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November 2023

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Ireland on the Verge of Establishing an Oppressive Censorship Regime Charles Cooke

By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/ireland-on-the-verge-of-establishing-an-oppressive-censorship-regime/?utm_source=

Despite superficial similarities to First Amendment jurisprudence in the U.S., the proposed Irish hate-speech statute would all but guarantee its politicized use.

The ferocious desire of Ireland’s myopic and feckless governing class to crack down on speech that it considers “hateful” seems at last to be reaching fruition. After a riot in Dublin was blamed on “far-right” agitators, the country’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, renewed his push for a stricter set of legal restrictions on the free expression of the citizenry. “It’s now very obvious to anyone who might have doubted us,” Varadkar said last week, “that our incitement-to-hatred legislation is just not up to date.” “We need that legislation through,” he insisted, “and we need it through in a matter of weeks.”

When selling its proposal, Ireland’s government is careful to use words that do not appear suggestive of censorship. Far from being about “enforcing politeness or political correctness,” the country’s minister of justice, Helen McEntee, maintained last week, the statute she covets is about preventing forms of “criminal hate speech” that “recklessly incite” or “stir up acts of hostility, discrimination or violence.” “People may hold different views and opinions,” McEntee vowed. Her target, she explained, was instigation.

Rhetorically, this is quite a clever trick — akin to describing welfare spending as “insurance” or defining McCarthyism as “accountability culture.” But a trick it is nevertheless. If Ireland truly wished to crack down on reckless incitement while leaving “views and opinions” alone, it could simply have adopted the American standard of review, which, by design, does precisely that. That, instead, the Irish government has developed a system for the wholesale regulation of debate is telling.

Examined superficially, the guts of Ireland’s law seem similar to the holding in America’s controlling First Amendment case, Brandenburg v. Ohio. If enacted, Ireland’s measure would enable the punishment of speech that is “likely to incite hatred or violence” — which appears to channel Brandenburg’s exemption of speech that is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and is “likely” to do so. But this resemblance is a mirage.

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The Aborted War in Israel: Andrew McCarthy

By on November 30th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/the-aborted-war-in-israel/

Even if it were politically and psychologically possible to resume a war under the circumstances, how could Israel realistically win?
“I ask the question to remind us that, unless and until Israel’s enemies are decisively defeated, the thrum of eliminationist war and the periodic surges of jihadist terror will continue.”

I wish I could be optimistic about Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas in the aborted war, but I am more pessimistic than ever.

I’ve been a pessimist from the start. As Rich Lowry and I have discussed on the podcast, that’s because I’ve never believed Israel’s stated war aims were either politically feasible or reflective of on-the-ground reality — which is much worse than Israel or the Biden administration is willing to acknowledge.

Israel’s principal stated objective is to destroy Hamas. It has analogized this to the Trump-era American objective of destroying ISIS. There is something to this comparison. Contrary to his extravagant rhetoric, Trump did not actually destroy ISIS — it still exists and is a menace wherever it rears its head. Trump did, however, eviscerate ISIS’s capacity to hold territory as a de facto sovereign. This was a significant achievement. (Whether it was accomplished constitutionally is an interesting question.) Yet we shouldn’t overstate the achievement, because (a) terrorist organizations are more effective in pursuing their core competencies of insurgency and sneak attacks than in trying to govern territory, and (b) ISIS is a rebel sect broken off from al-Qaeda, which remains a major challenge, so ISIS would inevitably either fold back into al-Qaeda or rebrand as some new terrorist group — since what catalyzes jihad is the regional predominance of sharia-supremacist ideology, not any particular, transient organization.

The situation with Hamas is similar, and in some ways more vexing.

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Genocidal Hatred of Jews and the West by Guy Millière

By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20188/genocidal-hatred-jews-west

Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.

In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union wanted to gain more influence in the Arab Muslim world, its leaders decided to support what was at the time a sacred cause for Arab leaders: the attempt to destroy Israel. They… chose to invent a “national liberation struggle”…. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with the task of “liberating Palestine,” and the borders of “Palestine” on the maps used by the PLO showed that the goal was to erase Israel from the face of the earth.

Western leftists started vocally to express hatred of “imperialist Israel” and, ironically, the hard-won democratic freedoms they were at that moment enjoying to the fullest: freedom of speech, assembly, education, sexuality, and supposedly equal justice under the law.

The Oslo Accords only made everything worse. By signing them, Israel’s then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized… that a terrorist organization was somehow the legitimate representative of a people invented fewer than three decades earlier, and that this invented “people” had “rights” and deserved to have territory and self-government.

In reality, it was Israel that decolonized the land from the grip of the British, who governed it from 1917 until Israel’s war of independence in 1948.

The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere…. These demonstrations also show that support for the “Palestinian cause” sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.

[I]f nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of “democracy” of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups — the worst is bound to come.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hatred Without Borders Douglas Murray

By on November 29th, 2023

National Review- December 2023

Europe’s cautionary tale

It is 14 years now since Christopher Caldwell published his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. That book asked the interesting, provocative question, “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” — a question that policy-makers in Europe either dodged or answered glibly. It is now 17 years since Mark Steyn wrote his best seller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, in which he too addressed the question of demography in Europe.

Those are not the only two books on the subject, of course, but they are among the boldest. For over 20 years, a range of writers from a bewildering array of backgrounds have tried to warn Europeans that there will be a cost to mass immigration from the Muslim world. We have had Thilo Sarrazin, Éric Zemmour, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the late Oriana Fallaci. Almost every country in Europe produced its own prophets or seers. Each in turn had to face the same brickbats of abuse. Sometimes verbal. Sometimes worse.

But as I described in my own contribution to this genre in 2017 (The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam), the mass movement of Muslims into Europe has had effects that those who allowed the migration were bizarrely blind to.

For instance, until Valentine’s Day 1989 nobody in Europe knew what a fatwa was. Then suddenly everybody knew, and we learned that large proportions of our populations felt very strongly about novels if they were seen to be insulting the founder of Islam. But the learning can’t have gone very deep, because Muslim immigration to Europe after 1989 continued to grow.

After 2001 we learned that a certain number of Muslims in our midst were not moderate. What was the extremist percentage? Nobody really knew. Or nobody bothered to find out. It might be 1 percent. It might be 40 percent. But why raise the issue? It seemed easier to wish it away. And Muslim immigration continued.

In 2005 we learned that significant numbers of Muslims in the West were willing to take to the street, and that some would even commit murder, over a cartoon if they thought it blasphemous. Tiny Denmark in the north of Europe suddenly found itself a center of the world, with its flags being burned everywhere from London to Islamabad. In the years that followed, mass migration continued. Indeed it sped up.

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Former US Diplomat Tries to Rescue Hamas Dennis Ross wants to rescue terrorist leaders. Will it bring lasting peace? by Moshe Phillips

By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/former-us-diplomat-tries-to-rescue-hamas/

Former U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross has a plan to rescue Hamas from destruction, and he unveiled it on MSNBC just as announcements were being made that Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

Appearing on “Watch the Beat with Ari Melber,” on November 21, Ross said that “the way to end the war in Gaza” would be for Israel to allow the Hamas leadership to leave the territory in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. Ross said he hopes the Biden Administration will promote such a proposal.

Ross cited a precedent: Israel’s decision in 1982, under U.S. pressure, to allow Yasser Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership to leave besieged Beirut.

Ross forgot to mention what happened after Arafat left Lebanon. He didn’t ride off into the sunset of some quiet retirement. He sailed to nearby Tunis, set up PLO terrorist headquarters there, and embarked on twenty more years of terrorism. Shootings and stabbings. Bus bombings and intifadas. Thousands of Israelis murdered or maimed.

And now Ross wants Israel to repeat that tragic mistake. Once again, he wants to see terrorist leaders rescued, which would leave them free to orchestrate more October 7-style massacres.

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4 Of The Most Morally Bankrupt Lies Anti-Israel Pundits Are Spreading About Hostage Swap By: Tristan Justice

By on November 29th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/28/4-of-the-most-morally-bankrupt-lies-anti-israel-pundits-are-spreading-about-hostage-swap/

Terrorist sympathizers are out in full force spreading fake news about Israel’s treatment of its prisoners, as the country executes a swap with Hamas for hostages taken by the terrorist group on Oct. 7. Here are four of the most outrageous lies circulating on social media.

1. Israel Is ‘Only Country That Keeps Children As Prisoners’

This week, American supermodel Gigi Hadid shared a post to her more than 79 million Instagram followers condemning Israel as “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war.” The post, which has been deleted, claimed Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Mansara was “abducted” by Israeli officials at 12 years old and “has endured solitary confinement despite his severe health condition.”

According to the New York Post, Mansara went on a “stabbing rampage” in East Jerusalem with his 15-year-old cousin in 2015 that left a 20-year-old security guard and a 13-year-old boy with critical injuries. Mansara was convicted of two counts of attempted murder after his cousin was killed in the attack by a police officer.

“He initially received a sentence of 12 years in prison, which was later reduced” to nine and a half years, the Post reported. “During his incarceration, Mansara has repeatedly attempted to harm himself and others. He has been in and out of solitary confinement, drawing the ire of Amnesty International, a nongovernmental human rights advocacy group.”

Terrorist sympathizing aside, Hadid’s post claiming Israel is “the only country in the world that keeps children as prisoners of war” is fake news on its face. Roughly 30 children — some of whom still remain in captivity nearly two months later — were taken hostage by Hamas, after the terrorist group slaughtered Israeli women and children in the Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200.

Unsurprisingly, child hostages held by Hamas have been subject to physical and emotional abuse. A 12-year-old was even reportedly placed in solitary confinement for more than two weeks.

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Smearing Capitalism by John Stossel

By on November 29th, 2023

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/11/29/smearing-capitalism-n2631747

You must be lonely. The media say loneliness is everywhere in America.

A Los Angeles Times columnist says, “There’s a mass loneliness crisis going on.”

“Capitalism is Making You Lonely,” says Jacobin Magazine.

Vox claims, “Capitalism makes us feel empty inside.”

As usual, the media are just wrong.

In my new video, historian Johan Norberg points out that, “There’s no empirical data that actually shows that we feel more lonely now than we did in the past. … When researchers compare people with previous generations at the same stage of life, they don’t find evidence of increased loneliness.”

“But more people live alone now,” I say. “I would think that would make people lonelier.”

“What they never tell you in the reports,” Norberg replies, “is that people who live alone and spend less time surrounded by other people are also more happy with those relationships.”

In addition, “When people around the world are asked, ‘do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you?’ People in countries (like America) where more people live alone, usually say, ‘yes.'”

But in India and China, more people say they have no one.

“It’s the complete opposite of what people expect,” Norberg says. “In less market-based societies, 20% to 40% say they have no one to count on if they need help. In the richest and most individualist societies, it’s in the low single digits.”

On a YouTube channel with 1.7 million subscribers, a socialist says, “Material incentives of capitalists isolate us from nature, each other and ourselves.”

Norberg replies, “I understand why those charlatans get an audience, because at times we all feel lonely.”

But his new book, “The Capitalist Manifesto,” points out how capitalism makes life better, including making people less lonely.

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Businesses Begin Abandoning ‘Diversity’ Initiatives By Eric Lendrum

By on November 29th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/28/businesses-begin-abandoning-diversity-initiatives/

Despite a concerted effort by many institutions, government entities, and other left-wing forces to push “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives on private businesses, 2023 saw a greater decrease in such measures than previous years.

As reported by the Daily Caller, the total number of businesses with a designated DEI budget dropped to 54% in 2023, down four points from 58% in 2022. In the same period of time, the number of organizations with a DEI strategy declined by 9%. Both of these statistics were compiled by the consulting firm Paradigm.

“After two years of unprecedented investment sparked by 2020’s racial justice movement, this year, global momentum around DEI slowed,” the report from Paradigm states in part. “There are a number of headwinds contributing to this shift: the first is economic uncertainty that not only led to reduced spending across the board, it also firmly shifted the power balance back to employers.”

After a slow, behind-the-scenes effort to implement such radical DEI initiatives across the country, there was an explosion in the number of companies pursuing such objectives in the aftermath of the race riots in 2020, where far-left black nationalist and Anarcho-Communist agitators destroyed dozens of cities, killed dozens of civilians, and caused $2 billion worth of damage nationwide. The riots were in response to the death of George Floyd, a career criminal who died of a  fentanyl overdose while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May of 2020

Despite the decline in funding for DEI programs, there was nevertheless an increase in DEI-related hiring in 2023, with the number of companies with a senior DEI leader position increasing by 6%, and an 8% increase in the number of companies that emphasized putting women in leadership roles. From 2022 to 2023, the number of companies dedicated to increasing the number of non-White employees rose by 4%, thus resulting in a new total of 20% of overall companies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Glazov Gang: The Land that Israel Never Stole VIDEO

By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/glazov-gang-the-land-that-israel-never-stole/

Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield exposes one of the greatest slanders against the Jewish state.

Don’t miss it!

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

“Parchment Barriers” Won’t Keep Israel Safe And the only thing that can. by Bruce Thornton

By on November 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/parchment-barriers-wont-keep-israel-safe/

Last week during a pause in hostilities Israel started exchanging Palestinian Arab prisoners for Hamas’s Israeli hostages. Obviously, the “international community” has been pressuring Israel to make this concession, one that most Israelis know is dangerous, given the moral hazard of rewarding Hamas’ war-crimes, the certainty that any stop in the fighting will allow Hamas to regroup and rearm, and the Palestinian Arabs’ sorry track-record of serially violating every “agreement” it’s made with Israel, as well as transnational covenants like the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, Hamas is already violating the provision of the agreement that forbids evacuated Gazans from returning to the north.

The broader issue, however, is the continuing fealty that Western nations have to the “rules-based international order,” one predicated on dubious, if not empirically falsified assumptions about state behavior and human motivation; and on a questionable faith in “diplomatic engagement” and treaties to deter aggression and keep the peace. No global conflict illustrates this truth more than the war between Palestinian Arabs and Israel, one that has been going on for at least 75 years.

The failure of the postwar “new world order” and its most consequential institution, the UN, was obvious a few years after its creation, and Israel bore the brunt of that failure. After the Arabs rejected UN Resolution 181 in November 1947, and Israel declared itself a state six months later, five Arab states, four of whom were signatories to the United Nations Charter, invaded Israel.

This resort to violence was a blatant repudiation of the “rules-based international order” and its fundamental principle that no nation should use force to seize territory from another nation. Yet the challenge of this bedrock principle by four UN members was shrugged off, and offenders were not sanctioned or punished.

Several weaknesses of the “new world order” also were exposed, the most serious being the absence of any reliable or consistent provisions for enforcing the UN’s resolutions. Member states’ national interests and passions, no matter how illiberal or totalitarian or destructive, took priority over principle. The UN had begun its transformation into what Churchill feared in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri speech: “a cockpit in the Tower of Babel.”

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