Last night, Israel came dangerously close to tragedy. Five bombs exploded across Bat Yam, targeting public buses in a meticulously planned attack. Miraculously, the buses were empty—but they weren’t supposed to be. The devices were meant to detonate during this morning’s rush hour, filled with passengers. Israeli security forces have confirmed that additional explosives were found, and a manhunt is underway for those responsible. Hamas has claimed responsibility, and we now know that this was a deliberate, coordinated effort to inflict mass civilian casualties. Authorities are urgently searching for more hidden devices, while the entire country’s public transportation system has been shut down to prevent further catastrophe for the time being.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance is too reel and too real.
Maybe it’s because this is Black History Month that the complete Oscar lock-out of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths seems so wrong. (It almost hurts more than the dismissal of Better Man.) Hard Truths was also overlooked for the Image Awards given by the NAACP, which is equally troubling. Both omissions reveal the worst about contemporary film culture. This isn’t simply a matter of actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s being ignored (despite already winning most of the season’s critics’ prizes). Fact is: Mainstream opinion has degraded.
It would be an exaggeration to frame the Oscar and NAACP inadequacies as injustice; no contemporary movie has more significance than Hard Truths, for the way it deals with the spiritual trauma of the Covid lockdowns. In addressing this subject, Mike Leigh returns to modern relevance after his two previous films, the period pictures Peterloo, about the 1819 massacre in Manchester, England, and Mr. Turner, a biopic of the painter J. M. W. Turner. In Hard Truths, Leigh comes back to the modern world with tough, piercing frankness.
https://www.jns.org/icrc-despite-criticism-still-taking-part-in-hamas-hostage-ceremonies/
Although the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) previously issued a plaintive call for hostage releases to be carried out in a “dignified manner” following criticism from U.S. Senate leaders over its participation in Hamas’s handover ceremonies, the ICRC still took part in Thursday’s exhibition involving the transfer of four dead bodies.
While Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the ICRC had refused to cooperate in the ceremony, almost leading to a “blowup,” Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and CEO of the Israel-based International Legal Forum, said that report wasn’t accurate.
“Apart from some timid request by the ICRC for a ‘private, dignified handover of hostages’, today’s release again descended into an obscene and macabre propaganda display, in which a Red Cross representative even joined a masked Hamas terrorist on stage, alongside the coffins of the four murdered hostages,” he told JNS.
Ostrovsky noted: “Under the Geneva Conventions, for which the ICRC serves as guardian, ‘humiliating and degrading treatment,’ such as what Hamas is doing in parading the hostages on stage, including the murdered captives, is considered a gross violation of international law and a war crime.”
The ICRC, in a statement on Wednesday, urged “those with the responsibility and the authority over these releases, and those with influence on them, to ensure that they are conducted with privacy, respect, and care.”
Hamas prisoner ceremonies, in which hostages are presented to braying Gazan crowds and forced to thank their tormentors, have been denounced by Israeli and U.S. leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the crowds of Gazans who mobbed three Israelis during a Jan. 30 release.
U.S. President Donald Trump expressed shock at the emaciated condition of three others released on Feb. 8. American lawmakers condemned the ICRC for its part in the ceremonies, saying the agency risked jeopardizing its image as an unbiased actor. (The Red Cross claims two of its seven principles are “impartiality” and “neutrality.”)
U.S. Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Washington Free Beacon website on Wednesday, “Participating in Hamas’s propaganda ceremonies definitely calls into question their supposed neutrality. Seems like the ICRC is more concerned about their public image than actually fulfilling their mission to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5155741-elon-musk-doge-dividend-trump-gop
With Democrats screaming that the sky is falling with each federal workerthe Department of Government Efficiency axes, Elon Musk’s team needs some good public relations.
James Fishback, CEO of “free-thinking” investment firm Azoria, has an excellent idea.
Fishback made headlines recently by posting on X that, “President Trump and Elon Musk should propose a DOGE dividend — a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.”
Musk, who evidently sleeps with one eye trained on his X feed, sounded positive about the proposition, responding, “Will check with the president.”
Why not? What better way to bring home to people the benefits of cutting waste and fraud out of the federal budget?
Fishback explains his plan: “Our proposal for the President is simple: tax-paying households should receive $1 for every $5 of total savings that DOGE delivers. That means that if DOGE delivers $2 trillion in total savings, 79 million American households will receive a $5,000 check next summer because of President Trump’s bold leadership.”
Imagine the benefits:
Sending out checks will make DOGE’s success real, tangible and celebrated. Nobody dislikes getting money in the mail.
Taxpayers, whose money has been funneled into distasteful and wasteful ventures like spending $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia or $2.5 million to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, will catch a rare break — finally!
Democrats, who have reflexively and idiotically opposed DOGE’s efforts, will be silenced. Given their resistance — and their lack of leadership and message — they will not retake the House or the Senate in the midterm elections. Republicans will own what will come to be the most popular initiative ever undertaken by either party — reforming our bloated inefficient government and returning to taxpayers money that would have been wasted.
Additionally, the dividend will mean that the more spending DOGE purges from the $6 trillion federal budget, the bigger the checks will be. That means the country will be rooting for more cuts and more closings, cheering on Musk and his DOGGIES at every turn.
If reducing government spending pinches growth, which it could, putting some money in consumers’ pockets would provide a valuable offset. One of the reasons the economy grew robustly while Joe Biden was in the White House is that he spent money recklessly, creating the kinds of deficits usually reserved for fighting wars or deep recessions.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21419/prosecuting-unacceptable-opinions
On CBS television recently — in a scene straight out of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police for political repression — three German prosecutors being interviewed explain that their job is to suppress “unacceptable opinions.”
The question, however, clearly is not actually about repressing all false information – just that, it seems, which displeases the so-called “left” as well as many of Europe’s newcomers. As one of the three German prosecutors put it, “Freedom of expression is fine, but there are limits.” There are, and they are carefully laid out in the 1969 US Supreme Court decision Brandenburg v. Ohio…
The so-called “left”, nevertheless, appears to have reinvented itself in a form that rejects everything that is not itself.
Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a politician from Germany’s right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland… had posted on social media in 2021, questioning the socialist mayor of Hamburg’s decision to welcome Afghan refugees, by citing statistics about Afghan men’s involvement in gang rapes in Germany. The court ruled that her statements violated the “human dignity” of Afghan refugees as a group…. The court did not contest the validity of the statistics. She was therefore convicted not for peddling “false information,” but for telling the truth.
The good news is that the funding of this industry of lies by the US government is over. You can be skeptical of certain practices in Islam without being “phobic” and refuse to allow biological men (xy) to take part in women’s (xx) competitions without being “hateful”. Let us hope this trend will jump the pond.
A cultural war appears to be brewing between Europe and the United States.
At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance surprised attendees by downplaying external threats to Europe, instead emphasizing what he called “the threat from within” Europe. Vance argued that the greatest danger to European democracy stems from its own leaders’ retreat from fundamental values, such as freedom of speech and democratic principles. He lambasted European governments for suppressing free speech, citing examples like Sweden’s conviction of a Christian activist for burning a Quran, Germany’s crackdowns on anti-feminist online comments, and the UK’s restrictions on religious expression near abortion clinics. Vance compared these actions to “Soviet-style” censorship, suggesting Europe is abandoning the liberties it once championed during the Cold War.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/20/the-death-of-the-bibas-family-is-a-stain-on-the-human-conscience/
They kidnapped a baby. A mob of anti-Semites stole a nine-month-old baby from his home. They filmed the abduction, so proud were they of their besieging of this innocent infant. They published the footage online for other Jew-haters to salivate over. It showed the baby with his face buried into his mother’s breast. Mum’s face is etched with terror as she holds both her baby and her four-year-old tight to her chest: a small and extraordinary act of maternal heroism in the face of the swarming pogromists. ‘Look what we did’, the filmers of this crime essentially said: ‘We humiliated a baby Jew.’
It can feel hard sometimes to fathom the wickedness of Hamas, to map the depths of its anti-Jewish cruelty. But it is distilled for us in this image. In these scenes of the terror-stricken young Bibas family being violently dragged from their home for the ‘crime’ of their Jewishness. This is Hamas. This is its ‘resistance’ that the privileged of the West celebrated. It abducts mothers and children. It holds a baby prisoner. Its hatred for Jews is so fervid and zealous that it sees even a nine-month-old Jew as an enemy, a ‘coloniser’, as something less than human.
The kidnapping of the Bibas family was one of the great war crimes of our age. Mother Shiri and her two sons – Ariel, aged four at the time, and Kfir, then just nine months old – were taken from their home in the Nir Oz kibbutz during the fascistic onslaught of 7 October 2023. They hid in a safe room when they heard the army of anti-Semites approach. Dad Yarden left the safe room to try to distract the mob of Jew-haters and save his family. He was kidnapped, then the family was kidnapped. In the cruellest twist, Yarden survived – he was released from Hamas’s captivity earlier this month – but Shiri, Ariel and Kfir perished at some point during their internment by the Islamo-fascists.
The Bibas persecution reached its dire end today with the return of the bodies of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir from Gaza to Israel. Yet even now, Hamas continues to taunt these Jews it kidnapped. Its ‘handover ceremony’ this morning was honestly one of the sickest public stunts I have ever seen. On a stage, before a heaving crowd of people waving flags and filming with their phones, Hamas militants laid out the black coffins of the young mum and her children. It was Jew hatred as theatre, a celebratory spectacle of death designed to send a sick message to the Jews of Israel: ‘Even in death you will get no peace.’ The fascists of old buried the Jews they killed in mass graves – today’s put their bodies on display for the world to gawp at.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-fellow-to-faculty-programs-activists
In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”
One of her posts roused national attention: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation,” Decristo wrote. “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” She concluded with a series of icons: a knife, an axe, and three blood drops.
Shortly afterward, the university launched an investigation into Decristo’s comments, and in April of 2024, the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a lawsuit against the university for its inaction on anti-Semitism, putting the professor’s threats atop a list of examples in a press release. As of this writing, UC Davis has not disciplined Decristo.
Following Decristo’s comments, UC Davis chancellor Gary May said in a statement that calls for violence were inconsistent with the university’s commitment to “equity and justice.” Ironically, Decristo’s employment at UC Davis came about precisely because of the University of California’s purported commitment to social justice. Decristo, once described by UC Davis as a “scholar-artist-activist,” was recruited through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), which fast-tracks scholars showing a “commitment to diversity” into permanent faculty roles.
A growing number of like-minded activists are following Decristo’s path. For years, universities, federal agencies, and private foundations have worked to create well-funded career pathways for scholar-activists in higher education. The network includes undergraduate fellowships, graduate school funding, special hiring initiatives, and even administrator development programs. This constellation of “pipeline programs” is intended to hire more minorities; in practice, it heavily favors academics who view their scholarship as an extension of their political agenda.
The programs also raise legal questions. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. After President Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity,” many universities will likely reassess their pipeline programs to avoid federal scrutiny.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/muslim-terrorists-behead-70-christians-in-church-in-the-congo/
Open Doors International, a worldwide organization which supports Christians who suffer persecution and discrimination for their faith, reports that the bodies of 70 Christians were found in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They had been beheaded by jihadists in the latest horror of the ongoing Islamic genocide of Christians in that country and elsewhere throughout Africa.
According to local sources, at around 4 a.m. last Thursday (13 February) militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a group with direct ties to the ISIS (Islamic State) terror group – seized 20 Christian men and women from their homes in Mayba in northeast DRC. Later, the militants surrounded the village and captured 50 more believers. All 70 were held hostage for a short period and then taken to a Protestant church in nearby Kasanga and slaughtered, reportedly with machetes.
You wouldn’t know any of this by checking in with the mainstream media, partly because they don’t care about the massacre of Christians anywhere in the world, partly because they can’t figure out how to blame Israel and the Jews for the beheadings of African Christians, and partly because they’re too busy ginning up outrage over Trump firing IRS employees and dismantling the DEI grift.
But some accounts on social media tried to raise awareness. The X account “Libs of TikTok” tweeted, “Seventy Christians were found beheaded in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They were reportedly hostages of the Islamist group ADF—an ISIS affiliate. Why isn’t the MSM covering this story??”
Pro-life activist Lila Rose posted about the massacre as well: “Horrific. 70 Christians were brutally beheaded by an Islamist group inside a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo Where’s the media outrage? Pray for persecuted Christians.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/presence-2024/
“For English, press one.”“Please listen carefully. Our menu options have changed.” “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received.” “All our representatives are helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably.”
Some of us have lost some genetic lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and when we request our prognosis.
Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn’t gift cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn’t say anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets to you.
In November, 2024, I coped with my latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I wasn’t taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.
Friends? “Cancer ghosting” is a thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I’d soon be reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were, simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss was willing to hang out with me.
In January, 2025, I was going for a walk and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality programming that sneaks in.
A man was speaking. He was a white guy, older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and with himself. Ghost stories, the man was saying, are “essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there’s an afterlife. Something comes beyond” death, he said. I am intimidated by scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.
The man continued in a voice, that, unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the wash.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/bibas-children-israel-gaza
Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother Shiri and his four-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly eighteen months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.
What do we know, then?
We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be alright merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.
Justice meant not only reversing Haman’s evil decree but forcing all those who were only too eager to partake in the slaughter to face the consequences of their actions.
And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons.
