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October 2023

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Savages Civilization and savagery are fundamentally at war. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/savages/

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail.

Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others.

Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with what we’re fighting.

The barbarism of murdering women and children, taking them as hostages, and posting photos of their dead bodies to social media, is not a byproduct of Islamic warfare, it’s the whole point.

Cruelty, beheading, burning to death, torturing and mutilating are the essence of Islam. This is how Islamic warfare was practiced beginning with Mohammed for over a thousand years. It’s how it continues to be practiced, whether it’s ISIS fighting other Muslims, Azerbaijani troops killing Armenians, Hamas attacking Israelis, or Islamic terrorists plotting carnage in Western nations.

Islam was born out of a war by barbarians against the civilized societies of Persia and Byzantium. Despite academic mythmaking, its vision never extended beyond rape and slavery, its empires fell into power struggles, beginning with Sunnis and Shiites, and its cultural and scientific accomplishments were all looted from conquered peoples. When civilization finally toppled the Ottoman Empire with some help from its internal barbarians, the cycle began again.

Israel is just one front in a global war between savages and civilization. And not all of the savages bow to Allah. There are inner city gangs across the American hemisphere that behead and torture their victims. And there are children of civilization that turn into savages. Savagery is not a condition of birth: it is a choice. People born into savagery can become civilized and those born into the highest echelons of civilization can prey on us like the worst vicious animals.

The question is how do civilized societies confront savagery? Do we blame ourselves for having made the savages what they are through our capitalism and colonialism even though they have behaved this way long before modern western civilization amounted to anything? Or do we set forth to reeducate them, to build modern nations for them and teach them to become civilized?

We have sent forth our sons and daughters to make peace with them and to educate them. Our societies opened themselves to embrace and celebrate the virtues of the noble savage. When we realized that we could not coexist with savages, we tried to remake our societies to serve them. All of that has been tried and civilization is still drowning in the violence of the savages.

The fundamental truth is that civilization and savagery are innately at war with one another.

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How Iran, the ‘Head of the Snake,’ Directly Helped Hamas’s Assault on Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20059/iran-helped-hamas-assault

“We coordinated with Hezbollah and with Iran and the Axis [of Resistance] before, during and after the battle at the highest level.” — Hamas representative Ahmed Abdulhadi, revealing Hamas coordination before and during the massacre, Newsweek, October 11, 2023.

Another Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told Russia’s state-run RT outlet that his group had secretly planned the assault for two years and did not inform any other factions or allies, including Iran and Hezbollah, of the “zero hour.” Baraka confirmed that Iran “gives us money and weapons.”

While many in the West chose to disregard Iran’s role in arming, training and funding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the same cannot be said about a large number of Arabs who have long been warning of Tehran’s expansionist actions in the Middle East. Some of those Arabs have been openly talking about how Iran uses its proxies to wreak havoc not only on Israel, but on some Arab countries. Through its proxies, the Iranian regime now effectively occupies Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the Gaza Strip. The Arabs, in short, see clearly what many Westerners apparently want to remain oblivious to.

“Hamas is an organization affiliated with the clerical regime in Iran, just like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and it is the same axis that threatens Saudi Arabia and Kuwait day and night. We differentiate between a just cause and a terrorist axis.” — Mansour al-Malik, Saudi Arabian petroleum engineer, on X, October 8, 2023.

“Iranian Regime Mouthpiece Kayhan : Iran Is The Mind And Hands Behind Hamas; Operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ [The Invasion of Israel] Was Planned By Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani Before he Was Killed; Khamenei Hinted in August 2022 at ‘The Complete Conquest of Israel.” — Report by the Middle East Media Research Institute, (MEMRI), October 12, 2023.

“Iranian Website Asr-e Calls On Iranians Not To Speak Out On Iranian Involvement In ‘The Hamas-Israel Conflict’ – For Fear Of Harming Iranian Interests….” — Report by MEMRI, October 13, 2023.

What will it take for the US and its allies to grasp that the appeasement of the Iranian regime is read by the mullahs and their proxies as weakness? If such appeasement continues, make no mistake: today, the carnage is Israel; tomorrow, it will be the US and Europe.

The Biden administration insists that it does not have any evidence of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The Biden administration has apparently totally dismissed the Wall Street Journal report on October 9, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks,” as well as the Washington Post’s “Hamas received weapons and training from Iran, officials say.”

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Indigenous Slavers: American Indians Who Whipped and Owned Blacks You won’t learn about Indigenous slaveholders from our textbooks. by Paul Kengor

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/indigenous-slavers-american-indians-who-whipped-and-owned-blacks/

As leftists look to cancel Christopher Columbus and  annual holiday commemorating him — that is, the man who discovered this land that is the United States of America — they’re also looking to replace the great explorer with a day of their own. That new day for these cultural revolutionaries, celebrated all the way up to the level of their president, one Joseph Robinette Biden, is something called Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

How ironic this is.

Among the sins that leftists try to peg on Columbus is slavery. And yet, many of their indigenous peoples, including the so-called “civilized” among them, in fact owned slaves. No, I’m not merely talking about their savage cruelty toward fellow tribes. I’m talking about their brute treatment of the black African slaves they owned, in some cases even after the Civil War. 

Now there’s something that progressives will not be teaching the kiddies this Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

I unfortunately know too much about this subject, having written a book on slavery. The ugly truth about slavery is that it isn’t America’s original sin; it’s humanity’s sin. Scholars trace slavery back 9,000-11,000 years ago. Pretty much every culture engaged in the practice. Open your Bible and read about Jews being enslaved constantly. Do a little more digging and read about Egyptian slavers, Mesopotamian slavers, Chinese slavers, the Incans, the ferocious Aztecs and Mayans hailed if not revered by the maniacs in our public schools, and, of course, the most militant slavers of them all: Muslims.

But pick up your kid’s civics text and you’ll find a total whitewash on the subject of Native American slavers.

For the record, many modern black Americans are not ignorant of that past. There are blacks today with literal lawsuits still against those Indian tribes. These black Americans probably wonder why university professors, liberal journalists, and Democrats have been silent on this racism against their people.

My book includes a long chapter on these Indigenous slavers. I cannot do the subject adequate justice here, but I’ll share a few thoughts.

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The West Has Israeli Blood on its Hands How Western illusions and shortsighted self-interest have paved the way for mass savagery. Bruce Thornton

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-has-israeli-blood-on-its-hands/

The mass terror attacks on October 7th by Hamas against Israeli citizens is a milestone of heinous savagery––the beheading of some of 40 murdered babies, the slaughter of 1300 Israelis and 27 Americans, as well as the usual indiscriminate butchering, rape, torture, grisly videos flaunting the dead, and hostages taken to brutalize and hold for ransom. None of this is new, but the scale of the attack and the atrocities mark a dangerous escalation.

One contributing cause of this mayhem is the feckless, if not lunatic, foreign policy blunders of the Biden administration. But the last 75 years of Western foreign policy and its idealizing illusions, along with sacrifices of Israel’s security to Western national interests, have been predicates for this mass savagery.

There’s no question that actions both taken and avoided by Biden’s puppeteers enabled the terrorists and their patron and financier Iran. Our willful blindness about the Iranian Revolution and the mullahs’ religious motives reached its post-Cold War apogee in the Munich-class appeasement of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons via the Iran nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama.

Donald Trump wisely ended our participation in this dangerous “parchment barrier.” He increased sanctions on Iranian oil sales, imposed “maximum pressure” on its economy, and took out one of Iran’s most effective and dangerous terrorist bosses, Qassem al Soleimani, despite our foreign policy clerks who issued dire warnings of apocalypse in the region.

Yet for Israel, disaster didn’t happen on Trump’s watch, but on Biden’s. Biden transferred billions of dollars to Iran, and relaxed sanctions on oil sales, allowing the regime to generate $80 billion more from oil exports. He squandered our country’s prestige on groveling outreach to lure Iran back to the nuclear deal, even though the regime has serially violated its terms from the start, in addition to attacking Americans 83 times––with a U.S. military response to only four.

As a result of Biden’s cringing solicitude, Iran now has enough enriched uranium to be months away from producing nuclear weapons, and has increased its support to violent proxies and clients like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other jihadist storm troopers. Indeed, according to The Gatestone Institute, “Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Iran Deal Is Even Worse Than It Looked Andrew McCarthy

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/bidens-iran-deal-is-even-worse-than-it-looked/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

The administration didn’t just arrange a ‘prisoner swap’ — it allowed Tehran’s agents to remain in the U.S.

The more one looks at President Biden’s decision to waive sanctions on Iran — in essence, to pay a ransom to the mullahs in exchange for the release of American hostages — the more peculiar it appears, and the less the administration’s explanations make sense.

I’ve already had plenty to say about Biden’s provision of $6 billion to the regime in Tehran (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Regardless of what administration officials say about the restrictions in effect to prevent Iran from diverting the loot to nefarious activities, the stubborn fact remains that Biden chose to make $6 billion available, via Qatar, to the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism. Again, it doesn’t matter if Iran has direct access to these funds; if it can direct its ally Qatar to disburse it for its legitimate government activities, then the regime can redirect to terrorism funds that were previously allocated to those legitimate activities. That’s such common sense that Iran’s own president touted it, as Noah Rothman relates.

But let’s look beyond the money to other aspects of Biden’s deal with Iran — consummated on September 11, of all days.

The deal was pitched to the nation as a prisoner swap. Iran released five Americans whom it had imprisoned on trumped up spying charges; plus, it allowed one prisoner’s mother and wife to exit the country (though not imprisoned, they had previously not been permitted to leave). In exchange (besides the $6 billion), the United States was required to release five Iranian convicts who had been or were being prosecuted by the Justice Department on various charges arising out of their clandestine work on Iran’s behalf.

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Becket Adams:The Rebirth of ‘Both Sides’

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/the-rebirth-of-both-sides/

The free press in the West, which has spent the past seven years warning of the dangers of “both sides” news coverage, insists now that there are two sides to the story of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,300 people, most of whom were unarmed Israeli civilians.

On October 7, Israel suffered its worst terrorist attack in the post–World War II era, as Hamas militants attacked Israeli communities by air, land, and sea. As of this writing, the estimated death toll of 1,300, which includes infants, women, and the elderly, also includes 27 U.S. citizens. In addition, Hamas has taken an estimated 150 hostages.

It’s rare that a news event is as black-and-white as this, with no gray areas, involving clearly laid out villains and victims. Terrorists murdered civilians. That’s the news story. The way the murders were carried out, and the sheer death toll, are shocking. In terms of straightforward reporting, there is plenty to go around for journalists. Who survived the attacks and how? What did the survivors see and hear? Most important: What happened? Yet, instead of focusing exclusively on uncovering the “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why” of the horrors of October 7, the free media insist upon presenting their work through a “root causes” prism, balancing their coverage of the terrorist attack equally with coverage of Palestinians’ criticisms of Israel.

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Yikes! Biden Glitches so Badly During a Speech That His Wife Has to Rescue Him by Matt Margolis

By on October 16th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/10/15/yikes-biden-glitches-so-badly-during-a-speech-that-his-wife-has-to-rescue-him-n1735187

Joe Biden spoke at the Human Rights Campaign’s annual dinner Saturday night, and the news from that event was not that he was interrupted by a pro-Hamas protester but the fact that he glitched so badly that his wife Jill Biden had to come up on stage to rescue him.

One notable glitch took place when he accused “Extreme MAGA Republicans” of “trying to undo virtually every bit of progress we’ve made,” including banning “Pride flags from flying on public lands.”

“Who the hell—” Biden started to continue, before apparently drawing a blank as to what he was trying to say.

Biden was hardly finished. He went on to make an outlandish claim that gay people are being thrown out of restaurants. He claimed, “When a person can be married in the morning and thrown out of a restaurant for being gay in the afternoon, something is still fundamentally wrong in this country — and that still exists!”

Where exactly has this happened? The way Biden tells it, this is endemic in the United States. Curiously, there are ample examples of conservatives being refused service and thrown out of restaurants, such as Fox News’s Gianno Caldwell, who was kicked out of a restaurant in North Miami, Fla., by the owner over his conservative views earlier this year, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were kicked out of a Virginia restaurant in 2018 because she was working for Trump at the time.

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The Sick Alliance between the Left and Muslim Extremists Charles Lipson

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/15/the_sick_alliance_between_the_left_and_muslim_extremists_149901.html

The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims. That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.

What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and Muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs.

The left supports women’s rights and full equality in the workplace and public sphere. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports gay rights and gay marriage. Militant Muslims toss gays off buildings. None would dare hold a public march in Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.

The left supports abortion rights. Militant Muslims oppose them.

The left supports religious freedom, including the right to reject religion altogether. Militant Muslims believe heretics should be executed.

The left rallies against book banning. Militant Muslims embrace it for any book they believe insults Islam or supports Israel.

The left opposes the death penalty. Militant Muslims endorse it and praise their governments for using it.

These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other. Still, the two groups have formed a long-standing alliance. How do they deal with these profound differences? And why are they allied?

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Why the Woke Support Hamas By Richard Samuelson

By on October 16th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/10/14/why_the_woke_support_hamas_149903.html

In the wake of the barbaric attack on Israel, many Americans have been shocked, angered, and disgusted to see woke organizations express anything other than condemnation for Hamas. On campuses and in our communities, students and organizations like Black Lives Matter have expressed support for the butchers of Jews. Meanwhile, all too many campus leaders, formerly so quick to condemn even the hint of racism, can barely muster even weak condemnation of such savagery. Many Americans find themselves shaking their heads in dismay.

Where does this blindness come from? Why are so many people who think of themselves as crusaders for justice so misguided?

It is a complicated story. But one key part of that story is the way that civil rights, which began as a cause, became an ideology. Eventually that ideology metastasized into “anti-racism,” a radical legal doctrine that scholar John McWhorter suggests is nothing less than a secular “religion.” The once-noble cause of civil rights changed. No longer merely about ending specific acts of discrimination in voting, employment, and public accommodations, it became a crusade to rectify the wrongs of slavery, Jim Crow, and the lingering legacy of institutional racism. In the view of 21st century progressives this entailed transforming America and the world. It is a reminder that even good things if done in the wrong way, or carried to excess, can turn bad.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act makes it illegal to discriminate against someone due to their “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” In subsequent decades we have added more categories, notably sexuality, disability, and gender identity. Those categories are “protected classes” in law. But it didn’t take long for the legal category to be transformed into a moral category. Certain people were regarded as having special protections. In the decades since 1964 we have created an ever-expanding and ever more influential bureaucracy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) workers dedicated to this task.

But there is a problem, especially as the number of protected classes grows, and as the number of non-white Americans grows. (When the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed, whites were roughly 88% of the population. They are roughly 60% today.) What to do when a member of one protected class mistreats or discriminates against another? To cite one infamous example, early civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael said that “the only position for women in the SNCC [Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee] is prone.” So Carmichael was both a fighter against segregation and a sexist pig.

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Majority Of Voters ‘Not Satisfied’ With Biden’s Efforts On Russia-Ukraine War: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

By on October 16th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/16/majority-of-voters-not-satisfied-with-bidens-efforts-on-russia-ukraine-war-ii-tipp-poll/
With the world’s attention still riveted by Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel, the death and destruction of the Russia-Ukraine war, now in its 21st month, goes on. During the conflict, President Joe Biden has put the U.S. forward as a potential peace broker. Do average Americans believe his plan is working?
To find the answer, the October I&I/TIPP Poll asked voters: “How satisfied are you with the Biden administration’s efforts to find a settlement to the Russia-Ukraine conflict?”
The response, after more than $113 billion in U.S. military and humanitarian aid, is not much. Among those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll, conducted from Sept. 27-29 among 1,378 adults, just 34% said they were either “very satisfied” (11%) or “somewhat satisfied” (23%).
More than half of respondents — 53% — described themselves as either “not very satisfied” (22%) or “not at all satisfied” (31%). Another 12% said they were “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

As is usually the case in these days of highly partisan politics, the major parties and independents show sharp differences over Biden’s efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war. Democrats (61% “satisfied,” 27% “not satisfied”) strongly support Biden, while Republicans (12% “satisfied,” 83% “not satisfied) overwhelmingly reject Biden’s efforts so far.
Independents again represented a kind of middle ground between the two parties, with 29% “satisfied,” but 53% calling themselves “not satisfied.”
Indeed, among all possible responses, “not at all satisfied” was No. 1 at 31%.

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