WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The anti-US Iran-Venezuela-Hezbollah axis Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

http://bit.ly/47cvzhe

*Venezuela’s geo-strategic location in Latin America has been leveraged by Iran and its chief proxy, Hezbollah, to undermine the strategic posture of “The Great American Satan” in the US’ own backyard. The Iran-Venezuela-Hezbollah axis has erected a mutually beneficial anti-US network of intelligence, terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, training, weapons, supplies, and know-how, transforming Venezuela into a central hub of transnational organized crime and international terrorism.  However, since 1979, the State Department has persisted in its diplomatic option toward Iran’s Ayatollahs, which has bolstered the Ayatollahs’ anti-US capabilities, threatening the survival of every pro-US Arab regime.

*According to the Atlantic Council: “The dual-use nature of Iran’s cooperation with Venezuela’s Maduro regime, layered with the illicit financial connections of its facilitators, and Hezbollah’s established crime-terror network in Venezuela, creates a tier-one national security concern for the United States. It is multifaceted and requires a robust response.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Don’t Be Fooled: Kamala Is A Zero-Carbon Green Radical Francis Menton

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-9-2-economic-policy-is-the-key-to-growth-or-decline

What is Kamala Harris’s position on any important policy issue? It’s not so easy to figure out. She studiously avoids interviews and reporters’ questions. Go to Harris’s official campaign website, and it’s almost entirely about raising money, without a word about what she stands for. Back when she was in the Senate (January 2017-January 2021), and a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2019-20, she made many definitive statements on various subjects (all in accord with the radical left wing of the Democratic Party). Now, it’s silence. Unidentified campaign spokespeople imply that her previous positions are no longer operative; but what is the new position?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden-Harris can’t lead and it emboldens our enemies: Liz Peek

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-harris-cant-lead-emboldens-enemies

President Joe Biden, fresh off an 18-day vacation, says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not done enough to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. He appears to blame Netanyahu for the cold-blooded execution of six hostages, including a U.S. citizen, as much as the Hamas thugs who pulled the trigger. That figures. While the president once vowed that U.S. support for the Jewish state was “rock solid,” more recently that support has crumbled as Biden has pushed for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, damn the consequences. 

When told of the hostage deaths, Biden issued a statement saying: “Make no mistake, Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.” We’ll see.  

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ faltering backing of Israel and pandering to the pro-Palestinian mob has hindered IDF’s aggressive hunt for the Hamas beasts who murdered some 1,200 innocents on October 7 and for the hostages held in Gaza.    

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Bring Them Home’ Is Bringing Us to the Brink Empty slogans and misbegotten promises are designed to cause civil war. Don’t let them. By Liel Leibovitz

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-brink-civil-war

Tens of thousands of protesters were swarming the streets of Tel Aviv on Sunday, calling on all restaurants, bars, and shops to shutter in solidarity. Many did. Highway 4, the major coastal route that runs from the Lebanese border down to the cusp of Gaza, was blocked in several locations by protestors setting tires on fire and confronting the police. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor union, declared a general strike, which meant closing schools, businesses, and other essential institutions. Outraged, a slew of municipalities declared the strike illegitimate, with mayors threatening to take action against anyone who doesn’t show up for work. Although Histadrut abided by the Labor Court’s order to end the strike by Monday afternoon, the battle lines were drawn: town against town, brother against brother.

What are Israelis fighting about?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

EU Should Condemn Iran, Not Israel, for West Bank Violence by Con Coughlin

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20915/eu-should-condemn-iran-not-israel

[T]he fact that the EU’s foreign policy chief [Josep Borrell] has even suggested imposing punitive measures against Israel, a country smaller than the state of New Jersey, when it is involved in a desperate fight defending itself against the world’s largest sponsor of state terrorism, Iran, and its proxy terrorist groups — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iraqi militias, as well as Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — on at least seven fronts, shows a woeful lack of understanding of the conflict.

Borrell’s constant articulation of anti-Israeli views also raises questions about his suitability to continue holding such an important position in the EU. Earlier this year, he launched a blistering attack against the “Israeli occupation authorities” for imposing punitive measures against an openly genocidal Palestinian Authority (PA).

Even so, Borrell’s stance reflects the deep anti-Israel sentiment that exists within the EU bureaucracy… After Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis, rather than receiving support for her gesture of solidarity by visiting Israel, during which [European Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen went to the Kfar Aza kibbutz (where at least 52 of 700 residents were murdered), she faced a barrage of criticism from EU insiders, with 800 EU staffers writing an official letter of complaint criticising her “uncontrolled” support of Israel.

[UN Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres’s willingness to focus his criticism on Israel, and not the Iranian-backed terrorists, is yet another example of the UN’s institutional anti-Israel bias. If the UN has any genuine interest in taking a balanced approach to the violence in the West Bank, then, instead of focusing its criticism exclusively on Israel, it would call on Iran to cease backing the network of terrorist groups it backs in the region, whose main goal is the destruction of Israel on the way to destroying the United States — the main representative of the West.

The failure of international bodies such as the EU and the UN to demonstrate any pretence of balance when intervening on vital international security issues such as the Iranian-sponsored conflicts taking place in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon not only makes a mockery of their claim to be independent arbiters on the issue. It also runs the risk of making them utterly irrelevant, to the extent that they suffer the same fate as the League of Nations in the 1930s, whose inability to confront fascism condemned it to abject failure.

The European Union’s dangerous bias on the Gaza conflict, where it constantly backs Iranian-backed terrorist groups at the expense of a democracy, Israel, has been exposed yet again by the latest anti-Israel stance adopted by Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign minister.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MARK STEYN DRIFTING TO ARMAGEDDON

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.steynonline.com/14610/drifting-to-armageddon

Actually, it turns out I’ve gone full-on Bidenist, literally more submissive to his Delaware beach house than the Delaware beach house itself. As widely reported in Britain and Europe, “there is an American veto on Ukrainian use of Storm Shadow missiles to attack targets at depth in Russia, even though that will materially assist Ukraine.”

So what is still nominally the “Biden” Administration is restraining London and Paris from letting the Ukrainians strike Russia with their UK-provided Strike Shadows and French-provided SCALP missiles. The “Biden” Administration evidently feels nuclear Armageddon might not be helpful in, say, the tighter swing states such as Pennsylvania or Michigan, so would rather the next world war be postponed if possible until, oh, mid-November at the earliest.

Nevertheless, yesterday, Monday, a Ukrainian drone strike hit an oil refinery in south-eastern Moscow. The same day Polish aircraft were scrambled, and the country’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, told The Financial Times that “Poland has ‘duty’ to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine”.

It’s difficult to have a one-sided proxy war. At some point, the logic of the US, UK, France and Germany gifting Kiev with an arsenal they could never have accumulated on their own and then permitting Zelenskyy to lob his freebies deep into Russia will lead the Russkies to conclude that a state of war exists between them and Nato. What then? From The Guardian:

Russia will make changes to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons in response to what it regards as western escalation in the war in Ukraine, state media quoted deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Sunday.

The west’s insouciance – indeed, total indifference – to “escalation” with a country that has more nukes than anybody else on the planet stands in marked contrast to its urge to de-escalate certain other conflicts. Headline from the BBC:

Harris tells Netanyahu ‘it is time’ to end war in Gaza

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Lammy’s shameful appeasement of Hamas Punishing Israel with a partial arms embargo will embolden Islamofascists everywhere. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/03/david-lammys-shameful-appeasement-of-hamas/

Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with ‘optics’. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: ‘Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?’

This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a ‘clear risk’, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to ‘commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law’. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.

Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. ‘What is the point?’, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Tal Fortgang Destined to Fail Northwestern’s initiative to combat anti-Semitism does not respond to student protesters’ shallow worldview.

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/northwestern-university-initiative-to-combat-anti-semitism-destined-to-fail

Even among the jarring snapshots that emerged from this spring’s anti-Israel encampments, imagery from Northwestern University’s “Liberated Zone” was particularly vile. In addition to the usual signs calling for the elimination of Israel, the campus was defaced with a depiction of a crossed-out Star of David—a symbol not just of Israel, but of the Jewish people. Perhaps most horrifying was a sign featuring Northwestern’s Jewish president, Michael Schill, caricatured with horns and blood dripping from his face, with a dialogue bubble reading, “I [heart] genocide.”

At the time, Schill indicated that Northwestern would take the blatant anti-Semitism seriously. “[W]hen I see a Star of David with an X on it, when I see a picture of me with horns or when I hear that one of our students has been called a ‘dirty Jew,’ there is no ambiguity,” he said. “This needs to be condemned by all of us, and that starts with me.” 

Nothing more than that condemnation materialized. Northwestern did not punish any student demonstrators. In fact, the administration negotiated an end to the encampment by acquiescing to several of the group’s demands. Schill had formed an Advisory Committee on Preventing Antisemitism and Hate in November 2023, but it disbanded in May after failing to find consensus on appropriate language to address festering Jew-hatred.

The kicker came last week, when Northwestern took a step likely to be emulated by other universities seeking to fend off lawsuits alleging violations of Jewish students’ civil rights. Schill announced that Northwestern would provide “expanded resources” and “educational opportunities” to combat “antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of hate.” At the heart of the plan: “Mandatory trainings on antisemitism and other forms of hate will be used in September at incoming student orientation and over the Fall Quarter for all returning students.” Naturally, there will also be “an integration of antisemitism and Islamophobia into the work of our Institutional Diversity and Inclusion Office, including a new religious literacy program.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Daniel J. Flynn Kennedys Gonna Kennedy In endorsing Donald Trump, RFK, Jr., is following a long family tradition of opposing Democrats when their disgust with the party overwhelms their loyalty to it.

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-historical-precedent-behind-rfk-jrs-trump-endorsement

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in suspending his presidential campaign as his family members long desired, nevertheless displeased those sharing his last name by endorsing Donald Trump in the process. “It is worse than disappointment,” Max Kennedy wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “We are in mourning.”

“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” a statement joined by five other Kennedy siblings read. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”

Several of the Kennedy siblings, including former congressman Joseph and current journalist Douglas, did not attach their names to the statement.

“Personally,” reacted younger sister Kerry, “I completely disavow and separate and disassociate myself from my brother, Bobby Kennedy, and his flagrant and inexplicable effort to desecrate and trample and set fire to daddy’s memory.”

Our memories of Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., remain uncorrupted by facts. Like his brother John and so many others cut down in the prime of life, he appears to us as less a person than projection. In the case of Democrats, including many of his children, this amounts to a depiction of him as a loyal servant of the party. Falling for this seduction makes for an imaginary Bobby Kennedy, who always and everywhere acts to please the present. Reality, so often the imagination’s bête noire, objects.

Both Robert Kennedys, in fact, not only opposed Democrats in the White House when their disgust with party overwhelmed their loyalty to it but also voted Republican. Here the factual past overrules a present in search of not truth but affirmation. Who, really, “tramples” the memory of Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Take That! Biden-Harris DOJ Files Complaint against Hamas Mass Murderers Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on September 4th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/take-that-biden-harris-doj-files-complaint-against-hamas-mass-murderers/

More a campaign document than a charging instrument . . . and a fundamentally unserious one.

Could it be more fitting that, in the criminal complaint against Hamas leaders unsealed in Manhattan federal court today, the lead defendant charged by the Justice Department is Ismael Haniyeh. Yes, if you were wondering, that would be the Ismael Haniyeh who was killed during a daring Israeli Defense Forces operation in Tehran about five weeks ago (on July 31).

If there was any doubt about it, “September 10 counterterrorism” is back.

The expression refers to the eight years between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the destruction of that complex in the jihadist atrocities that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. That is the period, spanning the Clinton administration, when our government decided to regard jihadist terrorism as a law-enforcement problem to be addressed foremost by courtroom prosecutions.

Merrick Garland, now the Biden-Harris administration attorney general, was a top lawyer in the Clinton Justice Department. The Clinton strategy was not the Justice Department’s doing; America’s counterterrorism strategy is the president’s call. But having been there at the time, I can attest that DOJ was the strategy’s most enthusiastic advocate.

I can further attest that the strategy was a national-security train wreck.

It makes sense, it should be needless to say, to conduct courtroom prosecutions of terrorists who are captured trying to carry out attacks in the United States during ostensible peacetime. There is an argument (I don’t subscribe to it, but it is commonly held nonetheless) that such prosecutions are required by the Constitution, especially if some of the terrorists happen to be American citizens (as was not uncommon in the Clinton-era terrorism prosecutions). It makes even more sense to prosecute material supporters of terrorism in order to choke off the funding and recruitment of foreign terrorist organizations — a significant improvement in American counterterrorism law enacted in the mid Nineties.