Displaying posts published in

January 2025

Trump’s Suggestion to Resettle Gazans Is Quite Rational Eric Levine

NO URL…..ERIC LEVINE IS AN ATTORNEY IN NEW YORK

President Trump’s statement that resettling Palestinians living in Gaza “could be temporary or long term” has raised many eyebrows.

[Gaza is] literally a demolition site right now … So, I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change…You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing…You know over the centuries it’s had many, many conflicts.  And I don’t know, something has to happen.

Although Trump’s statement is controversial and an abhorrent nonstarter to some, his suggestion is actually quite rational.  The history of the Middle East and other regions around the world is full of examples of resettling refugees to give them a chance at a better life for themselves and future generations.

At a minimum, Gazans who want to leave should be given the opportunity to do so. As unlikely as that opportunity is, even more unlikely are the odds that Hamas will allow them to leave. They will be labeled as “traitors” and shot. Hamas has no intention of allowing any Gazan to resettle. Every Gazan is effectively a prisoner of Hamas.

For 75 years the Arab and Muslim worlds, with the open assistance of the United Nations, have waged war against Israel. Some Arab states have made peace with Israel. For other Muslim countries – such as Iran and its terror proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis – the effort to destroy Israel continues. As a critical component of that war, Hamas repeatedly uses Palestinian civilians as props and human shields in their propaganda war to show the world Israel’s “inhumanity” as it exercises its legitimate right of self-defense.

As Trump’s statement on resettlement makes clear, there is another path forward.

Throughout history, refugees have been offered asylum in host countries where they can start new lives.

ICE agents begin deportation raids in Chicago, Cook County By Kevin Bessler

https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/article_507b6012-dce4-11ef-9d56-abcd3aaa0b5d.html

The Trump administration is following through on promises to ramp up immigration enforcement efforts and Illinois is in the bullseye.  

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents made over a thousand arrests nationwide over the weekend, with many taking place in Cook County.

Border Czar Tom Homan, who was in Chicago this weekend, said for now they are focusing on criminals with arrest warrants and deportation orders. 

“Sanctuary cities lock us out of the jails,” Homan said on ABC’s ‘This Week’. “So instead of ICE being able to arrest the bad guy, that the criminal alien in the safety and security of a jail, where the officers are safe, the alien is safe, the public safe, sanctuary cities release him back in the community,” Homan said.

The actions come after Homan warned sanctuary cities across the U.S., including Chicago, that their policies will not prevent deportations, and will instead endanger communities, federal agents and illegal aliens.

Several immigrant advocacy groups in Chicago are suing the Trump administration and U.S. Immigration And Customs Enforcement. 

The Illinois Latino Agenda issued a statement in response to incorrect reports that ICE agents attempted to enter a school.

“Although it was later confirmed not to be ICE, it’s an example of confusion and misinformation that spreads when communities are being terrorized. The most helpless and vulnerable among us, our children, should not live in fear and their parents should not be afraid to send them to school,” the statement read. 

Trump Is off to a Great Start Trump’s bold actions on immigration, DEI, and fairness signal a high-energy, focused vision for America’s future, turning the tide and putting conservatives back on offense. By Christopher Roach

https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/28/trump-is-off-to-a-great-start/

Like most Trump supporters, I consider his first term a mixed bag, with the capstone being the rigged election of 2020. This was not all his fault, obviously, but there were failures of execution along the way. Things were often disorganized; disloyal people were put in positions of power, while quality outsiders were not invited into the fold. Trump faced relentless opposition from the Democrats within the Deep State and had to have eyes on the back of his head because of turncoat Republicans like Paul Ryan.

As I wrote in an earlier piece, “Trump’s presidency will have little permanent effect if he does not devote himself to the task of reform. The first order of business . . . will be to take full charge of the bureaucracy.”

He seems to have taken the criticism to heart that he was great on the big picture but poor in execution. This time around, everything is different. The last week has been a whirlwind of activity, including many executive orders, each one more impressive and revolutionary than the last.

This has been a week of wins, and Trump’s policy focus and high energy are good omens for future success.

Trump Takes on the Border Disaster

One of his more visible achievements has been executive action to halt the immigration crisis after Joe Biden’s disastrous policies allowed millions of unvetted and unskilled immigrants into our country. On day one, Trump shut down the ridiculous app that allowed otherwise illegal aliens to make an appointment to obtain long-term parole, during which they will wait years for hearings on fraudulent asylum claims.

There have also been high-visibility workplace raids. ICE says it is now working seven days a week, and the military is already getting involved in shoring up the border.

A Real Genocide in Sudan While the media was focused on a fake genocide. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-real-genocide-in-sudan/

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has now announced that a “genocide” has been going on in Sudan. He blames not the regular Sudanese army, but the rebels fighting that army — the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The media have been paying far too little attention to Sudan, where a real famine affecting close to 25 million people is now in progress. Twelve million people have been displaced in the country since 2023. As many as 150,000 people have been killed in the same period. But the international media haven’t wanted to pay attention to the real miseries in Sudan; they are determined, rather, to concentrate on the exaggerated miseries of life in Gaza, which we keep being told is “on the brink of famine,” but never quite goes over that brink. Charges including “genocide” and “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” are bruited about whenever Israel is mentioned. But in Sudan, there is no way to blame Israel, so the media keep the focus on Gaza — the gift that keeps on giving to the legions of Israel-haters.

However, Blinken’s description of a “genocide” in the Sudan — a real genocide, not the nonexistent one that UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and Pope Francis all want to blame Israel for committing in Gaza — has brought about a sudden renewal of interest in the Sudan. One hopes, and expects, that more attention will be given to that continuing conflict and that “real genocide” in the Sudan, about which much of the media has been withholding essential information. For what has not been clearly stated is this: it’s a “genocide” committed by well-armed Arabs belonging to the RSF, who are engaged in murdering defenseless black Africans.

The Irish President’s Holocaust Address Was a Predictable Disaster Michael Brendan Dougherty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-irish-presidents-holocaust-address-was-a-predictable-disaster/
The European impulse after the Holocaust is a kind of utopian death wish. The Zionist impulse is a thrilling will to live.

Above the expressed objections of the Jewish community in Ireland, Irish president Michael D. Higgins was invited to speak at the National Holocaust Memorial commemoration yesterday.

He managed to bungle it, of course. Twice he referred to the “attempted genocide” of the Holocaust. Not once in the last year has he qualified the word “genocide” when using it to describe Israel’s policy in Gaza. A granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor was physically dragged out of the ceremony.

Higgins gave what I have come to call the European religious answer to the Holocaust:

We must never lack the courage to challenge hatred and persecution in whatever forms they are sought to be manifested by promoting a world that is free from persecutions based on difference, such as faith or ethnicity, by embracing diversity, by working for equality, peace and justice, thus making possible a world that is free, too, from so many of the sources of war and conflict based on a distorted reflection of the ‘Other’.

Theologian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw such a peaceful state as being achievable through a species evolution in human consciousness, believing that humankind is not only capable of living in peace but by its very structure cannot fail eventually to achieve peace.

It’s hard to communicate to the Irish mind how offensive this is. The closest I can come is to say that this is preaching Raglan Road manners to kids who have to grow up in Crumlin. But it’s something worse than that.

The Covid Iconoclasts Were Right About Everything Noah Rothman

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-covid-iconoclasts-were-right-about-everything/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

Over the weekend, the CIA issued an updated assessment indicating that the agency now believes, albeit with low confidence, that Covid likely originated in a Chinese laboratory. That intelligence agency joins the Department of Energy and the FBI, both of which favor the lab-leak hypothesis.

It wasn’t that long ago that lending credence to that notion would have branded you a “conspiracy theorist,” and that was gentle treatment. In accordance with the elite consensus, social media outlets attempted to limit the reach of those who failed to summarily rule out that prospect. Heterodox voices at scientific institutions were defamed and intimidated by their colleagues. One unnamed whistleblower described by House Republicans as a “highly credible senior-level CIA officer” alleged that his colleagues who were amenable to the lab-leak theory were offered “a significant monetary incentive to change their position.” Too many in the scientific community led a concerted effort to mislead investigators, like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, and make them, in his words, a “victim of deception.”

Despite this history, the country responded to the CIA’s revelations with a gaping yawn. That’s understandable, even if it is regrettable. Those who knew long ago that the lab-leak theory had too much going for it to be so easily dismissed are underwhelmed by this late confirmation of their priors. Others who enforced the omertà around China’s role in the pandemic don’t want to dwell on their embarrassment. Thus, a conspiracy of silence has been replaced by a conspiracy of boredom. It should not be so. The unduly confident arbiters of American public discourse who raked dissenters over the coals — and whose faith in their own sagacity is matched only by their incuriosity — should be forced to confront their failures.

Desperate Dems Throw Eggs At Trump

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/28/desperate-dems-throw-eggs-at-trump/

After four years spent denying that inflation was a problem, Democrats are suddenly screaming at President Donald Trump for not having lowered the price of eggs already.

“Democratic lawmakers slam Trump for not making good on promise to ‘immediately’ lower food prices amid egg shortage,” shouts NBC News, pointing to a letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other leftist lawmakers who accuse Trump of backtracking on his promise to deal with Bidenflation.

This is all part of a coordinated – and rather pathetic – campaign by the left, which is saying things such as “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, egg prices in the United States have hit an all-time high,” “What is Trump going to do about the price of eggs?” and “Donald Trump lied, he did not bring down the price of eggs on day one.”

Social media “influencer” Harry Sisson posted on X that “Trump has been president for 3 days and egg prices are at all-time highs. TRUMP’S AMERICA!!!”

(Sisson is the same guy who last June posted that “Inflation is going down … and grocery prices are falling. Thank you, President Joe Biden!”)

What’s amusing – or depressing, depending on your perspective – is that all this handwringing is the result of a Consumer Price Index report released a week ago that found that egg prices are up almost 40% compared with last year.

There’s just one problem. That CPI report was about price increases in December 2024 – a month before Donald Trump took office. The more recent spate of egg shortages and price hikes is due to the avian flu.

Qatar’s ‘Day After’ Plan for Gaza: Keeping Hamas in Power by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21346/qatar-gaza-hamas-power

Qatar wants the Palestinian Authority (PA) government to collect the garbage, rebuild destroyed houses, and pay salaries to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while Hamas is busy rearming, regrouping and getting ready for the next attack on Israel.

[T]he PA government in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians in the West Bank, decided to suspend the broadcasts of the Qatar-owned Al-Jazeera television for supporting and promoting Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Israel and some Arab states had also shut down the broadcasts for the same reason.

The Qataris do not want the PA in the Gaza Strip to rein in Hamas and other terrorist groups, or to prevent attacks against Israel. Instead, they want the PA to act as a front to maintain Hamas’s hold on power — as a cover for keeping Hamas in power.

Qatar has one main purpose: to safeguard its friends in Hamas, continue promoting radical Islam, and deceive Westerners into believing that the Jihadists are a better alternative to the Arab world’s present regimes. Whether the new US administration will be as gullible as other Westerners in trusting Qatar remains to be seen.

Why does Qatar, the largest funder and sponsor of Hamas, have such a strong desire to restore the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the Gaza Strip? To guarantee Hamas’s continued domination of the Gaza Strip.

Qatar has no problem with the PA, which was expelled from the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007, taking up its duties there again as long as Hamas is permitted to maintain its grasp on power and preserve its security and military forces and capabilities.

The debasement of the Holocaust Auschwitz has been robbed of its historical and moral significance. Frank Furedi

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/the-debasement-of-the-holocaust/

On 27 January 1945, Soviet forces liberated those then still imprisoned at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. Eighty years on, millions of young people in the West know nothing about Auschwitz or indeed the Holocaust itself. They are ignorant of the gravest crime of the 20th century.

A recent survey has shown that one in nine young Germans has not heard of the Holocaust. A quarter cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. It also showed that ‘nearly half of American adults could not identify any killing sites of the Holocaust’.

A poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov in 2023 made for equally disturbing reading. It showed that more than a fifth of young Americans, aged between 18 and 29, agreed with the statement that ‘the Holocaust is a myth’, while a further 30 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed. That means that less than half of young Americans firmly believe the Holocaust actually happened.

This growing historical amnesia is worrying enough. But of even greater concern is the way in which the meaning of the Holocaust has been distorted and inverted by our cultural and political elites, and weaponised by anti-Israel zealots.

Indeed, Auschwitz itself – a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews – is fast being turned into something else: an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It is becoming Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an easy moral message.

Take UNESCO, arguably the most powerful international cultural institution in the world. In its official assessment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a World Heritage site, it talks of its ‘outstanding universal value’. It claims that the camp serves as a symbol of ‘humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century’.

To treat Auschwitz as a generic symbol of cruelty, as UNESCO has done, renders it totally banal. There are countless examples of humanity’s terrible cruelty throughout history, but there is only one Holocaust. Its unique historical significance derives from the fact it was an industrialised extermination campaign singularly directed at Jewish people. And it’s that meaning we are now in danger of losing altogether.

How Jews were turned into the ‘new Nazis’ Eighty years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust is now routinely weaponised against Israel. Daniel Ben Ami

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/27/how-jews-were-turned-into-the-new-nazis/

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, we are marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazis’ concentration camps. It ought to be an occasion for sombre reflection on the systematic extermination of six million Jews. A chance to contemplate the unique moral horror of the Holocaust.

But that is becoming more difficult than ever. And that’s because so many ‘progressives’ today are eroding the terrible significance of the Holocaust by casting Israel, and by extension Jews in general, as the new Nazis.

How did it come to this? How did the victims of the greatest evil in modern history come to be likened to its perpetrators?

Those portraying Israel as the new Nazi Germany will, of course, point to Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to substantiate their claims. But such a comparison is absurd. Israel is hardly behaving like Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was an expansionist, imperial power. Israel simply isn’t. It is responding to the horrific, genocidal actions of Hamas after it carried out a pogrom on Israel on 7 October 2023. Since then, Israel has been fighting a war of self-defence not just against Hamas, but also against an anti-Semitic alliance from across the Middle East (including Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen), which is hell bent on Israel’s destruction.

Claims that Israel is a new Nazi Germany speak to a more profound problem – namely, the ‘dejudification’ of the Holocaust. That is, instead of being seen as a specifically anti-Jewish act, the Nazis’ systematic extermination of Jewry has increasingly been cast as an example of man’s inhumanity to man in general. Hence, even Jews can apparently be guilty of Nazism.

Many now downplay the specifically anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. They will point out that the Nazis’ mass-killing operations took the lives of 13million civilians, of whom less than half were Jews. Other mass casualties included Soviet prisoners of war, civilians killed in anti-partisan operations, disabled people and the Roma. From this perspective, it is possible to argue that Jews were just one group among many who were slaughtered by the Nazis.

However, this misses the centrality of anti-Semitism to Nazi ideology. It is not that the loss of an individual Jewish life should trouble us more than other lives. It was that the Nazis were driven by an overriding racial animus towards the Jews – they were the specific targets of the Nazis’ Vernichtungskrieg, their ‘war of extermination’.

There was a reason for this. In the fevered imagination of the Nazis, the Jews represented the combined evils of capitalism and Communism. As historian Paul Hanebrink explains, ‘Communism and global capitalism always functioned in [Nazis’] minds as two sides of the same international (and anti-national) Jewish evil. In their paranoid fantasies, Jewish Communists and Jewish financiers invariably worked together to pursue world domination, each feeding off the power of the other.’