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Ruth King

Our Ukrainian War Narrative—Paradoxes, Obsessions, and Disconnects Why does the Biden-Harris administration deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/30/our-ukrainian-war-narrative-paradoxes-obsessions-and-disconnects/

About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it.

After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya.

The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO countries and, to a far greater extent, the United States.

But now, after a reported 1 million combined dead, wounded, or missing Ukrainians and Russians (the actual figure is probably far higher), the war remains deadlocked with no end in sight.

Putin serially threatens to break the static front with tactical nuclear weapons. The Europeans are tiring. And no one in the United States has come up with a strategy to push back the Russians from either their February 2022 demarcation points or their post-2014 occupation of Ukrainian borderlands.

The result is a lot of disconnects, paradoxes, and mysteries about the war, the Biden administration’s role in it, and the general geostrategic landscape surrounding the conflict.

Ukrainian Election Interference?

Americans are demonized by the Uniparty elites for having doubts about their blank-check support for Ukraine. And while the American people are mostly anti-Putin, they are not always pro-Ukraine.

But why is that so?

For one, we know that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Israel’s Bad-Faith ‘Critics’ By Tal Fortgang

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/11/israels-bad-faith-critics/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Their real goal is to delegitimize the Jewish state

It has become a cliché to point out that there is a difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state), which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context. But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere criticism of its conduct.

Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with. Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a week after October 7.

These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words, by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright: When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral, and, frankly, impractical.

What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons. Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics, including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and diplomats.

Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady by Douglas Murray

https://www.amazon.com/Islamophilia-Metropolitan-Malady-Douglas-Murray-ebook/dp/B08BT75Y7S/ref=sr_1_4?crid=27FQ26MNLODWH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xMwQFPsMtjMVn3GT8bxg9L_FFNmHMWpJ2VhdM3h4s63wmshkDr

In this 2013 book (now reissued for the first time) bestselling author and broadcaster Douglas Murray, with trademark wit, delivers an alarming analysis of the post-9/11 world. It is a devastating satire on the climate of fear in the West today. Murray’s analysis is wildly entertaining yet ultimately profound:

“If absolutely everybody in the world agrees on something – from the President of the United States to most film-stars, pop-stars, Popes, Bishops, atheists, writers, film-makers, brain-boxes and everyone else – then surely they must be right. Well, no. I think they are wrong. Wildly, terribly, embarrassingly and dangerously wrong, “ writes Murray.

ISLAMOPHILIA shows how so many of the celebrities above, have, at some point chosen to abandon any hope or wish to criticize Islam and instead decided to profess some degree of love for it. Love, that Murray points out in the book, is often irrational and certainly misguided: Murray is not afraid to name and shame, and the book’s tour includes Sebastian Faulks and Martin Amis, Boris Johnson, South Park, Tony Blair, Ridley Scott, David Cameron, Liam Neeson, Justin Bieber, Random House Publishers, the BBC, Richard Dawkins, the Prince of Wales and even George Bush. Yes, George Bush.

“They may have done this for a range of good and bad reasons. Some of them have to done it to save other people. Some of them have done it to save themselves. Some of them have done it because they are too stupid to do anything else and others because clever people can be really dumb at times.”

Murray goes on to detail the extraordinary strategic cultural efforts made in recent years to “rewrite the last few millennia of history, minimising and denigrating the impact of actual scientists and promoting the claims of Islamic proselytisers”. And he has fighting words for the version of history depicted by Ridley Scott and others in Hollywood.

Pascal Bruckner A Palestine of the Mind For the radical Left, the Palestinian is the last natural savage—innocent even when killing and slaughtering.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-palestine-of-the-mind

In 1974, the writer Jean Genet, an uncontested celebrity of the French Left, whose works extol the beauty of hoodlums, assassins, Black Panthers, the S.S., and Yasser Arafat’s Fedayeen, explained his attachment to the Palestinian cause: “It was completely natural for me to favor not only the most disadvantaged but those who distill hatred for the West most purely.”

For decades now, the Palestinians—or rather, a mythical view of the Palestinians—have brought together two elements essential to this distillation: they were poor, in contrast with the purported colonizers, who arrived partly from Europe (though a million Jews thrown out of Arab countries, beginning in 1948, also became Israelis); and they were Muslims, that is, members of a religion that some on the left see as the spearhead of the disinherited. Thus, during a time when leftist revolutionary horizons were darkening, a certain orphaned progressivism took up the Palestinian revolt against Israel. Surprisingly, however, what originated as a minority preference has developed into a majority position, winning significant support from the highest reaches of political power and from the academy, in both Europe and the United States—and reshaping the mind of an era.

The extraordinary degree of media coverage devoted to the conflict exemplifies this shift (though a period of relative reduction in attention occurred in the mid-2010s, with the emergence of the Islamic State as an international problem). It is as if the fate of the planet were playing out in a little patch of land between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza. The condemnation of Israel is first an obsession with Israel. The media focus tends to convey little accurate information but is satisfied to reinforce a stereotype: the confrontation between what is deemed a racist and colonial state, a latecomer in the Arab world; and a crushed, dispossessed people. 

The widespread ignorance about this region of the world, far from a handicap, is an asset: no need to know, for instance, what river is referenced in the Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea,” since the point is Justice, with a capital J. Where Western support for the Palestinians is concerned, we find ourselves in the realm of pure ideas—abstractions—not flesh-and-blood human beings.

Iran’s Newest Proxy: Sudan by Peter Hoextra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20982/iran-newest-proxy-sudan

Iran, having just had two of its major proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, seriously degraded, is apparently setting its sights on a new, “consolation prize” proxy to use as an additional base of operations: Sudan.

Iran’s strategy of supporting and infiltrating other countries and terrorist groups — as it has done in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Lebanon, Venezuela and Yemen — appears as yet another extension of its strategy of moving into territories with weak or unstable governments to expand its influence throughout the Middle East, to create new fronts for its campaign to destroy Israel and bring down the world order led by the West.

A major port and foothold in Sudan will enable Iran to accomplish two of its goals: to continue encircling Israel in a “ring of fire” by opening yet another front from which to attack the small Jewish nation from the southwest, and to further control all international shipping in the Red Sea.

The Sudanese Armed Forces, led by [Sudanese General Abdel Fattah] Al-Burhan… although invited [for peace talks], was not represented. “We will not go to Geneva,” Al-Burhan told reporters in Port Sudan, at the time; “we will fight for 100 years.”

Al-Burhan nevertheless showed up at the UN recently, asking for talks. Why did he not respect the offer from the US and the international community when they gave him that opportunity in Geneva? Might the incident suggest a lack of candor?

Openly stating its ambition to dominate the Middle East — and to drive US forces out of the region presumably to make it easier to do so – Iran, for 40 years, through force and intimidation, has been seeking to dominate its neighbors in the Middle East, not just Israel, but also Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Iran’s militias and proxies have been firing, as well, on American assets in the region, more than 160 times just in the last year, with virtually no response from the US. Iran has also been extending its reach into Africa, especially with the increasing collaboration of two powerful allies: China and Russia.

Iran’s influence is not presently confined to any region. Iran has, for instance, been “exporting the revolution” to the Western Hemisphere, particularly, as mentioned, Venezuela, an ideal base from which to harass the “Big Satan,” especially when Iran will have nuclear weapons, which are reportedly close to being “taken public.”

This new, potential land-grab by Iran, in collaboration with Russia and China, poses yet another serious security threat not only to Israel, but also to the entire region and the United States. It is hoped that the US government, and whoever wins the November election, will give this emerging flashpoint urgent attention.

Israel Faces Existential Threats from Hamas and Hezbollah By Sloan Oliver

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/israel_faces_existential_threats_from_hamas_and_hezbollah.html

For years, the Democrats (Obama, Biden, Hillary, Kamala, etc.), Big Media, Hollywood elites, Big Tech, and even the military have called President Donald Trump an “existential threat” to America and to our democracy.

First, the U.S. is not a democracy; we’re a constitutional republic.  A true democracy is simple majority rule, best understood as Hillary, Pelosi, and Trump voting on who to throw in prison, or two wolves and a sheep voting on the dinner menu — meaning the simple majority become dictators over the minority.  However, a constitutional republic is based on a constitution with checks and balances that prevent the majority from becoming authoritarians.

Second, Trump is clearly not an existential threat.  The Dems, along with all their minions of voters, and the media, knows that fact.  How do we know they know?  Simple, we already had four years of a Trump presidency.  He never was a threat to “our democracy.”  (The FBI said that January 6th was not an insurrection despite what Pelosi and Liz Cheney claimed.)  Additionally, if the Dems truly believed he were the threat they claim he is, Biden, Kamala, and all the others would be cheering for those who tried to assassinate him.  They didn’t do that.  Instead, they called him and expressed concern for his safety and promised more protection.  So, their claim of “existential threat” is further proof that the media and the Dems (especially their politicians) are dishonest. 

That said, an existential threat (ET) is defined as “a threat to the survival of a people or the long-term potential of humanity.”  Basically, an ET is a threat to a people’s/nation’s existence and/or survival.  A couple of historical examples will help understand the definition.  The white man was an ET to the native/indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.  Within decades of Columbus discovering the island of Hispaniola, 95% of the natives were gone.  It took several centuries, but the same result happened to the indigenous peoples of North, South, and Central America who were wiped out by the new inhabitants, mostly from Europe.  One could argue that the European discoverers didn’t intend to kill off the native peoples, but whether they intended to or not, the result was the same.  A much more recent example of an intended existential threat was Nazi Germany and European Jews.  The Nazis used an organized, systematic effort (called the Final Solution) to exterminate the Jews in countries and areas they occupied.  They were hugely successful, killing roughly 70% of the Jews in Europe.  If they had had a few more years, that figure would have approached 95% or higher. 

You would hope the world would have been so appalled at the Nazis’ genocide directed at Jews, that we would demand “never again.”  And for a short period of time, the world was appalled.  Sadly, that short period lasted about 20 to 25 years.

The Deep State vs. the People Opposing anything that makes America great. by Jeff Crouere

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-deep-state-vs-the-people/

Despite an enormous fundraising advantage, a rigged presidential debate, and overwhelmingly positive media coverage, Vice President Kamala Harris is still in a virtual tie with her challenger, former President Donald Trump.

According to the latest Real Clear Politics average of national polls, Harris leads Trump by only 2.2%. In his last two campaigns, Trump was further behind his Democratic opponents. In 2016, he trailed Hillary Clinton by 2.6%; in 2020, Joe Biden led by 6.6%.

Additionally, Harris has the support of many Hollywood stars, the endorsement of pop superstar Taylor Swift, and just received a televised “love fest” from media icon Oprah Winfrey. Of course, the Vice President is avoiding all reporters who will ask tough questions and has not held any news conferences since her coronation as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.

Harris hopes to employ her version of the “Biden basement” strategy until Election Day, while the left-wing media refuses to hold her accountable.

In contrast, Trump continues to hold monster rallies, speaking behind bulletproof glass. The assassination attempts have not deterred him from outdoor events or interacting with his enthusiastic supporters.

Donald Trump is truly the “people’s candidate.” While Kamala Harris and Democrats ludicrously claim that Trump only wants to enrich himself and his billionaire friends, his real interest is in helping average Americans.

His ideas, such as “no tax on tips,” “no tax on overtime,” and “no tax on Social Security,” are designed to help struggling Americans deal with the pain of Biden’s failed economic policies. Despite the recent easing of interest rates and inflation, Americans have endured four years of economic agony. Just to survive, many Americans have been forced to withdraw money from their savings accounts or increase charges on their credit cards.

Oh Yeah, They Tried to Kill the President … I Forgot About That Shouldn’t two assassination attempts in the space of a couple of months be a big deal? by Kurt Schlichter

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oh-yeah-they-tried-to-kill-the-president-i-forgot-about-that/

You might think that an attempt to shoot the president – okay, the former president and likely the next one, but you know what I mean – would be a big deal. And you might think that two attempts to shoot him in the space of a couple of months might be an even bigger deal. But you would be wrong. They are no deal at all, and that’s not a good thing. Not at all.

We are on a very scary path, and it’s unclear that there is a turn-off we can take that brings us someplace good.

What is happening now is unprecedented. I was a junior in high school when that rabid and very misguided Jodie Foster fanboy shot President Reagan. A few years before, a couple of Charles Manson bimbettes had made feeble attempts to murder Gerald Ford, but Hinckley managed to shoot Rawhide as well as three others. That happened while I was a high school junior. I am not sure if school let out or if we just watched it in class, but that was a huge deal. And it remained a huge deal for a while.

Now, one scuzz wounds the president and a couple of other people, plus kills Corey Competore, and it’s no biggie. Next, some Harris-Walz voter tried to ambush Trump on the fairway. And is this a huge story? Nah. They did not even interrupt the sportsball games for a special report. I mean, sure, an assassination attempt is no pet-noshing narrative. It’s just a couple of committed Democrats trying to change the course of American history with guns because Orange Man Bad.

And the regime media is okay with that. The reaction to Attempt No. 1 was simply muted as if they were measuring their words to provide plausible deniability that they thought the shooting was a bad thing for reasons beyond the fact that it gave the courageous candidate an iconic photograph and more combat time than the pseudo-sergeant major Dem VP nominee. But after Attempt No. 2, the regime media’s journohacks did not even try to pretend. They went right into their bullSchiff narrative. Why, Trump being mean to illegal aliens for dining on Fido means he brought it on himself. Stop hitting yourself, Donald. You were asking for it with that short skirt.

But beneath the garbage narrative to try to turn yet another Democrat murder freak into a MAGA NRA GOP White Nationalist Christian Guy, you could detect something else.

Disappointment. It was as if the unspoken question was not “How can we stop our allies from trying to murder our political opponents?” and was, instead, “Can’t anybody here shoot straight?”

ICE confirms hundreds of thousands of migrant criminal convictions By Karah Rucker (Anchor/Reporter), Jake Maslo (Video Editor)

https://san.com/cc/ice-confirms-hundreds-of-thousands-of-migrant-criminal-convictions/

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows that more than 13,000 undocumented immigrants with murder convictions have been apprehended and released into the United States. ICE is currently tracking 425,000 migrants who have criminal convictions but are not in federal custody.

Additionally, 222,000 migrants have pending criminal charges against them, according to the data.

Among the migrants released into the U.S., 13,099 are convicted murderers and 1,845 more face pending homicide charges. Nearly 15,845 migrants have convictions for sex crimes, while another 4,250 have pending sexual assault charges.

The figures are sourced from ICE’s “non-detained docket,” which includes migrants encountered by border officials but not in custody. Those individuals were released with a court date or ordered to be deported but remain in the U.S.

The internal data, shared by the ICE deputy director, also shows that 56,533 migrants have drug charges, 2,521 have been convicted of kidnapping, 62,231 have assault charges and 14,301 are convicted burglars.

Currently, there are more than 7 million migrants on ICE’s non-detained docket, with 647,000 of them having criminal convictions or pending charges.

The Killing of Nasrallah—and the Virtue of Escalation The best way to end a regional war is to win it. Eli Lake

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-killing-of-nasrallahand-the-virtue?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

What Israel has managed to accomplish over the past two weeks will long be studied by military historians.

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grâce on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

Hezbollah’s war is not just with Israel. It has American, Syrian, and Lebanese blood on its hands as well.

Recall that in 1983, the group killed 241 servicemen with a massive bomb at the Marines barracks in Beirut. The organization was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 innocent people were murdered. In 2012, Hezbollah bombed a bus with young Israeli tourists at the port of Burgas, Bulgaria, that left five dead and 32 injured.

But Hezbollah’s bloodiest campaign was reserved for Syria, where it became the shock troops for the country’s tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, during his brutal suppression of a democratic uprising. Hezbollah’s forces led the ground operations in the siege of Aleppo, a vicious campaign in 2015 and 2016 that starved the ancient city and reduced most of it to rubble.

A day after Hamas launched its pogrom of October 7, Hezbollah began raining rockets and missiles into northern Israel, displacing up to 70,000 Israelis. Nearly a year later, those people have not been able to return to their homes.

With this kind of butcher’s bill, one might think the response from the civilized world upon learning of Nasrallah’s death would be jubilation. But Western leaders have responded with reticence. In this they have revealed their profound confusion about the enemy. It is not a nation-state, a terror group, or even an ideology. From Washington to Paris, they seem to believe the real enemy is escalation.