Iran and Israel: Is the Denial Game Over? by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20548/iran-israel-denial-game

Soleimani would do everything to avoid a direct clash with either Israel or the US forces in the region.

If he [“Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] does nothing, he could anger his core supporters. If he orders attacks on Israeli and/or Jewish targets, he won’t be able to cite plausible deniability. And that, as the Iranian state TV analyst suggests, could give Israel an excuse for attacks on big targets in Tehran itself.

“Will this time be different?” This is the question that haunts Tehran political circles as more body bags are flown in from Damascus.

The body bags contain the mortal remains of 13 Iranian diplomatic and military officers, including two senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), General Muhammad-Reza Zahedi (alias Abu Mahdi) and Gen. Muhammad-Hadi Haj-Rahimi, killed in an Israeli airstrike on what was presented as an Iranian consular building in the Syrian capital.

To be sure, this is not the first time that Israelis have taken out IRGC officers, and Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Pakistani, and Afghan mercenaries in Syria.

The take-out operation started in 2015 and reached a peak in 2020. The last time an Iranian official organ provided figures was in 2018, when the Foundation for Martyrs and Self-Sacrificers put Iran’s losses at around 5,000. The figures didn’t show how many were Iranian officers or foreign mercenaries.

In the first three years of this deadly cycle, Tehran used the transfer of body bags from Damascus as a propaganda ploy and organized mass rallies on the burial day of its “heroes of Islam.” Later, when Tehran’s losses grew the propaganda aspect was forgotten, the “heroes of Islam” were quietly buried in their native hometowns and villages.

Over time, partly thanks to the influence of late Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Tehran decided to swallow the bitter pill and brag about “taking revenge,” but not retaliate.

Marxist Globalists Will Resort to Terror and Violence By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/marxist_globalists_will_resort_to_terror_and_violence.html

It is important to understand that censorship does not occur in a vacuum.  It is a symptom of a worsening disease.  It is an early indicator of the political repression to come.  Like a canary in a coal mine, the criminalization of speech forewarns that State-sponsored terror and murder are not far away.  First, certain words and thoughts are banned.  Next, certain people are rounded up and imprisoned.  Finally, certain “enemies of the State” are executed quite publicly.  The imposition of fear supersedes the rule of law.  Terrorism undergirds social order.  Oppression replaces popular support.

What is happening in the West today is a concentrated push for global communism.  We could bicker about precise definitions — whether we are under attack from Marxists, socialists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, or other “revolutionaries” — but the end goal is clear.  A small group of global “elites” seek to use ideological and economic leverage to centralize political power and direct all human activity.  They seek the abolition of private property.  They seek absolute control over individual lives and local communities.  They are rebuilding twentieth-century totalitarianism with the privacy-destroying surveillance technologies of the twenty-first century.  

Most Western nations are working together to promote a public vision that achieves their private totalitarian goals.  Governments do not care about “hate speech”; they are dedicated to seizing control of the press, punishing dissent, censoring political opposition, and regulating public debate.  Governments do not care about “climate change”; they are dedicated to seizing control over all economic activity by first establishing a monopoly on available energy.  Governments do not care about “systemic racism,” “social justice,” or “income inequality”; they are dedicated to maximizing social divisions and distorting the meaning of fundamental rights, so that they may undermine long-cherished personal liberties.  Governments do not care about “gun violence”; they are dedicated to disarming their populations and making it impossible for them to fight back against tyranny.  Governments do not care about minimizing vicious and costly wars; they are dedicated to distracting their citizens with false threats to their personal security.  Governments do not care about maintaining the integrity and value of their monetary currencies; they are dedicated to printing and spending money that inflates household costs, taxes middle class savings, maximizes Wall Street profits, and increases welfare dependency.  Governments do not need to create central bank digital currencies to stave off economic disaster; they are dedicated to creating economic disasters, so that they can justify a future communist system that runs on privacy-destroying CBDCs.  

Navigating the Vibe Shift of a Cultural Reckoning Vibe shift or vibe stiffening?  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/07/navigating-the-vibe-shift-of-a-cultural-reckoning/

We have been hearing a lot about a “vibe shift” in American culture recently. The phrase has been around for a while. It gained new currency after the commentator Santiago Pliego wrote an essay about the phenomenon, and Tucker Carlson had him on his show to talk about it.

I recommend both.  For one thing, they offer notes of cheerfulness (I almost said “optimism,” but optimism is Dr. Pangloss’s failing) in the midst of our sea of gloominess and despondency. According to Pliego, Americans are awakening from their “dogmatic slumbers,” where the dogmas in question are the rancid pieties of the so-called “progressive” establishment. Have you checked your privilege today, Comrade? How are your pronouns holding up? What have you done to combat “whiteness,” “toxic masculinity,” and “climate change?”

The air of unreality is as unmistakable as it is noxious, and I think Pliego is right that the modification in the ambient vibrations—to the extent that one is underway—“is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.”

I like all those things—the items on the list of affirmations just as much as the tally of rejections.  Pliego admits that the shift he discerns may be ephemeral, though he is emphatic about his hope that the inklings of change he discerns are strong enough to last and effectively challenge what has become the dominant narrative in our culture.

I, too, have sensed a sea change abroad.  This forthright manifesto by Newsmax’s Carl Higbie is a representative declaration of the New Resistance.

But I also sense a robust resistance to the resistance, an increasingly agitated effort to tamp down and discredit anything or anyone that dares to wake up from wokeness.

That exercise in vibe stiffening takes place around the electric nodes of our culture war.  The carefully manicured narrative surrounding the January 6 entertainment, for example, has become increasingly tattered in recent months as revelation after revelation has undercut, contradicted, or exploded the official “insurrection” narrative. True, there were skeptics from the very beginning (I was one).  But the succeeding months and years—thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of investigative reporters like Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie—have knocked one pillar after the next out from under the official account of what happened during those few hours in and around the Capitol. Remember the “pipe bombs” that were supposedly planted by “insurrectionists” that day? It turns out they were almost certainly dummy explosives planted by government agents.

Up close and too personal with America’s fentanyl epidemic — where New York is ground zero By Social Links for Douglas Murray

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/opinion/up-close-and-too-personal-with-americas-fentanyl-epidemic-where-new-york-is-ground-zero/

It is very easy to find fentanyl in New York.The drug that in 2022 alone killed nearly 110,000 Americans is readily available right here on the streets of this city.Over the past the year, I’ve been investigating the spread of this lethal drug across this country .Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that has a potency many hundreds of times that of morphine.

Largely made in China, its strength means it is easy to transport huge quantities of the drug. It floods into this country, mainly through Mexico.

One recent evening in New York, I headed over to OnPoint, a supervised drug injection site in Washington Heights.

The controversial facility allows addicts to shoot up under “safe” conditions, with staff on hand to revive users if they overdose.

These “safe use” facilities are still in the experimental phase, with many critics as well as supporters.

But, inevitably, it is a meeting place for drug addicts.

And although people are not meant to deal drugs inside the facility, inevitably OnPoint is a focal point for people who are using the most lethal drugs.

Hanging around outside after dark, it didn’t take me long to find someone who was using fentanyl.

He led me over to the park opposite to show me where people were coming to meet dealers.

While I was there, I watched a steady stream of people (including a couple pushing a stroller) going into the darkened park. For one reason alone.

Then, right there in the middle of the street, this man started tourniquetting his arm, getting out a needle and burning something up in a container with a lighter.

What was it?

“Fentanyl,” he explained.

Brendan O’Neill: The truth about Israel’s ‘friendly fire’

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-truth-about-israels-friendly-fire/

David Cameron has got some front. The Foreign Secretary is haranguing Israel over its tragic unintentional killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, and yet he oversaw a war in which such ‘friendly fire’ horrors were commonplace. In fact, more than seven people were slain in accidental bombings under Cameron’s watch.

It was the Libya intervention of 2011. In that Nato-led excursion, in which Cameron, then prime minister, was an enthusiastic partner, numerous Libyans died as a result of misaimed bombs. Things got so bad that the West’s allies took to painting the roofs of their vehicles bright pink in an effort to avoid Nato’s missiles.

In one awful incident, 13 people were slaughtered by our ‘friendly fire’. Their number included not only anti-Gaddafi rebels but also ambulance workers. It was in the wake of this calamity that the rebels got out the pink paint. ‘How to avoid friendly fire? Libya rebels try pink’, said a headline at NBC News.

Yet now Cameron is on his high horse over Israel’s bombing of trucks carrying volunteers from the World Central Kitchen. He is demanding a ‘full, transparent explanation of what happened’. Fine. Three of the dead were British nationals, so it makes perfect sense Britain wants answers. But you would think a former PM who was involved in wars in which other accidents happened would understand that ‘friendly fire’, sadly, is all but inevitable in bloody conflict.

This is not to downplay the horror of what happened in Gaza on Monday. That civilians were killed while trying to help people, while trying to deliver food, is horrendous. It is fitting that the Israeli president Isaac Herzog has apologised for the bombings, and that the Israeli government has promised to get to the bottom of what happened.

And yet there is something off, even something nauseating, in all the Western finger-wagging. It isn’t only Cameron. US president Joe Biden has also weighed in, saying he is ‘outraged’ by the killing of the aid workers. You can’t help but wonder whether he directed similar outrage at his own nation’s military when 37 Afghanis at a wedding party, mostly women and children, were killed by mistake in a US airstrike.

Antisemitism and the Devil David Solway

http://The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted. -Psalm 22

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2024/04/06/antisemitism-and-the-devil-n4927961

 What historian Robert Wistrich has called the world’s longest hatred is also the world’s oldest sickness. Jew hatred is best construed as a universal epidemic, the emotional and intellectual equivalent of a decimating plague. The difference is that those who have contracted this septicemia of the mind do not die, except inwardly. It strikes me that the catalogue of such reprobates would fill the devil’s Rolodex. Unfortunately, the Israeli pharmaceutical firm Teva, one of the world’s largest suppliers of antibiotic medicines, has no psychic or endocrinal equivalent to treat the malady.

In “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Jean-Paul Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an idea but “first of all a passion” that is akin to hysteria. This passion connects schematically with “the idea of the Jew” to which individual Jews are made to conform irrespective of their personal attributes. Sartre’s thesis is that the Jew is made responsible for the inescapable distress of being human — an excuse for failure, a means of false absolution, and a convenient repository of all the unpleasant things we are unwilling to acknowledge about ourselves. Sartre concludes that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Unfortunately, the malediction of Isaiah has been forgotten or dismissed: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness…” Israel and its people, whom Isaiah called “a light unto the nations,” are now threatened by an encroaching darkness.

The cadastral address of the Empire of Antisemitism is located in the recorded past and the indefinite future, but it squats in the here and now so that it remains substantial, fully formed, repressive, and immutable, and refuses to be abolished. It merely creates tenement states — anti-Zionism, scholarly distaste, personal animosity, feckless alliances — renting time until the day history is annulled and the devil’s pleasure palace is erected in perpetuam. It is an evil that migrates from the meandering insincerity of our lives to the radical decline of moral sensitivity into the ninth circle of Hell where the social order turns feral and what Wistrich calls the “Judeophobic virus” once again infects the human race. We see this happening now in the wake of the Gaza embroilment as majorities side with a monstrous Islamic entity while reviling and abusing the only democratic nation in the Middle East constantly fighting for its always-threatened survival. We see it in the increasingly frequent and toxic anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement playing out on the streets, ministries, websites, and university campuses of our liberal world.

BORIS JOHNSON: It would be insane for Britain to ban arms sales to Israel. The sooner we denounce the idea, the better

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13276141/BORIS-JOHNSON-insane-Britain-ban-arms-sales-Israel-sooner-denounce-idea-better.html

“Israel has no choice but to defend itself because the charter and aim of Hamas is to destroy Israel, and indeed to liquidate the entire Jewish people. The Hamas massacre on October 7 was plainly designed to further that end: the moral and political destruction of Israel.”

If you want an example of the death wish of Western civilisation, I give you the current proposal from members of the British establishment that this country should ban arms sales to Israel.

If you want evidence of government madness, it appears that Foreign Office lawyers are busily canvassing the idea — which has not, as far as I can tell, yet been rejected by the Foreign Secretary himself. He seems to have gone into a kind of purdah on the subject.

More alarming still, we are told that an Israeli arms ban is the subject of an active row in Cabinet, with only a handful of ministers positively sticking up for Israel.

The contagion has spread pretty wide, and very fast. The proposed embargo is now supported by MPs on all sides, by the former head of MI6, by some former Supreme Court Justices, and by about 600 members of the legal profession, all of them clamouring for us to turn our backs on the only democracy in the Middle East.

We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel — when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since World War II; and when 130 hostages, including, for heaven’s sake, a baby, are being kept in dungeons in Gaza by their jihadi captors; and when the release of those hostages, it cannot be stated too often, would mean the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli Defence Forces and the end of the conflict.

How can we get things so wrong, so upside down? What has come over us?

A letter from Israel Israelis are divided by politics, but united in their determination to survive. Rob Killick

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/07/a-letter-from-israel/

Hamas must be eradicated.’

You can rely on taxi drivers the world over to deliver blunt opinions. Unusually for Israel today, my taxi driver is a Netanyahu supporter. He has lost family in the war with Hamas. ‘Our minds were broken’, he says of the 7 October atrocities, ‘but now we are fighting back’. This, I soon discovered, is a common sentiment in Israel. Netanyahu remains deeply unpopular, but the war on Hamas is the one policy of his that the vast majority of Israelis back.

I ask the taxi driver if the pressure from the US and the rest of the outside world to hold back is having any effect. ‘No’, he says, ‘nobody likes us now, but they will respect us when we win’.

My two-week stay in Israel began in Tel Aviv, at the main station, Savidor. It looks like a normal rush hour, except for the fact a large proportion of the commuters are in army uniform. Many look ridiculously young – just kids, really. Their uniforms often don’t fit very well. But there are also serious-looking men and women in smarter uniforms, all carrying submachine guns. This is what a nation under arms looks like.

From Tel Aviv, we head to Ashkelon, just north of Gaza. This is the terminus, as the line further south runs too close to the Gaza border to be safe. On arrival, the train empties and I am surrounded by soldiers waiting to be picked up and deployed. It’s from Ashkelon that I meet the taxi driver, who takes me further south, to Sderot.

As I’m being driven through the military checkpoint at the entrance to Sderot, I hear the boom of Israeli artillery. The intermittent barrages will become a permanent feature of my 10-day stay in the Gaza Envelope, the towns and villages of Israel that run to the east of the Gaza Strip.

I am joining up with Livnot, a volunteer organisation based in Sderot, which is dedicated to renovating and fixing buildings in the Gaza Envelope. Sderot is a town of just over 30,000 and only one mile from the border of northern Gaza. On 7 October – always known here as 7/10 – Hamas terrorists invaded without warning, killing at least 50 civilians and 20 police officers, before eventually occupying the Sderot police station. Rather than risk losing any more lives, an IDF tank destroyed the police station with the terrorists inside it.

The Obama and Biden Administrations’ Betrayal of America’s Closest Ally in the Middle East: Israel by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20547/obama-biden-betray-israel

What onlookers see, including terrorists and America’s enemies and adversaries – when they also factor in the open US southern border across which millions of illegal immigrants have recently poured, including 46,000 Chinese, many of whom are military-aged men possibly “building an army from within” – is that the Biden administration is perfectly content to welcome and support terrorists.

The White House actions have bolstered America’s adversaries and pretty much extinguished America’s credibility as an ally. The universal “optics” are that if America will throw its closest ally, Israel, under the bus, what chance has anyone else got?

Many people in Israel call to “Bring the Hostages Home.” The request is wrong, because it is addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been doing his best to do free the hostages, while preventing Hamas ever to be able to strike Israel again – and standing up to US pressure, as he did during the fraudulent Iran nuclear deal. But the hostages are not his to bring home. The cry should be: “Release the Hostages” — addressed, as well as calls for a ceasefire — to the people who are holding them: Hamas, Qatar and Iran.

The US administration would clearly like to replace Netanyahu with new US-handpicked prime minister who would do whatever they tell him to, and appears to have launched a plan to do just that, using Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as its mouthpiece. The Israelis must not fall for it. If they want to preserve Israel, preserve Netanyahu.

The Palestinian state, even if it were officially “demilitarized,” would, of course, be free to enter into military alliances with any countries it wished — perhaps Russia, China, Iran, North Korea?

Israel’s new US puppet prime minister would presumably be happy to have Qatar – a country that has supported virtually every Islamic terrorist group — including Hamas, ISIS, Hizballah, the Taliban, the al Nusra Front and Al Shabaab — “operate” the Gaza pier now being built to bring “humanitarian aid” and Heaven knows what else into Gaza. Above all, of course, the new puppet would presumably agree to Iran being armed to the teeth with nuclear bombs.

The Biden administration would do far better, especially for November 5, instead of aligning itself with the terrorist groups and the countries that support them — such as Hamas, Qatar and Iran — to align itself with those in the Free World, fighting for freedom, human rights and civilization.

The White House actions have bolstered America’s adversaries and pretty much extinguished America’s credibility as an ally. The universal “optics” are that if America will throw its closest ally, Israel, under the bus, what chance has anyone else got?

Rutgers Police Escort Jewish Students Out of Town Hall after Pro-Palestinian Protesters Call for ‘Intifada’ By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rutgers-police-escort-jewish-students-out-of-town-hall-after-pro-palestinian-protesters-call-for-intifada/

Rutgers University president Jonathan Holloway held a town hall with students Thursday night aimed at offering the school community the opportunity to ask him questions. Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos.

As Holloway attempted to address the crowd, “pro-Palestinian students interrupted the town hall and prevented the scheduled programming from happening. They shouted and tried to intimidate other students,” Rutgers student Sarah Shiner, who was in attendance Thursday night, told National Review.

The chants — as captured on video and shared on X — included slogans like “globalize the intifada,” “long live the intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and “we don’t want no two-state; we want ’48.”

“What shocked me the most,” Shiner said, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.”

Holloway also had a police escort out of the building mere minutes into the event, leaving only half the security dispatched to the town hall there to protect the Jewish students who had come to ask their university’s president how he plans to handle antisemitism on their campus.

Shiner told NR that the environment on Rutgers’s campus is “extremely hostile” to Jewish students. The university’s student body recently voted in favor of two referenda calling on Rutgers to divest its endowment and academic affiliations from Israel. As the campaign in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement vote went on, anti-Israel students posted flyers featuring a photo of a Jewish student next to the words “Free Palestine” across campus.

Neither Holloway nor any other Rutgers administrator has addressed the targeted harassment, though Holloway did issue a statement after the BDS referenda saying he believes “in engagement, not isolation,” and opposes any divestment plan.