forced out in recent years for failures of leadership on campus anti-Semitism and racially discriminatory DEI programs. Yet Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University, has managed to keep his job despite similar failures. Mason may not be an Ivy League school, but anti-Semitism and discrimination are problems at nonelite public universities, too. Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.

Mason’s Board of Visitors selected Washington in 2020, just as woke fever was reaching its peak. Upon appointment, Washington committed Mason to being “a national exemplar of antiracism and inclusive excellence.” True to his word, Washington built a gigantic diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, with 7.4 DEI staff per 100 tenure-track faculty members. This was the second-highest ratio among the more than 70 universities the Heritage Foundation examined

Despite President Trump’s executive order calling out DEI bureaucracies for promoting illegal discrimination, and a Supreme Court decision prohibiting racial preferences, Washington has refused to scale back his DEI efforts. His commitment to DEI surpasses his concern for the legal liability those activities impose on Mason.

Washington’s ideological commitments also eclipse his obligation to follow the law when it comes to face-coverings worn by campus protesters. Virginia law forbids wearing a mask to conceal one’s identity in public. Courts have upheld that law—created in response to the state’s experience with the KKK—as constitutional, and the state attorney general advised universities to amend their policies to prohibit face-coverings at protests.

All major public universities in Virgina complied—except for George Mason. Instead, it merely requires protesters to show identification upon request, a policy that is impractical to implement and does not actually align with the law. Washington claimed to favor this approach out of concern for free speech, even though courts have ruled that concealing one’s identity during a public protest is not protected speech.

Meantime, anti-Semitic activity at George Mason is on the rise. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has subjected the university to investigation for its failure to protect the civil rights of Jewish students during both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mason students were arrested for planning anti-Semitic violence in two incidents last year. In the first, police searched the home of two sisters who led the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, finding an illegal gun and “pro-terror materials, including Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Jews,’” according to the Washington Free Beacon.