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U.N. Says Nine Employees Likely Involved in October 7 Attacks, Won’t Release ‘Confidential’ Report Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-n-says-nine-employees-likely-involved-in-october-7-attacks-wont-release-confidential-report/

The U.N. said today that an internal investigation found that nine staffers of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East likely participated in the October 7 terrorist attacks — but that it will not release the details about what they did that day.

The organization revealed that it fired the nine staffers, some of whom it had initially terminated in January when the allegations first surfaced, and that one staffer fired that month had rejoined the scandal-plagued agency, which has used pro-terrorism textbooks in its schools.

While U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq, announcing the findings at a press briefing today, said the employees “may have been involved,” he confirmed that what the organization means is that it is likely or highly likely that the staffers joined the attacks.

After Israel initially told other governments and the U.N. that twelve UNRWA staffers had taken part in October 7, several of those countries, including the U.S., suspended their funding for the agency, and the U.N. kicked off two internal investigations.

Subsequent findings from Israeli intelligence reportedly hold that about 1,200 employees of the organization in Gaza are tied to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

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Headline Fail of the Week Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

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The ‘Moderate’ Genocidal Madmen of Hamas By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at more sympathetic media reporting on Hamas and cover more media misses.

Attention Reporters: There’s Nothing Moderate about Hamas

Israel’s latest attacks on Hamas will not permanently wipe the group out, the New York Times reports. Instead, the group may gather itself and come back “more radicalized.”

“The assassinations of two Hamas leaders may be a short-term setback, analysts say, not enough to prevent the group from re-emerging intact — and possibly more radicalized,” a subheading reads.

“Israel’s decades-long targeted killing campaigns against its Palestinian and regional rivals have a contested record: Critics have long argued the tactic has simply created room for new parties or leaders to emerge as Israel’s main foes — often with ever more radical forces replacing them,” the story goes on to explain.

How, exactly, this group could become any more radical than it already is remains a mystery. It’s been just ten months since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took nearly 250 hostages during its infamous October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

But the article continues a line of rhetoric seen in several recent obituaries of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who has been described by a handful of outlets as “moderate.”

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran. While no one has claimed credit for the attack, Israel is believed to have been behind the Hamas leader’s death. A separate New York Times report suggests Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device that was “covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.” The bomb had reportedly been stashed in the guesthouse two months before its detonation.

Reuters reported, “Tough-talking Haniyeh was seen as the more moderate face of Hamas.” But after receiving backlash, it amended the headline to read: “Who was Ismail Haniyeh and why is his assassination a blow to Hamas?”

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World War III Coming Soon, U.S. Military Woefully Unprepared by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20845/us-china-world-war-iii

“The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance… Such methods are not suited to today’s strategic environment…. The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” — Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 29, 2024.

“The Department’s usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change… The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense.” — Blaine Holt, former US Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone Institute, August 5, 2024.

Unfortunately, Biden has not addressed the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way about the greatest threat they face.

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy is clear on what must be done: “A bipartisan ‘call to arms’ is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”

It is unlikely, however, that bad actors will give America a decade more to prepare.

General Mike Minihan, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, predicted in a memorandum to his command leaked in January of last year that America would be in a war with China “in 2025.”

Xi Jinping can see the United States is starting to stir; why would he wait for his foe to get ready?

“We are closer today to World War III than we’ve been since the Second World War,” said former President Donald Trump at the Believers’ Summit in West Palm Beach on July 26.

Trump hyperbole? No.

The former president is not alone in thinking this way. “China and Russia’s ‘no-limits’ partnership, formed in February 2022 just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has only deepened and broadened to include a military and economic partnership with Iran and North Korea, each of which presents its own significant threat to U.S. interests,” states the Commission on the National Defense Strategy in its 114-page report released three days after Trump spoke. “This new alignment of nations opposed to U.S. interests creates a real risk, if not likelihood, that conflict anywhere could become a multitheater or global war.”

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Kamala Harris: Recycling the 2020 Democrat Campaign A remote stealth campaign. by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamala-harris-recycling-the-2020-democrat-campaign/

Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election through a successful tripartite subterfuge.

One, Biden never really campaigned. His handlers rightly assumed that the more the public and the media saw a debilitated Biden in the flesh, the less they would want him as president.

So, the Biden campaign used the COVID lockdowns to ensure that Biden stayed safe in his basement office.

Biden strategically distanced himself from disinterested journalists, using COVID as an excuse to avoid public appearances. It allowed him to run a 19th-century, front-porch sort of virtual campaign.

In his place, the liberal media, Democratic grandees, and the billionaire donor class served as Biden campaign surrogates—vastly outspending, out-advertising, and out-lawyering the underfunded incumbent Trump.

Second, again using COVID as a pretext, well-funded Democratic legal teams altered the voting laws during early 2020 in key swing states to encourage non-Election Day voting.

For the first time, majorities in many key states voted by mail-in/absentee ballots and during weeks of early voting.

We now know why the left was so motivated to push through radical balloting changes that were otherwise impossible prior to 2020 but have been mostly institutionalized since.

Non-Election Day ballots outnumbered Election Day ballots. They were far more likely to be cast by Democrats. And as the number of such ballots soared, the traditional rejection rate of non-Election Day ballots prior to 2020 fell—even as registrars were swamped.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Battle for Britain Finally, the UK public explodes. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/battle-for-britain/

Should anyone be surprised that what has been called a “wave of violence” swept the cities of Britain this past weekend?

For years, while the mass immigration of Muslims has utterly transformed their country, the overwhelming majority of Brits have stuck to form – keeping a stiff upper lip, queuing politely for buses, and biting their tongues as they watched entire neighborhoods, such as the traditionally cockney East End of London, converted to Muslim enclaves. In the months since October 7, they sat home and sipped their tea while armies of Muslims filled their streets weekend after weekend, screaming their support for anti-Western terrorism and shouting their plans to turn Britain into an Islamic caliphate. Those decent Britishers even tended to stay quiet while the few heroic members of their race who protested these outrages – men like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox – were abused, insulted, and unjustly arrested by a police force that has strayed far from the civilized rules of police behavior set down two centuries ago by Sir Robert Peel and has practiced “two-tier policing” – turning a blind eye to actual Muslim violence while imprisoning ethnic Englishmen who dare to criticize that violence online.

Well, eventually something’s got to give. This weekend, according to the Guardian, “bricks were hurled at police officers in Stoke-on-Trent, fireworks were thrown amid tense exchanges between an anti-Islamic group and an anti-racism rally in Belfast, and windows of a hotel which has been used to house migrants were smashed in Hull, where three police officers were injured and four people arrested. Several officers were also injured during ‘serious disorder’ in Liverpool city centre, where bricks, bottles and a flare were thrown and one officer hit on the head with a chair. Greater Manchester police said a dispersal notice had been authorised for the city centre and scuffles broke out as opposing groups faced each other in Nottingham’s Old Market Square with bottles and other items thrown from both sides.”

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Kamala Harris Has A Serious ‘Project 2025’ Problem Of Her Own

Posted By on August 6th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/06/kamala-harris-has-a-serious-project-2025-problem-of-her-own/

If you didn’t know any better, you might think that Kamala Harris was running against some guy named “Project 2025.” She brings it up in every speech. Her campaign has said that “Project 2025” is on the ballot.

But it’s not the lies she and the media are spreading about Project 2025. It’s the fact that Harris doesn’t have one herself that should trouble voters most.

In case you don’t know, Project 2025 is an alliance of more than 100 conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation, which got together to compile a 900-page list of policy proposals called “Mandate for Leadership.” (Heritage has published this volume every four years since 1980.)

Trump and his campaign have repeatedly made it clear that this isn’t his agenda. And, indeed, he has detailed plans posted on his campaign website – not to mention a track record of success as president.

But Harris? She has no policy agenda whatsoever. None.

Aside from fundraising pitches and ads for childish merch, her official campaign website is comprised of just a “Meet Kamala Harris” page, with 11 paragraphs of text that unintentionally showcase her rice-paper-thin resume.

Here’s the entire list of her “big” accomplishments:

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How Trump Can Win—or Lose—the Election Moving forward, Donald Trump needs to focus his attack on the disastrous Biden governance of the last four years. Make Harris own it. And contrast it with 2017-21 and what will follow in 2025. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 5th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/05/how-trump-can-win-or-lose-the-election/

The Good News

The good news for the Trump campaign is that the sure Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is a lifelong California hard leftist at a time when the state is emblematic of progressive nihilism. Her extremist advocacies as a San Francisco county and city attorney, state Attorney General, and senator are on record. And they are consistent with what has virtually destroyed the state.

Harris was also a driving force as vice president for Joe Biden’s unpopular and unworkable progressive policies—whether open borders, massive illegal immigration, hyperinflation, fanning woke divisiveness, arguing for lax criminal prosecution, or defunding the police. She was far closer to the mindset of the unhinged Squad than Joe Biden himself.

None of the Biden-Harris administration’s main policy initiatives ever polled 50 percent approval. Abroad, the world blew up under their tenure with an unbridled Putin invading Ukraine, an unbound Iran brazenly using its proxies to attack Israel, and China all but warning the West of its impending absorption of Taiwan—now not a question of if but only when.

So, it should be easy for Trump to win the key midwestern swing states. All he needs to do is repeatedly remind voters that Harris is the most far-left presidential candidate in modern history. He can drive home that she is not only on record endorsing these extreme positions but has been doing so emphatically for years to energize her exclusively left-wing constituents and audiences.

If Trump heeds the lessons of late Lee Atwater, then he need only follow the 1988 Republican campaign script, when hard-left Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis’s 17-point lead in late July melted through nonstop reminders that Dukakis was and always would be far to the left of the American voter.

Dukakis’s efforts to claim that the election was only about his “competence,” not his liberal ideology, evaporated after a devastating series of ads—exposing the “technocrat” Dukakis as an extremist and a hypocrite desperate to disown and hide his prior unapologetically left-wing record from the voters. And Dukakis was a far better candidate than Harris.

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Why slavery is not America’s original sin The left’s view of slavery as a uniquely Western evil is a product of deep historical ignorance. Wilfred Reilly (July 2024)

Posted By on August 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/14/why-slavery-is-not-americas-original-sin/

Modern histories tend to rely heavily on the new ideological pieties of left-wing activists. First among these is the belief that we live in a totally corrupt and oppressive society – in fact, in the world’s most oppressive and corrupt society. Feeding this belief is the widely accepted claim – at least, within the modern Western world – that slavery is the United States’ ‘original sin’, and alleged to be uniquely evil as practised within the US.

One major American textbook, Traditions and Encounters, appears to describe the Western-dominated slave trade as the largest and most brutal in history, calling even the full sweep of Arab / Islamic slavery ‘smaller than the Atlantic slave trade of modern times’. Elsewhere, the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones argues bluntly: ‘America’s brutal system of slavery [was] unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Enslaved people were… property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.’

This take has become increasingly prominent within the modern American educational environment. The 1619 Project – which insists that 1619, the year that 20 Africans arrived in the English colonies, and not 1776, was ‘the true founding’ of America – has a formal curriculum. Underpinning this view that slavery in America and the West was uniquely brutal are several unexamined assumptions. Modern Americans tend to project our positive values back into the past while thinking that our sins are uniquely bad. What we don’t understand is that contemporary Western beliefs about human dignity, inalienable rights, a right to freedom, etc, are the exception, not the norm. If they seem like the norm today, that is largely because we have remade much of the world in our image. In reality, as conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell writes in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), it is probably fair to say that most Westerners think of historical slavery almost entirely in the context of Western white oppression of blacks during what is technically known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. Almost nothing could be further from empirical truth: American slavery was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal and it did not invent any new oppressive systems. It was terrible, but talking about it as if it came out of nowhere means we understand less about history and about global norms. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the ancient and historical world – often the step of human ‘development’ after simply killing and eating one’s defeated foemen.

Slavery in historical perspective

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What a ‘Free’ Palestine Would Mean Eugene Alexander Donnini

Posted By on August 5th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/07/what-a-free-palestine-would-mean/

The claim that Islam is a religion of peace is a nicety invented by Western politicians so as either not to offend their Muslim populations or simply lie to themselves that everything might yet turn out fine. In fact, since its beginning Islam has been pretty violent.         
                                   —Douglas Murray, Islamophilia

Do Westerners who attend pro-Palestinian demonstrations really understand the ideology their support is empowering? I suspect many do not, that their support arises from a genuine humanitarian concern for the people of Gaza. What they don’t understand is that their compassion is being directed and manipulated by Islamic and other totalitarian forces whose primary objectives are not to improve the lives of Palestinians, but to bring about the destruction of Israel and its people, by any means necessary, including genocide. Do they know that Hamas, the current government of Gaza, in its 1988 original Charter (and the 2017 revised edition) advocates for these things (as reported by Bruce Hoffman in the Atlantic on October 10, 2023):

The covenant opens with a message that precisely encapsulates Hamas’s master plan. Quoting Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a constituent member (Article 2), the document proclaims, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” …

After some general explanatory language about Hamas’s religious foundation and noble intentions, the covenant comes to the Islamic Resistance Movement’s raison d’être: the slaughter of Jews. “The Day of Judgement will not come about,” it proclaims, “until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

The killing-the-Jews bit is a quote from Sahih al-Bukhari Book 56, Hadith 138, attributed to Mohammad, that is simply reiterating Allah’s instructions to Muslims. Here are a few of many examples: “Strike terror [into the hearts of] the enemies of Allah and your enemies.” (Surah 8:60) “Fight [kill] them [non-Muslims], and Allah will punish, [torment] them by your hands, and cover them with shame.” (Surah 9:14) “I will instil terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not ye who slew them; it was Allah.” (Surah 8:13–17)

You could say then that Hamas are carrying out Allah’s plan here below.

These kinds of mystic marching orders from Allah gave Hamas fighters scriptural and moral justification and authority on October 7, 2023, to behead children, rape women, and chop up, shoot and burn parents and grandparents while chanting Allahu Akbar! before proudly ringing Mum and Dad to tell them what a great job they were doing, taking a few hundred hostages with them as trophies, including several women, who they stripped naked, repeatedly raped, tied to the back of cars and dragged through the streets of Gaza where they were cursed, spat on and stoned by crowds until they were dead.