Displaying posts published in

February 2025

Temper Tantrums by Zelensky and European Leaders Could Scuttle Trump’s Ukraine Peace Efforts Trump’s push for Ukraine peace talks angers Zelensky and European leaders, who resist compromises and fear U.S.-Russia negotiations. By Fred Fleitz

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/21/temper-tantrums-by-zelensky-and-european-leaders-could-scuttle-trumps-ukraine-peace-efforts/

You would think that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would be extremely grateful to President Trump for his extraordinary full-court press to end the war in Ukraine. You might also assume that America’s European allies would appreciate that America now has a president who is reasserting strong American leadership on the international stage to promote peace in the Ukraine/Russia War, the Middle East, and around the world.

Over the last two weeks, Trump began an aggressive diplomatic effort to end the war in Ukraine. He enlisted his National Security Adviser, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, Russia/Ukraine special envoy, Middle East special envoy, and other officials to engage with Ukrainian, European, and Russian officials on how to end the war. Trump spoke on the phone with Putin and Zelensky. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff arranged the release of American prisoners from Russia, which hopefully was a sign of good faith by Putin in joining future peace talks.

This week, Secretary of State Rubio, National Security Adviser Waltz, and Witkoff held four hours of meetings in Riyadh with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Russian foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov. This meeting was intended to repair U.S.-Russian relations after years of neglect by the Biden administration and start a conversation with Russian officials on how to reach a cease-fire and a peace agreement in the Ukraine War.

Instead of promoting and supporting Trump’s peace efforts, European leaders and Zelensky threw temper tantrums. They have opposed everything Trump has tried to do, asserted that Trump is siding with Putin against Ukraine, and claimed they are being excluded from U.S. peace efforts.

European leaders, Zelensky, and the mainstream press have harshly attacked President Trump and his national security team for appeasing Putin, claiming that the U.S. talking with Russian officials rewards Russia by ending its isolation. This argument doesn’t make sense because it obviously is impossible to negotiate an end to the war without dialogue with Russia.

The real issue here is that Zelensky and European officials want to stick to the fantasy policy on the war they pursued with the Biden administration. This included no compromises whatsoever to Russia. Russia must withdraw from all Ukrainian territory. They want Russia to pay reparations to Ukraine and Russian officials to be tried for war crimes.

The Insanity In Washington

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/21/the-insanity-in-washington/

We’ve noted before that Democrats and progressives are, with some exceptions, of course, mentally imbalanced. What we’ve seen in the first month of the Trump administration, though, is appalling. The political left in this country needs an intervention before it goes completely mad.

We say this because:

New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer on Wednesday said – from the Senate floor – “At a time when incidents in the air and on the runways in and our airports seem to be increasing, why would we cut the very people meant to prevent them? Simple. Donald Trump and DOGE are doing it like they’re doing so much else, so they can help their billionaire buddies with another tax break.” This is so insane on its face that it needs no comment from us.
Rep. Robert Garcia, California Democrat, said, in reference to the Department of Government Efficiency that is eating away at the fourth, unelected but controlled by Democrats branch of government that the American people want “us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy, for the future of this country.”
Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas believes American voters are “callous & selfish” and a trifle too satanic for their support of DOGE’s work.
California Democrat Rep. Swalwell claims that “no president has had more planes crash in their first month in office than Donald Trump,” which might be true but there’s no reason to check because Swalwell’s comment is nonsensical. He should be embarrassed. In fact, as CNN just reported, “there was a record low number of airplane accidents nationwide” last month.
Margaret Brennan, a “journalist” at CBS and therefore a Democratic Party operative, apparently believes “free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide” by the Nazis. Surely nuttier things have been said on national television by network-paid political hacks, but it would be hard to find a better example of lunacy in the media. And, yes, CBS is the network that edited a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris last fall to help make her appear lucid and promoted the criminalization of censorship.
The same job description can be applied to Anne Applebaum, who, writing in the Atlantic, said “suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.” That’s right: When federal employees’ work product is being audited and their positions are determined to be unnecessary, they’re living under the boot of an invader. She believes that federal workers have been “under instructions to respect the rule of law, venerate the Constitution, maintain political neutrality, and uphold lawful policy changes whether they come from Republican or Democratic administrations” – and that they actually did those things.
The Democrats’ communications department, known by some as the legacy media, has also implied that higher egg prices are Trump’s fault, with blanket coverage of an issue it largely ignored while prices were rising during the Biden years. “No Democrat has offered a coherent explanation of how anything Trump has done in the first month of his administration has had any effect on the price of eggs,” our friend Steven Hayward writes at Power Line. “In short, this is one of the dumbest and most contemptible political attacks of all time.” Which is what we’ve come to expect from a confederacy of the unhinged that has lost its ability to reason.
The Democrats elected a child to be their party’s vice chair. David Hogg might be 24-years-old, but he has the temperament of a toddler who has been told “no.” It’s hard not to picture him wearing one of those little boy suits that have shorts rather than trousers. While he is a successful – and shameless – self-promoter, he brings nothing but deranged, puerile anger. Which is probably why he was elected to that post.
And then there are the incessant chants, caterwauling and braying from the left that seems unable, and probably even unwilling, to stop its descent into madness.

Matti Friedman: The Family that Never Came Home

https://www.thefp.com/p/matti-friedman-the-bibas-shiri-kfir-ariel-yarden

The deaths of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas were too unbearable to believe. Israelis couldn’t accept it until we had no other choice.

Israeli television did not broadcast the ceremony that took place in Gaza this morning. As masked terrorists put four black coffins on a stage in Khan Younis, the channels instead showed photos of the people inside them, taken before the war began—including of an Israeli mother and two redheaded boys, laughing on a couch, picking fruit in an orchard, still believing they’re safe.

Shiri Bibas was seized from her home on October 7, 2023, along with her children Ariel, 4, and Kfir, 9 months. Their remains were returned to Israel after 10 a.m. local time. With them was the body of Oded Lifshitz, a grandfather, journalist, and peace activist who was 83 when he was kidnapped from the same kibbutz, Nir Oz.

For Israelis, October 7 is a slow-release catastrophe. Hamas has bargained not just over every Israeli hostage and corpse, but also over scraps of information about their fate, meaning that the precise death toll from the war’s first day is still not clear. Some of those we hoped were still alive turn out to have been dead from the very beginning—like Shlomo Mantzour, a grandfather taken at age 85 and thought to be the oldest Israeli hostage until last week, when new information revealed he was killed 16 months ago.

No captives have focused public sentiment like the Bibas children, the youngest Israeli hostages. Footage from October 7 showed a terrified Shiri Bibas cradling a baby and a toddler as they were taken at gunpoint from their home. The two redheads quickly became symbols of the 250 Israelis taken hostage—icons not just of the inhumanity of the Palestinians who kidnapped and murdered civilians and celebrated this barbarism as a victory, but of the unthinkable weakness of the Israeli state that allowed this to happen.

The shadow of history Both the Nazis and Hamas called for the murder of innocent Jewish children.Fiamma Nirenstein

https://www.jns.org/the-shadow-of-history/

On Oct. 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler delivered a chilling speech to Nazi leaders justifying the murder of Jewish children. Eighty years later, on Oct. 6, 2023, Hamas senior leader Yahya Sinwar reportedly issued a similarly horrific order to his followers—not only to kill Jewish children but to kidnap them. This stark parallel underscores the persistent and brutal nature of antisemitic violence, revealing its continued threat in the modern era.

In his speech, Himmler rationalized the mass murder of Jewish families, stating: “I would not consider myself justified if I killed the adults … and then allowed their children to grow up and seek revenge against our own children and grandchildren. We have therefore decided to make this people disappear from the face of the earth.”

This ideology led to the systematic murder of 1.5 million Jewish children during World War II and the Holocaust, many slaughtered in their mothers’ arms or subjected to brutal conditions in concentration and death camps. The echoes of this horror resonate today as Hamas targets Jewish children in its acts of terror. During the attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities, burning families alive, mutilating victims and abducting children, the youngest a 9-month-old baby. These actions were driven by religious hatred, not strategic warfare.