NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

ISIS Plots Its Return Brian Stewart

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/isis-plots-its-return/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The West can’t afford passivity

We are living through a momentous phase in the twilight struggle against the Islamic State. In the past year or so, the jihadist outfit has been an increasingly assertive presence in Syria’s hinterland, deploying a band of “holy warriors” to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. Once more, an armed rebellion has blossomed there against the U.S.-led coalition, and, unless put down in short order, it promises to bring about an Islamic State resurgence.

The gathering of jihadist forces and the corresponding explosion of violence could prove potent enough to engulf Syria and consolidate another state with no law but God’s — a supposed kingdom of heaven on earth. This year, the pace of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets have been U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Kurdish-led troops who worked with the U.S. to defeat ISIS five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counterterrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates who have languished in jail since the SDF and the U.S.-led coalition swept away the final remnant of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate at Baghuz in March 2019.

Since shattering the Islamic State, the U.S. has maintained a small military footprint in Syria and Iraq to keep the peace. U.S. warplanes carry out air strikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces that conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos conduct missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. This year, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations, while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of activity mirrors that of 2023, when the U.S. carried out four strikes against the Islamic State.

Bolstering the tepid military campaign in Syria and Iraq is a necessary precondition to staving off the ISIS resurgence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Chooses Pam Bondi to Replace Gaetz as AG Nominee Alex Welz

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-chooses-pam-bondi-to-replace-gaetz-as-ag-nominee/

In the hours following Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration, President-elect Donald Trump selected Florida’s Pam Bondi to be his nominee for U.S. attorney general.

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump said in a statement.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

Bondi served as one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused of conditioning military aid to Ukraine on the Eastern European nation’s commitment to investigating Joe Biden.

The Sunshine State’s first ever female attorney general previously served on a Trump commission tasked with curtailing the opioid crisis and drug addiction more broadly. The former president has commended her work in combating “the trafficking of deadly drugs.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yes, You Do Have to Hand It to Trump Jeffrey Blehar

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/yes-you-do-have-to-hand-it-to-trump/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

If anything, his political skills have been underrated

In a very real way, Donald Trump was running not just for the presidency but for his life.

Many political observers, myself included, spend more time mocking or castigating the losers of an election than crediting the winners. “If it bleeds it leads,” and for someone prone to engage in rhetorical carnage, few better opportunities present themselves than by counting coup on the political sad sacks moping around the Losers’ Table. So, if you’ll permit one last laugh about Kamala Harris’s blessed political demise, let’s marvel that the official line in Washington, D.C., and among Democratic media types is that “Harris ran a perfect campaign.” A “flawless campaign.” She did “everything she needed to do,” you see — why, she even secured Queen Latifah’s endorsement — but, alas, fell just a bit short.

You know who surely did not run a flawless campaign? Donald Trump. His consolation is that he has completed the most impressive act of political resurrection in American history, one that makes Richard Nixon’s 1968 return look trivial, and that he, not Harris, will become the 47th president of the United States. The Trump campaign’s victory this year was a landmark — and not just because Trump managed to win despite his behavior and the events that have surrounded him since the last election. The campaign was remarkable also because of its breadth. It organized a voter coalition very different from those of the Bush years and one much better equipped to compete nationally against Democrats in the longer term. It produced an increasingly multiracial party now reoriented toward working-class economic and cultural concerns, whose constituents are bound together in their skepticism of elites, all by the force of Trump’s success.

Who deserves the credit? Surely everyone involved in the campaign is eager to claim some.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Howard Husock Local Option How to drill, baby, drill—even in New York State.

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/local-option

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Seriously, Is Biden Trying To Start WWIII To Get Even With Trump?

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/22/seriously-is-biden-trying-to-start-wwiii-to-get-even-with-trump/

A mentally-challenged President Joe Biden turned 82 years old this week, a much-diminished man from his hey-day as a Democratic Party Senate stalwart in the last century. But one part of his character is undimmed by the passage of the years: His legendary spite and gleeful willingness to betray his political foes.

Knowing this, is he now about to set off a third world war to settle an election score with newly re-elected President Donald Trump, who Biden still calls an “existential threat” to America?

We’re talking of course of Biden’s inexplicably dangerous decision to encourage Ukraine to use long-range U.S. missiles against Russian territory, which has already prompted a response from Russia in the form of a missile barrage against Ukraine.

Biden’s also approving antipersonnel mines for use against Russian forces, along with sending yet another $237 million in military aid and forgiving $5 billion in loans.

It makes no sense at all, unless you see it as a way of showing he still has the reins of government firmly in hand, and wants to hand newly re-elected President Donald Trump a nasty, dangerous mess as he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Regime-Change: Prerequisite for Iran’s Policy-Change Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

http://bit.ly/40Xe8QQ

According to the State Department’s annual human rights report on Iran: “Iran’s restrictions on human rights worsened in a number of areas during the year….[For instance], transnational repression against individuals, femicide, forced sterilization, early and forced marriage, trafficking in persons, recruitment of child soldiers, worst forms of child labor, violence targeting ethnic minorities [e.g., Shiite Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Kurds and Sunni Balochis], severe restrictions on freedom of expression and religion [e.g., Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews], criminalizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government….”

The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights adds: ”Human rights violations by Iran… amounting to crimes against humanity…. Women and girls subjected to rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including gang rape, rape with an object, electrocution of genitalia, forced nudity and groping…. State authorities at the highest levels encouraged, sanctioned and endorsed human rights violations through statements justifying the acts and conduct of the security forces….”

*Since its February 1979 violent rise to power, the Ayatollahs’ regime has been intensely committed to its 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, as documented by its Constitution, school curriculum, mosque sermons and the daily enforcement of its Islamic Revolution, domestically and globally.  The Ayatollahs’ vision – which transcends financial and diplomatic considerations – has transformed Iran from “The American Policeman of the Gulf” to the leading global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden sanctions Israeli farmers while dropping sanctions on Palestinian terrorists Victor Sharpe

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

Here in the United States, journalism ruined itself and by extension harmed the nation. The leftwing legacy media, filled as it is with anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and increasingly anti-Israel hacks, exposed its relentless malignancy during this last election with its inexorable bias. However, vast numbers of U.S voters finally saw the malign legacy media for what it is and has become. They voted in favor of Trump and against the dangerous Democrat Biden-Harris policies that were pushed by the media.

The number of votes in favor of President Trump may have even exceeded that of the votes cast for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. America may yet become great again.

There is little the Trump Administration may be able to do about the current malevolence which erodes ABC and CBS News, as long as those two media outlets don’t violate their license. But NPR and PBS violated the public trust with extreme and biased coverage during the election. For so many years they have been subsidized by the American taxpayers through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it is now high time to end those subsidies. After all, that will help defeat their wokeism.

With support for the new President and his Administration, the hope is that the appalling measures that Biden, Harris and Blinken enacted since coming to power – and especially during these last two months of their term of office – will be toppled by President Trump. Biden immorally is ramping up yet more sanctions on Israeli farmers but is dropping those on Palestinian terrorists.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why they refuse to see Jews as victims The left’s pitiless cynicism about the pogrom in Amsterdam confirms how morally lost they are. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/20/why-they-refuse-to-see-jews-as-victims/

It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’

It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.

The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Unfulfilled Promise Pope Francis and the Israel-Hamas War Adam Gregerman

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/unfulfilled-promise-pope-francis-israel

Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s operation in Gaza constitutes genocide, according to a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year. “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pope said in excerpts published Sunday by the Italian daily La Stampa.

What makes the inflammatory statements in the pope’s book especially disturbing is that they follow on remarks by the pope that appear to demonize Jews even more broadly and which are contrary to teachings of the Church. Pope Francis’ prior Letter to Catholics of the Middle East on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel from Gaza provoked widespread confusion and consternation among Jews and Catholics. While he has spoken regularly about the attack and the fighting that erupted in its wake, his inclusion in the letter of a citation of John 8:44 to denounce the evils of war was to many inexplicable.

The verse chosen by the pontiff, a vitriolic accusation that the Jews “are from [their] father, the devil,” has for centuries provoked and been used to justify Church hostility to Jews. Yet such terrible imagery of Jewish malfeasance is thoroughly out of place in a modern Catholic document. Regrettably, the pope nonetheless chose to use this notorious verse at a time when global antisemitism has reached disturbingly high levels. Such a statement threatens the intellectual work of his Catholic predecessors going back to the 1960s.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Sending Them Home ‘Mass deportation’ starts with the removal of illegal aliens who break the law inside our borders, whether on the streets or on campuses by Mark Krikorian

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-deportation-criminal-aliens

Who said the following?

Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?

No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.

Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.

The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.

Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.

And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”

Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.