AP Had Advance Notice of Israeli Air Strike on Gaza Building, Was Able to Safely Evacuate All Journalists By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ap-had-advanced-notice-of-israeli-air-strike-on-gaza-building-was-able-to-safely-evacuate-all-journalists/

On Saturday, Israel struck a building in Gaza housing Hamas assets that also happened to have offices for the Associated Press. Why the AP was sharing an office building with a U.S. State Department designated terrorist group that is known to use civilians and journalists as human shields is a subject worth exploring. But here is the full statement by the AP, which includes two important details (which I’ve highlighted in bold):

We are shocked and horrified that the Israeli military would target and destroy the building housing AP’s bureau and other news organizations in Gaza. They have long known the location of our bureau and knew journalists were there. We received a warning that the building would be hit.

We are seeking information from the Israeli government and are engaged with the U.S. State Department to try to learn more.

This is an incredibly disturbing development. We narrowly avoided a terrible loss of life. A dozen AP journalists and freelancers were inside the building and thankfully we were able to evacuate them in time.

The world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today.

So to be clear, Israel warned the journalists, who had sufficient time to get out safely, and then proceeded to liquidate a legitimate enemy target.

Moral Clarity Versus Moral Depravity in Israel and Gaza | Opinion Josh Hammer

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/moral-clarity-versus-moral-depravity-in-israel-and-gaza-opinion/ar-BB1gI5Rz

Nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager has often observed that if the Israelis were to lay down their guns, Israel would be destroyed tomorrow, but if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, there would be peace tomorrow. It has always been thus.

The latest flare-up of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is no different. The proximate causes are a thorny combination of an abstruse housing dispute in northeastern Jerusalem, deceitful Palestinian slander about an ostensible threat to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the destabilizing nature of Israel’s current domestic political morass and the contemporaneous American appeasement in Vienna of the Palestinians’ preeminent jihad bankroller, the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the immediate aggressors, as per usual, are clear: Hamas, the internationally recognized Gaza-based terrorist outfit whose founding charter calls for the murder of every Jew worldwide, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, ruled in profoundly corrupt fashion by serial jihad-inciter Mahmoud Abbas, a Holocaust denialist now in the 16th year of his four-year term.

The result has been the worst bout of bloodshed since the last full-scale Israel-Hamas war in 2014. Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, seeking—and, tragically, occasionally succeeding—to inflict maximal harm upon Israel’s civilian population. Hamas’ rockets do not discriminate on the basis of age, race or religion: Victims include an Israel Defense Forces soldier, a 6-year-old boy in the oft-targeted Gaza border town of Sderot and a 32-year-old Indian national in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. One would be waiting in vain for Black Lives Matter, or other leading institutional wokesters and intersectional shakedown artists, to reconcile such calamities with their professed principles.

On the Hypocrites at Apple Who Fired Antonio Garcia-Martinez Much easier to ruin a career than mess with a corporate cash cow Matt Taibbi

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who-canceled

I’m biased, because I know Antonio Garcia-Martinez and something like the same thing once happened to me, but the decision by Apple to bend to a posse of internal complainers and fire him over a passage in a five-year-old book is ridiculous hypocrisy. Hypocrisy by the complainers, and defamatory cowardice by the bosses — about right for the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style era of timorous conformity and duncecap monoculture the woke mobs at these places are trying to build as their new Jerusalem.

Garcia-Martinez is a brilliant, funny, multi-talented Cuban-American whose confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys is to big tech what Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker was to finance. A onetime high-level Facebook executive — he ran Facebook Ads — Antonio’s book shows the House of Zuckerberg to be a cult full of on-the-spectrum zealots who talked like justice activists while possessing the business ethics of Vlad the Impaler:

Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo.

When I read Chaos Monkeys the first time I was annoyed, because this was Antonio’s third career at least — he’d also worked at Goldman, Sachs — and he tossed off a memorable bestseller like it was nothing. Nearly all autobiographies fail because the genre requires total honesty, and not only do few writers have the stomach for turning the razor on themselves, most still have one eye on future job offers or circles of friends, and so keep the bulk of their interesting thoughts sidelined — you’re usually reading a résumé, not a book.

Anti-Israel Forces Encouraged by Biden’s Weakness It has taken the Democrats all of four months in power to screw up the Middle East, and the good guys in the region are not pleased or inclined to play along.by Christian Whiton

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/anti-israel-forces-encouraged-biden%E2%80%99s-weakness-185215

Four years of relative peace in the Middle East have been shattered by a conflict between Hamas and Israel, which began when Hamas bombarded Jerusalem. The Iranian-backed force that rules Gaza then expanded its target list to other Israeli cities.

Why now? The Middle East and particularly the Levant had been on the mend since then-President Donald Trump took the handcuffs off U.S.-led forces in 2017 and allowed them to all but obliterate ISIS. Trump also knocked off balance the terrorism-exporting Iranian regime by curtailing its finances and confronting it with an aggressive military posture in the Arabian Gulf.

The biggest Trump breakthrough came with the Abraham Accords, which achieved a historic breakthrough between Israelis and Arabs, with the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Unfortunately, the new Biden administration refused simply to accept this new and beneficial status quo upon entering office. Biden officials set about immediately to let Iran out of the doghouse. The administration is set on resurrecting the 2015 nuclear deal that showered Tehran with money and still allowed it to keep the key parts of a nuclear program it today is using to enrich uranium far beyond what is necessary for peaceful purposes.

Biden officials also put the Palestinians, and therefore Hamas (aka, the Muslim Brotherhood), back on the payroll with $235 million in payments. Trump had cut them off in 2018, realizing they funded terrorism. In restoring the funds, the administration said it “wanted to restore credible engagement” between the Palestinians and Israelis. Certainly, it did: nothing is more credible than a rocket attack targeting civilians in one’s capital.

For the Sake of Peace, Israel Must Rout Hamas By Bret Stephens

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opinion/gaza-hamas-israel.html

As of this writing, terrorists in Gaza — the word “terrorist” fits people who take indiscriminate aim at civilians to achieve political goals — have fired some 1,750 rockets at Israel since Monday.

That’s a number worth pausing over, and not just because it has had the effect of overwhelming Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense. Gaza is often said to be sealed off and utterly destitute. Yet Hamas, which rules Gaza, seems not to have had too much trouble amassing this kind of arsenal, or too many qualms employing it in a way it knew was sure to incur a heavy Israeli response.

The usual rule in life is that if you throw the first punch you can’t complain if you’re counterpunched. The test of Western policy and public opinion is whether they will let Hamas break this rule.

That’s a test the Biden administration has so far passed: Both the president and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have issued statements stressing that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Good. It’s more than can be said for progressives such as Bernie Sanders, who blamed “the irresponsible actions of government-allied right-wing extremists in Jerusalem” for the fighting without adding a word of condemnation for Hamas.

Now let’s hope the administration’s attitude lasts. The tactics of Hamas are to house its arsenals in schools and mosques, set up headquarters in the basement of hospitals and fire its missiles from sites next to crowded apartment buildings and hotels housing foreign journalists.

The idea is either to keep Israel from returning fire or, if it does, reap the propaganda benefits from televised and tweeted pictures of wrecked buildings and human casualties and “disproportionate” Israeli-Palestinian death counts that obscure the fact that one side is doing what it can to protect civilian lives and the other side is doing what it can to endanger them.

On Eastern Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and Israel East and West are not simple geographic terms as they are in the United States.by Moshe Phillips

https://www.jns.org/opinion/on-eastern-jerusalem-sheikh-jarrah-and-israel/

CNN ran a news story on May 9 with the headline “Israeli Supreme Court delays hearing on Palestinian evictions from East Jerusalem neighborhood.” This followed an official press statement issued on May 7 by the U.S. State Department that reported “concern” about “evictions in East Jerusalem, settlement activity, home demolitions and acts of terrorism … .”

The catch? The area in the news is not in “East Jerusalem” at all. What’s more, there is not now, nor has there ever been in history a political entity known as “East Jerusalem.”A glance at any map of the city shows that the neighborhood Sheik Jarrah, including the parts also widely known in Hebrew as Shimon HaTzadik for centuries, is not in the capital’s east. It is in the north, about 1.25 miles north of the Western Wall, the Kotel.

In fact, this area is farther west than numerous well-known parts of Jerusalem, such as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (construction began in 1918) and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus (construction began in 1934).

The term “East Jerusalem” is an artificial construct that supporters of the Arab cause use in their propaganda in order to make it appear as if that part of the city is an intrinsically Arab area that Jews are illegally entering. In reality, there are Jewish neighborhoods throughout the eastern, western, northern and southern parts of Jerusalem. It’s a pity when American politicians and news outlets play along and use such geographically inaccurate and politically loaded language.

East and West in Israel are not simple geographic terms as they are in the United States, where Northeast Philadelphia, the Upper East Side in Manhattan and East L.A. are used to denote neighborhoods and sections of a city. In Israel, where Judea and Samaria have been labeled as the West Bank, things are different. The term West Bank was created by Arab propagandists to de-emphasize the area’s inherent Jewishness and to disassociate the land from the State of Israel. East Jerusalem was similarly invented.

This Time Israel Should Finish Off Hamas Roger L. Simon

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/this-time-israel-should-finish-off-hamas_3815825.html?

Sometimes when psychopaths, religious and otherwise—people whose charter urges the faithful to “kill all Jews,” even Jewish trees, whatever that is or could be—rain missiles on your country again and again, try to destroy you any way they can, dig tunnels under your property, loft flaming balloons over your schools and farms, fly drones toward your airports and even nuclear installations, it’s time to say “enough!”

Or, in the local parlance, “dayenu.”

It is time to put paid once and for all to the evil terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been attacking the heartland of Israel virtually ever since Israel freely gave Gaza to the Palestinians, first to the Palestinian Authority and then to Hamas after they murdered the PA officials in a mini-civil war and took over the territory as a fanatical dictatorship.

Every few years Hamas (and their now-billionaire leadership) seizes on something, some issue on the Temple Mount, a neighborhood where, in their view, too many Jews are moving in, and start a missile barrage, aiming to hit as many innocent civilians as possible and ignite the “Arab street.”

The current barrage, thanks largely to Iran, is the biggest ever, with modern weapons that can reach the entire Jewish state with significant payloads.

Several times the Israel Defense Force has been constrained to enter Gaza to put a stop to these barrages.

That appears to be happening again now. At this writing the IDF seems on the edge of a ground incursion, if not actually over that edge.

Whatever the case—this time they should finish the job. Finally.

The Beasts Smell Blood Gary Gindler

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/the_beasts_smell_blood.html?

China and Russia are aggressively raising their stakes against Taiwan and Ukraine.  Why?  Just take a sober view of Biden’s America, at war with itself.  China and Russia came to a pragmatic conclusion: America in 2021 has neither the desire nor the courage nor the political will to protect itself and its allies.

It was under Biden that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline work continued.  It was under Biden that the preparations for the seizure of Taiwan by China entered the final phase.  Under Biden, China’s seizure of the South China Sea, suspended by Trump, is close to completion.  Under Biden, both Russia and China decided on something that was simply unthinkable under Trump — they forced preparations for open aggression against neighbors.

Trump, at the end of a dinner with the Chinese leader, three months into his presidency, fired 60 Tomahawk missiles at Syria.  Everything was organized so no one doubted that the missiles were intended for China and Russia’s leaders, although they were fired into Syria.  A year later, in February 2018, a platoon of American Rangers defeated a battalion tactical group of Russian mercenaries in Syria.  Of the 500 people, few survived, and all 27 tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed in a four-hour battle.

Both China and Russia immediately realized that, with Trump, the guy who brought down a billion dollars’ worth of missiles while sweets were being served, it was necessary to remain within the bounds of decency.  Under Biden, no one is going to remain within these bounds.  On the contrary, Beijing and Moscow are well aware that Biden is a temporary, accidental person in the White House, and it is necessary to strike while the iron is hot.  Under Biden, Beijing’s and Moscow’s expansionist plans are destined to come true.

Russia and China are united against a common enemy.  China’s #1 territorial objective is the capture of Taiwan.  Russia’s territorial task #1 is the seizure of Ukraine.  Trump was an insurmountable obstacle to their aggressive plans for four years.  Putin has taught the world that he is amassing troops on the border with Ukraine every spring.  But with each escalation, nothing happens.  More precisely, nothing happened during the Trump era, but with Biden, it can explode.

Opinion: Almost Nothing You’ve Heard About Evictions in Jerusalem Is True Neutral application of property law becomes an international incident because a landlord is a Jew. By Avi Bell and Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-nothing-youve-heard-about-evictions-in-jerusalem-is-true-11621019410?

Hamas never needs a special occasion to bombard Israel with rockets. Yet the progressive narrative connects the terrorist group’s current onslaught to eviction proceedings in Israeli courts concerning a few properties in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren claim these are stark human-rights violations by the Israeli government, and illegal under international law. Even the State Department expressed “serious concern.”

The truth about Sheikh Jarrah is the opposite. It is an ordinary property dispute between private parties. The Jewish claimants’ ownership of the few plots of land has been confirmed repeatedly in court, following laws that apply equally regardless of ethnicity. Israeli courts have gone out of their way to avoid evicting the Palestinian residents who haven’t paid rent for half a century.

In the case now before Israel’s Supreme Court, the owner is an Israeli corporation with Jewish owners whose chain of title is documented back to an original purchase in 1875. Until 1948, the neighborhood now known as Sheikh Jarrah was home to both Jewish and Arab communities. Jordan invaded Israel in 1948 and occupied half of Jerusalem, expelling every one of its Jewish inhabitants and seizing their property.

When Israel reunited Jerusalem and ended the Jordanian occupation in 1967, it had to decide what to do with these properties. In the many cases in which Jordan had officially transferred the title of Jewish-owned properties to Palestinians, Israel respected the new titles—and still does—even though they are based on forcible takings in a war of aggression followed by ethnic cleansing against Jews. Where title had never been transferred, however, Israel returned properties to their owners. Critics of Israel claim that Arabs can’t recover property under the same law, but the law is entirely neutral—it is simply the case that Jordan took property from Jews, not Palestinians.

Title to the properties in dispute in Sheikh Jarrah was never given by Jordan to Palestinians, so Israeli law respects the unbroken title of the plaintiffs. This case has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion. The only discrimination in the legal treatment of Sheikh Jarrah property is historic, by Jordan, and against Jews to the benefit of Palestinians.

The plaintiff and its predecessors in title have spent four decades in court seeking to recover possession of the properties. In every case, courts have ruled in favor of the owners. In the latest lawsuits, the courts ruled that four of the eight defendants were squatters with no legal rights in the land, and the remaining four were descendants of tenants who had never paid rent.

Nevertheless, Israeli courts have treated the Palestinian squatters and leaseholders alike as “protected tenants,” and would shield them from eviction indefinitely if they paid rent. They have refused to do so.

The laws involved are the same as any landlord would invoke. There is only one objection in this case: the owners are Jews. Western progressives have elevated the desire of some Arabs not to have Jewish neighbors into a human right and a legal entitlement that even the Jewish state must protect.

MORE HEADLINES: MAY 14, 2021

America under siege on Biden’s watch as cyberattackers cripple the country https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cyberattacks-america-biden-watch
Joe Biden Proposes More Education Spending to Solve Gas Shortage https://www.breitbart.com/education/2021/05/12/joe-biden-proposes-more-education-spending-solve-gas-shortage/
U.S. Southeast Sees Gas Shortages Due to Colonial Pipeline Cyberattack https://maritime-executive.com/article/u-s-southeast-sees-gas-shortages-due-to-colonial-pipeline-cyberattack
Larry Kudlow Warns ‘All Bloody Hell Will Break Loose’ If Pipeline Isn’t Back Up Soon https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/05/12/larry-kudlow-warns-all-hell-will-break-loose-if-pipeline-isnt-back-up-soon-n2589302?
Trump blasts Biden’s handling of pipeline attack, asks if Hunter is in charge of energy with ‘Burisma experience’ https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-blasts-bidens-handling-of-pipeline-attack-asks-if-hunter-is-in-charge-of-energy-with-burisma-experience/ar-BB1gFqtY?ocid=a2hs
The Ten Plagues of American Liberalism https://www.newsmax.com/craigshirley/liberalism-schools-1619project-freespeech/2021/05/11/id/1020962/
We’re Governed by Morons https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/05/13/were-governed-by-morons-n2589332
Biden Restarts Border Wall Construction https://thejewishvoice.com/2021/05/biden-restarts-border-wall-construction/
Migrant Encounters at Southwest Border Jump 944 Percent over April 2020 https://www.breitbart.com/border/2021/05/11/migrant-encounters-at-southwest-border-jump-944-percent-over-april-2020/

Rockefeller Foundation Bankrolls COVID-19 Commission Led by Beijing Sympathizer https://freebeacon.com/coronavirus/rockefeller-foundation-bankrolls-covid-commission-led-by-beijing-sympathizer/
The key question for Tony Fauci (aka Dr. Frankenstein) https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/key-question-tony-fauci-aka-dr-frankenstein/
This Is Why Fauci Needed to Go https://spectator.org/fauci-wuhan-lab-covid/?utm_source=mainline
A doctor’s plea to doctors: Remember our Hippocratic Oath https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-doctors-plea-to-doctors-remember-the-hippocratic-oath/

Calgary Pastor Released on Bail, but Arrest Raises Concerns About ‘Draconian’ Pandemic Restrictions, Says Expert https://www.theepochtimes.com/calgary-pastor-released-on-bail-but-arrest-raises-concerns-about-draconian-pandemic-restrictions-says-expert_3810793.html

Face Masks Are Not About Science, They Are About Instilling Fear & Social Control https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/no_author/face-masks-are-not-about-science-they-are-about-instilling-fear-social-control/

Video: NY Professor Warns Basic Education Regarding America’s Founding Being Replaced With Globalist Indoctrination https://www.newswars.com/video-ny-professor-warns-basic-education-regarding-americas-founding-being-replaced-with-globalist-indoctrination/

BOMBSHELL!! Gates Had A Secret Girlfriend All Along Right Under Melinda’s Nose https://dailypol.com/119-2/