https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/there-is-a-frightening-defect-in-the-israel-hamas-deal-the-terrorists-live-to-fight-on/ar-AA1xpuZa?ocid=winp2fptaskbarhover&cvid=3ff8207ea26c41a4edbb93a2a0de580d&ei=102 On October 7 2023, Hamas murdered more than 1,200 people in Israel and abducted 251. The deal which begins its enactment tomorrow, provides for the release, in phases, of the estimated 94 hostages still held by Hamas, of whom, the Israeli government calculates, 34 are dead. In return, Israel will let hundreds of Palestinian […]
https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-the-left-disrupt-the-inauguration
Left-wing radicals have been mobilizing near the nation’s capital ahead of the January 20 inauguration, which has been moved indoors. Since summer, we have tracked D.C.’s radical networks—their movements, methods, and potential for violence. After George Floyd’s death in 2020, these groups learned that street protests could yield political gains. Now, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they’re weighing their options.
This network is decentralized, adaptable, and steeped in organizing social unrest. Black Lives Matter messaging is fading, replaced by anti-Israel rhetoric. As Inauguration Day approaches, Communist militants and members of Antifa-aligned hubs have suggested storming the Capitol, bringing “direct action” to the streets, and obstructing law enforcement. If these demonstrations unfold, they will have been carefully planned and ideologically incited by professionals, some visible, others hidden.
The network spans college professors, nonprofit leaders, and masked and often troubled militants willing to engage in violence. Those less directly involved play a sophisticated inside-outside game, relying on prestigious NGOs to provide financing and logistics while maintaining arm’s length control over the more radical elements, which do the dirty work.
Key components of this infrastructure include legal organizations, violent demonstrators, street medics, propaganda specialists, and safehouses, indoctrination centers, and publications. Though some Antifa-aligned groups from prior riots have gone underground or merged, a core network of the most committed activists—veterans and new recruits alike—remains active and prepared.
This is their unmasking.
The militant Left organizes in the light and in the shadows. In the light, the Left has built a significant above-ground infrastructure that preaches abstract ideals—liberation, justice, equality—but operates with a sharper edge behind the scenes.
This upper level includes organizations such as the Open Society Foundations, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Lawyers Guild. These groups support a well-funded network that includes dozens of interlocking organizations, providing a level of legitimate infrastructure and cover for smaller nonprofits and other groups, which sometimes fraternize with street-level activists. (We reached out for comment to most of the groups named in this piece; unless otherwise indicated, they did not respond.)
https://nypost.com/2025/01/16/opinion/douglas-murray-it-is-time-to-eliminate-hamas-and-bring-our-hostages-back-home/
“Bring them home” has been the slogan of the hostage families in Israel since October 7, 2023.
But when Hamas murdered 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, and when it took 254 people hostage, including 12 Americans, there should have been a different slogan: “Give them back. Now.”
Since that day, so many opportunities have been missed.
On October 8, Joe Biden could have called up the governments in Qatar, Iran and other rogue states and told them to get their friends in Hamas to hand over the hostages now.
Or else.
With the leverage the US has in the Middle East, a hardball approach against the Qataris, Iranians and Turks could have solved this mess 15 months ago.
Instead it has taken the pressure of the incoming Trump administration to get a deal agreed to.
It is still a bittersweet moment.
On the one hand, everyone except Hamas and its goons in the West must feel their hearts lift at the idea of the remaining hostages being released.
These are men, women and babies who did nothing wrong but have spent 15 months in the hell of Hamas captivity.
On the other hand, the deal includes the release of Palestinian prisoners, including murderers.
In the first round of releases, nine ill and wounded hostages will be exchanged for 110 Palestinian prisoners who are serving life sentences.
Just think about that.
An Israeli baby could be released in exchange for a dozen grown murderers.
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/trump-russia-advocacy/2025/01/14/id/1195050/
Former U.S. Senator Gordon Humphrey served on the Foreign Relations and the Armed Services Committees. He publishes a Russian-language YouTube channel, Nashi Emigranti, that tells America’s story to the Russian people.
The Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy document hit the nail on the head. “U.S. efforts to counter the exploitation of information by rivals have been tepid and fragmented.” Ironically, the Russian Academy of Sciences concurs, reporting in 2021 that the U.S. information war structure looks like “a dusty relic of a bygone era.” Both statements are factual and explain why the nation that invented the internet continues to lose the information war to despotic regimes. It should be no surprise that freedom has been retreating around the world for nearly two decades, imperiling our national security.
Nothing has changed significantly since the first Trump administration sounded the alarm. In his second term, with a Republican majority in each House, President-elect Trump has an opportunity to create a 21st century strategic messaging structure that can persuasively tell America’s story to the world while undermining despots by stoking the coals of discontent among those they misruled and abused. Think Putin, Xi, Khamenei, and Kim. The president should seize this new opportunity to put us on the offense in the battle of ideologies, a battle we must win or, in all likelihood, perish as a free and prosperous nation.
Broadly, our adversaries are on the attack, employing every means of hybrid warfare, from outright invasion, as in Ukraine, to sabotage, as in the severing of vital cables in the Baltic; to terrorism, as in the attempt, believed to be Russian, to hide incendiary devices in cargo meant for air shipment to the U.S.; to assassination plots, witness the November federal court indictment of three persons accused of plotting to kill Trump on behalf of Iran. In between increasingly frequent acts of attempted or actual violence, there is the daily poisoning of human minds by disinformation meant to confuse and demoralize. We’ve never faced anything like today’s hybrid war. But we’d better get used to it because it’s here to stay as long as there are evil regimes in the world.
To survive and triumph, we must bring to bear every instrument of national power. Trump has vowed to rebuild our armed forces, restore self-sufficiency in our defense industrial base, and protect essential infrastructure from cyberattacks. Those big programs reflect one of the president’s well-known business principles: Think big. But they will take years to accomplish.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/18/mark-carney-the-wrongest-man-at-the-wrongest-time-ever/
The politicization of business and capital markets has many fathers. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, one of the most prominent and unrelenting advocates for “sustainability” in investing, is often described as such. Klaus Schwab, the now-retired chairman and founder of the World Economic Forum, also often wears that title. So does the billionaire political gadfly Michael Bloomberg; so does R. Edward Freeman, the business professor and originator of “stakeholder theory;” and so do countless others who have worked diligently to advance ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance investing), DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and all the other efforts to make business and investing more “socially responsible” or less unfair or…whatever.
Of all those responsible for this abuse of business and capital markets, perhaps no man is more singularly responsible—yet nearly totally overlooked by ESG’s critics—than Mark Carney. Carney is a banking and economic giant. He was the Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013 and the Governor of the Bank of England from 2013-2020. It was in this latter capacity that, in September 2016, Carney gave one of the most important and influential speeches in the history of central banking. Appearing at an event in Berlin, Carney gave a very carefully and very confrontationally worded address, in which he addressed climate change and framed its mitigation in fiscal and fiduciary terms. “A wholesale reassessment of prospects, as climate-related risks are re-evaluated,” Carney intoned, “could destabilise markets, spark a pro-cyclical crystallisation of losses and lead to a persistent tightening of financial conditions: a climate Minsky moment.”
A “Minsky moment” is a market term named for the economist Hyman Minsky, which is used to identify the point at which a bull market has become so speculative and over-leveraged that it hits a peak and then tips over and crashes. What Carney meant by predicting a “climate-related” Minsky moment was that he—and others, presumably—believed that global capital markets were already overleveraged, already well overbought, given the inevitability of climate change. As a result, once investors started to understand the reality of the climate “crisis,” they would come to realize how foolish and speculative their investments in “unsustainable” businesses were, leading to a crash. Or to put it more simply, Carney—the Governor of the Bank of England—was warning global investors and politicians that they either had to force business in general to become environmentally sustainable immediately or could face commercial and economic Armageddon.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/17/will-trump-finally-kick-men-out-of-womens-sports/
Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.
Before US president-elect Donald Trump has even taken office, the Republicans are coming down hard on gender ideology. Trans athletes’ chances of beating women to scholarships, to medals and to a bloody pulp suffered a significant setback this week, when the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Bill was passed in the House of Representatives.
This bill is the first step in ensuring that schools receiving federal funding bar males from female sporting competitions. The legislation still needs to make it through the Senate to become law, but, interestingly, it did gain support from two Democrats. It seems that at least some left-leaning politicians are beginning to return to reality.
Of course, rather than being reported as a measure to ensure safety, privacy and fairness, ‘progressive’ media outlets from CNN to the Guardian described the proposed act as a ‘ban’ on transgender athletes. But what the bill ultimately aims to do is to amend Title IX – the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools – to define sex as ‘reproductive biology and genetics at birth’ rather than being based on magic gender words.
Transgender Delaware representative Sarah McBride (a white male politician whose election was widely heralded as ‘making history’ because he has long hair and wears a dress in public) claimed to be ‘mystified that this is a priority’. In fairness to the fella, it does seem strange that, when it comes to the trans vs women debate, the focus has been sport rather than, say, ensuring women in prison are no longer locked up with rapists.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-canadian-food-banks-collapse-canada-offers-3k-to-gaza-refugees/
Liberals claim that they care about other people, but the real mark of liberal governments is how little they care about their own people.
Times are hard in Canada under the corrupt radical Trudeau government.
As Canadians grapple with astronomical grocery prices, troublingly high numbers of people are flocking to food banks to feed their families. Last March alone, two million Canadians visited food banks—a staggering 90 per cent increase from 2019—and the most recent figures estimate that 12,000 new users access them every month. Food banks aren’t just frequented by unhoused and precariously employed folks anymore, either: now, one in five users has a steady job.
Faced with the deluge of need, community food programs across the country have begun closing their doors due to empty shelves
That means it’s the right time to bring a whole bunch of freeloading ‘refugees’ from terrorist Gaza to Canada.
The Liberal government will provide tax-free grants of $3,000 per adult and $1,500 per child to Gazan refugees arriving in Canada, the Department of Immigration announced Thursday…
Thus far, 4,782 applications have been approved, and 616 Gazans have arrived, typically as relatives of Canadian residents.
“While it is extremely difficult for people to exit Gaza at this time, Canada is making sure necessary support is in place for Gazans as they start to arrive in our country,” the department said.
The government has not disclosed the total cost of the refugee program.
“Canada is the only country in the world with a dedicated pathway for extended family members of its citizens or permanent residents in Gaza,” the department stated in a May 27 briefing note.
That’s not something to be proud of.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21321/iran-eu
Even though Iran keeps increasing its military support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — posing a significant threat to the European Union, the EU policy of appeasing the mullahs persists.
“These drones [in Russia] aren’t just a threat to Ukraine — they’re a threat to every NATO country bordering Russia.” — Henrik F. Rasmussen, executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security, politico.eu, November 13, 2023.
“The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was responsible for at least 11 attempted attacks in Europe between June 2018 and June 2024, making it clear Tehran sees Europe as one of the battlefields in its conflict with Israel and the West, going so far as to partner with organized crime to achieve its ends.” — Oliver Rolofs, Strategic security and communication expert and the director of the Austrian Institute for Strategic Studies and International Cooperation, politico.eu, October 9, 2024.
Europe is bankrolling Iran to devour it.
Even though Iran keeps increasing its military support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — posing a significant threat to the European Union, the EU policy of appeasing the mullahs persists.
The EU blithely continues to trade with Iran, the top state sponsor of terrorism. The Tehran Times bragged in a recent report that the country’s exports to the EU have increased by 28% in just 9 months:
“The Eurostat’s data show that Iran exported commodities worth €799 million to the union in the nine-month period of this year, while the figure was €623 million in the same time span of the previous year, IRNA reported.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/16/is-this-peace-or-appeasement/
Here’s a pretty good rule for international affairs: if a deal pleases neo-fascists, it’s probably a bad deal. If an agreement gets an army of anti-Semites dancing in the streets, it’s likely a poor agreement. That was my first thought upon seeing the Jew-killers of Hamas emerge from their tunnels in Gaza last night to celebrate the ceasefire deal struck with Israel: if they like it, then those of us who side with civilisation over the regressive tyranny of such merciless Islamists probably will not.
Of course there’s a thinness to Hamas’s bravado. Its crowing disguises the profound losses it has suffered in this war it started with its pogrom of 7 October 2023. Thousands of its militants are dead. Its leaders are too. Its allies in Hezbollah have been pummelled into insignificance. All Hamas has to show for its fascistic onslaught against the Jewish nation a year-and-a-half ago is the depletion of its racist army and the ruination of vast swathes of Gaza.
And yet its instinct to laud the deal is not wholly wrong. For it does seem to benefit Israel’s foes more than Israel. The Associated Press has seen a draft. It will be enacted in three phases. In the first phase, which will last for 42 days, hostilities will cease and Hamas will release just 33 of the 94 hostages it still holds. In return, Israel will set free around a thousand Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds of terrorists. As AP says, Israel is required to release ‘30 Palestinian prisoners for each civilian hostage and 50 for each female soldier’. Anyone who thinks it is a fair deal to swap 30 detainees, many of whom will be terrorists, for one child stolen from his home almost 470 days ago is in urgent need of a moral compass.
Israel will also commit to removing its troops from ‘populated areas’ and staying on the ‘edges of the Gaza Strip’. It is in those populated areas, of course, that Hamas militants are gathered. The overnight withdrawal of the opposing army will benefit them enormously. In Phase 2, which will also last 42 days, Hamas will release the remaining hostages in return for a ‘yet to be negotiated number of Palestinian prisoners’ and the IDF will initiate a ‘full withdrawal’ from Gaza. In Phase 3, the final act of the deal will take place: the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages will be returned to their grieving families.
We have to be honest: for those of us who support the Jewish nation against the medieval militants that wish to destroy it, this is a bad deal. It is hard to see it as anything other than a boon for Hamas and a blow to Israel. Over the next month, Israel will secure the return of 33 hostages, but Hamas will secure immeasurably more from the deal. Alongside the release of dangerous prisoners, Hamas will watch the IDF withdraw from Gaza’s fighting zones. It will win the breathing space to regroup, rearm and refortify after 15 months of war. Is this peace or appeasement?
Of course, we should not belittle the joy of the Israeli families who will finally have their loved ones returned. Or the sweet relief Gazans will enjoy once the hostilities that Hamas ignited are brought to a halt. These are good, human developments. Yet it is undeniable that the war aim of eliminating Hamas, a noble goal, has not only been temporarily halted but reversed. It seems that Israel must, after all, suffer a genocidal terror army on its doorstep. Can you think of any other nation that would be told to leave be a neighbouring army of racists that slaughtered its civilians and longs to slaughter more?
For a sense of how risky this deal is, consider that in 2011 Israel likewise agreed to the release of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in return for one IDF soldier abducted by Hamas. And among the released was Yahya Sinwar. He went on to become leader of Hamas in Gaza and a chief architect of the butchery of 7 October. Who is Israel releasing this time? What might they go on to do? The moral dilemma faced by the Jewish nation is almost unimaginable. Should it secure the return of its citizens even if that means releasing men who will plot the future slaughter of its citizens? That the Jewish State, alone among the nations, must make such a tragic calculation is nothing to celebrate.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/01/what_an_interesting_time_to_be_alive.html
A lot of people are anxious these days. They are worried about nuclear war, mass government surveillance, artificial intelligence, lab-created disease, central bank digital currencies — you name it! I’m worried about those issues, too. However, there is a part of me that relishes the opportunities we have to shape the future. This is an interesting time to be alive.
This is not the age of tranquility. There have been epochs for which that description might be apt — when people were born and died without experiencing much change during the course of their lives. The technologies that existed never advanced. The universe of human knowledge never expanded. Time stood more or less still, as if humanity were stuck in amber.
We’re not stuck in anything. The technological revolutions from the late nineteenth century forward have remade the world time and again. We’ve gone from telegraphs to telephones to cellular phones to smartphones. Mass communication has evolved from printed newspapers to radio broadcasts to television news to internet chatrooms, email, and social media. In the last twenty years, individuals have seized control over the instruments of mass communication — becoming self-created news reporters, entertainers, influencers, and celebrities. In the last ten years, governments and their corporate allies have tried desperately to claw back control over the mass media monopoly they once had.
Global wars have jumbled history’s trajectory and shifted the balance of power more than once. In some ways, World War II never truly concluded. An Iron Curtain demarcated the world for another half-century, and even thirty years after the Cold War, its battles rage on. Russia’s tense relationship with former Warsaw Pact members, China’s belligerent insistence on swallowing Taiwan, Israel’s generational defense of its sovereign borders, post-colonial Africa’s cauldron of bloody civil wars, and the continuing state of war between North and South Korea are but five of the most prominent examples of conflicts that have continued, in one form or another, for eighty years.
