Displaying posts published in

July 2024

Kamala Harris’s ‘Only Path’ To Destroy Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20820/kamala-harris-destroy-israel

What is insupportable is that Harris completely ignored that the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip are suffering because of a war initiated by Hamas. She could have done many Palestinians a favor had she called on Hamas to relinquish control over the Gaza Strip and stop using its people as human shields in its Jihad (holy war) against Israel.

Harris seems not to know or to have forgotten — either is not excessively impressive — that on October 6, 2023, there was a ceasefire in place between Israel and Hamas. Hamas broke it.

“Sometimes, on happier days, I like to comment on the remarkable similarities between Singapore and the Gaza Strip. Both are self-governing city-states located at key crossroads of world trade on the opposite ends of the Continent of Asia. Both combine density of population with a significant urban buildup and dramatic natural advantages, including a high-quality harbor. And yet, due to differences in civil culture and governance, Singapore has been built into the trade hub of East Asia. Gaza, as Saturday’s (October 7, 2023) events have demonstrated to the world, has chosen another path: becoming a terrorist dystopia like the benighted lands formerly under ISIS (Islamic State).” — Bassam Eid, Palestinian human rights activist, Newsweek, October 9, 2023.

The October 7 massacres, if anything, demonstrate why the creation of a Palestinian state is actually a surefire way to perpetuate the Palestinian jihad against Israel, as well as instability and insecurity throughout the Middle East. China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are watching and taking note that unacceptable behavior goes blissfully unpunished.

Hamas…. did not spend millions of dollars to boost the Palestinian economy or give young Palestinians in the Gaza Strip employment prospects. Rather than constructing a medical facilities or educational institutions, Hamas opted to build hundreds of tunnels to smuggle weapons, attack Israel, and shelter its terrorists and leaders.

[I]f and when a Palestinian state is established, as Harris and the Biden administration insist, it will be controlled by the same murderers, rapists and terrorist jihadists.

This is the time to remind Harris that Hamas’s charter views the Jihad as the way to take all of “Palestine” from the Jews and to destroy Israel. Harris sees a Palestinian state as the “only path” to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians, on the other hand, view the establishment of such a state as the first step towards eliminating Israel. The Hamas charter begins with a quotation attributed to Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al-Bana: “Israel will arise and continue to exist until Islam wipes it out, as it wiped out what went before.”

Harris’s remarks regarding a Palestinian state are seriously problematic: they send a message to the Palestinians and others that the US is happy to reward them for terrorism and the October 7 atrocities. Instead of talking about a Palestinian state, she should have told the Palestinians that they will never achieve a state as long as they back Hamas or vow to destroy a UN member state. Harris should also have warned the Palestinians that they will never be granted their own state unless they recognize Israel’s right to exist as the ancestral home of the Jewish people, stop radicalizing their youth, and renounce violence and terrorism.

By advocating an end to the war in the Gaza Strip, Harris is asking that Israel, by allowing Hamas to remain in power, submit itself to unending jihadist attacks. What country would do that?

Demanding a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is comparable to calling for an end to the US war on Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Unfortunately, destroying Hamas’s military capabilities and removing it from power is the only realistic option. Failure to achieve those two goals will only embolden Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Russia, Iran and other global aggressors waiting in the wings.

“A Conspiracy of Silence” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtottd.blogspot.com

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”   Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                            In many social settings, silence is the better alternative. As my mother would say: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Or my father: “Better to remain silent and have people think you a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” And my mother-in-law would quote the ancient proverb: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.”

Yet silence does not always contain the remedies its fans claim. In The Trumpet of Conscience, published posthumously, Martin Luther King wrote: “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”  Accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1986, Elie Wiesel spoke: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever humans endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

The silence of which I write does not bear the evil of which King and Wiesel wrote and spoke, nor is it the silence of my late in-laws and parents that leads to worried looks and shaking heads in social gatherings. My concern is the Omeretà, the code of silence of politicians and their accommodating friends in the media – it is the silence that deprives people of the facts necessary to make informed decisions. As the British Parliamentarian Rory Stewart wrote in the prologue of his recent book How Not to be a Politician, “The public see the appearance that someone else chooses to share.”

Frenemies to the End So much for the myth of No-Drama Obama, whose endorsement of Kamala Harris is a win for Joe Biden and a loss for America. By Steve Gruber

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/30/frenemies-to-the-end/

When an ex-president loses control, when he no longer controls the man who pretends he is president or the woman who wants to be president, when the ex-president is Barack Obama, leading from behind looks like what it is: a losing strategy.

So much for the myth of No-Drama Obama, whose endorsement of Kamala Harris is a win for Joe Biden and a loss for America. So much for the myth of Obama as the silent arbiter—the final voice, so to speak—of the Democrat Party. So much for the myth of Barack and Michelle Obama as the demigods—more like demagogues—of Democrat politics, because their phone call to Harris sounded as sincere and spontaneous as a coerced confession.

The call was a concession. The drama between Obama and Biden, of the former pushing the latter aside, ended with the anointment of Harris. By the time Obama called Harris, his time—the time necessary to back another candidate—had passed. By the time Obama “endorsed” Harris, all other Democrats and donors had spoken.

With Biden still in the White House, Obama is out of time and out of luck. The ex-president lost to a man who was his second-in-command, who is in command of nothing. The country lost, the country is at a loss, as we do not have a commander in chief.

Between an attempt on the life of our next president, Donald Trump, and the attempt to install Kamala Harris as president, between the incompetence of the director of the Secret Service and the incompetents occupying the White House, we do not need more drama.

We recognize the stories about Obama’s purported genius, about his shrewdness as a politician and his sharpness as a leader, for what they are: lies.

Why is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates? Israel has every right to respond to Hezbollah’s cruel slaughter of 12 Druze kids. Brendan O’Neill

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/29/why-is-it-only-escalation-when-israel-retaliates/

The New York Times is breathing a sigh of relief. For while Israel has fired a few rockets at Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s massacre of 12 Druze kids in the Golan Heights on Saturday, it has stopped short of launching all-out war on its unfriendly neighbour. For now, says the NYT, we’ve not seen a ‘major escalation’ in Israel-Lebanon hostilities. Yes we have. The slaughter of the Druze youths was a ‘major escalation’. Hezbollah’s firing of a missile that butchered 12 children was surely the very ‘surge in fighting’ that the NYT fears. Or is it only ‘escalation’ when Israel retaliates to the apocalyptic violence of the Islamist armies that surround it?

The media chatter in the wake of Saturday’s bloodbath has been incredibly – and depressingly – revealing. Hezbollah’s rocket hit a miniature football pitch in Majdal Shams in northern Israeli territory. That’s a village inhabited by the Arabic-speaking Druze people, who are spread across northern Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The rocket’s 50kg warhead detonated right where youngsters were taking a breather between games of footie. Twelve of them, all aged between 11 and 16, were killed. It was such a devastating explosion that the remains of one of the kids have not yet been found.

Hezbollah denies firing the rocket. Few are taking its denials seriously, aside from the usual Israelophobic hotheads online, who hate the Jewish State with such unhinged intensity that they hang like wide-eyed fanboys on its enemies’ every word. Israel, as Sky News reports, says the missile clearly flew the short distance ‘over the sunburnt hills’ that divide Lebanon from the Golan Heights. US intelligence officials say they have ‘no doubt’ Hezbollah fired the rocket. And yet, still, the media discussion focusses less on the horror of what Hezbollah did than on the horror of what Israel might do in response.

Everyone’s fretting over an ‘escalation’ in hostilities following the Majdal Shams massacre. ‘Diplomats [are] scrambling to prevent a surge in fighting’, says the NYT. Too late. The surge in fighting already happened. It happened on Saturday when Israel lost 12 of its children to the rocket fire of radical Islamists. There are widespread ‘fears of escalation’ after Saturday, says Reuters. That it printed these words next to a photo of a row of small white coffins containing the remains of the kids murdered by Hezbollah is extraordinary. There’s your ‘escalation’, Reuters. It has already occurred.

The emptiness of Kamala Harris Daniel McCarthy argues the Democrats are wedded to a failed status quo.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/30/the-emptiness-of-kamala-harris/

The coronation of Kamala Harris is in full swing. With lightning speed, following Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the vice-president secured the backing of enough Democratic power-brokers, donors and media cheerleaders to become the presumptive nominee. So, what does Harris’s rise represent? What does she actually offer to the American public? Does she stand a chance against a resurgent Donald Trump?

Daniel McCarthy – editor-in-chief of Modern Age: A Conservative Review – returned to The Brendan O’Neill last week to discuss how the 2024 presidential election is shaping up. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How do you think Kamala Harris will measure up against a bruiser like Donald Trump?

Daniel McCarthy: The Democratic Party and the media are going to try to repeat what they did in 2020. In that election, they were able to sell the idea of Joe Biden, even though he was not able to go out on the campaign trail. In effect, the pandemic allowed the Democrats to create a product without actually having any substance behind it.

The Democrats are going to try to do this again in a very compressed, four-month schedule. The idea here is to try to make it all happen so quickly that the American public doesn’t have a chance to really think about who Kamala Harris is. They would much rather run a campaign about what people don’t like about Donald Trump, than about what they do like about Kamala Harris.

I don’t think this is going to work. Those who do know who Kamala is are divided between those who think she’s awful, and those Democrats who are just going to take whatever medicine they’re served. I don’t think she’s got a real base of support, and independents are repulsed by her.

En route to Beirut? Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/en-route-to-beirut/

When 12 kids were slaughtered Saturday in the Golan Heights town of Majdal Shams by an Iranian missile supplied to Hezbollah, Israelis were horrified but not surprised. Given the incessant bombardment of northern Israel—leading to the evacuation months ago of hundreds of families from their homes—mass murder was just a matter of time.

That’s what happens with a policy of containment—a key element of the very “conceptzia” that enabled Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. If an enemy assault fails to be as deadly as it could have been, Israel doesn’t treat it with the response it deserves. Instead, it prides itself on preventing more casualties thanks to Iron Dome defenses and public obedience to Home Front Command directives.

These include: informing us of how many seconds we have to enter a bomb shelter or safe room when an air-raid siren goes off; instructing us to exit and clear away from our cars when caught by an alarm while driving on the highway, then lie on the asphalt with our hands on our heads; warning us not to photograph interceptions, which can result in injury from falling shrapnel; admonishing us to lock our doors, turn out our lights and close our shutters at the first sign of a potential terrorist invasion; and assuring us that we’ll be the first to know if we need to stock up on supplies ahead of a greater, less temporary threat.

It’s no wonder, then, that our military is called the Israel Defense Forces. Considering the fact that we are surrounded by foes both bent on our destruction and equipped by Tehran to carry it out, one would have thought it appropriate to replace the word “defense” with “offense.”

But no. The IDF boasts of being the most moral army in the world, with a code of ethics fit for local and international kangaroo courtrooms, not soldiers risking their lives to protect the country.

Oh #CANADUH The Corruption! Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/oh-canaduh-the-corruption/

Most of us are aware of the corruption in government, from the top down, but how many are aware of the corruption from the bottom up? We, the tax-paying citizens, are being squeezed – or is it screwed – in the middle.

First, I am sharing my experience with local government in Caledon, Ontario. A little bit country, a little bit city. Then I will move on to federal politics.

I had a problem regarding construction on my street. I turned to my elected representative and the Mayor. After 6 months of bafflegab and obfuscation, I realized that the only group who could help me was the Town Council! Great. So, I contacted the Mayor and asked to speak to Town Council. She said “no.” My elected representative also said “no.” Hmmmm.

So I contacted David Boghosian, the Integrity Commissioner, and much to my surprise, he told me that there is nothing in the Town Council Code of Conduct that makes the elected officials accountable to the electorate – the taxpayers!

According to, Mr. Boghosian, the Integrity Commissioner, there is no provision for the manner in which Council members are to deal with the public based on the Code of Conduct. In his words:

“the Code does not empower me to investigate individual dealings between Members of Council and members of the public that do not otherwise constitute a violation of some other provision of the Code.”

Now that was a shock, as silly me; I assumed the people one elects are accountable to the people who elect them!

Behind the Scenes, the Western World Is Cutting Off Weapons Supplies to Israel The dark underside of calls for “restraint” after the Golan Heights massacre. P. David Hornik

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

Attitudes toward Israel in today’s world can be put into three categories:

1.       It must not continue to exist.

2.       It can exist, but it must not fight.

3.       It can exist, and it can fight.

The first category comprises much of the Muslim world and just about all of the far-left world. The second category corresponds broadly—not always precisely—with official attitudes and policies toward Israel of the United Nations and most Western governments.

The third category comprises mostly conservative governments, parties, and sectors in the Western world.

Although, at the time of Hamas’s October 7 massacre against Israel, the Biden administration seemed to be staunchly in the third category, it eventually began shifting toward the second category and now hovers between the third and the second. While Israel fights on seven fronts of the Iranian ring of fire (Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran itself), the Biden administration’s endlessly repeated mantra is now “ceasefire”—along with all other Western governments that publicly address the issue.

Accordingly, in an effort to discourage Israel from fighting and constrain its ability to do so, since February the Biden administration has been substantially reducing arms shipments to Israel.

Imagine that, say, Belgium—a country roughly the size of Israel—had in less than ten months suffered a massacre and mass kidnapping of its citizens, as well as a constant bombardment of well over 20,000 rockets, missiles, and explosive drones from six different countries. (In Israel’s case, the six countries are Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Iran; by June 10 more than 19,000 unguided rockets alone had been launched at Israel.)

It would be strange, then, if Belgium—not any of the countries or terror organizations attacking it—were under constant, obsessive pressure for a ceasefire. It would be even stranger if Belgium—not any of those countries or terror organizations—were being charged by two international courts with “genocide” and other severe human rights abuses.

But the push to deny arms to Israel has, by now, gone well beyond the US.

This “America ain’t so great and never was.” posture is a sophomoric indulgence. Glenn Loury

https://substack.com/@glennloury/note/c-63185924?utm_source=feed-email-digest

This “America ain’t so great and never was.” posture is a sophomoric indulgence.

In the 21st century, our birthright citizenship in this republic is an inheritance of immense value.

Black Americans are a privileged and blessed people.

Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.

The Civil War left 600,000 dead in a country of 30 million.

The consequence of that war, together with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments enacted just afterward, was to make the enslaved Africans and their descendants into citizens.

In the fullness of time, we have become equal citizens.

Should that have taken another 100 years? No.

Neither should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place.

But here’s the thing.

Slavery has been a commonplace human experience since antiquity.

Emancipation – The freeing of the slaves en masse.

That was a new idea. It was a Western idea.

It was the fruit of enlightenment.

Paris Olympics – Worst Opening Ceremony Ever A mélange of multicultural mediocrity. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/paris-olympics-worst-opening-ceremony-ever/

The opening ceremonies of Olympic games have always followed the same pattern. A parade of national teams enters the stadium, led by Greece, and followed by the other countries in alphabetical order, with the host nation coming last. When that’s done, the stadium turns into a stage for an splendiferous show of some kind, an extravaganza marked by lights, dance, fireworks, that is meant to reflect the very best of the host country, its culture and history. Over the years these displays have grown more and more ambitious.

Thomas Jolly, the man who put together last Friday’s opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, decided to take another route. First of all, the parade of athletes took place not in a stadium but along the Seine, where the nations’ representatives rode in on yachts, barges, and other vessels. As usual, the parade was led by the Greek team. It was followed by something called the “Refugee Olympic Team.” After that, the teams appeared in French alphabetical order, although the signs identifying them were in English, which made for some confusion, if you cared to give the matter any thought.

Indeed, the mixture of those two particular languages brought to mind the annual Eurovision song contest, and unfortunately this event, like that one, was not lacking in terrible music. Instead of holding off the entertainment, to use the word loosely, until after the parade, Jolly mixed it all together, cutting away from the parade repeatedly to focus on a wide range of performances, most but not all of them taking place along the riverbank. Almost every bit of it was absolutely horrible. Lady Gaga did an extraordinarily annoying (and endless) song and dance number (in French) while being circled energetically but with very little in the way of artistry by a couple of dozen guys in black body tights. (It brought to mind Danny Kaye’s “Choreography” number in the movie White Christmas, a wicked parody of some of the more pretentious varieties of modern dance.)