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Hamas Tests Israel—and Biden Iran’s Palestinian ally reignites its conflict with the Jewish state.

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-tests-israeland-biden-11620772433?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The jihadists of Hamas on Tuesday launched the biggest single-day rocket attack on the Jewish State in memory, with hundreds flying toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as well as the usual civilian targets in southern Israel. Israel struck back at 500 targets in Gaza, and this has the potential to become a larger conflict after a relatively long period of Mideast quiet.

The Hamas attacks come after days of Palestinian riots in Jerusalem, some prompted by long-running property disputes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Israeli courts ruled in favor of Jewish owners and against Palestinian leaseholders who claim rights to the property dating to Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The case’s Supreme Court hearing was delayed.

Mahmoud Abbas, who runs the Palestinian West Bank region adjacent to Jerusalem, has been held up as a moderate negotiating partner for Israel. Yet his party fomented the Jerusalem violence, broadcasting that it “calls on everyone to raise the level of confrontation in the coming days and hours in the Palestinian lands,” according to Palestinian Media Watch.

The 85-year-old Mr. Abbas, who has headed the Palestinian Authority since 2005 without standing for re-election, may want to turn up the temperature to compensate for falling public confidence in his rule. He’s in competition with Hamas and even more extreme groups, which he shut out of power in the West Bank last month by postponing elections yet again. Hamas, which promises the destruction of Israel, one-upped Mr. Abbas’s riots by reigniting its military confrontation.

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The Dark Face of Palestinian Terror A death cult reignites its terror against Israeli civilians. Joseph Klein

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/dark-face-palestinian-terror-joseph-klein/

The “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is spinning out of control toward another possible all-out war. Blame should, of course, fall on the Palestinian terrorists operating from Gaza, who have once again fired hundreds of rockets inside Israel against civilian targets. This time, the terrorists deliberately escalated what began as a local fracas over the possible eviction of Palestinians from homes they have been occupying in an area of East Jerusalem known as Sheikh Jarrah. Israeli Jews claim that this land belongs to them. After a barrage of rocket attacks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck back. The Palestinians are complaining. Here we go again.

The pattern is very familiar by now. Palestinians use a pretext to start a riot. The Israeli police and security forces respond proportionately. The Palestinians up the ante, prompting a further Israeli response. Then Palestinian terrorists in Gaza use the territory they control to launch rocket attacks into Israel against civilian targets. Israel warns the terrorists to stop the rocket fire, which the terrorists ignore. After the Israeli military retaliates proportionately in an effort to target the terrorists responsible for the rocket attacks and their facilities, Palestinian government leaders cry foul. They point to unintended Palestinian civilian casualties, which are often caused by the Palestinian terrorists putting the civilians, including women and children, in harm’s way. Then, with their usual crocodile tears, Palestinian diplomats run to the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other globalist forums to reprise their false narrative of victimhood at the hands of the “oppressor,” “murderous,” “apartheid” Israeli regime. The Palestinians can count on leftist support for their cause in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

In short, Palestinian militants provoke violence to which Israel responds. Palestinian terrorists target innocent civilians deliberately. Israel targets the terrorists and their facilities, with policies and practices in place to minimize civilian casualties. And like the youth who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy because he’s an orphan, the Palestinians ask the so-called “international community” to rally around them.

The Israeli Supreme Court had not even ruled yet on the Sheikh Jarrah dispute before Palestinian agitators exploited the situation. They used the dispute, together with a peaceful Jerusalem Day parade celebrating Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as an excuse to riot. Israeli police responded, leading to an outbreak of violence in and around the Temple Mount.

Then Hamas and Islamic Jihad entered the fray by firing hundreds of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel and several rockets into the Jerusalem area. Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said it had launched “a rocket strike against the enemy in the occupied Jerusalem in response to their crimes and aggression against the holy city and its aggression against our people in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa mosque.” This was the first time since the 2014 Gaza War that Hamas has aimed its rockets at Jerusalem.

While Israel’s Iron Dome defense system managed to intercept some of the rockets, others got through and killed at least two Israeli civilians, injured scores of other Israelis, and destroyed homes.

On Tuesday evening, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists launched rockets reaching the Tel Aviv region. One of the rockets hit a bus, causing several injuries, including to a 5-year-old girl.  

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Why Is Twitter Letting Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei Incite Rocket Attacks on Israeli Civilians? By Philip Klein

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-is-twitter-letting-irans-ayatollah-khamenei-incite-rocket-attacks-on-israeli-civilians/?utm_source=

As the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians intensified on Tuesday night, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who helps fund and direct Hamas’s actions, tweeted out the following:

Khamenei.ir

·Palestinians are awake and determined. They must continue this path. One can only talk with the language of power with these criminals. They must increase their strength, stand strong, confront the enemy, and force them to stop their crimes. #FreePalestine

Within minutes, the IDF reported sirens were sounding in Tel Aviv as one of its largest cities came under a barrage of rocket fire.

It’s worth remembering that when Donald Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter while still an office holder, Twitter cited, “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

Yet in this case Ayatollah is using Twitter to directly signal to his terrorist proxy group Hamas that they should continue attacking civilians. Why does that not count as inciting violence?

To be clear, this is not a one off tweet by Ayatollah. He has continually used the account to urge Palestinian terrorists to continue attacks on Israel. Here is a sampling of tweets over just the past few days.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Yes, the Abraham Accords Were a Historic Success By David Harsanyi

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yes-the-abraham-accords-were-a-historic-success/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

David Frum
@davidfrum
Remember all the Trump-Kushner self-congratulation about their Middle East successes?

The Abraham Accords were predicated on the idea that the United States could broker peace between Israel and once-antagonistic Arab nations by bypassing the intractable Palestinians, who have actively stood in the way of every agreement since 1994. Though they are mentioned in passing, the agreement has nothing to do with Palestinians, who grumbled at the time, “Our Arab brothers have abandoned us.”

Jared Kushner, whose approach had more results than anything tried by the Obama administration retreads who now populate the Biden administration, never claimed the normalization deals would fix the Palestinian situation.

Here is what he said at the time:

You have 5 million Palestinians who are really trapped because of bad leadership. So what we’ve done is we’ve created an opportunity for their leadership to either seize or not. If they screw up this opportunity — which again, they have a perfect track record of missing opportunities — if they screw this up, I think they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are victims, saying they have rights. This is a great deal for them. If they come to the table and negotiate, I think they can get something excellent …

The Palestinian leadership have to ask themselves a question: Do they want to have a state? Do they want to have a better life? If they do, we have created a framework for them to have it, and we’re going to treat them in a very respectful manner. If they don’t, then they’re going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.

Indeed, the Palestinians have extended their perfect track record of “missing opportunities” (really, more like blowing them up). And the fact that Iranian-funded Hamas rockets are falling on Jewish cities or that riots are being perpetuated by the Palestinian Authority only further proves that Kushner was right: Waiting around for the theocrats in Gaza or corrupt former PLO officials in West Bank is a foolish endeavor. Now, maybe Frum and others believe that those who indiscriminately fire Qassam rockets at civilians deserve their own state. But that has nothing to do with the Abraham Accords.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York-Style Justice Disarms the Victims There is nothing accidental in today’s New York. It is exactly what the Left wanted—only not yet violent enough, not yet dangerous enough. By Dan Gelernter

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/11/new-york-style-justice-disarms-the-victims/

In Times Square on Saturday, a street vendor named Farrakhan Muhammad got in an argument with his brother and tried to shoot him. With the surgical precision for which petty criminals are known, the man instead wounded three bystanders, including a four-year-old girl. One of the victims said she is unlikely to visit New York again until the city has stricter gun laws.

But New York City already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Muhammad was carrying an illegal gun illegally—that is, the gun was illegally owned and illegally carried. If he had obtained the gun legally, Muhammad would have been required to attend a government-approved safety class in which he would have learned that you may not discharge a weapon indiscriminately in Times Square while attempting to murder your brother (this is covered on the first day).

If the gun had been legal, it would also have meant Muhammad had paid hundreds of dollars in permitting fees, had obtained letters of recommendation from friends attesting to his good character, had been fingerprinted by the police, had waited several months to obtain the permit to purchase this particular pistol (on which he would have had to put down an advance deposit, its serial number having been submitted to the state), and he would then have had to wait a year after obtaining the permit to apply for a further permit to carry the weapon, for which he would have had to demonstrate to the satisfaction of New York a valid reason for needing to do so. 

I very much doubt that Muhammad did any of this. 

And when someone is already breaking four or five different laws, it’s hard to imagine a sixth law on the same subject being the deciding factor.

It’s also hard to imagine how gun laws could become stricter in New York. In fact, any weapon that might be remotely useful for self-defense is prohibited. That includes pepper spray, tasers, blackjacks, batons, nunchucks, coshes of any sort, including a coin purse that has a handle, slingshots, and sandbags. Don’t get caught trying to defend yourself in the city with an illicit sandbag: That’s criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree. 

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Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be A Jimmy Carter Reboot

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/12/joe-biden-is-turning-out-to-be-a-jimmy-carter-reboot/

Joe Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president.  Now Biden appears bent on recreating Carter’s disastrous presidency. The parallels are striking.

What characterized Carter’s one-term presidency? Disasters at home and abroad. At home, the country suffered a self-inflicted energy crisis, with gas shortages and long lines. Inflation surged even as unemployment climbed, making the “Misery Index” a household term. Abroad, America’s adversaries sensed Carter’s weakness as Commander in Chief and the world was thrown in chaos – from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Carter’s response to these disasters was to tell people to turn down their thermostats. He blamed Americans for what he called a “crisis of confidence.”

What’s happened after just over three months with Biden in the White House?

Both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate have been on the rise and the world is getting more dangerous.

This week, the stock market suffered two days of heavy losses as inflation fears mounted.

Forbes quoted Sophie Griffiths, a market analyst at Oanda, as saying that “The overriding fear is that pandemic stimulus combined with reopening economies will spark a sharp drive high in inflation, forcing central banks to take action, tightening policy and potentially slowing down the economic recovery.”

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Migrant children held in mass shelters with little oversight

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-immigration-health-coronavirus-pandemic-government-and-politics-3b4e480c9021e6a8e02313f4c73a497e

By GARANCE BURKE, JULIET LINDERMAN and MARTHA MENDOZA

The Biden administration is holding tens of thousands of asylum-seeking children in an opaque network of some 200 facilities that The Associated Press has learned spans two dozen states and includes five shelters with more than 1,000 children packed inside.

Confidential data obtained by the AP shows the number of migrant children in government custody more than doubled in the past two months, and this week the federal government was housing around 21,000 kids, from toddlers to teens. A facility at Fort Bliss, a U.S. Army post in El Paso, Texas, had more than 4,500 children as of Monday. Attorneys, advocates and mental health experts say that while some shelters are safe and provide adequate care, others are endangering children’s health and safety.

“It’s almost like ‘Groundhog Day,’” said Southern Poverty Law Center attorney Luz Lopez, referring to the 1993 film in which events appear to be continually repeating. “Here we are back to a point almost where we started, where the government is using taxpayer money to build large holding facilities … for children instead of using that money to find ways to more quickly reunite children with their sponsors.”

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman, Mark Weber, said the department’s staff and contractors are working hard to keep children in their custody safe and healthy.

A few of the current practices are the same as those that President Joe Biden and others criticized under the Trump administration, including not vetting some caregivers with full FBI fingerprint background checks. At the same time, court records show the Biden administration is working to settle several multimillion-dollar lawsuits that claim migrant children were abused in shelters under President Donald Trump.

Part of the government’s plan to manage thousands of children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border involves about a dozen unlicensed emergency facilities inside military installations, stadiums and convention centers that skirt state regulations and don’t require traditional legal oversight.

Inside the facilities, called Emergency Intake Sites, children aren’t guaranteed access to education, recreational opportunities or legal counsel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Elephant and Donkey Go Plunging Over the Cliff . By Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/05/12/the_elephant_and_donkey_go_plunging_over_the_cliff_145744.html

In the 19th century, when political parties worried about voters who couldn’t speak English or read campaign flyers, they adopted animal symbols. Despite originally being a symbol of ridicule, the Democratic Party came to embrace its inner donkey. Likewise, the Republican Party grew to love the elephant. It was an easy way to identify their candidates. Today, the elephant and donkey are less-beloved mascots and more like Wile E. Coyote, who continually plummets over the cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner.

The GOP pachyderm took the plunge on Jan. 6. Outgoing President Donald Trump sat unsteadily atop the beast, where he remains, and contributed mightily to losing two Senate seats in Georgia. His behavior after the November election alienated many undecided voters and even some erstwhile supporters. He fumed and fulminated, contested the election results without winning in court, and stampeded GOP congressional leaders over the size of the next round of stimulus checks. His refusal to accept certified vote totals challenged basic constitutional norms. That behavior hurt the candidates he ostensibly backed in Georgia, costing his party its Senate majority. Outgoing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was furious and said so publicly. Most of his Republican colleagues agreed but remained silent. They knew Trump would retaliate for any criticism and his die-hard supporters would back him.

The giant splat of the elephant hitting the canyon floor was the sound of Republicans losing the upper chamber. That loss has had immense political consequences. It is the dominant fact of Joe Biden’s presidency so far. The only way to moderate his agenda, aside from court decisions, would have been Republican control of the Senate.

With their slender majority, Democrats gained control of all Senate committees and held the sole power to conduct hearings and subpoena witnesses. Since Democrats already controlled the House of Representatives, albeit narrowly, they found themselves in control of both Capitol Hill and the White House. That gave them free rein, something donkeys are unused to, and they used it to reign freely. They proceeded to do exactly what Trump had done after November: gallop at full speed toward the cliff’s edge.

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Barrage of rockets launched at Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip Emily Jacobs

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/barrage-of-rockets-launched-at-tel-aviv-from-the-gaza-strip/?utm_source=maropost&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news_alert&utm_content=20210511&mpweb=755-9375372-720223421

Tel Aviv came under a barrage of 130 rockets launched by Hamas from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, sending residents fleeing for shelter as air raid sirens blared across Israel’s second-largest city.

Israel’s anti-rocket defense systems were activated Tuesday night, with the streaks of multiple interceptor missiles lighting up the skies over the area.

The heavy bombardment came in retaliation for an Israeli strike earlier on Tuesday evening that leveled a high-rise building in Gaza, which housed the offices of several top Hamas officials. That strike had come in ralition for earlier Hamas bombings.

Both sides had been firing at each other almost nonstop throughout the day, in some of the worst fighting between Israel and the terror group since their 2014 war.

As the rockets launched into the skies from Gaza on Tuesday night, mosques blared with chants of “God is great,” “Victory to Islam” and “Resistance.”

One of the rockets appeared to have hit an oil pipeline belonging to an Israeli state-owned energy company, setting a large storage tank on fire. Videos showed flames engulfing the tank in the city of Ashkelon, which reportedly burned for hours.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Loss, Discovery, and a Lost Discovery in “Reading Ruth” Parent-child collaborations are rare enough in literary history. Grandparent-grandchild collaborations are unheard of, until the publication this spring of a new study of the book of Ruth.

Posted By on May 12th, 2021

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2021/05/loss-discovery-

Hillel Halkin

Parent-child collaborations are extremely rare in literary history. Of grandparent-grandchild collaborations, I had never heard—never, that is, until the publication this spring of Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel, a slim book jointly written by the eminent American-Jewish thinker, author, Bible commentator, and Mosaic contributor Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum. As told by Kass in a brief preface:

We did not start out intending to write a book. We began it, in the fall of 2015, to give comfort to each other following the death of our beloved Amy Apfel Kass—wife of 54 years to Leon, grandmother (“Gaga”) of sixteen years to Hannah. Leon was living, then as now, in Washington, D.C.; Hannah was living, then as now, in Jerusalem. The idea was Hannah’s, suggested in one of her daily calls: “Zeydeh,” she said, “perhaps you would like to read something with me.” Leon grabbed the offer: a log brought to a drowning man. We settled easily and quickly on the book of Ruth. Not only was it short and lovely. It also had special meaning for Leon. Some twenty years earlier, Amy and he had made a discovery in the book of Ruth that they thought might be the key to understanding its meaning, and they had spoken about working on it in the future. But that future never arrived, and Leon had forgotten the insight. He was therefore particularly keen to see whether, with Hannah’s help, it could be recovered.

And so one begins Reading Ruth with a set of questions. What was Leon and Amy Kass’s insight? Will Leon recover it? And how can Hannah help him to do this? It is almost like starting a suspense novel.

Although there are many ways of reading Ruth, they all fall into two basic categories.  One, more appealing to modern sensibilities, is to view it as a love story, the tale of a widowed young Moabite who tells her mother-in-law Naomi, a widow herself, “Whither you go, I shall go. . . . Your people is my people and your God, my God.” Ruth joins Naomi in returning from Moab to her native town of Bethlehem in Judea; lives there with her in poverty and isolation; catches the admiring eye of the unmarried Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s late husband Elimelech and a leading citizen of the town, when he notices her foraging for the grain left behind by the harvesters in his fields; is drawn to him in return; and, in the end, following a dramatic night of romantic confession, is happily wed to him and bears him a son who turns out to be the grandfather of King David.

The second and more traditional way of reading Ruth, best exemplified by rabbinic exegesis, is as a narrative of religious faith, personal virtue, and obedience to God’s commandments, for their exemplification of which Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are rewarded with the ancestry of Israel’s greatest king. And since the Moabites, according to the Bible, are Israel’s bitter foes with whom it is forbidden to mingle, there are also two ways of thinking about Ruth’s Moabite identity. Its function in the story can be said to champion acceptance of the stranger, no matter how hateful his or her background, or to extol the determination of the proselyte who overcomes such a background in order to cleave to a new people and its God.