Displaying posts published in

June 2024

‘Queers for Palestine,’ Like ‘Minks for Fur Coats,’ Support Those Who Want to Slaughter Them by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20676/queers-for-palestine

Palestinian members of the LGBTQ community have never felt safe either in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank or under the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group in the Gaza Strip.
In 2016, when Hamas commander Mahmoud Ishitwi was accused of having sex with men, he was “suspended from a ceiling for hours on end, for days in a row… [h]e was whipped and guards coasted loud music into his cell, banishing sleep.” After enduring days of torture, he was shot to death.
“In many countries, including my parent’s former homes and theocratic Iran, homosexuality is still sometimes punished by public hangings…. The international community must not be silent. But it is.” — Hen Mazzig, self-described “queer Israeli Jew,” named among the top LGBTQ influencers, Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2022.
“It is alleged that ‘harassment of gays’ is ‘practically official policy’ in the PA. The victims are frequently called collaborators and accused as such. It is also reported that the PA police regularly inflicts appalling torture on homosexuals.” — Ilka Schröder, Member of European Parliament, 2003.
“When it comes to Queers for Palestine, what’s richly ironic is that many LGBTQ Palestinians seek asylum in Israel – the same country these stateside protesters are rallying against… At the heart of this contradiction is the tendency within social justice movements to pick a clear protagonist and antagonist, the oppressed and the oppressor, and to proceed from there in one-size-fits-all fashion. Some progressives decided long ago that Palestine is the former and Israel is the latter, which is the seed from which everything must grow. Palestine, then, stands not only for anti-colonialism but also LGBT rights and reproductive rights, despite that those rights, in any meaningful sense of the word, do not actually exist there. Queers for Palestine is about as convincing as minks for fur coats.” — Billy Binion, Reason, October 27, 2023.
“Queers for Palestine” should talk to “Queers in Palestine”…. Many Palestinian lives could have been saved if “Queers for Palestine” had cared for the Palestinian people as much as they detested Israel.

The anti-Israel group “Queers for Palestine,” whose members frequently demonstrate in the streets of US cities to criticize Israel for defending itself against Islamist terrorists, has probably not heard about the case of Ahmad Abu Markhiya, a gay Palestinian man from the West Bank city of Hebron. Even if the organization were aware of the case, it has done nothing to protest against the horrific death of Abu Markhiya.

Who Is Funding the Pro-Hamas Protests; Are They Aiming to Take Down America? by Robert Williams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20680/funding-pro-hamas-protests

Rather more jarring is that the Biden administration, and therefore taxpayer money, is also funding the protests, through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee… discussed oversight findings from the EPW Committee that revealed a $50 million grant was awarded from the EPA through the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to ‘Climate Justice Alliance,’ a group that engages in pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic activities.” — US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, May 21, 2024.

“[We] went to the website of Climate Justice Alliance. This is what we found on the website that our taxpayer dollars are going to organizations such as this. This, at the bottom, is a picture of the bulldozer that went through the fence when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.” — Senator Shelley Moore Capito, May 21, 2024.

The People’s Forum’s executive director Manolo De Los Santos called for the complete destruction of the United States at the conference to great applause: “We have to bring down this empire with one million cuts, and those one million cuts have to come from every sector of struggle in this room.”

Terrorists and their billionaire, as well as less-affluent supporters, are actively conspiring to destroy the US with the backing of foreign powers — and very little, if anything, is being done to stop it.

The answers to the question of who is funding the groups behind the pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli protests on US campuses, continue to grow in complexity. It appears that a multitude of donors are falling over each other to help promote the cause of the officially designated terrorist group, Hamas – whose openly stated aim is the destruction of Israel and the Jews — to impressionable young students and the public at large.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: We Have Been Subverted What is at stake in our ability to see the threat plainly? Nothing less than the preservation of our way of life.

https://www.thefp.com/

If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.

I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.

The Somalia that gained its independence was a young, optimistic society full of national pride. We had such hope for growth, political stability, prosperity, and peace. But, in a story sadly familiar to many of my fellow Africans, those hopes were dashed.

What followed was a nightmare.

For me it is all captured in the earliest memories of my youth: statues of Mohamed Siad Barre, our dictator, sprung up across Mogadishu, flanked by a trio of dark seraphim: Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This particular communist experiment plunged Somalia into bloodshed, mass starvation, and a 20-year period of suffocating tyranny. I recall my grandmother and mother smuggling food into our house. I also remember the whispering: we felt the state was omnipresent. It could hear everything.

My father was thrown into prison. His friends—those other pioneers in pursuit of a democracy modeled on America—were either jailed like him or, in many cases, executed.

By the time I was eight, my family knew we needed to escape. We left in 1977. By 1990, the country had descended into a civil war from which it has never fully recovered.

The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-destructive-generation-proving-americas-weakest-link/

Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it.

Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited.

In contrast to them, eighty years ago this week, the Allied powers of World War II—chiefly the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada—landed on five Normandy beaches to begin what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied expeditionary forces, would call the great “crusade” to liberate Western Europe from four years of brutal Nazi occupation.

The plan was to land within a few hours and in stormy weather well over 150,000 Americans, British, and Canadians on the Atlantic Coast beaches of France, where they were to charge directly into the fire of tens of thousands of enemy troops. They were to charge uphill in the sand while being fired upon by entrenched German troops occupying the hills above. From there, the beachhead was to serve as the launching pad for two million more troops, who were to somehow drive eastward through France and into Germany to end the war and the devastation the Third Reich had inflicted on the world.

All that was accomplished in the ensuing 11 months. That can-do American generation assumed that impoverished teenagers emerging from the Great Depression, with equipment often inferior to their seasoned German enemies, would, over the ensuing months, surely prove able to route Waffen SS veterans. Many of them were hastily transferred from the murderous Eastern Front, such as the nihilist 2nd SS Panzer Division das Reich (“The Empire”). No matter, the Americans did the impossible in less than a year—from the Normandy beaches to well across the Rhine River.

That same generation went on to save South Korea, build an anti-totalitarian world order, defeat Soviet communism, and pass on to the Baby Boomer generation the strongest economy, military, and political system in history, or, to paraphrase the poet Horace, “monuments more lasting than bronze.” Or so we, the inheritors, thought.

The myth of Gaza’s ‘innocent’ majority By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/the-myth-of-gazas-innocent-majority/

It’s time to dispel the myth that Gaza is filled with innocent civilians. In the first place, the residents of the enclave are responsible for Hamas’s takeover in 2007.

Second, their brethren in the Palestinian Authority are hungry to copy the move in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), despite years of ample evidence of what life is like under Hamas’s reign of terror.

Third, no disgruntlement on the part of either populace has replaced antisemitism. On the contrary, the worse their plight, the more they cling to the lie that the Jewish state, from its inception in 1948, is to blame.

In fairness, it’s tough for people who imbibe jihadist ideology with their mothers’ milk to engage in critical thinking when they come of age. In this respect, they’re victims—of their upbringing, not Israel’s existence. Certainly not of its policies, which have been nothing but magnanimous over the decades. Suicidally so.

Indeed, concern for the welfare of noncombatant human shields has not only led to the death of far too many Israel Defense Forces soldiers, it’s been preventing the IDF from defeating Hamas.

Ironically, much of the hesitance emanates from the military itself. Having the most stringent rules of engagement—to the point of referring to the phenomenon as “purity of arms”—does tend to make it more difficult to conduct warfare, particularly on such an asymmetric battlefield as Gaza.

Nor are such directives conducive to deterring the country’s numerous other enemies. This is the Middle East, after all, where strength is revered and weakness scorned. Just ask any Gazan.

Biden acts on the border… sort of… maybe The orders are meant to solve a serious problem at the ballot box:Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/joe-biden-acts-border-maybe-executive-order/

The contrast between the two parties on illegal immigration couldn’t be sharper. Donald Trump erected a wall. Joe Biden erected a pole. Oops. Sorry. That should be “poll.” And Biden didn’t erect it. He was skewered by it.

Very few people think President Biden is doing a decent job at the southern border. More than twice as many think he has created a full-scale disaster. Those poll numbers aren’t just underwater. They’re headed for the Titanic in a flimsy submersible.

Faced with this disaster, Biden finally did what he has said for three years he had no authority to do. He issued some Executive Orders to close the border… .well, sort of, partially, maybe, under certain circumstances. It’s unclear why he thought he could issue orders demolishing Trump’s effective border policies during the first weeks of his new presidency but couldn’t issue others to restore tougher measures as the crisis unfolded.

And a crisis it is. Since Biden entered office, US Border Patrol has totaled some 8 million “encounters” with illegal immigrants at the southern border, overwhelming the agency’s manpower and the courts’ ability to hear cases. These migrants aren’t just coming from Mexico and Central America. They are coming from around the world, including America’s most dangerous enemies.

British Foreign Office accused of coverup over terror-linked Palestinian groups By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/british-foreign-office-accused-of-cover-up-over-terror-linked-palestinian-groups/

The British Foreign Office is suspected of sending millions to terror-linked Palestinian groups and then covering it up to avoid a public backlash after refusing to disclose where the money went.

The United Kingdom granted the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) £4.6 million, or about $5.9 million in 2022.

NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute, filed a freedom of information (FOI) request on March 25, 2021. It asked the U.K.’s Foreign Office, officially the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), for names of the beneficiaries.

The NRC is infamous in Israel as an NGO engaging in anti-Israel activities disguised as “humanitarianism.” It made headlines in Israel a few years back when it tried to undermine the country’s judicial system by flooding its courts with cases.

NGO Monitor suspected that the Norwegian Refugee Council had funded Palestinian organizations with terror links, notably to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

A tipoff was the U.K. government’s growing reluctance to talk about the NRC’s beneficiaries.

“Up until 2018 or so, the government used to publish the names of all local NGO recipients of U.K. aid via the NRC,” Anne Herzberg, legal adviser at NGO Monitor, told JNS. “We began to see a marked decrease in transparency regarding NRC funding to local NGOs around 2018-2019.”

NGO Monitor knew that the NRC worked with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC). Fatah identifies UAWC as an official “affiliate” of the PFLP. Two of its officials were arrested in 2019 for the murder of 17-year-old Rina Shnerb. A 2017 NRC document showed the group still worked with the UAWC.