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June 2024

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World Plays ‘Pretend’ as Iran Burns Down Middle East Israel Is NOT the Problem by Robert Williams

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20686/iran-burns-middle-east

Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron came to Jerusalem, where he told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza. “The ordeal of the Palestinians in Gaza must end,” Macron said, without even bothering to demand the release of the remaining hostages as a precondition for his fever-dream of a ceasefire. So far, Hamas has rejected all proposals but one, and that came only after extreme military, not diplomatic, persuasion.

World leaders like Macron play a game of “pretend.” According to it, the situation in the Middle East is an issue between Israel and the Palestinians; and if just that is resolved by establishing of a new Palestinian terrorist state, “peace” will drift down upon the region. Of course, the idea is demented, as the world leaders are undoubtedly aware, but they continue to propose it – but only to the victim, Israel, which was attacked without provocation and is still being attacked; never to Hamas, Qatar or Iran, the parties that ignited the war. The ceasefire that the world claims it wants could be delivered this week if Iran and Qatar seriously ordered their proxies to stop, and Hamas and Hezbollah laid down their weapons.

Clearly Iran and Qatar have no intention of doing any such thing: they undoubtedly see their job as keeping their proxies in power to be able to strike again.

World leaders, however, are not demanding that Iran or its proxies stand down. The main reason Ireland, Norway and Spain have recognized a borderless Palestinian terrorist state is that they do not have to live with the consequences. Maybe Spain would also like to recognize a State of Catalonia? Ireland, even at the height of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, never demanded that all the Welsh, Scots and English leave Britain, to have it peopled only by Irish Catholics.

Conspicuously, the same Macron who is ordering Israel to lay down its weapons in Gaza has been silent when it comes to asking that of Hamas and Iran.

Iran’s proxy Hezbollah already is the main power inside Lebanon; a new ineffectual border agreement will not change that. Furthermore, a border agreement is not what Biden wants. Biden’s policies, like Obama’s, are all about strengthening Iran in every way, including allowing it to fully realize its nuclear ambitions.

“Most importantly, these profits have enabled Iran to accelerate completing its nuclear weapons program, if it has not already done so and is not just being paid to stay quiet before the US presidential election this November.” — Majid Rafizadeh, Gatestone Institute, June 1, 2024.

Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah, having fired thousands of rockets, guided anti-tank missiles and exploding drones into Israel since October, has lately ratcheted up its attacks even more, killing and wounding Israelis and igniting massive wildfires that have so far consumed more than 3,500 acres of farmland, forest, brush.

For months, a steady stream of world leaders has flocked to Israel to pressure it not to defend itself. Israel has now been attacked incessantly for eight months by Iran and its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon: Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Since October 7, 2023, they have rained down more than 10,000 rockets, missiles and attack-drones on a democratic country smaller than New Jersey, presumably in attempts to obliterate it, or at least cause mass slaughter.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Directive Is Clear: Israel Can Do Only Wrong By Jeffrey Blehar

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-media-directive-is-clear-israel-can-do-only-wrong/

This weekend something quite surprising and wonderful happened, for a change: In a brilliantly daring and well-coordinated rescue, commandos from Israel’s counterterrorism unit, Yamam, raided two buildings in Gaza on Saturday morning and retrieved four hostages taken on October 7 — alive and well. In an eerie echo of the heroics displayed by the Israelis at Entebbe in 1976, they suffered only one casualty, that of Arnon Zmora, who died of wounds sustained while leading his extraction team on their successful mission.

Most media attention has focused on the return of young Noa Argamani, whose abduction — livestreamed by cheering GoPro-wearing jihadis — was one of the most traumatic videos from that day; the images of her reunited with her family were thus among the most moving from this weekend. But for those familiar with Hamas’s brutal hostage calculus, the rescue of the three men — Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv — unharmed is in many ways even more miraculous. (Kozlov popped the collar on his polo shirt as he stepped off the rescue transport, which is exactly what I’d be doing if I’d spent the last eight months expecting to be shot in the head execution-style yet walked away unscathed.)

You might have thought that all this was cause for celebration. You are of course a benighted fool to think that, and likely a moral monster as well. For it seems our betters in the media, as well as the keening mobs online, are here to tell us that the rescue of these hostages was in fact a tragedy if not an outright war crime. Hamas immediately claimed over 200 civilians dead — as spurious and invented as all “official” Hamas death tolls, but the peg upon which they correctly expected Western media to hang their coverage. Then, like clockwork, the story became not about the miraculous rescue but the supposedly horrifying human cost of it.

The Daily Beast’s Wahajat Ali lamented, “Is killing more than 200 Palestinian civilians worth 4 Israeli hostages? A question worth asking on the record.” (Not asked on the record: What were those 4 hostages doing in Gaza?) Others lamented the death of Palestine Chronicle journalist Abdallah Aljamal — killed senselessly while reading his Koran at home during the raid, merely because he was holding three Israeli men captive there. The Washington Post led the way in the media, with the headline “More than 200 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Hostage Raid in Gaza” and a subheading describing it as a “brazen” attack that “unleashed relentless bombardment” in the Nuseirat refugee camp — the story as told from Hamas’s point of view. That freakishly inverted moral framing was everywhere. A pair of CNN headlines told you everything about whom they believed and whose side they were on: (1) “Yesterday marked Gaza’s deadliest day in 6 months, Palestinian health ministry says,” (2) “Israel alleges journalist held hostages in Gaza, without providing evidence.” (They have since provided reams of it.)

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Joel Kotkin Are American Jews Moving Right? For now, at least, the Jewish vote is up for grabs.

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-american-jews-moving-right

For much of modern history in both Europe and North America, Jews have been reliably left of center politically, backing Democrats in the United States, Labour in Britain, Canada’s Liberals, and France’s Socialists. In recent years, though, Jews are moving toward the center, and, somewhat tentatively, even the right.

The shift reflects Jews’ revulsion at the increasing popularity of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic positions in most left-of-center parties. For the roughly 80 percent of Jews who back Israel’s war aims in Gaza, remaining reliably progressive will be hard. In Great Britain, a 2019 study showed Jews shifting substantially away from their traditional Labour orientation and largely embraced the conservatives. In France, Jews generally no longer affiliate with the Socialist Party but instead support the centrist government of Emmanuel Macron. Similarly, Canadian Jews seem to be severing their historic ties to Liberals and adopting a friendlier stance toward the Conservatives.

The change is also occurring in the U.S., albeit more slowly. Three-quarters of Orthodox Jews, whose numbers are growing due to their higher birthrate, identify as Republicans, up from 57 percent in 2013. In 2020, Donald Trump gained 30.5 percent of the Jewish vote, a 6.5 percent bump from 2016. A more recent Economist study found that roughly 37 percent of Jewish voters favor Trump, whose campaign just received $5 million from the increasingly influential Republican Jewish Coalition.

Jews generally have embraced progressive parties, seeing them as more committed to their well-being than those on the right. It was the Left, after all, that rallied to the Jewish cause during the Dreyfus affair in France, and in Germany, the Social Democrats represented the strongest counterweight to the Nazis. The “enemy” of Jewry was usually an adherent of a racialist ideology that wrote off Jews as less than fully European, white—or human.

But the roots of leftist anti-Semitism, particularly among the intelligentsia, are older than many realize, having emerged within the world’s first socialist state, the USSR. Marxism, the creation of a stridently secular Jew, considered religious Jews as well as practicing Christians as “enemies of the people.” In his Secret of Chabad, Rabbi David Eliezrie observes that, under Joseph Stalin, Orthodox Lubavitcher rabbis found themselves hunted, deported, and murdered in socialist pogroms, often carried out by zealous Jewish Communists.

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The racism of never blaming Hamas for anything Following the rescue of four Israeli hostages, it is time the Western left gave Hamas some credit for its evil. Brendan O’Neill

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/10/the-racism-of-never-blaming-hamas-for-anything/

So rescuing hostages is a war crime now. A ‘grave, grave war crime’, in fact. That’s according to the Guardian’s Owen Jones who is outraged that IDF troops used a humanitarian truck to sneak into the town of Nuseirat where they rescued four of their hostages from the clutches of Hamas and its local heavies. Kenneth Roth, formerly of Human Rights Watch, is also fuming over the IDF’s Trojan Horse antics, reminding Israel that it has a legal duty ‘not to disguise soldiers as civilians’. These people are nuts. What do they expect the IDF to do? Knock on the doors of the fascists holding their compatriots and say: ‘Can we have our Jews back, please?’

There is frothing anger online over Israel’s rescue operation in Nuseirat. It is bloody proof of Israeli deceit, people are saying. From the ‘war crime’ of troops wearing civilian disguise to the subsequent streetfighting and airstrikes that caused many civilian deaths, this was a wicked massacre, says the anti-Israel set. They’re in agreement with Hamas, which has accused Israel of carrying out a ‘complex war crime’ in Nuseirat. Just one thing is missing from all this boiling commentary: any acknowledgement whatsoever of Hamas’s responsibility for bringing this hellish situation about. When is Hamas going to get some credit for its evil?

From what we know, the raid of Nuseirat seems to have been a difficult, daring strike. It was given the name ‘Seeds of Summer’. It had been planned in great detail, with the IDF even building mock-ups of the two apartment buildings they believed the four hostages were being held in, in order that they might train for all eventualities. It is reported that the special forces were disguised as displaced Gazans. They told locals they were moving into the apartment buildings. But once inside they started their op, taking out the men who were guarding the hostages and taking the hostages to freedom.

When Hamas clocked what was happening it fired on the IDF troops, reportedly with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, explosive devices and mortar rounds. A battle ensued. Israeli airstrikes were called in. And many died. Fewer than a hundred, according to Israel; more than 250 according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

All the fingers are being pointed at Israel. Not only by the usual suspects of the Israelophobic ‘left’ but by the mainstream media, too. ‘An Israeli operation rescues four hostages and kills scores of Palestinians’, said CNN’s headline. The BBC all but made itself an outpost of Hamas propaganda with its early headline on the raid. ‘Gaza health ministry says Israeli hostage rescue killed 274 Palestinians’, it announced to the millions who peruse the BBC for their news. Here was the public broadcaster splashing not with the liberation of four Jews from the captivity of a racist terror group, but with Hamas’s self-serving claim that Israel, and Israel alone, caused the civilian deaths in Nuseirat.

The political class stooped even lower. There is ‘outrage’ in European political circles over this latest ‘massacre’ in Gaza, reports the Guardian. The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, called it ‘another massacre of civilians’. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, said the Nuseirat raid is proof of Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’. She accused Israel of killing ‘at least 200 Palestinians, including children’, all while ‘perfidiously hiding in an aid truck’. This was ‘humanitarian camouflage’ for genocide, she thundered.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU has been shaken to its core Europeans have had enough of the Brussels oligarchy. Fraser Myers

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/10/the-eu-has-been-shaken-to-its-core/

‘I cannot act as if nothing has happened’, said a weary, dejected Emmanuel Macron, in an unplanned address to his nation last night. The French president, bruised by an unprecedented showing for the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) on Sunday’s European Parliament elections, immediately dissolved the French parliament and announced snap legislative elections. The first round will take place in just three weeks’ time.

When Macron was elected president in 2017, he promised the French people that they will ‘no longer have a single reason to vote for the extremes’. Pro-EU centrists hailed his apparent defeat of nationalist, populist forces. Seven years later, RN is on course to achieve its best-ever result in an EU election. Marine Le Pen’s party is projected to win double the vote share of the president’s liberal, centrist Renaissance group. Clearly, the French feel that they have more reasons than ever to revolt against the mainstream.

The French are not alone in this. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite two of its leading MEP candidates being dogged by major scandals, came second behind the centre-right CDU. Crucially, it beat all three of the parties in Germany’s governing coalition. The Social Democrats (SPD), led by chancellor Olaf Scholz, suffered its worst result of any nationwide election since the 1940s. According to one pollster, around a million people who supported the left-leaning parties in the ‘traffic light’ coalition have since defected to the AfD. Pressure is now mounting on Scholz to call his own snap election. In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy topped the European polls, exceeding the vote share that swept her into power in 2022’s national elections. Populist, right-wing and hard-right parties, therefore, came in first or second place in all three of the major EU nations.

Even Belgium, at the epicentre of the EU empire, has been struck by the populist earthquake. Prime minister Alexander de Croo announced his resignation last night as his party was beaten to below 10 per cent in Sunday’s federal parliamentary elections and to around five per cent in the European elections – squeezed by Flemish separatist parties. Hard-right parties also came first in Austria and second in the Netherlands.

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Europeans Waking Up In the EU elections, a good showing for the good guys. by Bruce Bawer

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yes-more-europeans-are-waking-up/

Just as increasing numbers of Americans, in response to such outrages as the disastrous Biden economy and the unending invasion at the southern border, appear to be shedding their distaste for Donald Trump, more and more Western Europeans, mostly in response to mass Islamic immigration, are rejecting their globalist elites and turning to the right. A month ago I wrote here about New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s hysteria about the rise of the so-called “far right” in Europe – an attitude that is, needless to say, representative of legacy-media views. Well, this past weekend – specifically, from Thursday, June 6, through Sunday, June 9 – a great many Europeans, casting their votes in the elections for the 705-seat European Parliament (EP), affirmed their support for that fearful “far right.” Not all of the results, but a great many of them, have proven unsettling both to the leftist poobahs in Brussels and to their minions in the mainstream media, and those results provide at least a smidgen of hope that, when it comes to individual freedom and national sovereignty, the continent of Europe ain’t down yet.

To be sure, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, claimed that her so-called “center” – meaning the heart and soul of the EU establishment – had held the line against the “extremes” – meaning, on the one hand, outright Commies, and, on the other, a tiny number of actual right-wing radicals but mostly just proud patriots who don’t like being governed by unelected Brussels technocrats and don’t like seeing their countries transformed by mass (and largely illegal) immigration. Most commentators, however, appeared to have a very different take on the election results than von der Leyen. The Associated Press, for example, spoke of “strong electoral gains for the hard right” – “hard right,” of course, meaning anyone who seeks to strengthen national sovereignty and put a halt to the ever-increasing power of the open-borders globalists. “Voters across Europe,” observed Douglas Murray, “are fed up with being told not to notice mass immigration or not to object.” And Politico (the European one, not the American one) concluded that “Europe’s center of political gravity is veering to the right.” Hurrah.

Following the lead of Nigel Farage – who presided over the campaign to take Britain out of the EU from inside the EU itself, sitting as a member of the EP for two decades – many of Europe’s right-wing political heavyweights, including Wilders, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and France’s Marine Le Pen, as the AP put it, want “more power in the European Parliament” precisely so that they “can weaken it from within.” And the election results – which began to be released on Sunday night, Central European Time, after the Dutch voted on Thursday, the Irish and Czech on Friday, and everyone else on the weekend – encourage one to hope that these rebels against EU tyranny may well be able to pull it off, to some extent at least.

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ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What America Can Learn From Israel on the Battlefield by Daniel Greenfield

By on June 11th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20691/america-can-learn-from-israel

America has never successfully liberated and held territory from Islamic terrorists. After thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, both countries are now controlled by Islamic terrorists.

Many top current and former defense officials who oversaw both disasters, despite a track record of zero wins, have been criticizing Israel for not following in their footsteps.

Everyone from retired General David Petraeus to current Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown offer the familiar criticisms that Israel is not following the COIN (counterinsurgency) model.

“Not only do you have to actually go in and clear out whatever adversary you are up against, you have to go in, hold the territory and then you’ve got to stabilize it,” Chief Brown argued.

The problem with this model is that it failed and left a lot of widows and orphans along the way.

The United States spent over 50 years losing wars, prestige and young men by trying to follow the familiar strategy for defeating guerrilla armies through conventional warfare followed by efforts to hold and stabilize the territories. And what exactly do we have to show for it?

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) discarded this conventional wisdom for another approach.

Rather than trying to hold territory filled with an enemy population among whom the terrorists move, it has used its manpower to attack concentrations of enemy forces, moving quickly and at times unpredictably, while refusing to get bogged down by trying to ‘hold’ any particular area.

This strategy has frustrated the entire Hamas war plan which, like that of Jihadis in Iraq and Afghanistan, depended on using terror attacks to pin military units in place, forcing them to defend and patrol a territory, and then exploiting their weaknesses to launch ambushes.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Unvarnished Truth About That ‘Blockbuster’ Jobs Report

By on June 11th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/11/the-unvarnished-truth-about-that-blockbuster-jobs-report/

Editor’s note: This has been revised and updated from an editorial that ran over the weekend.

President Joe Biden might think that last week’s jobs report shows that “the great American comeback continues.” Democrats might believe that “the numbers don’t lie – things are great,’ Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost put it. And leftist media mavens have no doubt convinced themselves that “the American job market is so good, Republicans have literally found themselves speechless — again.”

So why aren’t Americans themselves celebrating? Why is Biden’s claim that he created 15.6 million jobs — “more than any president in U.S. history” — that the unemployment rate is at historic lows, and that wages are rising, all falling on deaf ears? It’s a head-scratcher, right?

Well, not if you dig just a tiny bit deeper into the employment data, then you realize that all the hoopla about jobs under Biden is entirely statistical fiction, one happily repeated by Biden’s media vanguard.

Let’s break it down:

15.6 Million New Jobs? Not Even Close

Take Biden’s claim that 15.6 million more people have jobs. This is wildly misleading because the measure he’s using doesn’t count the number of people with jobs, it counts how many paying jobs there are.

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