NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

North Korea And Iran: The Evil Axis Of Missiles ByBrent M. Eastwood

Posted By on October 8th, 2024

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/north-korea-and-iran-the-evil-axis-of-missiles/

New ‘Partnership’ Of Evil: North Korea and Iran – It should not surprise us that Iran is acquiring technology and ballistic missiles from North Korea. The newly resurgent “Axis of Evil” is alive and well in 2024.

North Korea has always needed hard currency, and providing the missiles and technical know-how to Iran in exchange for monetary funding and goodwill is irresistible to diabolical North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Sadly, the DPRK has been working with Tehran on missile tech for years, and the results of that partnership could have wide-ranging impacts all over the Middle East and, specifically for Israel.

North Korea Aids Iran in Missile Development

Iran, for example, has a ballistic missile it calls the Emad. This model is actually a Shahab-3, which itself is a copy of the North Korean ballistic missile called NoDong. The Emad has a more extended range than the NoDong that enables it to strike Israel, and it is essential to note that the North Koreans have their fingerprints all over the Emad.

History of Iranian and North Korean Partnership

The North Korean and Iranian missile partnership has been active since the 1980s when Tehran acquired the Hwasong-5 missile from the DPRK for use in the Iran-Iraq War.

This led to the development and transfer of the improved Hwasong-6 from North Korea to Iran. In the 1990s, the North Korean Hwasong-7, with five times the range of the Hwasong-5, proliferated in Iran. This put American military installations in the Middle East, including the entirety of Israel, within range. The Hwasong-7 could hold more fuel and a bigger payload.

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Niall Ferguson: My Journey From a Jerusalem of Ghosts to the Living Jerusalem To make sense of this bloody year, I had to go back to Lithuania. By Niall Ferguson

Posted By on October 8th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-my-journey-between-jerusalems?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius. 

That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.

It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.

To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies.

What today is Vilnius was once Vilna, a part of the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, and then, between 1918 and 1939, Wilno in the Republic of Poland. The condition of much of the Jewish population was impoverished and insecure. A British member of Parliament who toured the Pale of Settlement in 1903 was appalled by Vilna’s “pestilent” cellars. 

Yet the city was also the most important Jewish cultural hub in Eastern Europe—a center of Jewish learning and culture from the 1560s until the 1930s. The greatest Talmudic scholar of the eighteenth century, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, was known as the Vilna Gaon. The man who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, studied in Vilna. That cultural vitality did not abate after the city’s incorporation into the Polish republic. YIVO, the center for Jewish studies that is now based in New York, was originally founded in Wilno in 1925.

In 1939, when Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the city was handed over to Lithuania. This seemed providential. For Jews fleeing Nazi and Soviet rule, Vilnius looked like a sanctuary. Indeed, many of the city’s Jews celebrated the end of Polish rule. 

But the celebration was premature. In June 1940, along with neighboring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union. A year later, the regime changed once again—this time fatally. 

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the fate of the Jews of Vilnius was sealed. Between 190,000 and 196,000—more than 90 percent—of Lithuanian Jews were murdered: a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied. Their destruction was swift: Most Lithuanian Jews perished before the end of 1941. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

One year after 10/7: Israel’s alliance with a weakened America brings dangerous consequences David Goldman

Posted By on October 8th, 2024

https://www.theblaze.com/return/one-year-after-10-7-israels-alliance-with-a-weakened-america-brings-dangerous-consequences

Betrayed by the United States, Israel will have to maneuver as best it can in a world of diminishing American influence.

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” said the late Henry Kissinger to William F. Buckley. Israel’s alliance with the United States hasn’t proved fatal — and probably won’t — but it has left Israel with difficult choices and an enduringly dangerous security situation.

Zoom out from the battlefields in Gaza, about the size of Brooklyn and Queens, or the 18 miles from the Israeli-Lebanon border to the Litani River and consider the mess that the Biden administration has made of the world. Israel’s biggest problem is that U.S. influence is imploding around the world and to be an American ally means to wear a target on one’s back. Israel’s second-biggest problem is that its American ally has sandbagged it at every turn.

Instead of peace through strength, Biden has offered promulgation from weakness. That has grave implications for Israel’s position.

October 7, 2023, was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust, with 1,200 dead and many raped and tortured as well as 250 kidnapped. Relative to Israel’s Jewish population of 7.2 million, that’s the equivalent of 55,000 Americans, or roughly 20 times the death toll on 9/11.

America’s Global War on Terror caused 900,000 civilian casualties, according to a Brown University estimate. Taking the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS during 2016-2017 killed anywhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians. Israel’s campaign to extirpate Hamas from Gaza has been measured by comparison.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala The Tax Cutter? I&I/TIPP Poll Finds Trump Losing The Messaging Battle With Harris

Posted By on October 8th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/08/kamala-the-tax-cutter-ii-tipp-poll-finds-trump-losing-the-messaging-battle-with-harris/

Of all the results from the latest I&I/TIPP poll, the most unsettling has to be that voters think Kamala Harris is at least as much of a fiscal and economic conservative as Donald Trump.

Our latest poll, taken of 997 likely voters, finds that more voters say they trust Harris (who’s already announced $4 trillion in tax hikes) than Trump to cut taxes by a 48%-45% margin. Among the crucial independent voters, the margin is even greater – 49% to 36%.

That’s not all.

More trust Harris to bring about energy independence, 48%-47%.

Trump is essentially tied with Harris on growing the economy (49%-48%), but he’s far behind with independents on this critical issue, with half saying they trust Harris to grow the economy and just 42% trusting Trump.

Harris is tied with Trump on cutting spending and fixing inflation. But among independents, she leads on the former, 44%-33%, and the latter by a 47%-39% margin.

Two other areas where Trump leads – lowering the national debt (46%-44%) and reducing crime (48%-46%) – are well within the poll’s margin of error.

The only two issues on which Trump holds a clear advantage over Harris are national security (50%-45%) and securing the border (54%-41%).

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden to Jews: ‘No’ to Defending against Iran’s Nuclear Weapons by Robert Williams

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20997/no-defending-against-iran-nuclear-weapons

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” — United Nations Charter, Article 51.

On October 1, 2024, Iran directly attacked Israel for the second time in six months, launching at least 180 ballistic missiles at Israeli towns cities and towns and sending millions of Israelis into bomb shelters. Iran simply did what it has been doing for decades: trying to obliterate Israel.

Iran, both alone and through its proxies, has attacked Israel — a country smaller than New Jersey – for the past year, non-stop, on seven fronts: Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran itself. Lately, Iran has been eyeing an eighth front from which to fire on Israel: Sudan.

If a country is in danger of being attacked by nuclear weapons, within “one or two weeks,” as it is, according to the US Department of State, a request for “proportionality” is nonsensical.

What Israel’s leadership needs to do is ensure that Iran will not be able to attack the Jewish state ever again, either with conventional weapons or nuclear ones. This obligation, elementary for any country, means that Israel needs to incapacitate Iran’s nuclear sites and arguably put an end to Iran’s theocratic regime. There is no point in having an “accommodation” with Iran. To have peace in the Middle East, the West will need to defeat Iran.

Iran, cordially loathed by many of own its trapped citizens, already controls four countries in addition to its own: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. The regime has made no secret of its commitment to exporting its Islamic revolution globally — including to Sudan, the rest of Africa, the Western Hemisphere and the world. As the founder of the 1979 Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, said: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”

“Islam says,” he also noted: “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword!”

Yet the Biden-Harris administration, together with the other G7 countries, who represent almost the entire West, apparently cannot agree that the world would be better off if “the leading state sponsor of global terrorism” — on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons — were stopped in its tracks.

The UN resolution also showed those countries’ disregard for Western civilization – a civilization which Israel, with no thanks from anyone, is paying the highest price imaginable to protect from tyranny and barbarism.

All this, however, concerns more than “just the Jews.” If Western countries actively enable autocracy, terrorism and savagery not just by standing passively by but by disabling a country that is fighting these onslaughts — where does that leave the West when those forces move on to their next targets?

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

How to Fight the Left’s Politicization of Medicine By Jack Butler

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/how-to-fight-the-lefts-politicization-of-medicine/

A new study challenges one of the more popular reasons cited for introducing left-wing ideology into medicine, and it outlines an agenda for making health care apolitical.

‘A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “To ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other.” In the national delirium of a presidential election, the maladies of politics impose themselves on our minds to an even greater degree.

Unfortunately, the current state of the medical field is not much of an analgesic. In recent years, left-wing ideology has thoroughly penetrated medicine. But new research undercuts one of the more popular academic buttresses of this blatant politicization. It’s more than enough to make one wonder if a movement that bills itself as pro-health might actually be iatrogenic.

Health care has not been immune from the whole-of-society effort by the Left to take control of institutions and subordinate them to its aims. Medical schools, journals, professional societies, continuing-education courses, and other institutions of the medical field now tilt left, as I documented last year.

Examples abound. The official publication of the American College of Emergency Physicians recently published a case for DEI in medicine. Harvard’s School of Public Health is offering a “Settler Colonialism” course. The Cleveland Clinic is currently being investigated for possible discrimination against white patients. The important roles academia and the government play in the medical field make this reality sadly unsurprising.

It still may have been a surprise to some when a related research paper became fodder for the Supreme Court. In her dissent from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion that overturned affirmative action last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the practice “saves lives” (indirectly), citing a 2020 study to claim that high-risk black newborns are twice as likely to live if they have a black physician. What the study actually found was that half as many black newborns died while being treated by a black physician as when treated by a white physician, while the survival rate was above 99 percent in either case.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The choice is between civilisation and barbarism The West has not chosen to defend civilisation. But iron has entered the Israeli soul Melanie Phillips

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/the-choice-was-between-civilisation-or-barbarism-wip06eny?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are living through a seismic moment in our history, and the Jewish people will never be the same again.

On October 7 — that terrible day — few would have imagined that one year later Israel would still be under attack from an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.

Even fewer could have imagined that, far from sympathy and understanding over the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews once more for genocide, the west would turn against Israel as the aggressor and war criminal and subject diaspora Jews to an unprecedented tsunami of antisemitism.

The scale and nature of this response indicate that something totally abnormal has been happening.

It’s not just the street mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and every other university student hurling accusations of genocide at the Israelis for trying to defend themselves against genocide.

It’s not just the wretched media pumping out the Palestinian-scripted narrative of lies aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel and writing the Jewish people out of its own history in the land.

It’s not just the Biden administration and the Starmer government and the UN and international courts and NGOs and the Church of England all singing from the same Hamas hymn-sheet.

It’s also that, when Israel bombs Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza, the west tells it to stop because it’s killing “too many civilians”, even though it has produced the lowest ratio in modern history of civilians killed in war.

When Israel carries out an unprecedentedly precise attack by exploding thousands of pagers on the person of Hezbollah fighters so that vanishingly few civilians are harmed, the west accuses it of “indiscriminate killing”. When Hezbollah is left reeling still further after Israel wipes out with one missile the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, the USA, France, Britain and other western countries start piling pressure on the Jewish state to cease fire immediately.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Biden Administration and Iran: DEI Manifested as Foreign Policy For the DEI crowd, Iran was the perfect petri dish for a new foreign policy rooted in Western self-abasement, guilt, and deference to “indigenous” voices. By Michael Ginsberg

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/07/the-biden-administration-and-iran-dei-manifested-as-foreign-policy/

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been killing and harming Americans directly or through proxies from the moment of its birth in 1979. America has suffered 45 years of murder, mayhem, and the perpetual targeting of American interests at the hands of radical Islamofascists.

Yet since 2008, Democrats, led by President Obama, have reoriented American foreign policy to actively seek a rapprochement with the blood-soaked mullahs of Iran. Time and again, the Iranians have shown they are committed to violence against America and its allies, and time and again, Democrats have ignored Iranian actions to pursue accommodation.

From where did this delusional notion that the US could reach an understanding with fanatics who scream “Death to America” come? And why is the Democratic foreign policy establishment committed to this policy in the face of overwhelming evidence Iran has no interest in détente with the US?

If you ask me, it’s the same scourge that has undermined so many American domestic institutions: DEI.

The Biden Administration’s Iran policy—which is nothing more than a resumption and continuation of the Obama Administration’s Iran policy—is DEI manifested as foreign policy.

Iran is DEI catnip. For the DEI crowd, Iran today is a non-Western, Third World country, the alleged victim of Western meddling and colonialism that threw off its supposedly Western-imposed chains and established a government whose defining characteristic was hostility to the West. It was the perfect petri dish for a new foreign policy rooted in Western self-abasement, guilt, and deference to “indigenous” voices.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hilarious job numbers from the Bureau of Labor By Jack Hellner

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/hilarious_job_numbers_from_the_bureau_of_labor.html

“And remember: recently, the Department of Labor said it overestimated jobs by 881,000 in a year.  It is sad when so many trust government numbers when they are so consistently wrong.”

As the media campaign so vigorously for Democrats and cheer how great the Biden-Harris policies have been, suddenly, the Department of Labor comes out with an unemployment report that blows away expectations. 

Biden and Harris were out bragging as a significant number of people still can’t pay their bills without running up new debt or going delinquent on the debt they already had. 

Supposedly, 254,000 jobs were created in September.  Isn’t that amazing, that this report came out one month before the election? 

Of course, the media gave the headline number and never got into the details.

Here is one important detail: government jobs showed a gain of 785,000 because of the second biggest seasonal adjustment on record.  (It is easy to manipulate numbers when you have “seasonal adjustments.”)  This would mean that private-sector employment declined 531,000 with seasonal adjustments.  I would say that is not too much to brag about.  Somehow, the voters don’t get to see that number, but they know that the economy has sucked the past four years because they can’t pay their bills. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Are in Need of Renaissance People Modern society’s focus on credentials has created a two-tiered system, where multi-talented individuals are criticized, and elites oversee a dependent underclass. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 7th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/07/we-are-in-need-of-renaissance-people/

The songwriter, actor, country/western singer, musician, U.S. Army veteran, helicopter pilot, accomplished rugby player and boxer, Rhodes scholar, Pomona College and University of Oxford degreed, and summa cum laude literature graduate, Kris Kristofferson, recently died at 88.

Americans may have known him best for writing smash hits like “Me and Bobby McGee” and “For the Good Times,” his wide-ranging, star-acting roles in A Star is Born and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, his numerous solo albums, especially with then-spouse and singer Rita Coolidge, and the country group super-quartet he formed with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson.

In other words, Kristofferson was a rare Renaissance man who could do it all in an age of increasingly narrow specialization and expertise.

At certain times throughout history at particular locales, we have seen such singular people from all walks of life.

Classical Athens produced polymaths like Aristotle—tutor to Alexander the Great, logician, student of music, art, and literature, educator, think-tank founder, biologist, philosopher, and scientist. Later Greeks like Archimedes and Ptolemy, as men of action, mastered six or seven disciplines and applied their abstract knowledge in ways that made life easier for those around them.

The late Roman Republic was another cauldron of multitalented geniuses. It produced the brilliant stylist, historian, politician, and consummate general Julius Caesar, as well as his republican archrival Cicero—politician, philosopher, orator, master stylist, lawyer, and provincial governor.

Turn-of-the-century Victorian Great Britain produced giants like Winston Churchill—prime minister, statesman, essayist, historian, orator, strategist, and wartime veteran. As Britain’s war leader, between May 10, 1940, and June 22, 1941, he, almost alone, resisted the Axis powers and prevented Adolf Hitler from winning the war.