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The New “European Zionism” and Viktor Orban’s Hungary David Goldman

Posted By on October 20th, 2024

https://www.newsweek.com/new-european-zionism-viktor-orbans-hungary-opinion-1969603

“Zionism for the nations of Europe,” wrote Dutch anti-immigration crusader Geert Wilders in Breitbart this month. “The Europeans should follow the example of the Jewish people and safeguard the sovereignty of their nation-states.” Wilders’ party took first place in Holland’s national elections late last year, a portent of the so-called shift to the Right that propelled nationalist parties to electoral success this year in Germany, France, Austria, and the Czech Republic. But the first European “Zionist” and the inspiration for many European conservatives was Hungary’s long-serving Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Hungary is a small nation that is determined to survive the demographic winter that has crept across the industrial nations. It devotes nearly a tenth of its budget to support for families, but even more important than family subsidies is a renewed national spirit and resistance to the European Commission’s attempt to homogenize the nations of Europe into a supranational blur.

“Humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it ‘the age of depopulation. For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people,” economist Nicholas Eberstadt Oct. 10 in Foreign Affairs.

That’s a death sentence for Europe’s smaller nations. When Orban came to office in 2010, government demographers gauged the total fertility (number of live births in a lifetime) for Magyar women at just 0.83, then the lowest in the world. Since then, Hungary’s TFR has roughly doubled to about 1.6, and a surge in the marriage rate portends further improvement.

Orban became a figure of controversy in 2016 when he refused to open Hungary’s borders to the millions of Middle Eastern migrants fleeing the Syrian civil war and other conflicts, defying migrant quotas assigned by the European Commission. It also put Orban in conflict with the world’s wealthiest Hungarian, George Soros, whose Open Society Foundation promotes free migration.

European nationalists look to Israel as a beacon of hope. It’s the only high-income country with a fertility rate above the 2.1 breakeven level—so far above breakeven at three children per female that its working-age population will more than double from today’s 4.5 million to 11 million by the end of this century, according to UN demographers. The same UN projections show that the working-age population of Turkey and Iran will fall by about half, and by three-quarters in Taiwan and South Korea.

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Death of a fascist The elimination of Yahya Sinwar is a great moment for Israelis and Palestinians alike. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/17/death-of-a-fascist/

So Yahya Sinwar has been killed. The leader of Hamas in Gaza is no more. The man widely believed to have been the architect of the pogrom of 7 October has been eliminated. The worst mass murderer of Jews since the Nazi era has been served the ultimate and most righteous punishment. The fascist is dead. This is a great day not only for Israel and the Jewish diaspora that has been smarting for more than a year from the horrors that Sinwar and his army of anti-Semites visited on southern Israel, but also for all of humanity.

It was during a ground operation in Rafah in southern Gaza that the IDF killed three terrorists. One was Sinwar. Rafah, of course, is the city every virtue-signaller in the West told Israel to leave well alone. ‘All eyes on Rafah’ went the social-media cry a few weeks back. Yet it turns out the man who green-lighted the rape, kidnap and slaughter of more than a thousand Jews was there. Listen, if your campaigning entails putting a moral forcefield around a fascist overlord, if it involves the protection of a Jew-killer from the Jews looking for him, then you might not be as virtuous as you think.

There will doubtlessly be much agonised analysis of Sinwar’s life. I expect we’ll even see the morally lost talking heads of the Western press gab about what a pensive leader he was or how his early life in a rundown refugee camp pushed him towards violent hate for the Jewish State. For now though, before all the unseemly handwringing, the basic facts of his life will suffice. He got involved in terrorism in the early 1980s. He later served as Hamas’s punisher of alleged Palestinian collaborators with Israel, earning him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Khan Younis’. He spent time in jail for the murder of such ‘collaborators’, one of whom he strangled to death with his bare hands, another of whom he suffocated with a keffiyeh. In 2017 he became leader of Hamas in Gaza. And in 2023 he okayed Hamas’s fascistic onslaught against the Jews of southern Israel.

This is a man who deserved to die. His crimes against the Jews were legion. He took the postwar cry of ‘Never Again’ and stomped it into the dirt. ‘Again, again’ was his preferred slogan. His violent disregard for Jewish life was a function of his deep-seated anti-Semitism – you don’t get to be leader of a terror group whose founding covenant committed it to an apocalyptic war on the Jews without being a Jew-hater yourself.

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128 U.S. Orthodox Jews Are Barred from Lufthansa Flight By Susan Quinn

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/128_u_s_orthodox_jews_are_barred_from_lufthansa_flight.html

Ever since the end of World War II and the Holocaust, the Germans have made a show about fighting anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, like the nation’s fairly recent passage of strict laws against hate speech, detailed below:

The German penal code prohibits publicly denying the Holocaust and disseminating Nazi propaganda, both off- and online. This includes sharing images such as swastikas, wearing an SS uniform and making statements in support of Hitler.

It also places strict limits on how social media companies must moderate and report hate speech and threats. These hate-speech laws were, after three far-right terror attacks in 2019 and early 2020 prompted German authorities to warn of increasing extremism.

But anti-Semitism has a long history in Germany, and in 2022, we learned of an anti-Semitic incident on Lufthansa Airlines that demonstrates its persistence, which has now resulted in a $4 million fine by the U.S. Department of Transportation, a penalty incurred from allegations that Lufthansa Airlines had discriminated against a large group of Jewish passengers. The situation was mishandled in so many ways that we have to wonder if there was an underlying zeal for acting assertively against a large group of Orthodox Jews.

The passengers were traveling from New York to Budapest, Hungary for an annual memorial event for an Orthodox rabbi. Although there were 128 Jewish passengers, they were not traveling as a group. There are inconsistencies in the stories about what instigated the passengers’ removal after they disembarked in Frankfurt and then were not permitted to reboard to continue their trip to Budapest, but here’s what an article at CNN reported:

The misbehavior detailed in the [airline] report includes 60 passengers onboard ‘repeatedly disregarded’ safety and public announcements from flight attendants and the flight deck. The crew said that some passengers obstructed flight attendants in economy class from its on-board food and beverage service, ‘inconvenienced other passengers’ and argued with the crew about wearing masks.

Another description from other passengers, via an item at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, doesn’t appear to confirm these comments:

On the first leg of the flight, some passengers said they were told by the crew to wear face masks and not to stand in the aisles. The passengers said they didn’t see anyone that didn’t comply. Lufthansa at the time required passengers to wear a face mask, while U.S. and German law prohibit passengers from assembling in aisles or galley areas during a flight.

The captain of the flight informed a Lufthansa security manager of misbehavior by passengers traveling on to Budapest. No specific passengers were identified, according to the Transportation Department. Still, the airline put a hold on more than 100 passengers’ tickets. 

Finally, a press release sent out by Lufthansa:

In a press release, the airline said the incident ‘resulted from an unfortunate series of inaccurate communications, misinterpretations, and misjudgments throughout the decision-making process’ and that these actions, ‘although regrettable, do not support any finding of discrimination and the department’s findings in this case.’

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Voter Fraud: The Only Issue That Matters in 2024 By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/voter_fraud_the_only_issue_that_matters_in_2024.html

No, it’s not “the economy, stupid,” in spite of the schizophrenic stock market since our remarkably resilient capitalistic economy ran head-on into the socialist-cum-communist Biden-Harris regime, with its $1.8-trillion deficit.

And no, it’s not domestic policy, where we have had the luxury of being on the receiving end of these:

High taxes.
High food prices.
High gas prices.
Sky-high regulations.
Alarmingly high crime rates throughout the country, particularly in states run by Democrats, where arrests are few, bail is nonexistent, and raging criminals enjoy no consequences for their assaults, rapes, murders, racist attacks, etc.
Eleven million illegal and unvetted aliens are further draining our economy  thanks to the largesse of this regime, which is housing them in fancy hotels and providing food, health care, iPhones, education for their children, and even monthly stipends that are higher than what American families and veterans receive.

And no, it’s not foreign policy, in which:

We’ve spent trillions of dollars supporting thugs like Zelensky in Ukraine but couldn’t find the funds, as ace investigative journalist Kelleigh Nelson spells out, to help the ravaged victims of the government-manipulated hurricanes Helene and Milton in several southern “red” states.  Talk about an October surprise!
There are now five wars that didn’t exist four years ago — in Yemen, Darfur, Myanmar, Ukraine, and Israel — costing us more trillions of dollars and precious lives.
The Biden-Harris regime is indefensibly antagonistic to our trusted and invaluable ally, Israel, as it has waffled on its support and threatened an arms embargo for that tiny Jewish state, surrounded and at war with seven menacing enemies whose charters call for its annihilation and death to every Jew on Earth.  And yet we have a president who threatens Israel not to destroy the Iranian nukes.

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Vengeance Noah Rothman

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vengeance-2/

“The glory in this moment, therefore, is owed to Israel alone. And although it has become a thankless mission, all those who stand against barbarism and tyranny are the beneficiaries of Israel’s actions.”

The Israeli military confirmed on Thursday that Yahya Sinwar — Hamas’s longtime strategist, the group’s leader since summer, and the foremost architect of the October 7 massacre — has been eliminated.

Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.

A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.

The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.

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Harris Has No Credibility on Immigration Rich Lowry

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/harris-has-no-credibility-on-immigration/

She can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

Kamala Harris isn’t great at answering questions but is perhaps at her very worst in addressing the border.

This isn’t because she can’t string sentences together (she can, although the results are always mixed) or she doesn’t know what she’s saying (she’s quite deliberate in sticking to her talking points). No, she can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

What is she going to say? Yes, we completely screwed this up and, I regret to say, did it on purpose. I’ve learned my lesson, though, and want to reverse field on this issue going forward.

An answer like that wouldn’t be sincere, but since when has that been an obstacle?

Since she and her team obviously believe that a confession is not in her interests, her only alternative is to deceive, obfuscate, and evade, and hope it’s enough to see her through to November 5.

She tries to sound like she’s always wanted to be a border hawk — if only she’d been able to get her way.

“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system,” she said on 60 Minutes a week or so ago, “knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up.”

Every single word of this, with the possible exception of the prepositions, is misleading. The proposal was a massive amnesty bill. It was intended “to fix” the system only if you believe the real problem is that illegal immigrants in the United States haven’t yet been legalized. The bill had no meaningful border provisions, not even more Border Patrol agents.

By complaining that the legislation wasn’t taken up, Harris clearly wanted to create the impression that GOP obstruction stymied the bill. Yet Democrats had unified control of Congress at the time and chose to ignore the proposal because everyone understood it was an absurd nonstarter.

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‘Pure Genocide’: Christians Slaughtered in Nigeria and the Great Press Cover-Up by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21033/christians-slaughtered-in-nigeria

Muslim militants slaughtered 16,769 Christians [in Nigeria] in just the four years between 2019 and 2023. That comes out to 4,192 Christians killed on average per year—or one Christian murdered for his/her faith every two hours. — Report, Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, August 29, 2024.

The violence has reached the point, the report says, that many traumatized Christian children sleep in trees to try to avoid being butchered during the night, when Fulani are most prone to attack.

[I]n 2014, there were 1.1 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria; as of 2023, there are 3.4 million. — “NO ROAD HOME: Christian IDPs displaced by extremist violence in Nigeria,” Open Doors, September 1, 2024.

Behind all these misleading euphemisms, the facts remain: the murderers are Muslim and their victims are overwhelmingly Christian.

When Muslim terrorists slaughtered nearly 200 Christians last Christmas, the Associated Press failed to mention the identities of the assailants and their victims. Rather, it presented the atrocity, as so many now do, as a regrettable byproduct of climate change — which is, ostensibly, forcing “herders” (Muslims) to encroach on the lands of “farmers” (Christians).

In another AP report on the 2022 Pentecost Sunday church bombing that left 50 Christian worshippers dead, the words “Muslim” and “Islam” — even “Islamist” — never appear. Rather, readers were told, “It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack on the church.”

“Muslim” and “Islam” — even “Islamist” — never appear. Rather, readers were told, “It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack on the church.” To maintain this ambiguity, the AP failed to mention that Islamic terrorists have stormed hundreds of churches and slaughtered thousands of Christians “for sport” over the years in Nigeria….

“It’s tough to tell Nigerian Christians this isn’t a religious conflict since what they see are Fulani fighters clad entirely in black [like ISIS], chanting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and screaming ‘Death to Christians.'” — Sister Monica Chikwe, cruxnow.com, August 4, 2019.

“Removing Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria will only embolden the increasingly authoritarian government there.” — Sean Nelson, Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom for Alliance Defending Freedom International, catholicnewsagency.com, November 23, 2021.

For the mainstream media and politicians, Christian lives taken by Muslims apparently do not matter.

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Justice in Gaza

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/justice-in-gaza/

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks and leader of Hamas, has been killed. His death was confirmed on Thursday by the Israeli government and supported by a powerful photo of Israeli military personnel standing over his bloody, debris-covered corpse.

This is a wonderful development.

Sinwar, who remained in the tunnels of Gaza as other leaders sought refuge abroad, launched the current war by sending an army of terrorists into Israel under the cover of thousands of rockets — to massacre children, rape women, and burn homes to the ground. By the end of that horrific day, 1,200 were dead and 251 were taken hostage and dragged into Gaza. In over a year of fighting, Sinwar has refused to surrender and release the hostages, as he preferred to have his people suffer if it meant that world opinion, and the U.S. government, turned against Israel.

The terrorist leader had previously been held in an Israeli prison, where he survived brain cancer owing to treatment by Israeli physicians. But in 2011, he was one of the 1,000 prisoners released as part of the deal to secure the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Once released, he rose up the ranks of Hamas and became its de facto leader in Gaza.

The killing of Sinwar is a major victory for Israel, both operationally and symbolically. As long as Sinwar was alive and defiantly leading Hamas, it was difficult for Israel to view its costly war in Gaza as a success.

His death follows a string of major successes by Israel — the killing of Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and of dozens of other high-ranking leaders of both terrorist groups. Coupled with the overall campaign, Israel has dealt a significant blow to the proxies of Iran as it contemplates retaliatory steps against Iran itself.

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Inside Cyber by Chuck Brooks: Reviewed – Irish Tech News

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://irishtechnews.ie/inside-cyber-by-chuck-brooks-reviewed/

Inside Cyber, by Chuck Brooks, takes complex ideas about emerging technologies and provides a simplistic explanation of the technology. Brooks takes technology such as quantum computing, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, and explains the positives and negatives of these new technologies.

We live in a world that seems like it’s changing by the day. Keeping up with the times and understanding all of the new technology around us can seem like an impossible task, especially as it affects our daily lives. Just a few years ago, Artificial Intelligence was considered to only exist in Sci-Fi movies. Cellular speeds are coming close to rivalling Wi-Fi as global satellite communication nears. Countries are scrambling as they prepare for the looming threat of cyber attacks aided by AI. These new technologies will forever change the way the world operates. This book dives into what may seem like an existential threat, providing necessary steps to remain safe and secure.

Cybersecurity

Brook’s passion for cybersecurity and protecting the globe against technological threats is clear with over 10 chapters addressing these issues and how to prevent them. The first 5 chapters break down the common definition of cybersecurity; detailing likely targets of cyber attacks, different types and methods of cyber attacks, and how to best prevent them from occuring. It provides a valued education about cyber security and preventative habits to protect yourself, your business, and your home.

According to the book, in 2023, there were 343,338,964 reported victims of cyber attacks. Email is the most common vector for malware, with about 35% of the malware delivered via email in 2023. Business email compromises accounted for $2.7 billion in losses in 2022.

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Doctors Have Responsibility But No Authority By Deane Waldman, M.D.

Posted By on October 18th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/doctors_have_responsibility_but_no_authority.html

Nothing proves the title better than the recent reinstatement of a mask mandate in San Francisco hospitals. Every clinical doctor knows the data overwhelmingly proves they don’t work “to prevent the spread of the flu, COVID and other seasonal illnesses,” the ostensible, official reason for re-masking.

Note the adjective “clinical” doctor to contrast MDs in the trenches caring for sick people with bureaucrat MDs who, like Fauci, have never cared for patients in the real world but who dictate how the clinicians must practice medicine.

For most viruses, a cloth surgical mask is as effective as a screen door on a submarine. When (not if) patients get sick with the flu despite healthcare workers wearing masks, who will be responsible to care for them? When patients complain that masks did not prevent illness, who will they blame?

For decades, federal regulations and bureaucratic doctors have been chipping away at doctors’ independence, authority, and valuation. The heart surgeon with the best results can charge more than the surgeon with poor results, yet both are paid the same: an amount much less than their charges and what Medicare determines as “allowable reimbursements.” These are not reimbursements — they are government-pre-determined, low-ball payments.

As an interventional pediatric cardiologist, this author’s charges for a cardiac catheterization in a critically ill newborn baby ranged from $1,500 to as much as $9,000 if a device were implanted. Medicaid paid the maximum allowable reimbursement: $387.

In the past, general physicians would refer their patients to surgeons with the best results for the operation the patient needed. Now they must send the patient to whatever institution (not even who) the insurance company has a contract with.

A personal physician is no longer chosen by the patient. The enrollee, not patient, is assigned a provider on a health plan panel. People wait months to get in for a 15-minute appointment during which the doctor spends most of the time looking at a computer screen and filling out forms. No one takes a history or does a physical exam anymore.