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June 2024

ICE Arrests Eight Foreign Nationals with Suspected Ties to ISIS By Haley Strack

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ice-arrests-eight-foreign-nationals-with-suspected-ties-to-isis/

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested eight foreign nationals with ties to the terrorist group ISIS-K, an Afghan branch of the Islamic State, over the past week.

“Over the last few days, ICE agents arrested several non-citizens pursuant to immigration authorities,” the Department of Homeland Security and FBI told the New York Post, which first reported the story, in a statement. “The actions were carried out in close coordination with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. The individuals arrested are detained in ICE custody pending removal proceedings . . . The FBI and DHS will continue working around the clock with our partners to identify, investigate, and disrupt potential threats to national security. ”

ICE arrested the ISIS-K-linked Tajikistani nationals in Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia this week.

FBI director Christopher Wray warned of potential threats from ISIS-K in April, specifically saying that, “increasingly concerning is the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland, akin to the ISIS-K attack we saw at the Russia concert hall a couple weeks ago.” ISIS-K carried out an attack at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March, which killed 145 people.

Wray has also cautioned that ISIS-affiliated groups have exploited the U.S.’s weak southern border to smuggle terrorists into the country. During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March, Wray said “there is a particular network that, where some of the overseas facilitators of the smuggling network have ISIS ties that we’re very concerned about and that we’ve been spending enormous amount of effort with our partners investigating.”

One U.S. official reportedly confirmed that the eight individuals were not flagged during their screening at the southern Mexico border, but that security officials tracked and later tied the individuals to ISIS-K.

The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to Do With the Prosecutions of Trump What Democrats should just admit. by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-myth-that-biden-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-prosecutions-of-trump/

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had (Attorney General Merrick) Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it — even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”

Americans Must Criticize Our Corrupt Courts By Carson Holloway

https://tomklingenstein.com/americans-must-criticize-our-corrupt-courts/

In the wake of his conviction in a New York court, President Trump has complained that the process was rigged against him, that the whole proceeding was a corrupt effort to persecute him with a view to influencing the 2024 presidential election. In response, many of his opponents have criticized him for undermining public confidence in our system of criminal justice and thus harming our democracy—a criticism that has been magnified by many in the media.

These critics, however, are missing the point and undermining a principle that is in fact essential to preserving our republic: namely, that criticism of the justice system when it errs or overreaches is necessary to preserving freedom under the rule of law.

Those who founded our nation were aware of this necessity.

Alexander Hamilton, representing the defendant in the famous libel case People v. Croswell, warned that “the most dangerous, the most sure, the most fatal of tyrannies” operated “by selecting and sacrificing single individuals, under the mask and forms of law, by dependent and partial tribunals.”

“Against such measures,” Hamilton continued, “we ought to keep a vigilant eye and take a manly stand. Whenever they arise, we ought to resist, and resist till we have hurled the demagogues and tyrants from their imagined thrones.” No sensible American would look back on these remarks and think that, by them, Hamilton was undermining democracy.

Hamilton’s great rival, Thomas Jefferson, acted on a similar view. As president, Jefferson pardoned publishers who had been convicted under the Sedition Act of 1798. Jefferson’s course of action here was inseparable from his belief that the Act was unconstitutional and that the courts of the United States had made themselves party to serious injustices by convicting defendants under it. Indeed, the pardoning power is included in the United States Constitution, and in many state constitutions, and is used routinely, precisely because prosecutors and courts can make mistakes and sometimes even willfully abuse their power over the lives and liberties of citizens.

Why Hamas must be defeated Israel is surrounded by enemies who are determined to destroy it. Andrew Fox

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/11/why-hamas-must-be-defeated/

Israel’s operation to free four hostages in Nuseirat, central Gaza may be dominating media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war at the moment. But the Israel Defence Forces’ operations in Rafah will be headlining the news again very soon.

This particular Gazan city is now Hamas’s final stronghold. The IDF has made significant inroads there, surrounding Rafah’s centre and seizing more than 75 per cent of the Philadelphi Corridor border with Egypt, which Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip.

Yet, the hostage crisis aside, Gaza is actually a tactical sideshow for Israel. The genocidal terrorists of Hamas certainly need to be militarily diminished and removed from power. But Israel faces far more serious strategic threats from elsewhere.

There is Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon. Since October last year, the IDF has struck roughly 4,000 Hezbollah targets within Lebanon, and Hezbollah has fired over 4,500 rockets into Israel in return. Northern Israel has been ablaze with wildfires from downed rockets. As it stands, 60,000 Israelis have been internally displaced thanks to the threat of these rocket attacks.

Yemen’s Houthis, another Iranian proxy, also pose a significant threat. Their ongoing attacks on shipping in the Gulf in support of Hamas threaten to choke off the Suez Canal.

Then there’s Iran itself. As a sign of its intent, it launched a large-scale drone and missile attack on Israel in April. It is also on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Beyond Iran and its ‘axis of resistance’, Israel also faces challenges from Qatar and Turkey. Both continue to support Palestine on the international stage with funds, strategic direction and sympathetic news media.

Why greens were the biggest losers in the EU elections The EU’s punishing climate policies are facing an almighty public backlash. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/11/why-greens-were-the-biggest-losers-in-the-eu-elections/

In 2019, Green parties achieved their best ever European Parliament election results. They even topped the polls in some member states, including Germany. Europe’s cultural and political elites could barely conceal their delight at the time, viewing the rising support for the Greens as an endorsement of their own managerialist mission to tackle the so-called climate emergency. The EU’s technocrats seized their chance. Within months of this alleged ‘green wave’, Brussels pushed through its Green Deal, which committed all member states to Net Zero, or carbon neutrality, by 2050. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen hailed the Green Deal at the time as ‘Europe’s man-on-the-moon moment’.

Things look very different today. As the results of last week’s European elections show, support for Green parties has dropped off a cliff. There were exceptions, such as in Denmark, where the Greens polled well. But overall, their vote fell sharply across the EU. The results are yet to be finalised, but it’s expected that the Greens / European Free Alliance political group has lost 18 of its 71 seats in the European Parliament.

The evaporation of 2019’s ‘green wave’ has also affected the Greens’ centrist fellow travellers – that is, those leftish and centre-left parties who have tended to promote a very green-adjacent agenda. Their European parliamentary group, Renew Europe, is expected to lose 23 of the 102 seats it picked up in 2019.

The collapse in support for the Greens was especially pronounced in the EU’s two key member states, France and Germany. The French Greens’ vote plummeted from 14 per cent in 2019 to just over five per cent this time, only just exceeding the five per cent necessary to gain any seats at all in Brussels. They finished seventh overall.

The German Greens, currently in a coalition government in Germany, arguably the most successful of all Europe’s green parties, fared no better. Their vote fell from 21 per cent in 2019 to just 12 per cent this time.

The Shady, Stagnant Wealth That Supports Hamas Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/12/the-shady-stagnant-wealth-that-supports-hamas/

The tycoons funding the ferocious – and mostly artificially engineered – student demonstrations in support of the genocidal, Iranian-financed terrorist organization Hamas, and its goal of destroying the state of Israel, did not attain their money through any entrepreneurial excellence and innovation on their parts.

They are, rather, in one way or another, trust fund heirs – Leftist Lord Fauntleroys, if you will – or wheeler dealers of the commodities markets, cannibalizing on the misfortune of others around the globe rather than producing new products or services; or shifty hotel magnates with a lack of vision as stationary as their properties.

David Rockefeller Jr.’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund has bestowed nearly a half million dollars during the past five years to one of the organizers of the unlawful student demos at Columbia University and other campuses, the anti-Zionist Orwellian-named “Jewish Voice for Peace,” as well as providing grants to notorious left-wing donor George Soros’ Tides Foundation. Soros’ operations themselves help fund both Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, another organizer of the demonstrations.

The entrepreneurial genius of John D. Rockefeller — whose Standard Oil, originating with Rockefeller’s $4,000 investment, enabled America to grow to economic global superpower status — is long gone. He died 87 years ago, a quarter century after Standard was judged to have become a monopoly and forcibly broken into dozens of companies. Since then his descendants have used his wealth and name in great measure to fuel their political ambitions and impose their imprint on American culture under the guise of philanthropy.

In 1934, Rockefeller established trusts for his children consisting of oil stock and real estate; they would themselves establish trusts, which divide into new trusts for succeeding generations upon their deaths. Money managers keep the wealth from dissipating and the principal is kept out of the hands of the beneficiary descendants, who live off the interest. The sale of much of Rockefeller Center’s Midtown Manhattan buildings to Japanese interests in the latter half of the 1980s as property values boomed unlocked billions in cash for the family.

Notes from the safest place in Europe for Jews Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/notes-from-the-safest-place-in-europe-for-jews/?_sc=NTAyMDI0NiM3NTAyMg%3D%3D&utm_campaign=Evening+Syndicate+Tuesday+6112024&utm_medium=email&utm_source=brevo

This is a perilous time to be a Jew. The world responded to the greatest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust with a surge of antisemitism and sympathy for those who committed the atrocities of Oct. 7, rather than its victims. Israel’s efforts to eradicate the genocidal terrorists of Hamas who launched that attack have not just been opposed but demonized in a way that enlightened liberal opinion did not condemn the orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that occurred on that day.

And while Jews everywhere celebrated the heroic rescue of four hostages this past weekend by Israeli security forces, the same mainstream corporate media that has been acting as Hamas’s stenographers throughout the eight months of the current war reacted by emphasizing the deaths of the Palestinians holding them captive.

Yet as bad as the situation has become in the United States, where elite college campuses have become hotbeds of support for Hamas, it is arguably worse in Europe. It is not just a matter of the governments of Western Europe opposing Israel’s military campaign and seeking to prevent the defeat of Hamas in concert with the Biden administration. Spain, Norway and Ireland chose to reward the Palestinians for their terrorism by formally recognizing their fictional statehood. More than that, a sinister red-green alliance of leftists and supporters of political Islam has created a situation in which Jewish communities throughout the continent feel themselves under siege. Many are choosing not to wear religious markers such as kippahs and Stars of David, and still others have taken off the mezuzahs once affixed to their homes.

But not in Hungary.

Spend a week in that Eastern European country, as I just did, and the one thing you can count on is that you won’t see its landmarks being the site of mass demonstrations of supporters of jihad and Hamas terror, as is the case elsewhere, including the United States. That is something that would be unimaginable right now in America, but the reason is that the Hungarian government has banned pro-Hamas demonstrations. They’ve deemed it an open expression of antisemitism and a threat to public order. Their rationale is to treat pro-Hamas activism as morally equivalent to open advocacy for Nazism, which in Hungary and most other places in Europe is illegal.

Belgium’s Extremely Alarming Antisemitism by Alain Destexhe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20692/belgium-antisemitism

What is striking about the survey is that, for every question, anti-Semitic prejudice is much higher in Brussels than at national level. It happens that the population of the capital of Belgium and the EU is between 30% and 40% Muslim.

In the country as a whole, 43% of Muslims think that Belgian Jews are not really Belgians like the other inhabitants of Belgium.

These figures are staggering. Many other signals testify to the sad reality that Jews are no longer safe in Brussels.

The compulsory Holocaust curriculum has not been taught in most Brussels schools for a long time now; teachers are afraid to broach the subject in classes where the majority of the pupils are Muslim.

The rise in anti-Semitism, appears, in fact, to coincide with the growth in Muslim immigration, which accelerated from 2000 onwards. The political world behaved as if they were the three monkeys: did not see, did not hear, did not speak. At Holocaust commemorations, the authorities repeat with their hands over their hearts that anti-Semitism has no place in Belgium, while passively witnessing its rise without ever acknowledging it.

The Muslim vote has become essential to the success of the left-wing parties, whose electoral weight in Brussels, as a result of immigration, has risen in 20 years, from 34% to 54%. Compared to the now hundreds of thousands of Muslim votes, those of the 30,000 Jews in Belgium, a genuine minority, do not carry much weight. Over the past 20 years, some of us have tried in vain to draw attention to this serious trend, which neither the media nor the political world has been willing to see.

The fate of Belgian Jews seems to be sealed. These testimonies are worth every analysis. Belgium is gradually becoming free of Jews — Judenrein — while joyfully and conscientiously celebrating the high mass of a highly racist multiculturalism.

A recent survey has attempted to quantify what Belgians feel towards Jews, a small minority representing 0.3% of the country’s population.

According to an IPSOS poll, 14% of Belgians express an aversion to Jews, twice as many as the French. This figure rises to 22% in Brussels, the capital, which is also the capital of European Union, where 11% of the population have sympathy for Hamas.