https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/
Beyond the headlines of hostage releases, and new paradigms for the future of Gaza, there is a nation of start-ups, scientists and researchers that develop new technology to improve every aspect of beneficent human endeavor. After work they can enjoy cafes, bistros, restaurants, concerts, theater and dance, in a democracy that protects their civic lives. Michael Ordman details the foregoing . Read all about it. rsk
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/no-one-can-now-deny-the-evil-that-is-hamas/ar-AA1yFavM?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=3e049c2261804ef0ac98245c7e89fbe2&ei=13
Two weeks ago the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In the years since 1945 the images of the inmates have become part of the fabric of history, documenting the evil of which some of our species are capable.
We may now be used to seeing them, but the pictures of starved, emaciated bodies, barely more than skeletons, have never lost the power to shock.
As a former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have had both to report and to confront anti-Semitism.
The battle against Jew hate has become the driving force of my professional life. Sometimes it has felt as though the Jewish people were banging our heads against a brick wall – such as when the response of so many self-described “progressives” to the barbarity of October 7 has been to demonstrate not against the barbarity but against the victims of that barbarity.
In that context, I have spent time asking myself if the scenes in Gaza and the terrible state of the latest hostages to be released might cause them to indulge in some self-reflection, or even a sense of shame that they have been marching in support of the terrorists who inflicted this evil.
I doubt it. These are the people, after all, who we have now learnt applied to the police at 2.50pm on October 7 2023 for permission to march against Israel the following week – making their application while the massacre was still in progress.
The footage of Eli Sharabi, Ohad Ben Ami and Or Levy could have come straight from 1945.
The only difference was the presence of their Hamas captors; the Nazis had fled the camps by the time they were liberated.
https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/09/trump-musk-and-the-deep-state-the-battle-over-transparency-begins/
Here we go again. At the beginning of his first term as president, Donald Trump issued an executive order temporarily banning travel from several countries—Yemen, for example, Sudan, Libya, and four others—that had been identified as major exporters of terrorism. The left went nuts, excoriating Trump for his “racist” “Muslim travel ban.”
It wasn’t a “Muslim travel ban,” but try telling that to Seattle District Court judge James Robart. He sniffed the air, sensed the pleasing hysteria and press coverage, and issued a cursory restraining order against Trump’s executive order. The humorous part of Robart’s order came towards the end. As I wrote at the time, Robart insisted that the “declaratory and injunctive relief” outlined in his order be applied immediately and on a “nationwide basis” (my emphasis).
Seattle has spoken, Comrades! Judge Robarts finds (where? how?) that his court has jurisdiction over … well, over just about everything: the president and the head of the Department of Homeland Security, for starters, but also “the United States of America (collectively).”
So all across the fruited plain, “Federal Defendants and all their respective officers, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and persons acting in concert or participation with them are hereby ENJOINED and RESTRAINED” from enforcing the President’s executive order.
This may be the best place to pause and point out that Donald Trump, acting as the president of the United States, was perfectly within his rights to issue an executive order to suspend travel from particular countries.
And so it is now with Trump’s deputies in the Department of Government Efficiency. Tasked with the daunting task of unscrambling the byzantine Rube Goldberg device that is the 21st-century administrative state for furthering corruption, illegal payments, and partisan influence at home and abroad, DOGE commander Elon Musk and his laptop-and-algorithm-toting lieutenants have been patiently uncovering the pyramid of waste, fraud, and abuse that is the foundation of the United States government in its twenty-first-century incarnation.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/08/who-really-wants-ethnic-cleansing-in-the-middle-east/
A new definition of chutzpah just dropped. It’s people thinking they can spend 16 months crying ‘Crush the Zionist entity!’ and then wring their hands over the threat of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s protesters thinking they can wail ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ – shorter version: erase Israel – and then accuse others of wanting to ‘cleanse’ the Middle East of ‘problematic’ people. It’s an activist class that is consumed by a burning hatred for the very idea of a Jewish homeland thinking it can lecture its opponents on the importance of respecting other people’s homelands.
I can stomach some hypocrisy, but I draw the line at pontifications on ‘forced removal’ from a political set that dreams of removing the Jewish State from the family of nations. Behold the orgy of sanctimony that has greeted Donald Trump’s nutty proposals to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip so that he might turn it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. We’ll come back to Trump’s vision, if you can call it that. But first we need to take down the idea that he has unforgivably put ‘ethnic cleansing’ on to the agenda for the Middle East, for the truth is that the West’s influential Israel-loathers did that long ago.
The fury over Trump’s Gaza idea is intense. He proposed resettling its population so that the Americans might go in and remake the place. We will ‘rebuild’ this ‘demolition site’, he said. The right-thinking are horrified. He’s flouting all the ‘established laws’ of international relations, says the Guardian. One wonders where this white hot fury was during earlier crusades of ‘nation-building’. From Bosnia to Libya, Iraq to Afghanistan, Washington and its allies dispatched local leaders, caused mass exoduses of people, and assumed the godly right to remake said country in their own ‘democratic’ image. And the Guardian often supported it. Keep your wigs on, people – Trump is not the first US president to propose ‘rebuilding’ a nation.
Still the cries of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have come thick and fast. Trump’s proposal would amount to an ‘alarming escalation’ in the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinians’, says Human Rights Watch. The UN also says it is ‘ethnic cleansing’. The left has been Trump’s noisiest critic. We know Israel has been ‘plotting the violent removal of Gaza’s surviving population’, says one commentator, and now these ‘genocidal’ ambitions are being abetted by the American president. Student radicals at Columbia University in NYC are damning Trump for ‘advocating for ethnic cleansing’ – a ballsy position for a campus where just a few months ago Jewish students were being told to fuck off back to Poland.
What’s exasperating about all this is that we’ve just come through 16 months of shameless agitation for the end of the Jewish State. Modern anti-Israel activism, at root, is a dream of ethnic cleansing. Consider Columbia. Its woke students are fuming over Trump’s Gaza idea. Yet this is a campus where apocalyptic Israelophobia has run riot since Hamas’s pogrom 16 months ago. Campus activists referred to Israel as ‘the pigs of the Earth’ and fantasised about a future when it would die. ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ’48!’, they cried, referring to 1948, when the modern state of Israel did not yet exist. Plainly put, they want the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/02/07/why_trumps_anti-dei_order_is_both_radical_and_rooted_in_civil_rights_law_1089775.html
Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, convened a panel of civil rights leaders last month to assail President Donald Trump’s executive order on “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” The so-called anti-DEI order, Morial claimed, was an effort to “reverse the gains of the last seventy years.”
Marc Morial: His National Urban League has adopted the very types of discriminatory racial practices that were once condemned by early civil rights leaders seeking a truly colorblind society — notably Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his March on Washington (top photo).
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
“Diversity, equity and inclusion are aligned with American values,” declared Morial. To any critics claiming that DEI represents “some sort of preference program” that “divides Americans,” Morial scoffed. “We say, absolutely not.” Morial then argued that the organizations gathered there would crusade to protect DEI and “the notion that everyone has an equal opportunity.”
This response of the civil rights establishment was more than simply a vow of resistance to the Trump order; it reflected opposition to a long-cresting sea change in racial politics in America.
In 1963, the Urban League was one of the groups that participated in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, where King envisioned a nation for his children not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” During this period, non-white Americans faced legal and cultural barriers to full participation in civic life, from school segregation to rampant discrimination in employment and housing opportunities.
Much has changed over the years. The Trump executive order was issued to counter a new form of discrimination as the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Many organizations, in an attempt to address anger about historical injustices, have fostered bias against groups perceived as privileged – particularly white and Asian men – and have developed explicit policies designed to advantage those perceived as disadvantaged.
The Supreme Court found that a bid to achieve diversity-related goals, Harvard had illegally engaged in racial discrimination. The Trump order builds on that.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5133353-elon-musk-reduces-government/amp/
It appears that Elon Musk has incited the good townsfolk of Washington, D.C.
Across the internet, politicians and pundits are in a monstrous mood. The same people who spent the last year declaring the imminent death of democracy if Donald Trump were elected are now insisting that the real threat is the monster he has unleashed upon the federal bureaucracy.
For Washingtonians, Musk is the bogeyman they have long described to their children around campfires at night: An outsider who comes to town and lays waste to government waste, firing thousands and slashing budgets. Part Frankenstein, part Bigfoot, that creature never had a name, but would be beholden to no one and uninterested in the status quo.
The monster now has a name, and it is Elon Musk.
Democratic politicians are now claiming that reducing government is equivalent to destroying government. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) yelled dramatically to an outdoor crowd this week that Musk’s government efficiency efforts are “taking away everything we have.”
For decades, both Democratic and Republican presidents have run on reducing government and making it more efficient. But everyone knew that such campaign pledges would be quickly discarded after each election.
What is so terrifying this time is that Musk means it. We know that because he has done it before.
When Musk bought Twitter with the promise of dismantling its censorship system and culture, he started by firing virtually everyone. Critics immediately declared that he was a fool and did not understand how to run a social media company. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that Musk’s firings meant the death of Twitter and triumphantly declared, “You break it, you own it.”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/paradigm-shift-middle-east-trump-israel-iran
The Middle East that U.S. President Donald Trump faces today features dangers and opportunities that were not present when he first took office, eight years ago. The greatest dangers are Iran’s advances toward nuclear weapons and the close relationships that the Islamic Republic has forged with Russia and China. The best opportunities have emerged from Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah and Hamas, its successful attacks on Iran, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
The dangers are unquestionably grave. But on balance, the potential upsides outweigh the possible downsides. Indeed, it has been a long time since the Middle East has offered an environment so favorable to American interests.
A year and a half ago, Iran’s foreign policy could possibly have been considered enormously successful. The country’s nuclear weapons program was steadily producing enriched uranium; by 2024, it had enough for several bombs. Washington was largely not enforcing its sanctions on Iran. China was purchasing about 90 percent of Iran’s oil, greatly improving the regime’s finances. Political and military relations with China and Russia were growing closer; Iran had secured their protection against action in the UN Security Council and had earned money and gratitude from weapons shipments to Moscow. And the “ring of fire” of Iranian proxies and allies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen—seemed to be a problem Israel could not solve.
But since then, Israel has turned the tables. Hamas has survived the invasion of Gaza that Israel carried out after the group’s attacks in October 2023, and Hamas remains dominant there. But it will never again pose a serious military threat to Israel. The Israelis have wiped out Hezbollah’s leadership and given Lebanon a chance to reclaim its sovereignty. Assad’s regime is gone, and the weapons highway that has long run from Iran through Syria to Lebanon—and to terrorist groups and their supporters in Gaza, Jordan, and the West Bank—appears to be closing.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/usaid-sent-over-18-billion-to-islamic-terror-states/
“It is really, really a sad day in America,” Rep. Ilhan Omar declared at a rally by Democrats outside USAID headquarters protesting President Trump’s reconstruction of the aid agency.
It wasn’t a sad day for America, but it was so for Somalia.
Over the last two years, USAID had funneled $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million in December 2024.
USAID support for Somalia had doubled under the Biden administration and with $3.3 billion from USAID allocated in the last 5 years, the end of the USAID gravy train for the Islamic terrorist state of Somalia must have been a painful blow for Omar, who is very close to the Somali regime. Former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire had reportedly celebrated that “the interest of Ilhan are not Ilhan’s, it’s not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of the American people, the interest of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia.”
It’s unknown if any of Omar’s Majerteen clan members benefited from the billions in American money, but considering the prominence of the clan in Somali politics, it’s likely to be the case.
Somalia, along with other Islamic terrorist entities, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, were among the top beneficiaries of USAID cash.
USAID boasted of having sent $2.1 billion to Gaza and the West Bank since the Hamas attacks of Oct 7. In 2024 alone, $917 million was programmed for the terrorist areas occupying Israel.
USAID provided over $3.7 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over with $832 million in the previous fiscal year alone. The money was so unaccountable that USAID refused to cooperate with the U.S. Government’s Afghan War watchdog tracking money going to terrorists.
Even while the United States of America was at war with the Houthis, the Iran-backed Islamic terrorist group firing on US Navy vessels, USAID continued to direct billions of dollars to Yemen.
Wealthy Hampton residents hold meeting over nannies being deported©News 12
The wealthy residents of East Hampton went into panic mode over the possibility their hired help could face expulsion from the US as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program. The exclusive Long Island village – with an average home value of $2 million and residents that include Sylvester Stallone’s daughters – held an emergency meeting amid fears that ICE would round up the employees of locals.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21376/iran-nuclear-survival-strategy
Possessing nuclear weapons provides any regime with a protective shield against foreign intervention, removing the fear of retaliation. Given this reality, no diplomatic effort — regardless of its structure — will convince Iran to relinquish its nuclear ambitions voluntarily.
For the Iranian regime, the tactic of negotiating to buy time has paid off really well. Iran successfully reached a deal with the Obama administration which provided it with financial relief, and diplomatic legitimacy, and the promise of nuclear weapons in just a few years, which just so happens to be this coming October.
Unfortunately, Iran appears to be dangerously close to achieving nuclear breakout The only viable solution is to neutralize Iran’s nuclear facilities now.
The correct course of action from the Trump administration is clear: reimpose maximum pressure, support Israel in targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, and ensure that the regime’s delaying tactics do not succeed once again.
The Iranian regime, currently at one of the weakest points in its recent history, presents a crucial opportunity for the United States and its allies.
The collapse of its strongest regional ally, Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, has left Tehran without a key pillar of support in the Middle East. Iran’s most powerful proxy groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, have suffered significant setbacks thanks to Israeli military operations. With Iran’s economy in shambles and its isolation increasing, the regime is more vulnerable than ever before. This moment should not be squandered. It presents an unparalleled opportunity to curb Iran’s ambitions — permanently.
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