The West Is Sick of the New Woke Jihadism The more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/13/the-west-is-sick-of-the-new-woke-jihadism/

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting?

What are the students at Stanford University vandalizing the president’s office really demonstrating against?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus. No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East. Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur. Nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protestors are not furious over the 1 million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government. Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadi movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.” It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar el-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces, and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war, or the fate of refugees. Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture, and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency.

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the U.S. in the last half-century.

Biden Housing Scheme Could Ignite Another 2008 Mortgage Crisis Talk about mission creep. by Stephen Moore

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-housing-scheme-could-ignite-another-2008-mortgage-crisis/

Politicians in Washington have very short memories, so they repeat the same mistakes over and over.

It was only 17 years ago that the “subprime” mortgage crisis torpedoed the economy and sent the financial markets into the biggest tailspin since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. One of the matches that lit that bonfire was Freddie Mac and its cousin, Fannie Mae, offering generous, taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance to risky borrowers on loans with low down payments.

It all blew up in the faces of the taxpayers even though the Washington experts said the chances of these mortgages going bust and taxpayers taking a loss was less than one in a thousand.

The biggest taxpayer bailouts went not to the Wall Street banks and investment companies but to Fannie and Freddie.

Here we go again. The latest scheme by the Biden administration is to encourage families to borrow more money by using the equity in their home as collateral. Home equity loans are often very risky. If prices fall, home equity can become negative. There is nearly $18 trillion in home equity, and it’s one of the largest sources of savings and ownership for American families.

Now the Biden administration wants to encourage Americans to borrow even more at a time when credit card and auto debts are at an all-time high. If homes fall in value, families could slip underwater and default — just like during the subprime crisis.

As The Wall Street Journal points out, the other “likely losers” from this scam “would be taxpayers.” The evidence is indisputable from 2008 that the mortgages that ended in default were low-down-payment and low-equity loans.

Why in the world would President Joe Biden want to go down this dangerous road again?

A Half-Century of Appeasing Iran The suicidal cost of blinding ourselves to the Mullahs’ true world view. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-half-century-of-appeasing-iran/

A measure of how feckless and dangerous the Biden administration’s Iran policy has become, was blatantly obvious last week. The International Atomic Energy Agency finally censured Iran for violating the terms of the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” that Barack Obama signed with several European countries in 2015. As the Wall Street Journal asked, “What took so long? The answer, we’re sorry to say, is U.S. opposition. Credit to the U.K., France and Germany for pushing the rebuke anyway, and winning President Biden’s reluctant support at the last minute, when he had no other way to stave off the embarrassment of defending Iran.”

Embarrassment indeed, when three of Nato’s richest military skinflints show more spine than the U.S. did. Biden’s appeasement may be the reductio ad absurdum of nearly 50 years of Western nations “running scared of Tehran,” as Daniel Pipes put it, since the Islamic revolution.  For all those decades, a nation viable only by dint of possessing the world’s third largest oil reserves–– and a ruthless totalitarian government so hated by its people that only murderous force and cruelty can keep its clerical leaders alive––is treated by the West as though it were a peer rival one must approach with cautious solicitude.

First in the catalogue of appeasement came the sacrifice of the Shah, a geostrategically reliable and loyal ally, who like his father was a reformer in the mold of Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk. Next came the abandonment of Iran despite the unpunished kidnapping of our embassy staff, and the subjection of Iran’s citizens to committed jihadists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

An esteemed Shia cleric, Khomeini’s tracts and sermons featured traditional Islamic doctrines like “Kill the unbeliever” and “Islam is the religion of blood for the infidel.” More ominously, he promised, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world,” and jihad will be waged “[u]ntil the cry ‘There in God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.’” And so it has, as Iran and its proxies have terrorized this a critical region.

From that point on, there followed numerous failures to punish Iran’s aggression against the “Great Satan,” as Khomeini dubbed the U.S. Iran’s shock-troops and trained proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, serially kidnapped our citizens and government officials, and incessantly facilitated attacks on our soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Indeed, the Mullahs struck at every flash-point in the region, including Hamas’s murders, rapes, brutalizing, and kidnappings of hostages in the October 7 terrorist attacks. Only the blind or willfully ignorant can fail to trace the role of serial appeasement in inviting and furthering these assaults on our security and interests.

Why should Israel sign on to Biden’s hideous ceasefire deal? By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/why_should_israel_sign_on_to_biden_s_hideous_ceasefire_dea.html

Joe Biden has a way of giving ceasefires a bad name.So when he first proposed his ceasefire bill for Israel and the Hamas terrorists, Hamas and its crummy little ally, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, didn’t have much problem signing on.

The ceasefire would be great for them, allowing the to regroup for the next round against Israel. Israel, which by now is winning its war with its hostage rescue, is supposed to forget about that success and just give the terrorists a mulligan.

Now the United Nations Security Council, with the exception of Russia, has signed on, too. (Russia said it didn’t have enough information as to what the heck this thing was about.)

Here’s what little is known about the bill, according to the Associated Press:

Biden’s May 31 announcement of the new proposal said it would begin with an initial six-week cease-fire and the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from populated areas in Gaza and the return of Palestinian civilians to all areas in the territory.

Phase one also requires the safe distribution of humanitarian assistance “at scale throughout the Gaza Strip,” which Biden said would lead to 600 trucks with aid entering Gaza every day.

When Will The Ministry Of Truth Shut Down The Lyin’ Biden Ads?

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/13/when-will-the-ministry-of-truth-shut-down-the-lyin-biden-ads/

President Joe Biden’s reelection ad campaign contains a boatload of misinformation and disinformation. Will the censors shut it down? Will the media alert their readers and viewers to the falsehoods? We all know the answers to those questions.

The political left is obsessed with shutting down any speech that doesn’t agree with its narrative. And it has successes to show for it. The Twitter files are the preeminent example. There exists a censorship-industrial complex, “a state-sponsored system targeting ‘disinformation,’” says journalist Matt Taibbi, who had access to the Twitter files, that strike “at the essence of the right to free speech.”

Hardly two years ago, and just a little more than a year into one of the worst administrations in U.S. history, the Biden White House created a Disinformation Governance Board. Its mission was to do the “critical work across several administrations” of addressing “disinformation that threatens the security of our country,” which meant punishing speech the Democrats don’t want the public to hear.

It didn’t last long. In less than four months it was dissolved. Turns out that people didn’t trust it. Many instinctively knew that it’s real mission was to censor political opponents and the free expression of private citizens who don’t hold the “correct” opinions and beliefs.

It would have also been good cover for the Democrats’ incessant lying, recently manifesting itself in the Biden campaign ads. Following is some of the inflammatory, and intentionally misleading, content from those ads, followed by the facts.

ICE Arrests Eight Foreign Nationals with Suspected Ties to ISIS By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ice-arrests-eight-foreign-nationals-with-suspected-ties-to-isis/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested eight foreign nationals with ties to the terrorist group ISIS-K, an Afghan branch of the Islamic State, over the past week.

“Over the last few days, ICE agents arrested several non-citizens pursuant to immigration authorities,” the Department of Homeland Security and FBI told the New York Post, which first reported the story, in a statement. “The actions were carried out in close coordination with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The individuals arrested are detained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings . . . The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security. ”

ICE arrested the ISIS-K-linked Tajikistani nationals in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia this week.

FBI director Christopher Wray warned of potential threats from ISIS-K in April, specifically saying that, “increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall a couple weeks ago.” ISIS-K carried out an attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March, which killed 145 people.

Wray has also cautioned that ISIS-affiliated groups have exploited the U.S.’s weak southern border to smuggle terrorists into the country. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March, Wray said “there is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.”

One U.S. official reportedly confirmed that the eight individuals were not flagged during their screening at the southern Mexico border, but that security officials tracked and later tied the individuals to ISIS-K.

The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to Do With the Prosecutions of Trump What Democrats should just admit. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-myth-that-biden-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-prosecutions-of-trump/

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had (Attorney General Merrick) Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it — even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”

Americans Must Criticize Our Corrupt Courts By Carson Holloway

https://tomklingenstein.com/americans-must-criticize-our-corrupt-courts/

In the wake of his conviction in a New York court, President Trump has complained that the process was rigged against him, that the whole proceeding was a corrupt effort to persecute him with a view to influencing the 2024 presidential election. In response, many of his opponents have criticized him for undermining public confidence in our system of criminal justice and thus harming our democracy—a criticism that has been magnified by many in the media.

These critics, however, are missing the point and undermining a principle that is in fact essential to preserving our republic: namely, that criticism of the justice system when it errs or overreaches is necessary to preserving freedom under the rule of law.

Those who founded our nation were aware of this necessity.

Alexander Hamilton, representing the defendant in the famous libel case People v. Croswell, warned that “the most dangerous, the most sure, the most fatal of tyrannies” operated “by selecting and sacrificing single individuals, under the mask and forms of law, by dependent and partial tribunals.”

“Against such measures,” Hamilton continued, “we ought to keep a vigilant eye and take a manly stand. Whenever they arise, we ought to resist, and resist till we have hurled the demagogues and tyrants from their imagined thrones.” No sensible American would look back on these remarks and think that, by them, Hamilton was undermining democracy.

Hamilton’s great rival, Thomas Jefferson, acted on a similar view. As president, Jefferson pardoned publishers who had been convicted under the Sedition Act of 1798. Jefferson’s course of action here was inseparable from his belief that the Act was unconstitutional and that the courts of the United States had made themselves party to serious injustices by convicting defendants under it. Indeed, the pardoning power is included in the United States Constitution, and in many state constitutions, and is used routinely, precisely because prosecutors and courts can make mistakes and sometimes even willfully abuse their power over the lives and liberties of citizens.

Why Hamas must be defeated Israel is surrounded by enemies who are determined to destroy it. Andrew Fox

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/11/why-hamas-must-be-defeated/

Israel’s operation to free four hostages in Nuseirat, central Gaza may be dominating media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war at the moment. But the Israel Defence Forces’ operations in Rafah will be headlining the news again very soon.

This particular Gazan city is now Hamas’s final stronghold. The IDF has made significant inroads there, surrounding Rafah’s centre and seizing more than 75 per cent of the Philadelphi Corridor border with Egypt, which Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the hostage crisis aside, Gaza is actually a tactical sideshow for Israel. The genocidal terrorists of Hamas certainly need to be militarily diminished and removed from power. But Israel faces far more serious strategic threats from elsewhere.

There is Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon. Since October last year, the IDF has struck roughly 4,000 Hezbollah targets within Lebanon, and Hezbollah has fired over 4,500 rockets into Israel in return. Northern Israel has been ablaze with wildfires from downed rockets. As it stands, 60,000 Israelis have been internally displaced thanks to the threat of these rocket attacks.

Yemen’s Houthis, another Iranian proxy, also pose a significant threat. Their ongoing attacks on shipping in the Gulf in support of Hamas threaten to choke off the Suez Canal.

Then there’s Iran itself. As a sign of its intent, it launched a large-scale drone and missile attack on Israel in April. It is also on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Beyond Iran and its ‘axis of resistance’, Israel also faces challenges from Qatar and Turkey. Both continue to support Palestine on the international stage with funds, strategic direction and sympathetic news media.

Why greens were the biggest losers in the EU elections The EU’s punishing climate policies are facing an almighty public backlash. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/11/why-greens-were-the-biggest-losers-in-the-eu-elections/

In 2019, Green parties achieved their best ever European Parliament election results. They even topped the polls in some member states, including Germany. Europe’s cultural and political elites could barely conceal their delight at the time, viewing the rising support for the Greens as an endorsement of their own managerialist mission to tackle the so-called climate emergency. The EU’s technocrats seized their chance. Within months of this alleged ‘green wave’, Brussels pushed through its Green Deal, which committed all member states to Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, by 2050. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the Green Deal at the time as ‘Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment’.

Things look very different today. As the results of last week’s European elections show, support for Green parties has dropped off a cliff. There were exceptions, such as in Denmark, where the Greens polled well. But overall, their vote fell sharply across the EU. The results are yet to be finalised, but it’s expected that the Greens / European Free Alliance political group has lost 18 of its 71 seats in the European Parliament.

The evaporation of 2019’s ‘green wave’ has also affected the Greens’ centrist fellow travellers – that is, those leftish and centre-left parties who have tended to promote a very green-adjacent agenda. Their European parliamentary group, Renew Europe, is expected to lose 23 of the 102 seats it picked up in 2019.

The collapse in support for the Greens was especially pronounced in the EU’s two key member states, France and Germany. The French Greens’ vote plummeted from 14 per cent in 2019 to just over five per cent this time, only just exceeding the five per cent necessary to gain any seats at all in Brussels. They finished seventh overall.

The German Greens, currently in a coalition government in Germany, arguably the most successful of all Europe’s green parties, fared no better. Their vote fell from 21 per cent in 2019 to just 12 per cent this time.