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September 2024

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s War Is Against Hezbollah, Not The Lebanese People by Bassam Tawil *****

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20968/war-against-hezbollah

On October 8, 2023, the very day after Hamas attacked, Hezbollah opened a “second front” against Israel to help Hezbollah’s brothers in Hamas.

On September 19, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah promised that his organization’s terrorist attacks on Israel would continue until the war in Gaza ended. Hezbollah, he said, will continue supporting the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “no matter what the consequences are, what the sacrifices are, what scenarios will unfold.” Nasrallah further threatened that Israelis who have evacuated from their homes will not be allowed to return, implying that Hezbollah might be planning to invade and occupy Israel’s north.

The war in the Gaza Strip could end tomorrow if Hamas would lay down its weapons and release the 101 Israelis hostages it is still holding, only about half of whom are thought to be alive. Hamas, nonetheless, seems to have chosen to fight to the last Palestinian. Hamas evidently does not care if thousands of Palestinians are killed in the war. Its main objective is to hold onto power.

How would the US respond if a terrorist organization in Mexico began launching hundreds of missiles and drones into American cities?… How would France respond if its cities came under attack from terrorists based in neighboring countries… Would the French call for negotiations with the terrorists, or would they practice their right to self-defense?

Hezbollah has decided to destroy Lebanon and sacrifice a large number of Lebanese civilians to keep Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip. It has left Israel with no choice but to wage a counterterrorism offensive to defend its own citizens. After Hamas brought a nakba (catastrophe) to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah is bringing the Lebanese people another.

Some in the international media are misrepresenting the recent round of fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist organization, Hezbollah, as a war between Israel and Lebanon. This, however, is not a war between Israel and the Lebanese people. Rather, it is a war between Israel and a heavily armed terrorist group that has created a state within a state in Lebanon and is acting on orders from the mullahs in Tehran to advance their goal of destroying the “Zionist entity.” This war was initiated 11 months ago by Hezbollah in support of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, another Iran-backed proxy based in the Gaza Strip.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Cats of Springfield Roger Franklin

By on September 25th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/features/america/the-cats-of-springfield/

What shocks most about Springfield, Ohio, is that there’s nothing shocking about the place at all. This is not as promised, for all the way here, over the Appalachians and down into the rolling corn carpets of the plains, the radio brought word of chaos and strife, of Klansmen on the way and neo-Nazis too, locked-down schools, bombs, missing cats and Haitians cowering in their basements. And of course there was much hissing at Donald Trump, who started it all by doing Springfield the disservice of painting the town as the Meowschwitz of the Midwest.

“They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the dogs!” he fairly yelled during the second debate, prompting an immediate fact-check and subsequent blitz of denials that any such thing was happening or had ever happened. From the BBC to the Hindustan Times, that Trump had bared his vile, lying, racist soul was affirmed in report after report. How could he say such a terrible thing! Legacy Media and the left generally were so offended, the spirit of noisy outrage once again upon them, they seemed almost jubilant, for it must surely be the moment when Orange Man, finally and once and for all, made himself unelectable. Impeachments, confected scandals, bent New York judges and 34 criminal convictions, none of that has put him in the longed-for orange jumpsuit. Instead social media’s cat-themed AI memes were positive – Trump grabbing pussies of another kind — and in the polls he either lost no ground or gained a point of two. Ten days after the debate, according to the New York Times’ latest survey, he was four to five points up in three key Sun Belt states whose Electoral College votes would almost seal the deal on November 5.

Trump’s supporters weren’t fussed, and neither at a glance are the good citizens of Springfield. Speaking as an eye witness this past week, let me say you couldn’t find a nicer, more polite, or seemingly pacific town, or in the cycles of its history and fortunes a more typical Rust Belt city. Apart from the incidence of homicidal driving that is, which in a further testament to local civility doesn’t prompt the same volume of horns and curses you would hear just about anywhere else were someone to shoot a red light and execute a weaving right-angle turn through four lanes of oncoming traffic. Quadrant’s mobile office survived that particular close encounter, just, which happened no more than a mile to two past the sign that says ‘Welcome to Springfield’. An increasingly and quietly qualified welcome, as it happens.

In Springfield, to describe a neighbour as ‘rude’ is to utter a damning appraisal, so take ingrained good manners as a given and then mull a recent poll conducted in nearby Dayton. Less than three years ago 70 per cent of residents said they would have no objection were a migrant family to move in next door. Today, officially, it is 57 per cent, but likely lower if you consider those respondents who preferred not confirming to a stranger that they have had their fill of foreigners. In Dayton it is the Congolese. Back in Springfield, half an hour away, Haitians. And in many other midsize towns and other small cities where similar demographic upheavals are playing out there is an undeniable disquiet, which helps to explain the allegations of kittynapping, dog-eating and dusky poachers praying on ducks and geese in municipal parks.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The West’s reckless dishonesty over Lebanon Why won’t the political and media establishment tell us the truth: that Hezbollah started this awful war? Brendan O’Neill *****

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/24/the-wests-reckless-dishonesty-over-lebanon/

If a keffiyeh-adorned posh kid on a leafy campus were to hold forth on the Israel-Lebanon clash without once saying the word ‘Hezbollah’, none of us would be surprised. To the West’s à la mode loathers of Israel, the Jewish State is responsible for every ill in the Middle East, and its foes are always blameless. But for a world leader to do it, to pontificate on this bloody battle without mentioning the ruthless terror outfit whose rocket fire started it, is unforgivable.

Step forward President Emmanuel Macron. On Friday, in the aftermath of Israel’s pagers attack on Hezbollah militants and the firing of missiles by both sides, he said France stands with Lebanon and feels ‘grief for all civilian victims of [the] attacks’. He said he’d spoken to the key parties to the war, ‘from Israel to Iran’, and told them to de-escalate. There was one party he neglected to mention, however. Which is odd given it’s the party that started the war by raining rockets on Israel from 8 October 2023 onwards – in solidarity with the racist pogromists of Hamas – and in the process drove 60,000 Jews from their homes, destroyed land and massacred children. As the Times of Israel put it: he ‘made no explicit mention of Hezbollah’.

As oversights go, it’s a shocker. It’s like gabbing about the West’s intervention in Raqqa without saying ‘ISIS’ or lamenting 9/11 but forgetting to mention a certain Islamist death cult. Is it any wonder that in a reportedly tense phone call between Macron and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter said ‘instead of putting pressure on Israel, it’s time for France to increase pressure on Hezbollah’? Or at least to mention Hezbollah. That would be a start: saying out loud the name of the Iranian proxies who’ve been battering the Jewish State with missiles for a year in a show of support for the worst act of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.

Macron’s post-pagers commentary may have been bizarre but it wasn’t surprising. In handwringing over a war without referring to the war’s instigators, without namechecking that self-styled ‘Army of God’ whose destruction of Israeli homes and murder of Druze children gave rise to this latest round of hostilities, he was doing what many in the West have done. Namely, ripped this battle from its historical and moral context. Depicted it as an act of unilateral Israeli evil. Worse, absolved Hezbollah, implicitly, of responsibility for this horror show by either playing down its role or outright redacting its name from their pompous virtue-signalling.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo The Real Questions of the Immigration Debate Recent migrant scandals force us to consider who, how, and how much.

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-real-questions-of-the-immigration-debate

Political campaigns are symbolic ventures, designed to drive attention to certain issues and to marshal facts, language, and emotion to deliver a material advantage. From Cicero’s campaign for the consulship to Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns for the presidency, it has always been thus.

This is a useful lens through which to view the current immigration debate. For several weeks, two migrant-related stories have dominated national attention: Venezuelan gang members apparently seizing apartments in Aurora, Colorado, and tensions resulting from large-scale Haitian migration in Springfield, Ohio. Beneath the surface of their rhetorical heat, the controversies point to three key questions of immigration policy: who, how, and how much.

Let’s first clear away some misconceptions. Both Trump and Harris’s stated views on immigration—which may not, of course, reflect their actual views—are more nuanced than commonly portrayed. In 2021, Harris warned illegal migrants that “if you come to our border, you will be turned back,” acknowledging, at least rhetorically, that Americans have the right to decide who enters the country. Likewise, Trump, despite his restrictionist reputation, often interleaves calls to “build the wall” with appeals to build a “big, beautiful door.” In other words, between the candidates, the questions of who, how, and how much are ordinal, rather than categorical.

The first and most controversial of those questions is “who.” Progressives believe that human beings are interchangeable, and that all differences are socially constructed and ultimately arbitrary. At first glance, this position seems grounded in the theory of natural right encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase, “all men are created equal.”

But this ignores a critical distinction. Yes, all men are born equal—that is, they are all born with the same human fundamentals—but this does not imply that all cultures, or civilizations, are equal. Culture is the product of tradition, not unmediated nature. Among the principles that cultures adopt and inculcate in their members, some are better, others are worse; some are compatible with America’s traditions, some are not. For American immigration policy, this means that the “who” matters.

The question of “who” has historically involved considering migrants’ national origin. A more refined approach would include other characteristics, such as educational attainment, employment history, language skills, and cultural values. The United States, which has an interest in admitting immigrants capable of integration and economic productivity, is well within its rights to prefer, say, an English-speaking software developer from Venezuela over a violent, uneducated gang member from the same country.

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EDUCATION, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Coming Election’s Effect on Education We know what Harris will do, but what about Trump? By Larry Sand

By on September 25th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/25/the-coming-elections-effect-on-education/

At the recent Donald Trump-Kamala Harris debate, the subject of education was nonexistent. Despite its hot button nature, the moderators did not broach the subject, and some parents are angry.

Michele Exner, a senior advisor at Parents Defending Education, commented that despite student literacy having “hit a crisis point,” those who were already struggling before the COVID-19 pandemic are being failed now. Yet, the moderators did not ask one single question about education. “They completely ignored one of the top issues parents are worried about.”

Interestingly, Trump, who has been known to wander off script, never brought it up. While he managed to insist that people in Springfield, OH, are eating cats and dogs, the subject of education never crossed his lips. (Thankfully, at least he didn’t erroneously claim, as he did to Moms for Liberty, that schools decide if your child is going to have a gender-changing surgery.)

The debate aside, Harris’s thoughts on education are no mystery. In a nutshell, she is a big government, anti-school choice, teacher union acolyte. She favors the Biden Title IX rewrite, which requires that schools treat students who suffer or think they suffer from gender dysphoria as though they were the opposite sex. The revision also stipulates that male students who identify as female must be allowed access to facilities designated for females, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and be allowed to participate in women’s sports and organizations.

Harris also wants to expand child tax credits, increase Title I funding, and abolish (essentially nonexistent) book bans, asserting, “We want to ban assault weapons. They want to ban books.”

She also wants to spend taxpayer dollars on electric school buses, is against any effort that weakens public schools (meaning she opposes parental freedom), and ensures the maintenance of the Department of Education. She nonsensically claims that the DOE “funds our public schools.”

Lest there be any doubt about her leanings, Harris gave a speech to the American Federation of Teachers on the last day of the union’s yearly convention in July. She thanked AFT president Randi Weingarten for her “long-standing friendship” and boasted about how she “led [the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort] to eliminate barriers to (labor) organizing in both public and private sectors.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden-Harris Admin to Waive Visas for Terror State That Harbored 9/11 Mastermind If there’s any country that should require visas, full body scans and bomb-sniffing dogs to enter, it’s Qatar. by Daniel Greenfield

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-harris-admin-to-waive-visas-for-terror-state-that-harbored-9-11-mastermind/

Qatar harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and tipped him off when we came to get him.

According to the intelligence community, Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, its former interior minister and minister of Islamic affairs, was an Al Qaeda sympathizer who had harbored Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. When the FBI arrived in Qatar to arrest him, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was transported away on a special Qatari government jet with blacked out windows.

Qatar currently harbors Hamas, is an ally of Iran, and enabled the Taliban. It’s a major backer of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Al Jazeera network was a Jihadist video dump for everyone including Osama bin Laden. And then there are the funds that were going to Al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda ally in Syria, out of Qatar.

If there’s any country on the planet where entry to the United States should require visas, full body scans and bomb-sniffing dogs, it’s Qatar.

But instead, the Biden-Harris administration decided to waive visas for one of the worst Islamic terror states in the world.

The United States said Tuesday it will waive visa requirements for citizens of Qatar, making the close Gulf partner the first Arab country to clear the hurdle.

The energy-rich Gulf monarchy cleared the “stringent security requirements” to become the 42nd member of the visa waiver program, the Department of Homeland Security announced.

What did the “stringent security requirements” consist of for a state that is actively harboring Islamic terrorists?

Million dollar checks to the right people?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Education for Freedom, Not DEI The dire urgency for access to alternative ideas. by Bruce Thornton

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/education-for-freedom-not-dei/

Two Supreme Court decisions in 2023 struck down the use of race-based admission to colleges and universities, and proscribed various proxies for race like admission essays. But just a year out, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA),” who represented the Asian-American applicants before the court, “suspects this [violation of the rules] about Yale, Princeton and Duke universities, and on Tuesday it asked the schools for information on how they chose the current freshmen who will graduate in the class of 2028.”

Having spent more than 50 years of my life in universities, I’ve had a front-row seat for observing how universities over the years have juked their admission criteria to make sure they admitted enough “protected classes,” which means anybody except white males. In my university, for example, even after California in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which forbade the explicit use of race, the admissions and hiring process still comprised numerous opportunities for evaluators to discern the applicant’s race.

The former “Affirmative Action Officer,” for example, required the hiring committee to document each member’s sex and race, as well as the applicants’. After Prop 209, the university didn’t observe the law, but merely changed the title to the “EEOC Officer,” who still gathered the same data that were inappropriate if the process was truly merit-based, while reminding everybody that the federal agency Big Brother was watching.

So those experiences made me skeptical when “Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that students must be admitted ‘based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race’ and that ‘what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.’”

But the really damaging idea connected to affirmative action came from an earlier Supreme Court decision and still remains today. Despite the blatant violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, these race-based policies were given the Supreme Court’s imprimatur in its 1978 Bakke decision. The court didn’t, as it should have, proscribe preferences based on race, but just numerical quotas, which were easily circumvented to reach the same end––choosing by race rather than merit.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Righteous War on Hezbollah Rich Lowry

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/israels-righteous-war-on-hezbollah/

The Jewish state is under no obligation to tolerate the intolerable.

Israel is supposed to tolerate the intolerable.

A terror group has launched thousands of missiles into the Jewish state over the last year — catalyzed by a hideous pogrom against Israel carried out by another terror group — and we are told that it is Israel, finally hitting back in earnest, that is dangerously escalating the situation.

Since the Hamas atrocities on October 7, Lebanon-based Hezbollah has fired roughly 8,000 rockets at Israel. These indiscriminate attacks have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee the north of the country. In July, a missile killed twelve children and teenagers who were playing soccer in the Golan Heights, a random massacre with no military purpose whatsoever.

Israel retaliated for the horror in the Golan Heights but has generally absorbed Hezbollah’s attacks, since it’s been focused on the war against Hamas to its south while the Biden administration has been working to stay its hand in the north.

The theme, as ever, is that the Jewish state is expected to accept as background noise unprovoked attacks on its sovereign territory that no other state would ever abide.

What other country is asked to bear the rocketing of its civilian population as the price for faux regional comity?

Israel won’t abide by these rules, and nor should it. It began turning up the heat against Hezbollah with its Mission Impossible–worthy attacks on Hezbollah operatives via their pagers and other electronic devices.

The pager attack was an experiment in whether Israel could carry out perhaps the most carefully calibrated counterterrorist operation in the modern age and still get accused of committing war crimes. Sure enough, AOC and others have condemned the Jewish state.

Israel hits terrorist targets from the air — and it’s accused of war crimes.

Israel goes in on the ground — and it’s accused of war crimes.

Israel does neither, opting instead to target terrorists by using their own devices against them — and it’s accused of war crimes.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Zelensky’s Inexplicable and Inexcusable Partisanship By Michael Brendan Dougherty

By on September 25th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/zelenskys-partisanship/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to campaign with Kamala Harris and to specifically attack the Republican vice-presidential nominee — preemptively blaming J. D. Vance for a global war — is unwise for many reasons. By appearing at what was in effect a campaign event for Democrats, the Ukrainian president himself is now deliberately and knowingly contributing to the political polarization of this issue in a way that can only work to his country’s detriment. 

There are two possible explanations for this bizarre stunt: One, Zelensky has concluded that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán is correct in saying that a Trump victory means that U.S. aid to Ukraine will immediately be zeroed to nothing. Or two, the Harris campaign is using its own leverage over Zelensky to make him a campaign surrogate, hoping to complete its pitch to Nikki Haley–style Republican voters who overwhelmingly support Ukraine, even if this stunt does more damage to Ukraine’s cause among Republicans generally.

To the first point, there is little evidence Donald Trump will simply cut off U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump has been cagey about his views on supporting Ukraine, but there are some clues about his wanting to keep his options open. First, he backed Republican Mike Johnson in the House as Johnson signed onto a Ukraine aid package. Second, Vance, as his running mate, has stuck to the script set by Trump. Even though Vance went out of his way to debate and cajole his own party on this issue when he was in the Senate, he did not mention Ukraine once in his own convention speech, and on the stump he repeats Trump’s views, not his own. Trump has said only that the war wouldn’t have happened if he were in office, and that it will end shortly after he is elected. He has also implied that he could, if he wanted to, make worse problems for Vladimir Putin.

To the second point, the deployment of Zelensky on the American political front amounts to a tacit admission that perhaps Ukraine isn’t vital to America’s interests. If it were, Democrats would not make it an acceptable sacrifice in a presidential campaign.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Women, Children, Disabled Pay The Price For Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion Sally C. Pipes

By on September 25th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/25/women-children-disabled-pay-the-price-for-obamacares-medicaid-expansion/

Obamacare greatly expanded Medicaid eligibility. As a result, about 20 million able-bodied, working-age adults who were previously ineligible are now enrolled in the program. 

But as a new report from the Paragon Health Institute makes clear, their gains have come at the expense of the pregnant women, children, and people with disabilities that Medicaid was established for. 

The harm to these legacy beneficiaries, and to taxpayers, will only mount unless Congress fixes the perverse incentives that Obamacare created for the nation’s flagship health program for the poor.

Obamacare directed states to expand Medicaid eligibility to able-bodied adults earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line. Forty states and the District of Columbia have complied.

Previously, eligibility had been restricted to vulnerable people — like nursing home residents with virtually no assets, or minor children, or pregnant women who lacked other health coverage. 

Obamacare incentivized states to enroll able-bodied adults by having the federal government cover most of the cost. 

For the legacy Medicaid population, the feds normally pick up between half and three-quarters of enrollees’ health care costs; states foot the rest of the bill. For the expansion population, Washington initially picked up 100% of the cost. Now the federal government covers 90%. 

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