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November 2023

The Irrelevance of Proportionality Nils A. Haug

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2023/11/the-irrelevance-of-proportionality/

Voted into power by the Palestinian people of Gaza during 2006, and with extensive support in the West Bank (Samaria and Judea), but designated a terror group by Western nations, Hamas is a jihadist Islamist mob of fanatics determined to create a Sharia law-based Caliphate free of non-believers. Specific animosity is directed at followers of the monotheist faiths of Judaism and Christianity which compete with radical Islamist ideology over critical ideals of identity, land, religion, and divine promise.

The actualization of Hamas’ intended utopia depends upon fulfilment of an apocalyptic event which would lead to a grand finale at the end of time. This would be the period of redemption and blessing of all faithful devotees of Allah and his prophet, Mohammed. Together with certain passages in the Quran which mention violence against non-Muslims, jihadists embrace authoritative scriptures known as the Hadith. This collection of Islamic writings in Arabic, attributed to Mohammed, contain an overriding prescription pertinent to apocalyptic destiny:

The time will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, until the        Jew hides behind the stones and the trees and the stones or the trees say, ‘O Muslim, O Servant         of God, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.’

The excerpt describes genocidal intent against which Israel and its people are forced to defend their right to exist. To justify this agenda, Islamism propounds a dichotomous ethical construction for humankind: a glorious destiny for Muslim faithful but with death and destruction for all non-believers. Religious convictions enable radical actors to ignore Western laws regarding ethical war behaviour. Yet, Israel as a democratic nation is bound by the just-war theory and is carefully monitored by Western powers, which compromises their ability to respond as necessary in a permanently hostile environment. In the world’s eyes, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Israel to hold the high moral ground due to unintended civilian casualties in Gaza however much the Israeli military machine, the IDF, complies with traditional rules of war and humanitarian concerns. To the contrary, Hamas eschews any limiting rules of war or considerations of human decency. 

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways Christopher Akehurst

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/11/how-do-i-hate-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/

“Abhorrence of Israel is now near universal and few apart from politicians with Jews in their electorates make any pretence at distinguishing between the race and the nation. But why the concentrated hate? Why the coordinated mobs worldwide, why is there not even a vestige of sympathy for butchered victims whose only offence was to have been Israelis? Why is it the Israelis whose “war crimes” are condemned in our federal parliament, with the sinister Adam Bandt, showing all the compassion of a judge in a Moscow show trial, parroting Hamas about “illegal occupation of  Palestinian territories”? Doesn’t he know Israel no longer “occupies” Gaza? Doesn’t he know that the “ceasefire” he and the rest of the Left harp on about would leave Hamas unopposed in its crusade to destroy a state and its population? Leftists are always going about the evils of genocide. Ah, but this would be an acceptable genocide, the triumph of justice, evil “occupiers” and “colonialists” getting their just deserts – you wouldn’t put it past some on the Left to want to try the same thing here.”

Councillors in what was known until recently as the Victorian city of Moreland in Melbourne’s inner north feel that their municipal talents should not be limited to such tiresome tasks as collecting rubbish and filling in potholes. They ought to have a voice, they think – even as they reel from the blow of the ignominious collapse of their other cherished “Voice”– a voice this time that ‘racists’ and rednecks can’t torpedo, that will carry beyond their dreary municipality of jerry-built apartment blocks and unenticing cafés, one that will be heard in the counsels of the world. So they sign up to the idiocy that currently reigns supreme in the West (they’ve long been on board with the earlier idiocies of race and sex) and pass a resolution that goes beyond the usual wishy-washy requests for a ceasefire in Israel’s war of self-defence against Hamas but actually condemns Israeli military action in Gaza full stop. They mutter about “war crimes”, though not those committed by the terrorists of Hamas, and they wouldn’t mind a boycott too.

U.S.-Mexico Border Becomes Global Terrorism Hotspot Under Biden Aaron Flanigan

https://amac.us/newsline/national-security/u-s-mexico-border-becomes-global-terrorism-hotspot-under-biden/

For nearly three years, the American people have watched in horror as the crisis on the southern border has injected deadly drugs, violent crime, and human trafficking into American communities. But even as the nation continues to reel from these consequences, one crucial element of the border catastrophe has gone largely overlooked – the rising threat from radical Islamic extremism.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s eradication of nearly every border security measure enacted by President Donald Trump, the southern border is now becoming the next hotspot for terrorism and violence—particularly as war rages in the Middle East and Hezbollah and Hamas seek to infiltrate the United States.

According to a September report released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyzing the “Homeland Threat Assessment” for fiscal year 2024, “[t]errorists and criminal actors may exploit the elevated flow and increasingly complex security environment to enter the United States.”

The report further notes that “individuals with potential terrorism connections continue to attempt to enter the Homeland” as the border crisis rages onward—a shocking admission that has elicited little public acknowledgment from Democrats, White House officials, or the mainstream media.

As of July, months before the end of the 2023 fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had already encountered roughly 160 individuals on the Terrorism Watchlist—an approximately 60 percent increase in encounters from fiscal year 2022.

Even more terrifying, those numbers only represent the people apprehended by CBP. There is no telling how many more were among the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who have escaped completely undetected into the interior of the country.

Accusing Israel of genocide is despicable doublethink Gary Lineker’s Israel-bashing has exposed the moral rot of the woke West. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/22/accusing-israel-of-genocide-is-despicable-doublethink/

Gary Lineker is taking the piss now, isn’t he? He’s had his knuckles rapped by the BBC numerous times for sharing his centrist-dad blather online. For using the public platform gifted to him by us licence-fee payers – on pain of criminal conviction – to advertise his milquetoast views that most people think are bollocks. And yet now, in studied defiance of his bosses, he’s given voice to his most ignorant political opinion yet. To a dinner-party prejudice that isn’t only irritating but will feel genuinely hurtful to many who are forced by law to make Lineker rich. He’s tweeted a link to a video in which Israel is accused of committing genocide against the Palestinians.

Yes, as if Israel hadn’t suffered enough at the murderous hands of Hamas, now it must endure the indignity of a football pundit wondering out loud if it might be guilty of the worst war crime of all. What next, Wayne Rooney sitting in judgement on the Democratic Republic of Congo? ‘Worth 13 minutes of anyone’s time’, said the Match of the Day presenter turned amateur Hague sleuth in his retweet of a conversation between the Guardian’s Owen Jones and Raz Segal, an associate professor of genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey. In that chat, Segal says that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a ‘textbook genocide’. Textbook. That is, it conforms precisely to the definition of genocide, which is the murder of a large number of people from an ethnic group with the aim of destroying that ethnic group. This is what Lineker is sharing to his 8.9million followers on X. The lie that the Jewish State has a bloodlust to vaporise all Palestinians.

This is serious, no? Mr Lineker is a representative of Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC. He is the face of BBC Sport. Did he not stop to think how the Jewish section of the public might feel about his sharing of a clip damning Israel as genocidal? Did it not cross his mind that our Jewish citizens who are compelled to pay his wages might now feel a lesser part of ‘the public’ that the Beeb is meant to embody? The vast majority of British Jews support Israel (if not the Netanyahu government). They consider it ‘the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people’. Call me a contrarian, but I think people paid by the public to provide a service to the public ought not to alienate any section of that public by sharing inflammatory ideological claims.

Maryland Hate-Crime Commission Official Suspended after Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/maryland-hate-crime-commission-official-compares-israel-to-nazi-germany/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

Maryland’s attorney general has temporarily suspended an official on the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response who compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a series of social-media posts and claimed that reports of Hamas murdering Jewish babies were “fake.”

Zainab Chaudry is the Maryland director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and was appointed to the hate-crime commission by Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown in August. Made up of 20 stakeholder representatives, the group is designed to “develop strategies to prevent and respond to hate crime activity and evaluate state laws and policies relating to hate crimes.” The commission’s first annual report to the General Assembly is slated for December 2024 and will detail recommendations on addressing hate crimes.

Following Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, Chaudry made a series of antisemitic social media posts. On October 17, she posted a photo of Israeli flags at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin next to a photo of Nazi Germany flags at the same gate in 1936. She captioned the post: “That moment when you become what you hated most.”

“The Commission must serve as a model for the entire State on how to respond to incidents of hate and bias,” Brown said on Tuesday. “The Commission is facing its first test. How we respond has deep implications. I take this very seriously, and I will do everything possible to bring people together to move forward the critical work of this Commission.”

Directly after Hamas invaded Israel, Chaudry referred to the attack on Facebook as an “uprising in Palestine.” She asked followers to remember that Palestinians “are a people who are illegally occupied.”

“Militarized occupation is inherently evil and violent,” she continued. “The state of Israel was created through the oppression, persecution and subjugation of Palestinians. It sits on the graves of martyrs and people forcibly displaced from their homes, forced to endure humiliation, terror, desecration of their holy spaces.”

Chaudry accompanied her post with a Malcolm X quote: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

On Facebook two days later, Chaudry criticized elected officials for showing “support for an apartheid government that has been waging terror against Palestinians for decades.”

USC Professor Relegated to Remote Teaching after Criticizing Hamas in Front of Pro-Palestinian Students By David Zimmermann

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-professor-relegated-to-remote-teaching-after-criticizing-hamas-in-front-of-pro-palestinian-students/

The University of Southern California relegated economics professor John Strauss to a remote-teaching position after he denounced Hamas in front of students.

Strauss, who is a Jewish supporter of Israel, is barred from holding classes on campus for the rest of the fall semester. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is speaking out on behalf of Strauss, so that other professors don’t have to face the same treatment.

“By requiring Professor Strauss to teach remotely for the remainder of the semester, USC has violated its own clear commitments to protect faculty free speech,” FIRE program officer Jessie Appleby told National Review. “Universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry and debate, but debate is impossible without the freedom to disagree and dissent — even when disagreement might be upsetting to others.”

On November 9, Strauss criticized Hamas terrorists as he was walking past pro-Palestinian student protesters for the second time that Thursday. The professor remarked, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”

One of the protesters posted a deceptively edited video which took the last sentence out of context, making it appear as if Strauss wished all Palestinians would die. He attested he wasn’t advocating for that.

A longer clip showed the exchange in full.

Jihad on Churches in France by Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20171/jihad-on-churches-in-france

A map, published by Christianophobie.fr, which marks with a red pin every spot where a church in France was attacked between just 2017-2018, looks like a war zone. Virtually the entire map of France is covered in red. Even Snopes, which presents itself as the final arbiter on what is real or fake news, admitted the accuracy of the map, while trying to minimize its findings…

One wonders if [Snopes] would be so casual if a Christian vandalized a mosque, or broke into a mosque while screaming Christian slogans?

Christian churches are under attack throughout Western Europe, with very recent examples from Austria, Germany, Italy and Sweden.

No Western nation, however, seems to experience as many attacks on its churches as France, once known as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church.”

Investigative journalist Amy Mek tweeted on July 1, 2023:

“Attacks on Churches are the norm in France; two Churches a day are vandalized — they are being burned, demolished, and abandoned, and their adherents are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Priests are under constant threat. At what point will France’s open border politicians be held responsible?”

That last question inadvertently identifies the culprits — namely, migrants from the Muslim world, where attacks on churches are not abnormal.

Hannah E. Meyers Create a Crime-Research Powerhouse Without federal investment in innovative research, any reimagining of law enforcement will look more like daydreaming.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/create-a-crime-research-powerhouse

Calls to “reimagine” everything from policing to incarceration have dominated criminal-justice policy circles in recent years, but truly innovative research has been stifled. The federal government should devote more resources to collecting data on criminal incidents and offenders, police, courts, and other facets of public safety.

To start, policymakers should work to improve the consistency and uniformity of data that cities provide. All jurisdictions—encompassing roughly 18,000 law-enforcement agencies—should report their data to the FBI-run National Incident-Based Reporting System. NIBRS, which became the sole collections system in 2021, improves on past systems by collecting not just broad incident numbers but also such details as date, time, and location, whether offenses were carried out or merely attempted, the relationships between victims and offenders, the presence of drugs, whether the offender was under the influence, gang involvement, and whether a computer was used in the commission of the crime. All told, NIBRS reports on 52 discrete offenses.

Though the FBI has distributed $120 million since 2015 to help departments adopt this system, in 2021, about 7,000 police agencies, representing approximately 35 percent of the U.S. population, still did not provide any data. It’s unlikely that the 2022 numbers will be more robust. With more than a third of the country’s crime reporting missing, analysts struggle to draw solid conclusions. Federal authorities should therefore offer carrots and wield sticks to ensure that jurisdictions submit NIBRS data.

Further, Washington should establish a “sentinel cities” program—an idea proposed by crime-data analyst Jeff Asher. Such a program would include about 100 cities, offering them targeted funding to publish statistics on selected offenses, at frequent, synchronized intervals, on an open portal and using a standard data format. Collecting all this baseline information will enable authorities to view and analyze trends.

The Meaning of Thanksgiving Can Save America We’re fighting for the soul of our nation By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/21/the-meaning-of-thanksgiving-can-save-america/

Thanksgiving, according to Britannica.com, has come to “has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family.” This definition captures the ideals, more relevant than ever, of one of America’s favorite holidays. But these ideals are threatened, because America’s mainstream institutions have either rejected them, or have created an environment where they are no longer possible.

This is immediately obvious with the “woke” doctrine of race-based oppressor and oppressed, now promoted by academia, the media, entertainers, politicians, and corporations. Maybe the fellowship of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians is mostly fable, cruelly debunked by history.

Or maybe, fable or not, it is an inspiring message of unity for a nation of settlers and immigrants who have created a place where everyone, including descendants of the Indians, have enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than anywhere else in the history of the world. That’s a debate we have to wage, and one we cannot lose. Like all nations and tribes, America has had dark moments. But the good overwhelms the bad. It’s not even close.

The attempted destruction of America’s self-confidence and unity by its own institutions, however, which must be challenged and overcome, must not distract from an even bigger problem. America’s institutions have also launched a propaganda campaign, growing in intensity every year, that claims we face an existential climate crisis, and massive sacrifices are necessary to cope. This is a lie.

It’s particularly relevant to reflect on this fraud during Thanksgiving, because our nation of settlers and immigrants would not exist if the types of rules and restrictions being imposed on Americans today were in effect 400 years ago. And it gives rise to a fundamental conflict: We continue to invite immigrants from around the world to move here, but thanks to extreme environmentalist restrictions, we are unable to build the necessary infrastructure to support them.

Campaign Kabuki By Leann Horrocks

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/campaign_kabuki.html

All the normal ways of analyzing election outcomes are a complete waste of time unless the issue of fraud is addressed. 

Less than a year to go until the 2024 election and the pundits are out in force with their analysis. There are whiteboards, videos, polls, graphs, and lots of posturing.

All the normal ways of analyzing election outcomes are a complete waste of time unless the issue of fraud is addressed. The sad truth is, that in many parts of the country, the voters really have no choice.

Take the case of the current president. He didn’t even have to show up in 2020. He was promised the win and he got it. The election was over before the voting began.

Then there’s the case of Lake vs. Hobbs in Arizona. Subtleties of computer malware weren’t even needed in Arizona when the strangely vague Katie Hobbs was declared the winner. Through the entire campaign season, she didn’t bother campaigning, she refused to debate and was rarely seen. Her opponent counted on people showing up at the polls on election day — so what could go wrong? The voting equipment was simply disabled in Republican-heavy precincts, resulting in long wait times, lost ballots, and ballots that were promised to be “counted later.” Subsequent investigations have shown video of tampering with sealed machines — mountains of evidence have shown the election was fraudulent.

Evidence of fraud was met with a big “so what.” The Arizona election tampering was so heavy-handed, one can easily assume the cartels were involved. Cartels were not about to have Kari Lake become governor of Arizona, and military-industrial types were not about to have a change in the U.S. Senate representation either. Neither of these parties care what voters want or what they do.