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February 2025

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu’s tightrope, Trump’s net Ruthie Blum

By on February 18th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/netanyahus-tightrope-trumps-net/

The Israeli opposition and so-called “international community” have spent most of the past 16 months lobbing two key demands—or accusations—at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu. One is that he must introduce a clear plan for the “day after” Hamas. The other is that he “bring home all the hostages now.”

Busy fighting an existential defensive war against the terrorists who gleefully perpetrated the massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, he has been unable to give a definitive answer. He did assert, however, that the Palestinian Authority could not assume any role in Gaza. “I will not allow us to replace Hamastan with Fatahstan,” he told the now-former administration in Washington.   

The second rebuke was akin to alleging that Bibi was holding the hostages in his basement. Never mind that he was deploying the might of the Israel Defense Forces to search for them while battling the barbarians responsible for their plight—those continuing to commit the worst atrocities against Jews since the Holocaust.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump answered both. First, he announced that the United States would take control of Gaza. Then—after witnessing the condition of the three men emerging last Saturday from captivity looking as though they’d been liberated from Auschwitz, and hearing Hamas say that it wouldn’t free the next three the following week—he delivered an ultimatum.

“If all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday, [Feb. 15] at 12 o’clock … I would say, cancel [the ceasefire deal] and all bets are off and let hell break out,” he declared to reporters at the White House. “And if they’re not returned—all of them, not in drips and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two–by Saturday at 12 o’clock … all hell is going to break out.”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Opening Move Against Migrant Sex Trafficking By Madeleine Rowley

By on February 18th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/trumps-opening-move-against-migrant?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Mellissa Harper, who was installed a few weeks ago as the temporary head of the federal government’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), is wasting no time making important and necessary changes to the agency’s infamous Unaccompanied Alien Children program. On Friday, the agency released new guidance that will make it more difficult for members of transnational criminal organizations and pimps to “sponsor” teenage migrants and then traffic them for sex or labor. The problem grew significantly under the Biden administration, with three times more victims applying for government benefits under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act during the Biden administration.

The most significant change is that all potential sponsors must be fingerprinted, and the fingerprints must be sent to the FBI to check for criminal records. No child will be released to a sponsor until their fingerprints are recorded in the unaccompanied child’s file. In addition, all identification documents must be legible and unexpired.

Critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policy complain that cumbersome fingerprinting and identification rules could delay the vetting of sponsors, leading to a backlog and overcrowding in shelters that house unaccompanied children. They also fear that under Harper, who has been an official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2007, ORR will share information about the sponsors, most of whom are illegal immigrants themselves, with ICE, making it easier to arrest and deport them. But Harper was unapologetic in an email to the ORR staff. “The pervasive fraud in the sponsor process is undeniable,’ she wrote.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Welcome to Hamassachusetts By Frannie Block and Will Sussman

By on February 18th, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/welcome-to-hamassachusetts?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

‘Rampant and ubiquitous antisemitism’ is making its way into the largest teachers union in New England, lawmakers say.

Inside the Massachusetts statehouse on Monday, State Representative Simon Cataldo displayed the image of a dollar bill folded into a Star of David in front of a packed audience of teachers, activists, and staffers. They were there to attend a hearing on the state of antisemitism in Massachusetts public schools.
(All visuals courtesy of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism)

“You’d agree that this is antisemitic imagery, correct?” Cataldo, who co-chairs the state’s Special Commission on Combating Antisemitism, asked Max Page, the president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA)—the largest union in New England, representing 117,000 members.

“I’m not gonna evaluate that,” Page responds calmly.

Cataldo pressed him. “Is it antisemitic?”

Page continued to sit stoically, before breaking into a smile. “You’re trying to get away from the central point,” Page said, “which is that we provide imagery, we provide resources for our members to consider, in their own intelligent, professional way.”

In fact, this image is referenced in materials recently made available to Massachusetts educators for teaching about the Middle East. Entitled “Resources on Israel and Occupied Palestine,” the union’s Training and Professional Learning Division developed the framework “for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.” Last December, the union published the resource document on a webpage accessible only to MTA members.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Virtue Signaling Now Means You Have To Sell That Tesla

By on February 18th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/18/virtue-signaling-now-means-you-have-to-sell-that-tesla/

Remember when all the best people, the elites and elitists among us, the correct thinkers, the self-appointed guardians of all things good, were buying electric vehicles, particularly Teslas? What a terrific way for them to demonstrate their green street cred. But that’s passé. The latest in look-at-me virtue signaling is selling that Tesla to make an important political statement.

Because Tesla CEO Elon Musk is aiding President Donald Trump in rooting out federal waste and corruption, he’s become a villain to the left. To be caught in one his cars is simply an embarrassment to status seekers and the prigs obsessed with placing themselves on Barack Obama’s “right side of history.” So like entertainer Sheryl Crow, they have to unload their Teslas, and, naturally, do it as loudly as possible.

Last week, Crow “dramatically bid adieu to her black Tesla,” the New York Post reported, to protest the man she tagged on her Instagram account as “#PresidentMusk.”

Crow took to social media on Friday to reveal she had sold the electric car and was donating the money to NPR, “which Musk has repeatedly called to defund as his Department of Government Efficiency looks to slash federal funding.”

“My parents always said … you are who you hang out with,” wrote Crow. “There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with. So long Tesla.”

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