Biden-Harris Threat against Israel Is a Moral Disgrace The Editors of National Review

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/biden-harris-threat-against-israel-is-a-moral-disgrace/

Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its terrorist proxies is a political problem for Democrats. While most Americans sympathize with Israel, a segment of the Democratic Party is harshly critical of the U.S. ally and, in some cases, openly pro-Hamas. This contingent is loud and heavily concentrated in the swing state of Michigan. Ever since the October 7 attacks, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to thread this needle by talking about their commitment to Israel’s defense while routinely haranguing Israel for its conduct of the war and pressuring the nation to operate with more restraint.

This tension has come into full view over the past week.

On the one hand, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the U.S. would be sending an advanced anti-missile system to Israel, along with troops to operate it, to bolster the defense against Iran. On the other hand, Biden has been pressuring Israel into a more limited response to Iran’s second ballistic-missile attack in five months, including publicly opposing an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In the midst of this, Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a joint letter to Israeli officials — promptly released publicly — chastising Israel for not ensuring enough humanitarian aid in Gaza and warning that if Israel does not meet the administration’s demands within 30 days, the U.S. could suspend aid to Israel. Conveniently, this would place the potential aid-suspension date a week after the November 5 election.

In other words, Harris can spend the closing weeks of the presidential election arguing to the pro-Hamas caucus that the administration has put Israel on notice while still claiming to supporters of Israel that no decision has been made to suspend aid.

The substance of the letter places the blame for insufficient aid getting into the hands of Gazans on Israel, claiming that Israelis are creating too many barriers to aid entering the strip. Yet Israel must vet aid going in because Hamas has historically used aid deliveries to smuggle in weapons. Also, Hamas inhibits the flow of aid within Gaza, looting delivery trucks and hoarding food and supplies for their own fighters.

Election 2024: Those Who Lecture Versus Those Tired of Being Lectured Hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/17/election-2024-those-who-lecture-versus-those-tired-of-being-lectured/

The election is finally shaping up to be not only liberal Democrat Harris versus conservative Republican Trump.

Instead, it has become a larger contest between those who talk down to their fellow Americans and those who are increasingly sick and tired of being lectured. How smart is it, for example, for Harris supporters to claim nonstop that ex-president Trump is a fascist dictator—and thus, by extension, those also who vote for him?

Women voters poll about 53-5 percent for Kamala Harris. Trump enjoys a similar, although likely somewhat smaller, majority margin of male voters.

Yet Harris—along with campaign surrogates Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—has been lecturing both black and white male voters nonstop that they are misled.

Or they supposedly suffer from false consciousness—as if they have no clue that Harris and her progressive agenda are really in their own self-interest.

Such haughtiness reached a zenith when Harris ran ads of actors costumed as supposedly working-class men. They voiced scripted talking points to prove that “real” men are progressive Harris supporters.

But the actors were so patently ridiculous, their canned lines so unreal, that most viewers likely thought the ads were run by Trump himself—to show how arrogant, out-of-touch elites must imagine how the so-called “clingers” and “deplorables” think and talk.

The Trump campaign also tries all sorts of strategies to win over women voters, from promising to rectify the Biden-Harris hyperinflation to reducing spiraling crime in towns and cities.

But one method they avoid is claiming women are ignorant of their real self-interest and deluded by Harris—accurately assuming that a candidate does not win voters by belittling their intelligence.

Harris and Obama both dressed down black men, claiming they are especially culpable for not voting en masse for Harris—even though a far higher percentage of black males will vote for Harris than for Trump.

This hectoring the electorate on its supposed ignorance or moral shortcomings has become a Harris campaign trademark.

Kamala doesn’t know the first thing ‘about fascism’ In the post-7 October world, the Dems’ Trump-Hitler hysteria just doesn’t wash anymore. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/16/kamala-doesnt-know-the-first-thing-about-fascism/

It’s hard to know what’s worse about Kamala Harris agreeing that Donald Trump is a fascist. Is it that eight, long years after Trump was first elected president in those heady days of 2016 the Dems are still playing the Hitler card? That they’re still wailing ‘You’re a NAZI’ like idiot 15-year-olds in the throes of a particularly bad temper tantrum? Or is it that they think they can still get away with crap, with this cheapest of cheap shots, in the post-7 October world? At a time when something that really does have a whiff of fascism to it – the unhinged animus for the world’s only Jewish nation – is sweeping not through Trump’s ranks, but theirs?

To put it another way: when Harris murmurs her haughty approval of the use of that f-word, is she being trite or ignorant? Overreliant on knackered cliché or blind to what has changed – which is it, Madame VP?

It was in a chat with the comic Charlamagne tha God that Harris agreed that Trump has fascist tendencies. Yesterday, on his hip-hop radio show, The Breakfast Club, Charlamagne suggested to Harris that Trump’s vision for America is ‘about fascism’. ‘Why can’t we just say it?’, he asked. Here was an opportunity for Harris to make good on her supporters’ belief that she will rise above our ‘age of political name-calling’and say that while she disagrees with Trump, she doesn’t believe he’s Mussolini reincarnate. But instead she said: ‘Yes, we can say that.’

The ‘Yes We Can’ cry really has degenerated of late. Now it’s ‘yes we can’ call our opponents fascists. Yes we can reach to the very bottom of the barrel of slurs and haul up the Hitler thing again. Yes we can overlook that Trump is now on what might be his third assassination attempt and keep calling him a fascist threat to the republic regardless. ‘When they go low, we go high’, said Michelle Obama. The Harris equivalent is ‘When they go low, we go even lower’ – all the way into the gutter of calling everyone we dislike a fascist with no regard for meaning, accuracy or truth.

Harris’s playing of the old tunes had the media classes dancing in the aisles. She went ‘further than she [has] before’ in casting her rival as a ‘dangerous authoritarian leader’, said a gleeful New York Times. Where her aides worry she’s ‘too cautious’, this time ‘she did not hold back’, said the NYT. It especially appreciated her warning that this man who’s ‘about fascism’ might ‘destroy our democracy’. Harris ‘agrees Trump is “about fascism”’, trumpeted CNN. In the UK, the Independent was positively cock-a-hoop over Harris’s ‘assailing [of] Donald Trump as an un-American “fascist” who isn’t fit to serve a second term’. She didn’t quite say all that, but hey, people embellish when they’re excited.

The media elites are thrilled that the Dem pick for president has given them permission to substitute name-calling for serious debate all over again. For how much easier it is, and how much more flattering to one’s outsized sense of self-importance, to holler ‘Hitler’ at Trump rather than try to understand why tens of millions of people intend to vote for him. Why so many in the working classes see a better future under the Trump-Vance economic programme than they do under the regime of ‘vibes’ Harris promises. These people take refuge in self-aggrandising ‘fascism’ talk to avoid confronting their own staggering unpopularity among vast swathes of working America.

The Hitler 2.0 thing was always dumb. It was always ahistorical. It was always fuelled more by the blind fury of coastal elites who had been unceremoniously bumped from their perch of power by the Great Unwashed. At times it was dangerous, too. The branding of Trump as a ‘Hitler pig’, as someone who had ‘The Reich Stuff’, as a man whose ascent to the White House represented a ‘new dawn of tyranny’ that was not unlike the ‘rise of fascism’ – nurse! – did not only massively exaggerate the threat of Trumpism. It also relativised the crimes of Nazism. It made the unique horrors of the 1930s seem almost mundane through comparing them with the rise of a controversial politician in the 2010s. The elites’ ‘fascism’ fretting that Harris has now resuscitated whipped up undue fear of Trump and ignorance about the past.

But this time round, it’s even worse. For now they’re screaming ‘fascist’ at Trump while all but ignoring the truly disturbing sight of young Americans marching through the streets carrying massive ‘Jew heads’ with blood-stained horns, and keffiyeh-wearing leftists on the New York subway shouting ‘Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist’, and students on the leafy lawns of Ivy League campuses calling the Jewish State the ‘pigs of the Earth’ and telling Jews to fuck off ‘back to Poland’. After 7 October, I don’t want to hear one word about fascism from the Dem elites or the media class, for there are people out there who vote for you and who read you who really are behaving like little Hitler pigs.

Drug Costs Explode As Kamalanomics Massively Backfires

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/17/drug-costs-explode-as-kamalanomics-massively-backfires/

Go to Kamala Harris’ campaign website and among the very short list of alleged achievements is this: “She cast the deciding vote to lower drug prices and cap insulin prices for our seniors.”

The only problem is that drug costs for seniors have skyrocketed since Harris signed that bill.

Harris is pointing to the criminally misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” which got zero Republican votes, and which was supposed to lower the cost of prescription drugs by giving, as Harris puts it, “Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices with Big Pharma.”

When George W. Bush established Medicare Part D, he let private insurers negotiate with drug companies over prices and then compete for seniors’ business. The result was a program that cost both seniors and taxpayers far less than government bureaucrats had expected, offered seniors a wide range of options, and had premiums that barely budged for more than a decade.

In fact, average monthly premiums for a Part D plan were lower when Donald Trump left office than under Barack Obama.

Harris’ tie-breaking vote has turned this once-successful program upside down.

Seniors next year will face premiums that are 57% higher, on average, than they were in 2021.

“Seniors in some states face even bigger hits to their wallets,” finds a state-by-state analysis done by the Heritage Foundation. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, Medicare drug plan premiums jumped by more than 90% in 10 states. Premiums more than doubled in three of those states (California, 122%; New York, 116%; and Nevada, 104%).”

And the number of plans offered has been cut in half. Which means less competition, which in turn will fuel further price hikes.

More Than 8 in 10 Americans Support Israel Over Hamas, Harvard Poll Finds By Corey Walker

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/10/15/more-than-8-10-americans-support-israel-over-hamas-harvard-poll-finds/

An overwhelming majority of Americans support Israel over the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, according to a new Harvard-Harris poll.

The poll, conducted from Oct. 11-13, revealed that the American public wants Israel to prevail in its ongoing military campaign in Hamas-ruled Gaza. The data also indicated that the American people believe the Jewish state should continue to prosecute the war until it achieves its objectives, including the permanent removal of Hamas from the Gaza strip and the release of the remaining hostages kidnapped from southern Israel last October.

According to the poll, Americans support Israel over Hamas by a margin of 81-19 percent. This represents a slight uptick from September, when 79 percent of Americans indicated support for Israel over the terrorist organization. Among respondents that follow the war “closely,” 81 percent similarly indicated support for Israel and 19 percent support Hamas.

The poll also showed a generational divide on Israel. Americans over 65 support Israel over Hamas by a staggering margin of 94-6 percent. Those aged 35-44 support the Jewish state over the terrorist group by a margin of 74-26 percent. Young Americans aged 18-24 are far more divided on the conflict, with 57 percent supporting Israel and 43 percent supporting the Hamas terrorist group. 

Islamic Militias in the Central African Republic by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21030/central-african-republic-islamic-militias

The Central African Republic is a tragic case of what happens when Islamic radicals take over a nation.

The UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) and government security forces have also not been able to exert effective control beyond the capital city.

This devastating war and its consequences need more media coverage. Why are activists and human rights groups concerned only with the Middle East? The horrific situation in CAR and elsewhere should also serve as an urgent warning about what happens to nations when Islamic radicals are not vetted or held accountable.

The Central African Republic is a tragic case of what happens when Islamic radicals take over a nation.

Much of the international community, human rights groups and media have ignored it, but the Central African Republic (CAR) has been struggling with an ongoing war launched by Seleka, an alliance of Islamic militias fighting against the country’s Christian and officially secular government.

Most of the country is today occupied by armed groups (both from within the country and foreign fighters), all of whom appear responsible for human rights abuses.

Russian mercenaries from The Wagner Group also arrived in the CAR after President Faustin-Archange Touadéra asked for help to tackle rebel groups in 2018. Wagner has since been fighting on the side of the CAR military against the Islamic militias and, while “protecting” the gold mines, has, at least for the time being, delivered “peace.” However, according to the BBC:

“Ms [Nathalia] Dukhan [a senior investigator at The Sentry investigative group] says the mercenaries are waging a ‘campaign of terror’ and are responsible for widespread human rights abuses including extrajudicial killings, torture and rape…. Wagner has taken advantage of weak institutions and a weak army to perfect ‘a blueprint for state capture.'”

USAID package found in Hezbollah weapons cache By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/usaid-package-found-in-hezbollah-weapons-cache/

Evidence that U.S. aid has found its way to terrorists in Lebanon emerged almost as a footnote in a video of a Hezbollah weapons cache posted to X on Oct. 13. A box marked “USAID” (United States Agency for International Development) appears in the background.

The box, also featuring the logo of the World Food Programme (WFP), a United Nations organization, is not even remarked upon by an Israel Defense Forces officer as he details the weaponry his men found in Southern Lebanon.

Those arms included anti-tank guided missiles, heavy and light machine guns, ammunition and other military gear.

Yona Schiffmiller, director of research at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based watchdog group which has long warned about the dangers of U.S. aid being diverted to terrorists, told JNS that he can’t recall seeing another more concrete example illustrating the danger of sending aid without proper oversight.

“We’ve certainly seen, over the years, a number of instances where USAID and the State Department gave support to organizations that glorified terrorists and promoted violence,” he said. “But there’s obviously a substantive difference between that and actual aid materials winding up in the hands of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.”

In this instance, Schiffmiller said it appears that the aid first went to a U.N. agency and then was redirected to Hezbollah further downstream.

It points to the need for “very strong U.S. oversight” to ensure the ultimate beneficiaries aren’t affiliated with terrorist organizations, he said.

“It’s not sufficient to just say we’re signing off on a U.N. project,” he added. “The United States needs to know who the ultimate beneficiaries are.”

The video comes in the wake of growing concerns among lawmakers that U.S.-taxpayer funded assistance meant for distressed civilian populations is finding its way to the world’s worst actors.

In an Oct. 9 letter, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), questioned Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID, about more than $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip that has likely been misused.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s Misguided Policy On The Palestinians by Bassam Tawil

ps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21012/biden-harris-palestinian-policy

On a number of occasions over the past few months, US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has declared her support for the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. Last month, Harris said: “We must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

Harris’s repeated talk about the need to establish a Palestinian state in the aftermath of the October 7 atrocities against Israelis is the best gift the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group could have wished for.

Harris seems to ignore that a majority of Palestinians continue to support Hamas and the October 7 atrocities…. Two-thirds of the Palestinians [in a poll conducted by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in June] said that the October 7 massacres were “correct.”

What is most disturbing about Harris’s advocacy for the establishment of an Iranian-controlled Palestinian state is that it is seen by many Palestinians as a reward for the October 7 atrocities…. So, when Harris talks about the need to establish a Palestinian state, she is sending a message to Hamas and other Palestinians that terrorism against Israel pays….

If Harris really cared about the Palestinians, she should be calling on Hamas to surrender; and calling on the Palestinian Authority (PA) stop glorifying terrorists and paying their families monthly salaries, dismantle all terror groups operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, stop poisoning the hearts and minds of their people, and recognize Israel’s right to exist. Unfortunately, she has done none of the above.

Moreover, the assumption that the PA can be “revitalized” and play a role in a post-war Gaza shows that Harris and the Biden administration are unfortunately clueless…. The poll also found that if presidential elections were held today, Hamas arch-terrorist Yahya Sinwar would receive 41% of the votes, while Abbas would get only 13%. A majority of 84% of the Palestinians want Abbas to resign.

Abbas is also well aware that the talk about “revitalizing” the corrupt PA is nothing but a farce. The PA was established more than 30 years ago and its leaders, first Yasser Arafat and now Abbas, have never shown any serious intention to combat rampant corruption, anarchy and lawlessness in areas under their control.

Abbas and the Egyptians appear to have renewed their talks with Hamas because they sense that the Biden-Harris administration is not interested in ending the terror group’s rule over the Gaza Strip.

If Biden and Harris really wanted to see Hamas removed from power and the Israeli hostages released, all they need to do, is issue an ultimatum to the ruler of Qatar, who funds and hosts the terror group’s leadership, that the US will withdraw its air base from the Gulf state and impose sanctions on the emirate if the issue is not resolved immediately.

If the Biden-Harris administration really wanted to get rid of Hamas, they would be calling out Abbas and the Egyptians for negotiating with a terror group about ways of incorporating it in a new administration in the Gaza Strip.

Talk about creating a Palestinian state emboldens terrorists everywhere and assures the world that the US is on their side.

What’s so triggering about The Canterbury Tales? University students are being treated like oversensitive morons. Joanna Williams

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/15/whats-so-triggering-about-the-canterbury-tales/

Over the past decade, universities have slapped ‘trigger warnings’ on everything from children’s books to entire fields of law. They have warned archaeology students about bones, theology students about the crucifixion and forensic-science students about dead bodies. In 2022, it was reported that over 1,000 books on university reading lists – including classic works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare – warned students about everything from racism and sexism to murder and suicide. Now, The Canterbury Tales can be added to this list of shame.

The Mail on Sunday reported at the weekend that the University of Nottingham is warning students that Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem contains ‘expressions of Christian faith’. The Canterbury Tales – as anyone with even a passing knowledge of literature knows – follows a group of pilgrims as they entertain each other with stories on their way to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. In other words, the clue to this being an ‘expression of Christian faith’ is right there in the title. Nottingham’s English literature lecturers must think students are stupid.

How on Earth did our once learned institutions end up in such a ridiculous situation? Trigger warnings took off on American campuses a decade ago before quickly crossing the Atlantic. The idea behind them, proponents argued, was to give students a heads up about distressing content. Those who had experienced sexual assault, abuse or violence could then protect themselves from ‘triggering’ flashbacks by leaving class or employing coping strategies. In this way, trigger warnings came to be seen as compassionate. And if some compassion is good, the argument went, then more is clearly better. Warnings about every negative element of human existence soon came to be sprinkled liberally across reading lists and course guides. Indeed, even the word ‘trigger’ was removed from what became ‘content warnings’ for fear it might harm students who had witnessed gun violence.

Meanwhile, a growing number of psychologists questioned the use of such warnings. Some argued they simply did not work and that victims of assault were far more likely to experience flashbacks as a result of a random colour or smell than reading an academic text. Others went further and argued they ‘might exacerbate negative reactions or promote avoidance behaviours’.

These debates about the efficacy of trigger warnings take at face value that their purpose is to protect traumatised students. They miss the point that their use has long since morphed into something else altogether. Those issuing warnings today are likely to see all students as vulnerable and in need of protection – not so much from descriptions of assault, but mainly from politically dubious content. The warning Nottingham University has attached to The Canterbury Tales perfectly illustrates this trend.

If lecturers felt compelled to give a heads up to students who had experienced trauma, violent scenes abound in Chaucer’s work. There’s the grim pursuit of death in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ that leads to one murder by stabbing and two by poisoning. ‘The Monk’s Tale’ goes one better. It features cannibalism, poisoning, hanging, beheading, suicide and children starving to death. The Wife of Bath – who was hit round the head by a former husband until she lost her hearing in one ear – tells of a young ‘mayde’ who was raped by a ‘lusty bacheler’ from King Arthur’s court. Meanwhile, the young wife in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ is forced to obey her husband, even when he convinces her he has had their children executed. Then there’s the Prioress who relays a story of blood libel. A young boy, she tells her fellow pilgrims, was wandering in a Jewish ghetto, innocently singing songs in praise of the Virgin Mary, when he had his throat cut, his entrails removed and his body thrown into a sewage pit. He reappears before his grieving mother in ghost-like form.

The Donald Trump you never see By Gamaliel Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/the_donald_trump_you_never_see.html

On October 9, the renowned lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz posted a video on his show, The Dershow, titled “Is Harris winning or is Trump losing?”  In it, he argued that the polls are beginning to trend in favor of Harris.  Professor Dershowitz asked:

What is the reason for that?  Is it that Harris is winning more voters, or Trump is losing more voters?

Professor Dershowitz said that he doesn’t think the election is about policy as much as it is about personality.  He said,

A lot of people I know are saying, “Look, I much prefer Trump’s foreign policy, and economic policy, but I just can’t bring myself to vote for the guy … because he did this or said that.”

Trump does say and do things that turn people off.  In addition, when he says things that are perfectly okay, the left wing, the media, and his political opposition twist what he says to mean something terrible and then claim he said it.  A classic example of that is when Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides,” referring to a clash in Charlottesville between people who wanted to remove the statue of General Lee and people who wanted to protect the statue.  Malevolent distortions of what Trump said about that clash never end.  Headlines include “Trump again blames both sides for violence at white supremacist rally in Charlottesville” (Politico), “Why Can’t Trump Just Condemn Nazis?” (The Atlantic), “Trump revives his controversial claim equating white supremacists and anti-racism protestors in Charlottesville clashes” (The LA Times), etc.  The press leaves out Trump’s clarification, which he made in the same press conference:

And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white Nationalists. They should be condemned totally.

The left wants us to think that Trump makes Nazi-like statements and that he is a right-wing antisemitic extremist who is against freedom and democracy.  Leftists are successful in persuading people.  At one point, they even convinced J.D. Vance, Trump’s current running mate, that Trump is like Hitler.