ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas is the enemy of the Palestinian people This reactionary religious movement has never had any interest in national liberation. James Heartfield

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/23/hamas-is-the-enemy-of-the-palestinian-people/

On 7 October last year, Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Despite this demonstration of anti-Semitic barbarism, many Western anti-Israel activists continue to see Hamas as some sort of ‘resistance’ movement, fighting for Palestinian nationhood.

This view couldn’t be more wrong. As Italian journalist Paola Caridi shows in her largely sympathetic account of the group, Hamas: From Resistance to Government (originally published in 2009 but updated last year), Hamas is not and never has been a national-independence movement. It is above all an intransigent, religious movement set on the destruction of Israel.

The exhaustion of Palestinian nationalism

To get to grips with the nature and development of Hamas, it’s important to understand the broader historical background. The central problem here for Palestinians and Israelis is that their national aspirations are irreconcilable.

Israel was founded in 1948, after Jewish people revolted against Palestine’s British rulers. (With a mandate from the League of Nations, the British took over from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Palestine for over four centuries, at the end of the First World War.) During the 1920s and especially the 1930s, Palestine’s indigenous Jewish population was supplemented by refugees from Eastern Europe and later Nazi Germany. This growing and increasingly restive populace rebelled against British occupation, just as neighbouring Iraqis did in the 1920s and 1940s, and Egyptians did in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In doing so, these rebellions laid claim to new nations, which claimed descent from ancient civilisations.

Many Arabs, caught in the crossfire of the often violent Jewish struggle for an Israeli state in the late 1940s, fled to the neighbouring territories of the Egyptian-governed Gaza Strip and the Jordanian West Bank. In 1967, Israel defeated the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War. Through this war, Israel conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, complete with their Arab populations. These became the ‘occupied territories’.

As the Six-Day War demonstrated, the Arab world refused to accept Israel’s existence. Arab nations took Israel as an affront to their own independence. Yasser Arafat, born to Palestinian parents in Cairo in 1929, co-founded the paramilitary organisation, Fatah, in the late 1950s. Its object was to fight for a Palestinian state. In 1967, Fatah joined and became the dominant faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was then a national-independence movement. Arafat became PLO leader in 1969.

Israel’s leaders always understood that the national aspirations of Palestinians were irreconcilable with the existence of Israel. Hence, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir insisted in a 1976 New York Times op-ed that there were no ‘Palestinians’, only Arabs, living in Egypt, Jordan and Israel itself.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo How DEI Corrupts America’s Universities The ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what it purports to be.

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dei-corrupts-americas-universities

The idea of public universities in the United States originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.

We can review the acronym in parts. First, “diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind equality and individual merit.

Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to prevailing ideologies and sentiments. 

Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea. Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.

What this means in practice is that members of certain groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under the ideology of “equity.”

You see this hiding in plain sight. Universities publish in their own materials prima facie evidence of their commitments to racial discrimination, quotas, and disparate treatment on the basis of identity in hiring, admissions, promotions, and in other programs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Logic in All the Madness The Biden administration’s agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/24/the-logic-in-all-the-madness/

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?

Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.

Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?

Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?

Why would the Biden White House’s counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former paramour chief prosecutor in the Fani Willis Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department step down to lead Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland select Jack Smith as a special prosecutor of Donald Trump—given his past failures as a special counsel and known political biases?

Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.

But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.

After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Will Voters Turn the World Upside-Down? By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/will_voters_turn_the_world_upside_down.html

So the Great Awakening continues apace.  All over the West, men and women who simply want to be left alone are concluding that their governments will not let them live in peace.  Woe to any Establishment hobgoblins who believe they can sabotage their home nations without paying a price.

After having failed to implement Brexit or curtail mass illegal immigration during their last decade and a half in power, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives appear destined for extinction-level losses in the U.K.’s July 4 general election.  This regrettably means that Labor’s champagne socialists will seize Parliament’s suicidal reins and drive that once great nation deeper into the ground.  But in the background of Great Britain’s self-immolation is the resurgence of Brexit champion Nigel Farage, who enjoys unprecedented support for his Reform Party.  Because the U.K.’s Deep State has refused to honor the terms of Brexit, the British people are ready to overturn the whole system.  July 4 — what a lovely day for a revolution!

Emmanuel Macron, the Rothschild banker and diminutive king who married his grandmotherly schoolteacher, will likely suffer electoral humiliation of his own in France’s legislative elections over the next two weeks.  The Napoleon wannabe — who speaks snobbishly of European empire and prefers to be photographed while kitted out in the latest boxing fashion — called for snap elections in a stompy-foot hissy fit after the French people handed him heavy losses in the European Parliament vote earlier this month.  Just as Le Petit Fromage seems to believe that he can convey strength by staring menacingly at stationary punching bags, Macron thinks his political hubris can transform almost certain defeat into chance victory.  The French people, on the other hand, are fed up with mass illegal immigration, rising crime, and deteriorating standards of living (common complaints throughout the West) and are not particularly enthused about the growing prospect of a hot war with Russia.  It is difficult to persuade French citizens that they should rally around their tricolor flag and defend Ukraine’s borders when French aristocrats continue to lecture the peasants that national borders are so passé (another common complaint throughout the West).

Of course, the granddaddy of imminent political earthquakes is the (cross your fingers, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder, turn around three times, and whisper, “MAGA-MAGA-MAGA”) likely return of President Trump to the White House.  Oh, I know the Democrat Deep State will continue to do everything it can to rig the election in November (even if it has to throw the MAGA Man in prison and wake up half the dead people in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Phoenix to “vote”), but political polling in the United States continues to show Iron Trump with substantial leads over Horse-Glue Biden.  If the United States didn’t have a third-world election system devoid of voter identification and rife with mail-in-ballot fraud, the propaganda press would already be grudgingly admitting that Biden’s re-election hopes are as dead as a doornail.  Since Dementia Joe is the president for dead voters, though, and because he managed to “win” fifteen million more votes than the progressive demigod Barack Obama did during his re-election campaign, the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation and the Department of (in)Justice are still telling everyone, “Don’t worry.  We’ve got this.”  As Hans Gruber would say, “You ask for a miracle?  I give you the FBI.” 

BOOKS Comments turned off

Linda Goudsmit: CHAPTER 24: The Politics of Pronouns Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release July 2024)

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27850/the-politics-of-pronouns

In an information war, fought without bullets or bombs, language is weaponized. The globalist campaign promoting gender fluidity in order to destroy individual selfness manipulates spoken and written language to achieve its goal. Perversion of pronoun usage in the English language has a particularly destructive political purpose. The enemies of national and individual sovereignty are revising language to reflect human existence without the boundaries of self. Words matter. The switch to third-person plural, gender-neutral language is a weapon of mass psychological destruction that begins in early childhood.

Consider this: young children who do not learn the first- and second-person individual and possessive pronouns I, me,mine, you, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers do not learn to name or identify themselves or others as individual gendered selves. Without a personal, individual, gendered, identifiable self, children become confused, destabilized, and vulnerable.

Instead of singular pronouns, young children are intentionally being taught to use the third-person plural pronouns they,them, theirs, so that they identify themselves in terms of the non-gendered collective. It is linguistic demolition of the individual. Plural pronouns effectively erase the concept of an individual self from the English language, and support the replacement of the individual with the preferred non-gendered collective identity.

Globalism’s tactical strategy is to have the Left focus its Marxist ideological values of diversity, equity, and inclusionon cultural and educational institutions. The incremental strategic objective is for those values to be accepted as normative, then become social policy, and ultimately become the law of the land.

This is how globalism’s linguistic hoax works to change the hearts and minds of America’s children in classrooms K–12 and online. Disingenuously presented as diverse, equitable, and inclusive language to make people feel respected and included, gender-neutral substitutions are promoted as empathetic, kind, and caring. Grammarly, the popular cloud-based typing assistant, instructs writers on “How to Use Gender-Neutral Language at Work and in Life”[i] in an article by freelance journalist Devon Delfino, June 17, 2022:

Gender-neutral language is simply a way of talking about people without assuming their gender. For example, it’s referring to someone you don’t know as “they” rather than using the pronoun “he” or “she,” or addressing a group as “everyone” rather than saying, “Hey, guys.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hezbollah Storing Iranian Weapons at Beirut Airport by JNS

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20729/hezbollah-beirut-airport

Hezbollah is storing massive amounts of Iranian armaments at Rafic Hariri International Airport, Lebanon’s main civilian airport, staff say.

Hezbollah has been accused of using the Beirut airport for weapon storage in the past, but whistleblowers say it has ramped up the practice since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel.

“This is extremely serious, mysterious large boxes arriving on direct flights from Iran are a sign that things got worse,” an airport worker told The Telegraph. “When they started to come through the airport, my friends and I were scared because we knew that there was something strange going on.”

He feared that an explosion, or an attack on the airport to destroy the weapons, could cause major damage to Beirut, similar to the 2020 port blast that devastated much of downtown. That explosion was blamed on a weapons warehouse belonging to Hezbollah.

“Beirut will be cut off from the world, not to mention the number of casualties and damage,” he said. “It’s just a matter of time before a disaster also happens at the airport.”

Stored weapons include Iranian-made Falaq artillery rockets, Fateh-110 short-range missiles, mobile ballistic missiles and M-600 missiles with ranges of more than 150 miles, The Telegraph reported.

AT-14 Kornet, laser-guided anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM), Burkan short-range ballistic missile and RDX, a widely used explosive, are also stored at the airport.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu Is Right to Reject Vassal-State Etiquette by Jonathan S. Tobin

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20726/netanyahu-reject-vassal-state

As far as the White House and Democrats are concerned, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing it again. Similar to multiple occasions during the presidency of Barack Obama, Netanyahu is not playing by the rules Washington and the foreign-policy establishment believe are laid down to govern the behavior of client states.

Rather than assume the role of the loyal and pliant vassal to his nation’s superpower ally, there have been several times when Netanyahu has talked back in public to Obama and now President Joe Biden. Washington’s angry response to the video the prime minister released last week, in which he spoke of the way the administration has been slow-walking arms deliveries, made it clear that—assurances of goodwill from both sides notwithstanding—U.S.-Israel relations have reached a crisis point.

In the 49-second video posted on the YouTube page of the prime minister’s office on June 18, Netanyahu said the following:

“When Secretary Blinken was recently here in Israel, we had a candid conversation. I said I deeply appreciated the support the U.S. has given Israel from the beginning of the war. But I also said something else. I said it’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies. Secretary Blinken assured me that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case. It should be the case. During World War II, Churchill told the United States, ‘Give us the tools, we’ll do the job.’ And I say, give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster.”

Washington’s anger

In reaction, Washington expressed shock and anger. According to U.S. officials, Netanyahu’s claims were both fictional and a sign of ingratitude after all that Biden had done for him and Israel since Oct. 7, and throughout the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Their story is that despite Biden’s talk of potentially refusing to continue to send arms and ammunition to Israel if it doesn’t obey him and not attack the last Hamas strongholds in Rafah, there have been no such cutoffs. The only exception, they assert, is a review of whether the United States should send a special kind of 2,000-pound bomb that might cause too many civilian casualties in urban areas.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

You Owe $100,000! America is now almost $35 trillion in debt. And Biden wants to spend more. John Stossel

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/you-owe-100000/

America is now almost $35 trillion in debt. That means every American owes $100,000.

The Biden administration doesn’t care. They want to spend more.

Already they are spending so much that they’re increasing our debt by a trilliondollars every 100 days.

President Donald Trump was no better. His administration increased our debt by almost $8 trillion.

This will not end well.

Last year, we hit a new ugly milestone: Americans must pay $1 trillion per year just for interest on our debt.

That’s more than we spend on defense — on infrastructure, education, poverty programs … everything, but Social Security and Medicare.

If we didn’t waste these trillion dollars on interest, we could give $3,000 tax cuts to every man, woman and child to use as they please.

Worse, America’s spending growth is unsustainable. You can stretch a rubber band farther and farther, but eventually, it will break.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Cultists on the Loose Spray-painting Stonehenge, launching a sex strike, and naked bike riding. By Mark Tapson

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-cultists-on-the-loose/

As far back as the 1960s and ‘70s, activists on a mission to save the planet from various environmental cataclysms (none of which ever materialized) have resorted to stoking panic to generate support for their hysterical pronouncements that all life on earth faces imminent extinction. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,” young climate activist icon Greta Thunberg once lectured the one-percenters of the Davos crowd. “I want you to panic.” Fear is a more deep-seated motivation than rational argument, especially if people are no longer falling for the sophistry and manipulated statistics from scientists corrupted by the promises of Green Reset profit and power.

Now that most people aren’t falling for the fear-mongering anymore, climate activists have given up trying to win support by manipulating people emotionally; instead, they have resorted to a counterintuitive strategy of simply antagonizing people – with traffic blockades, the destruction of priceless works of art, and eco-terrorism. The latest climate change protests include such unhinged actions as painting the Stonehenge monument, launching a sex strike, and riding naked through the streets of Madison, Wisconsin.

Last week a pair of environmental protesters from the widely-detested Britain-based Just Stop Oil group spray-painted the famed ancient Stonehenge megaliths orange, before being tackled by tourists. “We have to come together to defend humanity or we risk everything,” said a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil. Blah, blah, blah.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media’s Gaslighting on Biden’s Decline Is This Election’s Laptop Cover-Up By Becket Adams

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-medias-gaslighting-on-bidens-decline-is-this-elections-laptop-cover-up/

Don’t believe the evidence right in front of you, they say. Sound familiar?

Major media are aiming to repeat their performance from the 2020 presidential election, back when they endeavored to deny, dismiss, and denounce a story that could have damaged the Democratic presidential nominee.

In that election cycle, the press reflexively rallied behind a theory that the contents of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop were “Russian disinformation,” a Kremlin plot to throw the election in the GOP’s favor. Some went as far as to suggest that the laptop itself was fake (or stolen or didn’t belong to Hunter). Under the flimsy pretense of combating Russian interference, major media engaged in an industry-wide conspiracy to censor and reject the story.

The laptop is real. It appeared as evidence against Hunter Biden in his gun-felony case.

There was never a legitimate reason for members of the press to have dismissed the laptop story out of hand, especially considering the fact that those who pushed the “Russian disinformation” theory never bothered to provide evidence beyond “Trust me, bro.” Major newsrooms merely insisted that you, the voter, disregard the story as well as what the laptop’s contents suggested regarding a possible globe-spanning influence-peddling operation involving Ukrainian business interests, Chinese nationals, and the Biden family.