ISRAEL Comments turned off

Peace in the Middle East: The First Step by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21104/middle-east-peace

Over the decades, Iran’s regime has embedded itself deeply within the region’s crises, stoking unrest and sponsoring terrorism. If the Middle East is to see any genuine peace and stability, a transformation of Iran’s regime is essential.

Without addressing the regime at the core, these threats will only intensify, especially when Iran acquires nuclear weapons… weeks away.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution orchestrated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Israel has been regarded as a cancerous tumor to be wiped off the map.

[O]nly Israel has demonstrated the courage and determination to confront the Iranian regime head-on, recognizing it as the “tumor” that fuels much of the region’s instability.

It is crucial to recognize that the core ideological mission of the Iranian regime — using religion as a pretext to seize power by force — is deeply ingrained and is not going to change. For years, Iran’s regime has not only been attacking its own citizens, especially women, and it has even been executing children. In the first six months of 2024 alone, “Iranian authorities executed 249 people” and an additional 166 people just in October.

A regime that treats its own people this way is not likely to treat anyone else any better.

The system in Iran was founded on principles aimed at “exporting the revolution” and imposing an Islamist governance structure across other nations. This ideological commitment is even enshrined in Iran’s constitution…

Notably, during significant waves of protests in recent years, the Obama and Biden-Harris administrations remained silent, offering no substantial support to the people risking their lives for freedom.

Often, Western countries have chosen to overlook Iran’s human rights abuses and advances in military power: they might interfere with profitable trade.

If these Western nations lack the will to fight the Iranian regime directly, then they should, at the very least, provide Israel with the necessary support — economically, militarily and politically. This is not an act of charity: supporting Israel in its mission serves their own interests.

Can the West set aside its hypocrisy long enough to stand with Israel in confronting Iran — this source of terror to them as well? If they cannot summon the nerve to act directly, then the least they can do is back those who do.

To embark on the path toward sustainable peace in the Middle East, it is essential to confront a fundamental truth: without addressing a crucial first step, peace across the region will remain nothing more than an illusion. This first step lies in directly confronting and ultimately changing the root cause of much of the ongoing conflict, violence, and terrorism — namely, the Islamist regime in Iran.

Over the decades, Iran’s regime has embedded itself deeply within the region’s crises, stoking unrest and sponsoring terrorism. If the Middle East is to see any genuine peace and stability, a transformation of Iran’s regime is essential.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A pogrom in Amsterdam The thuggish attacks on Israeli football fans recall Europe’s darkest days. Tim Black

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/08/a-pogrom-in-amsterdam/

On Thursday night, in a dark echo of Europe’s darkest days, Amsterdam bore witness to a pogrom.

Following a Europa League football match between Ajax Amsterdam and Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv, ‘pro-Palestine’ thugs went on an organised and seemingly pre-meditated hours-long hunt for Maccabi supporters – because, well, they were Israeli Jews. And that is enough it seems, in this era of keffiyeh-sporting, BDS-fuelled anti-Semitism, to justify hunting people down and violently attacking them.

According to Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema, men riding scooters searched the streets for Israelis and carried out ‘hit and run’ assaults. Other reports tell of masked men ambushing and attacking fans as they walked back to their hotels. Some Israelis were knocked down and beaten up. Others were forced to jump into canals to escape.

One video recording shows a man lying on the ground as a gang of men repeatedly kick his motionless body. Another shows a vehicle being driven at what presumably is a Maccabi supporter. Another shows Jewish football fans being attacked in a crowded street, while a man shouts, ‘That’s for Gaza motherfucker… now you know how it feels’.

According to the Amsterdam police, five supporters were taken to hospital, while 20 to 30 others were treated at the scene. It is likely that many more would have been seriously hurt and worse if it wasn’t for those Amsterdam locals who allowed Maccabi supporters to hide and shelter in restaurants and cafés.

Deborah Lipstadt, currently the US special envoy to combat anti-Semitism, is in no doubt as to the significance of what happened last night. It was a concerted and violent attack on Jews because they were Jews. It was all too reminiscent of ‘a classic pogrom’, she said, before drawing attention to the attacks’ proximity to the anniversary of Kristallnacht, ‘when Nazi-sanctioned and Nazi-led pogroms against Jews erupted across the German Reich’. Striking a similar note, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands told Israel’s President Isaac Herzog: ‘We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during the Second World War, and last night we failed again.’

It was all so grimly predictable. Ever since Hamas’s 7 October attacks and the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, anti-Semitism has surged across Europe. Synagogues have been fire-bombed. Jews have been menaced and attacked. And the streets of Western cities have been filled on a near-weekly basis with anti-Israel marches, thronging with anti-Semitism. It was these conditions that made an attack on Israeli Jewish football fans all too possible.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Election, Common-Sense Democrats, and the Long March Institutional dominance by far-left ideologies presents a significant barrier to meaningful change within the Democratic Party By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/09/the-election-common-sense-democrats-and-the-long-march/

Not long before Tuesday’s election, Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political scientist and commentator, predicted that, regardless of the outcome of the election, the contemporary progressive movement was dead. Harris, he intimated, could still win the election, but the dominant force in Democratic politics for the last two decades was done. Voters had clearly and unambiguously voiced their distaste for the four pillars of contemporary progressivism: open borders/mass immigration, lax law enforcement/social disorder, identity politics, and the war on fossil fuels. As Teixeira astutely noted, the electorate simply isn’t buying what the progressives are selling.

Teixeira, it should be noted, is not alone in his concerns about and disapproval of the contemporary progressive agenda and its alienating effect on average voters. In the few days since Donald Trump handily defeated Kamala Harris, a handful of prominent Democrats have condemned their party’s polarizing platform and have echoed Teixeira’s denunciation of the progressives’ stubbornness. For example, Matt Yglesias, a longtime left-wing journalist and political commentator, posted a short “common sense” Democratic platform to restore the party’s following, overtly rejecting the entirety of the progressive plan. Like Teixeira, Yglesias slammed the progressives’ obsessions with climate, race, and anti-social behavior in particular.

Based on what we all saw the other night—the most improbable political comeback in American history and a realignment of the electorate—it is clear that both Teixeira and Yglesias are right. The progressive movement has enfeebled the Democratic Party and made it unappealing to a majority of voters. In order to stave off long-term minority-party status, Democrats must move on from contemporary progressivism and must realign themselves with the needs and wants of their traditional voters. The party must change.

There’s only one problem—and it reminds me of the old joke:

Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.

Teixeira, Yglesias, James Carville, and a host of other Democrats are inarguably correct about the state of their party, the malign influences on it, and the necessity of change. The problem is that the party has to want to change first, which is not as easy as it sounds. Indeed, there are several very important reasons why the Democratic Party will not change—why it cannot change.

The most obvious and overpowering of these is the capture of the institutions.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Muslim Mass Street Terror Campaign in Amsterdam “We have become the Gaza of Europe” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-muslim-mass-street-terror-campaign-in-amsterdam/

The media is calling it “protests”, “clashes” or at best “riots.” Jews have taken to calling it a “pogrom”. None of those terms are right. What we are seeing in Amsterdam is a systematic organized mass Muslim street terror campaign. It doesn’t rely on firearms or bombs, apart from the usual Car Jihad, but showed its ability to plan out and deploy hundreds of Muslim occupiers in the Netherlands to ambush and attack Jewish fans of an Israeli soccer team, and then to control the streets and terrorize any non-Muslims, forcing them to chant, “Free Palestine”.

The media is dismissing this as soccer riots. It’s not. The game was a friendly match between a Dutch team that has a large Jewish fanbase and an Israeli team. Nor are these “protests”. There isn’t even a pretense that this was anything other than a planned campaign of targeted assaults.

(I’m not going to post videos of it, for the same reason I didn’t post Oct 7 videos, but they’re easy enough to find.)

Geert Wilders has condemned it, called for accountability for the authorities and deportations for the perpetrators. And while this time the targets were Jewish, they eventually will be all non-Muslims in the Netherlands.

The same kinds of campaigns will eventually be fought as insurgencies with hundreds and thousands of armed Jihadis in the streets of Amsterdam once the Dutch save themselves.

This is not the end of the story. Like most acts of Muslim terror, it’s a trial run.

“We have become the Gaza of Europe,” Wilders tweeted. The ugly truth is that Gaza is where Islamic migration is.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Eitan Fischberger The Intifada Is Globalized An anti-Semitic rampage in Amsterdam sends a disturbing message to the West.

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-amsterdam-riots-and-the-global-intifada

One of the most harrowing aspects of the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israelis, was the glee with which the Palestinian terrorists livestreamed their atrocities for the world to see. Just 13 months later, Jews on social media were once again confronted with footage of an anti-Semitic rampage, one that shook Amsterdam on Thursday evening, following a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax.

After the game, social media was flooded with videos of hundreds of jeering and cheering attackers marauding through the city, throwing Israeli soccer fans into the river, beating them unconscious, and forcing them to chant “free Palestine” before assaulting them further. “Jewish, Jewish, IDF, IDF,” some shouted as they identified the Israelis. Though Dutch authorities have arrested 62 suspects, the shockwaves from this incident will not fade easily.

“We disappointed Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust, and tonight, we disappointed you again,” the King of the Netherlands told Israel’s president Isaac Herzog on Friday.

This was not the first riot against Jews since October 7. Just a year ago, the world witnessed an anti-Semitic outbreak in Russia’s North Caucasus region, where mobs stormed an airport in Dagestan in pursuit of Jewish passengers arriving from Israel.

What makes the Amsterdam incident particularly disturbing is that it did not occur in some distant, non-Western region but in the heart of “enlightened” Europe, in a city known for its progressive ideals and cultural sophistication. Even more troubling is that the attack appears to have been premeditated and telegraphed, yet nobody with the ability to stop it did so.

On Friday, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, posted on X that his office had relayed multiple warnings to local Dutch authorities, who failed in their duty to protect civilians. On November 5, the Jerusalem Post reported that members of Mossad—Israel’s national intelligence agency—had accompanied the approximately 2,600 Israeli fans who traveled to the Netherlands to provide additional security. This involvement spurred some conspiratorial journalists to suggest that the incident was a false flag operation aimed at garnering support for Israel.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Kristol Shows Signs of Advanced Kamalamentia

Posted By on November 9th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/09/bill-kristol-shows-signs-of-advanced-kamalamentia/

Out of a sense of morbid curiosity, we decided to venture over to the Bulwark, the opinion site founded by alleged conservative Bill Kristol with the single mission of providing readers a daily dose of anti-Trump vitriol.

We wondered if perhaps the folks at Bulwark were celebrating because Donald Trump’s victory means that their reason for existing just got extended another four years. Had Trump lost, their pretense of being a conservative “bulwark” would have shattered.

They aren’t celebrating.

Instead, Trump’s overwhelming victory against overwhelming odds has them struggling to think straight.

Jonathan Last, after lamenting that Biden didn’t pack the Supreme Court and add four Democratic senators by declaring Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., states, then effectively accuses 51% of American voters of not being “committed to … the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mona Charen reveals how hopelessly out of touch she is with everyday Americans by admitting that she “wrongly attributed (Biden’s unpopularity) mostly to his age,” instead of the economic disaster his policies unleashed on the working class. And then she shows that she has learned absolutely nothing by calling Kamala Harris’ loss “an elite failure of the first order.”

But the worst of the bunch is Kristol.

His response to this unprecedented turn of events is simply to say that Trump’s agenda must be stopped. “There should be no honeymoon for the Trumpists, no honeymoons for authoritarians,” he writes.

“This requires organized opposition,” he continues, “to thwart or delay or impede Trump’s plans.”

And what plans does Kristol want to stop?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard and Princeton Professors Cancel Classes to Let Students ‘Recover’ from Election By Abigail Anthony

Posted By on November 8th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/harvard-and-princeton-professors-cancel-classes-to-let-students-recover-from-election/

Professors at Harvard and Princeton have canceled classes following Trump’s victory, and other units within the universities are offering “spaces” to process the election results.

At Harvard University, the courses “Sociology 1156: Statistics for Social Sciences,” “Applied Math 22a: Solving and Optimizing,” and the general education courses “The Ancient Greek Hero” and “Popular Culture and Modern China” canceled Wednesday class sessions, made attendance optional, or extended assignment deadlines, according to the student-run paper the Crimson.

An undergraduate student at Harvard told National Review that the first 30 minutes of a section meeting for the class “Gov 1790: American Foreign Policy” were dedicated to origami folding.

Harvard economics lecturer Maxim Boycko said in an email that the in-class quiz for “Economics 1010a: Intermediate Microeconomics” would be optional this week and further permitted students to “take time off,” per the Crimson.

“As we recover from the eventful election night and process the implications of Trump’s victory, please know that class will proceed as usual today, except that classroom quizzes will not be for credit,” Boycko wrote. “Feel free to take time off if needed.”

According to the Crimson, Physics professor Jennifer E. Hoffman said in an email to physics students and faculty that her office would be “a space to process the election.”

“Many in our community are sleep-deprived, again grieving for glass ceilings that weren’t shattered, fearful for the future, or embarrassed to face our international colleagues,” she wrote. “I stress-baked several pans of lemon bars to share.

The Harvard College Democrats released a statement on Thursday expressing support for Kamala Harris and concerns about a second Trump presidency.

“The Harvard College Democrats are incredibly grateful for the leadership of Vice President Kamala Harris and the vision she presented for the future of the country in her campaign for President of the United States,” reads the statement. “We are proud to endorse a campaign that centered joy, community, and a belief in the immense potential of this great nation.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ohio U Professor Cancels Classes Due to ‘Trauma’ From the Trump Victory “Unsure how to go on.”

Posted By on November 8th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ohio-u-professor-cancels-classes-due-to-trauma-from-a-trump-victory/

Meet Amy Chadwick, a professor at @ohiou. She canceled classes today because students are traumatized, angry, scared, sad, hurting, and devastated after Trump’s win. Some students are also “unsure how to go on.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Indoctri-Nation Public schools continue to be ground zero for culture wars. By Larry Sand

Posted By on November 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/08/indoctri-nation/

An essential mission for many educators throughout the country is the indoctrination of their students. The newest arrival on the propaganda front is Israel. In August, one of the topics of a United Teachers of Los Angeles meeting was “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired.”

History teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating his students. He talked about transporting busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally—during the school day—without arousing suspicion.

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now, I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez further explained, “It’s like tomorrow I go to church, and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The unionistas then burst into approving laughter.

John Adams Middle School teacher and UTLA panelist William Shattuc agreed. Wearing a keffiyeh around his neck, he said, “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.”

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles, who received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching, insists that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?”

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Making America Safe Again Will be Donald Trump’s Highest Priority as President America’s enemies are not looking forward to January 20, 2025. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on November 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/08/making-america-safe-again-will-be-donald-trumps-highest-priority-as-president/

In my opinion, the most important of all of Donald Trump’s promises during the 2024 presidential campaign was to “make America safe again” by restoring American leadership and peace through strength.

This is because Joe Biden will leave Trump with grave national security challenges around the world. U.S. weakness under Biden, Biden’s frivolous foreign policy that designated climate change as the top U.S. national security threat, and major foreign policy failures have caused U.S. and global security to seriously deteriorate since 2021.

The war in Ukraine, caused by Biden’s weak foreign policy and his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, has become a stalemate and long-term war of attrition that could escalate, possibly with Russia using nuclear weapons, if Ukraine expands its attacks into Russian territory. President Biden and European leaders have no plan for a Ukrainian victory or ending the war and have instead promoted an endless war approach of arming Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”

U.S. relations with Russia and China plummeted during the Biden administration. Biden has not spoken to Russian President Putin since before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. There has been little meaningful U.S. diplomacy with China. Biden’s inept foreign policy has pushed Russia into the hands of China as part of a new anti-West axis that includes Iran and North Korea. Chinese military provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Sea soared during the Biden years with no serious response by the United States.

And then there is the Middle East, where Israel is facing a seven-front war in the aftermath of the horrendous October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. Increased instability in the Middle East since Biden became president was caused by his appeasement of Iran, which is $100 billion richer today due to Biden’s refusal to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. Weak U.S. leadership under Biden also caused tensions to explode in this region. This includes recent missile attacks by Iran and Israel against each other for the first time and huge advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Without a return of American deterrence and a strong U.S. president, the Middle East is facing the prospect of a full-scale Israel-Iran war that could go nuclear.