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August 2024

The high cost to the hostages of ‘enlightened’ hypocrisy Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/the-high-cost-to-the-hostages-of-enlightened-hypocrisy/

The argument over whether there’s such a thing as too high a price to pay for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza continues to rage in Israel unabated. And “rage” is the right word to describe what is rarely a serious discussion on the part of the “Bring Them All Home Now” advocates.

Those whose family members are still languishing in the Strip can be forgiven for seeing the issue from a prism of personal pain. Still, not all the captives’ loved ones agree with their more vociferous counterparts that the government should cave in to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s demands in order to seal a deal that would put an end to the 11-month nightmare.
The latter group grasps that it’s not so simple. In the first place, Sinwar hasn’t consented to free all the hostages, including if Israel withdraws all troops from Gaza and leaves him in power to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 “again and again and again,” as his henchmen have vowed to do.
Second, the hundreds of bereaved families of soldiers who fell in this war to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages are desperate not to have all that loss be in vain. Ditto for the men and women in uniform risking their lives every day in the same pursuit.
The people who deserve no sympathy are the ones who’ve been exploiting everyone’s devastation to fan the flames of the pre-Oct. 7 protests aimed at ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. Indeed, their cynical abuse of the hostage crisis to further a political agenda that got upstaged by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is nothing short of despicable.
Since the bulk of the Hebrew media has been complicit in this effort, it’s often difficult for members of the public to make a distinction between rational debate and “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. Occasionally, though, the disingenuousness gets exposed—and it’s a doozy.

Peter Arcidiacono, Tyler Ransom Elite Universities and the Diversity Game MIT and the media are blaming a 2023 Supreme Court ruling for “reducing diversity,” but the true picture is more complicated.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elite-universities-and-the-diversity-game

Since the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina in June 2023 that repealed race-conscious admissions policies, many observers have wondered what would happen to the racial makeup of elite universities. In the past, such schools have proudly advertised the data on the racial makeup of incoming freshmen. So far this year, most have remained strangely silent.

Last week, however, MIT broke the silence by reporting that the percentage of underrepresented minorities enrolling had precipitously dropped. Whereas black and Hispanic students, respectively, made up 15 percent and 16 percent of MIT’s Class of 2027, the Class of 2028 is just 5 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic. Meanwhile, Asian Americans have increased their enrollment from 40 percent to 47 percent, while the white share stayed essentially unchanged at 37 percent. That Asian Americans were the primary beneficiaries of the removal of racial preferences is consistent with the work we have published on the SFFA cases.

Both MIT and the media advertised the changes in the racial makeup of incoming freshmen as reducing diversity. The Chronicle of Higher Education described it as a 36 percent drop in racial diversity. Despite no change in the share of white enrollment, NBC News claimed that “The university’s white and Asian American student populations have increased, while all others have declined—some even down to zero, according to MIT.”

While MIT is to be lauded for actually releasing its numbers, the picture is more complicated than MIT and the media let on: it depends heavily on how one defines “diversity.” As MIT and the media are using it, the term seems to mean “representative of the national population.” Asian Americans are a diverse group, representing many different cultures and ethnicities. But MIT and the media treat them as a monolith. To them, the diversity they bring as individuals of particular cultures and ethnicities is less important than their representativeness of the U.S. Asian-American population as a whole.

Trump’s Ridiculers Haven’t Learned Their Lesson Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-ridiculers-havent-learned-their-lesson/

The impulse to mock every word out of Trump’s mouth sometimes exposes his critics as the ignorant ones, as with recent reactions to his space-defense proposal.

Donald Trump has once again said something about space. And according to the former president’s reflexive critics, it is positively hilarious.

“One of my proudest achievements in my first term was to create Space Force, the first new branch of the armed forces in over 70 years; it’s a big deal,” Trump said in a Monday address to the National Guard Association conference in Detroit. With that legacy achievement in his pocket, Trump announced a plan to build on it. “I agree that the time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” he said. In addition, “We’re going to build a great Iron Dome for missile defense around our nation.”

Trump’s skeptics are enjoying a hearty guffaw over the former president’s latest proposal. “Trump’s campaign has earthly problems,” read Politico’s gratuitously impish headline, “but he’s focusing on outer space.” Trump “promises to waste BILLIONS of tax dollars,” the super PAC American Bridge remarked. Indeed, the former president backed the creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces devoted to low-earth orbit only “because he thought it sounded cool,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen posited. And what’s with the Iron Dome talk? “I have a hunch it’s because he likes the words ‘iron’ and ‘dome,’” he speculated.

This fits a pattern, but by now, Trump’s hecklers should have trained themselves out of exhibiting it. It was obvious from the moment it was proposed that a new branch of the armed forces devoted to exo-atmospheric operations was necessary, if only because space had already become a theater of war. Likewise, creating a “a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” as Trump proposed, is a remedy to an unworkable proposal offered by Joe Biden.

Israel Launches Major Operation against Iran’s West Bank Proxies Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/israel-launches-major-operation-against-irans-west-bank-proxies/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

I’ve been contending that, rather than launch a major war it would lose in devastating measure, Iran has been conducting calibrated operations against Israel — trying to terrorize, exhaust, and effectively contract the territory of Israel by a thrum of violence on multiple fronts, knowing the Biden administration’s obsession about avoiding “escalation” of the conflict constrains Israel’s response.

The latest hot spot is Judea and Samaria — the West Bank, in which 3 million Palestinians are governed semiautonomously by the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas (now in the 19th year of his four-year term), and where jihadist Iran backs such proxies as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas (which controls Gaza but maintains a foreboding presence in the West Bank).

Israel has now commenced major combat operations against these jihadist strongholds. On Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces deployed hundreds of troops, supported by air power, in an effort to dismantle terror platforms.

To recap, on October 7, Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza in the southwest, where it has been supplied via Egypt and where the fighting continues. Within 24 hours of Hamas’s attack, Hezbollah stepped up strikes across Israel’s northern border from its bases in Lebanon, where Iran has supplied it with over 150,000 missiles, thanks in part to Iran’s long-standing presence in neighboring Syria, propping up the barbaric Assad regime. In the interim, from over the southeast horizon, Israel has been subjected to continuous aerial aggression — hundreds of attacks — by the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen.

Concurrently, Iran has been turning the West Bank into yet another front, this one on Israel’s east, capitalizing on weapons-smuggling routes through Jordan. The Long War Journal reports that at least nine terrorists were killed in fighting that surged on Monday, with IDF forces “dismantling explosives planted under the roads, and confiscating large quantities of weapons.”

Armed with heavy firepower, Venezuelan gang of illegals seizes control of entire apartment complex in Aurora, CO By Olivia Murray

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/08/armed_with_heavy_firepower_venezuelan_gang_of_illegals_seizes_control_of_entire_apartment_complex_in_aurora_co.html

Is Aurora, Colorado home to our first official “no-go” zone?

“Disturbing new footage from Aurora, Colorado reveals that an illegal immigrant gang has completely seized control of an entire apartment complex. This gang, originating from Venezuela through the Biden-Harris open border policy, is deeply involved in human smuggling, brutal… Show more+”

Seeing as these men are reportedly from the socialist Venezuela, Tim Walz might just consider this “neighborly” behavior—but the American neighbors are fleeing as quickly as possible. Per a report from a local Colorado news outlet:

The video was shot in the building where Cindy and Edward Romero lived until Wednesday. FOX31 caught up with them as they loaded up their stuff and moved out.

‘It’s been a nightmare and I can’t wait to get out of here,’ former resident Cindy Romero said.

The Romeros say the trouble started when a large number of migrants began moving in.

Government Shutdown Possible Next Month if Proof of Citizenship Bill Added to Must-Pass Continuing Resolution By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/28/government-shutdown-possible-next-month-if-proof-of-citizenship-bill-added-to-must-pass-continuing-resolution/

Democrats are prepared to shutdown the government next month over common-sense voter security measures attached to a must-pass continuing resolution (CR).

The CR is required to keep to keep the government funded past Sept. 30, and House conservatives may use it to force consideration of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, the Hill reported. The bill, if passed, would make it mandatory for states to obtain proof of citizenship to register voters and require states to purge noncitizens from voter rolls.

Democrats strongly oppose all voter integrity measures, arguing that they aren’t necessary and make it harder for legal citizens to vote.

The House passed the SAVE Act on July 10 with a majority of 216 Republicans and five Democrats.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has yet to take the proof of citizenship bill up in the Senate.

“Today 198 House Democrats voted against preventing illegal aliens from voting in American elections,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) after the vote last month. “Over the past four years, Joe Biden has welcomed millions upon millions of illegals into the country knowing that noncitizens only have to check a box to vote in a federal election.”

Earlier this month, the House Freedom Caucus urged Johnson to attach the the SAVE Act to next month’s spending legislation. With the November election on the line, Republicans in both chambers have joined the chorus.

Although the Democrat-led Senate is expected to reject the package, the Speaker is taking the idea seriously, telling the press last week that discussions are ongoing to “build consensus to come up with the final decision.”

“I can verify for you that the SAVE Act is a big part of this conversation,” Johnson said. “And it is not just the Freedom Caucus—it is members across the conference who share the same concern that we do about this. And we believe it’s one of the — perhaps the most urgent issue, the most imminent threat facing the country, is the integrity of this election cycle.”

On the GOP Senate side however, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office, according to Axios, has been privately pushing against attaching the SAVE Act to the September spending bill.

Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) said this week that he disagrees with Senate GOP leadership on this, arguing there is no good argument against it.

New Rules for Radicals: How to Reinvent Kamala Harris The complete Harris makeover requires fifteen radical rules followed to the letter. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/29/new-rules-for-radicals-how-to-reinvent-kamala-harris/

How do accomplished radicals elect a mediocre far-left presidential candidate?

The task might at first seem impossible.

Kamala Harris is currently a radical incumbent vice president. For more than three years, she was second in command to an unprecedentedly unliked Democrat president, his failed policies, and his unpopular record.

Harris herself had compiled a hard-left trail over her own entire career while loudly boasting indiscreetly to leftist audiences of being proudly “woke” and “radical.”

Most challenging for a Harris candidacy makeover was the long, entrenched Democratic Party’s reluctance to remove a debilitated President Biden from the Democratic ticket.

Why?

Because Harris was deemed such a liability that she had become a Spiro Agnew-like insurance policy for a failing Biden.

Until just recently, Democrats had considered an unpopular and enfeebled Biden nonetheless far preferable to an incoherent, lightweight, and widely ridiculed potential replacement Vice President Harris.

After all, she had never before entered a presidential primary. She never won a single delegate by voting. She failed miserably as a candidate in 2020.

And she co-owns the unpopular record of an even more unpopular president.

This Week Today Current Events from Israel Rabbi Ben Packer

https://mailchi.mp/dd9d88d97a17/israel-current-events***

In incredible twists of irony that would even shock Jewess Alanis Morissette, Israeli forces rescued an Israeli Muslim Arab hostage this week from a Hamas tunnel in Southern Gaza. Why Hamas took this guy hostage in the first place is anyone’s guess. And he’s not the only one. There are still more Arabs being held. Farhan al-Qadi, from Rahat in the Negev and married to two wives with a slew of kids, was reportedly treated very similarly to the Jewish Israeli hostages. How woke of Hamas – no Arab privilege. 

The actual details of the rescue remain somewhat murky, but I would like to offer my own suggestion. In a recent misguided campaign, certain elements within the Haredi community began generating messages about their opposition to National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Jewish prayer activity on the Temple Mount – IN ARABIC! This is not the first time in history that folks have thought that potential Jew killers would spare them if they were the “right kind of Jews”.  Well, you communicate in Arabic and G-d answers you with Arabic. Very fortunate for our Bedouin friend Farhan. 

Obviously Mr. Al-Qadi speaks Arabic, so there are hopes that much intelligence about other hostages and Hamas will be gathered from him. Intelligence gathered from a captured terrorist led this week to the recovery of the body of an Israeli soldier killed on Oct. 7th. Sgt. Shaked Dahan, hy’d, was killed while fighting the terrorists from his tank that was stationed near the Jewish community of Nir Oz. 

Despite what leftist defeatist propaganda would have folks believe, Israeli forces are making serious headway in Gaza.

Germany Vows ‘Knife Control’ After ISIS Refugee Slashes Throats at Diversity Festival ‘Knife Free Zones’ will stop Islamic terrorists. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/germany-vows-knife-control-after-isis-refugee-slashes-throats-at-diversity-festival/

After a Syrian Muslim refugee slashed the throats of a few middle aged people at the Festival of Diversity, the German government has announced that it will ban knives over three inches long.

The ISIS terrorist was one of over a million migrants who had invaded Germany while claiming to be “refugees”. The migrant was also one of the many scheduled to be deported, but was not.

All that the Muslim terrorist had to do to evade deportation was leave government housing when the authorities came looking for him. And then when the military age Arab Muslim migrant came back, the deportation order had expired and he couldn’t be deported. Undeported Muslim refugees have been one of the largest sources of terrorism,crime and violence in Europe.

So the German government is proposing a ban on knives over three inches.

After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

Right now, German people can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long, the law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.

However the authorities are also proposing ‘knife free’ zones around railway stations and other areas where stabbings and slashings tend to happen to finally put an end to the violence.

ON “FREEDOM” SYDNEY WILLIAMS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

The word freedom is inherent to our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is ingrained in what it means to be an American: “And so let freedom ring,” spoke Martin Luther King on August 28, 1963, “from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire…” The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word: “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint,” which is not too different from the definition Noah Webster assigned the word in his 1828 Webster’s Dictionary: “A state of exemption from the power or control of another.” Freedom from fear and freedom from want (two of FDR’s “Four Freedoms”) are offerings of the state, but they do not meet the classical definition of freedom.

Democrats see the state as providing the conditions, through rules, laws, and regulations, that allow individuals opportunities – what are now called “positive” freedoms. The Swiss-French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed that men are born free but “everywhere he is in chains.” So the state exists to guarantee his liberty and freedom from the restraints of society. Without the state, he believed, there is no freedom. Voltaire disagreed. The state can be a trap: “It is difficult to free fools from chains they revere.”

Republicans define freedom, in accordance with John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, as natural rights, characterized by the absence of external (the state) constraints on individual freedoms. These freedoms are now referred to as “negative” freedoms. Locke, two generations earlier than Rousseau, had argued that people are naturally free and equal, and have a right to life, liberty and property that are independent of society’s laws, ideas borrowed by Thomas Jefferson in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” The Bill of Rights, adopted in December 1791, exemplified individual freedom. The colonists had lived under a tyrannical king. Fearful of autocracy that could stem from a strong central government, they desired a limited, federalist government, one composed, as Lincoln later said, “of, by and for the people.”  In a September 25th, 1961 address to the United Nations’ General Assembly, President Kennedy warned: “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”