ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel at war: democracy in action The common cause uniting citizens with the armed forces has been key to Israel’s military success. Mike Hume

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/08/israel-at-war-democracy-in-action/

How does Israel do it? When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated the head terrorist of Hezbollah two weeks ago, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that ‘We are winning’. And he was right.

A year after the darkness of 7 October, the message from Israel is: let there be light! The IDF has crushed Hamas in Gaza, delivered hammer blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and shaken the terrorists’ sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots.

So how has Israel – a small state of fewer than 10million people, surrounded, as Daniel Ben-Ami analysed on spiked, by genocidal Islamist enemies and isolated on the international stage as never before – had such military success?

No doubt superior military technology, both imported and homemade, has played its part, alongside the sort of intelligence and chutzpah required to blow up personal pagers in terrorists’ pockets.

The most important factor, however, is surely the active commitment of a large part of the Israeli population to the war effort. It is a people’s war, supported by millions who identify with and have a stake in the Jewish State, and view its existential struggle against the Islamists as a fight for their own heritage and future.

Anybody who supports democracy and freedom should be unequivocally on Israel’s side. As the sole democracy in the Middle East, and the sworn enemy of Islamist terrorists, Israel is on the frontline of the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism.

Even more than that, Israel is an example to us all of what can be achieved if you fight for what you believe in and take the people with you. The support of the Israeli demos – the people – means that Israel is not only fighting for democracy. Its war effort is real democracy in action.

This idea might come as a surprise to those who get their news about the Middle East solely from the mainstream media. The only Israelis who ever appear on the TV news here, in between the constant coverage of suffering Palestinians, are those protesting against the Israeli government and demanding an end to the war.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Doug Emhoff Dismisses Domestic-Violence Allegations as ‘Distraction,’ Doesn’t Deny Report By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doug-emhoff-dismisses-domestic-violence-allegations-as-distraction-doesnt-deny-report/

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff says claims that he “forcefully” slapped his then-girlfriend in 2012 are a “distraction” – but did not deny the allegations in a new interview that aired Friday.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough gave Emhoff an opportunity to respond to several “tabloid stories about your personal life.” Reporting from the Daily Mail has claimed Emhoff slapped his then-girlfriend during the Cannes Film Festival more than ten years ago, with sources telling the outlet he hit the unnamed woman so hard that she “spun around.” The story, which is based on claims from several of the unnamed women’s friends as she declined to speak with the outlet, suggested he may have hit her in a moment of jealousy after he believed she had been flirting with a valet.

Other reporting from the outlet indicated he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” during his time working at a Los Angeles law firm.

“We don’t have time to be pissed off,” Emhoff told Scarborough. “We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”

While Emhoff did not deny the allegations, a spokesperson for Emhoff previously told Semafor that the report was “untrue.” “Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false,” the spokesperson said.

Vice President Kamala Harris began dating Emhoff in 2013 and the pair wed in August 2014.

Emhoff in August publicly admitted to having an affair during his first marriage after the Daily Mail reported that he cheated on his first wife and got their nanny pregnant.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Urban Violent Crime Surged 40 Percent Beginning in 2019 Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/urban-violent-crime-surged-40-percent-beginning-in-2019/

The further removed we are from the presidential debate, the clearer it is that ABC’s David Muir’s “fact-checking” of former President Trump’s remarks on surging crime was outrageous.

In insisting that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir relied on FBI statistics that, at best, showed a marginal one-year drop — down 3 percent nationwide from 2022 to 2023. Even if the bureau’s numbers were arguably reliable, such a reduction would be negligible. In reality, though, the FBI’s numbers are not reliable. And most significantly, Muir ignored the trajectory of the past five years, which tells a dramatically different story in major American cities — almost uniformly run by Democrats.

There, violent crime has, indeed, surged.

Jeffrey Anderson led the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) during Trump’s administration. Unlike Muir, he is a reliable source, both on overall trends and the flaws of FBI crime-statistic reporting — beginning with the rudimentary fact that the bureau is an investigative agency, not a statistical agency.

Writing in the City Journal, Anderson explains that if we start with 2019 — right before the radical Left’s George Floyd riots and the toxic combination of the defund-the-police movement and the Progressive Prosecutor Project of non-enforcement policies — and then run the numbers through 2023, there was “a whopping 40 percent surge in urban violent crime” (emphasis added). During the same timeframe, urban property crime increased by 26 percent.

Anderson is relying on the BJS’s National Crime Victim Survey. The NCVS is a Nixon-era crime measuring tool. It is the gold standard because it grapples with the fact that most crime — probably about 55 percent — goes unreported. By searching for victims, rather than recording only crimes that are reported to the police, it provides a more accurate depiction.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The China Crisis? For years, investors profited from China despite its corruption, but they are now acknowledging the increasing risks as the country moves away from capitalism. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/12/the-china-crisis/

It is largely axiomatic in the investment world that “to be early is to be wrong.” It doesn’t matter what you know, in other words, or how right you may be in understanding conditions or a developing situation. If the rest of the world isn’t ready to accept your case, if it isn’t “there” yet, then you won’t make any money. Indeed, you may lose quite a bit as you wait for everyone else to catch up to you.

Under this specific investment-driven definition, then, I have been wrong about China for the last 25 years or so—repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

My boss and I once got ourselves into scalding hot water with our employer at a large financial services firm for questioning the sanity and propriety of the hottest investment deal on Wall Street, the initial public offering of PetroChina, the listed arm of the Chinese National Petroleum Company. I once left a job—at a different large financial service firm—in part because the firm’s investment bankers were censoring what we could and could not say about the Chinese government. For some reason, they found it difficult to cut deals with the Butchers of Beijing when their own firm’s analysts were back stateside, calling their partners “the Butchers of Beijing.” Funny how that works.

In a real, fundamental, political, and moral sense, I was right about China. I was right that the CCP cannot be trusted, that it is a brutal, neo-fascist regime. I was right that the defenders of the “global order” had it backward, that allowing China to play in the free world’s sandbox would not make its government freer and more amenable to classical economics and politics. All it would do would befoul the sandbox, make it grotesque and largely unusable. I was right that the CCP would lie, cheat, and steal to advance its agenda and achieve its goals. In short, I was right about everything—everything that is, except the short-term investment possibilities.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

How the Biden/Harris Admin Helped Iran Get to the Brink of a Nuclear Bomb America and the world desperately need a strong and decisive U.S. president to undo the damage done to American and global security by the Biden/Harris administration’s disastrous Iran policies. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/11/how-the-biden-harris-admin-helped-iran-get-to-the-brink-of-a-nuclear-bomb/

Iran has made enormous progress in its nuclear weapons program during the Biden/Harris administration and reportedly can now enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to fuel nine nuclear bombs in one month. Although Iran may be nine months to a year away from having an operational nuclear weapon, recent attacks by Iran and Israel against each other’s territory have raised concerns that Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program could lead to a nuclear war in the Middle East.

Biden/Harris administration officials have tried to blame President Trump for the advances in Iran’s nuclear program because he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the JCPOA. Democratic Governor Tim Walz made this claim during the October 1 vice presidential debate when he said, “There had been a coalition of nations that had boxed Iran’s nuclear program in . . . Donald Trump pulled that program and put nothing else in its place.”

This is absolutely false. The huge advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program are the result of major flaws in the JCPOA and a series of terrible national security policy decisions, including repeated attempts to appease Iran, by the Obama and Biden administrations.

The first of these bad policy decisions was when the Obama administration conceded to Iran the “right” to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, such as nuclear medicine and nuclear reactor fuel.

This decision reversed the positions of prior Republican and Democratic administrations who believed Iran could not be trusted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes because of covert Iranian efforts to establish a nuclear weapons program and because it is easy to reconfigure uranium centrifuges supposedly constructed for peaceful purposes to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel.

Allowing Iran to enrich its own uranium for peaceful purposes has never made economic sense due to a glut of reactor fuel and nuclear medicine on the world market. Iran also does not need nuclear power due to its vast oil and natural gas reserves.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained this to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an October 2014 interview when he said Iran’s centrifuges “are only good for one thing: to make bomb-grade material.”

The JCPOA Was a Dangerous Fraud

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Islamization of Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus – Backed by Obama, Soros, Clintons by Keya Mukherjee

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21007/islamization-of-bangladesh

Meanwhile, it appears as if Yunus is waiting for the result of the November 5 presidential election in the US. A victory by Kamala Harris could pave the way for him to remain in power indefinitely and complete the process of Islamizing Bangladesh.

“New Delhi is getting increasingly concerned that banned militant outfits like Jamaat-e-Islami and even radical organisations like Hizb ut Tahrir may soon enter mainstream politics in Bangladesh, thereby posing security challenges not just for India but for the entire South Asian region…” – The Anandabazar Patrika, September 14, 2024.

Yunus is already under pressure to lift the ban imposed on Hizb ut Tahrir by Sheikh Hasina’s previous government in 2009.

“Delighted to see an old friend of my father and the foundation, Nobel Prize winner @professormuhammadyunus, interim leader of Bangladesh, who stepped in to lead Bangladesh towards a peaceful future based on equity and fairness.” — Alexander Soros, Instagram, October 2, 2024.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tom Cotton Sounds Alarm about ‘Likely Misuse’ of over $1 Billion of U.S. Aid to Gaza By James Lynch

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tom-cotton-sounds-alarm-about-likely-misuse-of-over-1-billion-of-u-s-aid-to-gaza/

Republican Senator Tom Cotton (Ark.) suspects more than $1 billion of humanitarian aid intended for Gazan civilians fell into Hamas’s hands and is calling for the federal government to suspend the aid until it can rectify the problem.

Cotton wrote a letter to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) administrator Samantha Power Wednesday asking her to consider cutting off the humanitarian aid because of the possibility it is being diverted to Hamas.

“I write to raise grave concerns about the likely misuse of more than one billion dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid sent to Gaza since October 2023,” Cotton said. Cotton is a strong supporter of Israel and an advocate for an assertive U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

He specifically criticized the USAID’s decision last month to approve $336 million of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, Judea, and Samaria on the same day the United Nations confirmed that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) employed a Hamas operative killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Bolstering Cotton’s concerns is a USAID inspector general report published in July describing how the agency failed to conduct basic due diligence on many of the organizations it sends taxpayers dollars to.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Now they won’t even let Jews grieve in peace This week, Columbia students intruded on a vigil for the victims of 7 October – a sick new low. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/09/now-they-wont-even-let-jews-grieve-in-peace/

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were the fundamentalist fruitcakes who would picket vigils for slain American soldiers with technicolour placards declaring ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. Well, there’s a new mob of grief-intruders in town. There’s a new gang of hateful trespassers on other people’s sorrow. They’re not quite as God-bothering, not so homophobic, but they’re every bit as ghoulish. It’s the ‘pro-Palestine’ set on university campuses.

This week, something truly appalling took place at Columbia University in New York City. A vigil for the 1,200 people butchered by the fascists of Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October was noisily interrupted by the Hamas fanboys of the cranky Columbia left. ‘Fanboys’ is not hyperbole. Some were chanting ‘Resistance is glorious!’. This was on Monday, on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom. If you are singing the praises of a ‘resistance’ one year after that ‘resistance’ slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then you are a Hamas fanboy, you are a fellow traveller of fascism.

Jewish students and their allies had gathered to pay tribute to the dead and stolen of 7 October. They prayed for the Jews murdered by Hamas and demanded the release of the Jews Hamas still holds captive. They assembled on Columbia’s South Lawn. They displayed giant milk cartons featuring images of the Israeli hostages and a collection of teddy bears covered in red paint symbolising those who were murdered. Their lamentations were soon interrupted, though. Their murmured grief was punctuated by the shrill cries of Columbia’s legion Israelophobes. ‘Israel go to hell!’, these radical Westboro Baptists screamed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis shows the country how it’s done By Monica Showalter

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/ron_desantis_shows_the_country_how_it_s_done.html

Amid all the shambles, disorganization, delays, and waste seen any time the federal or many state governments gets involved in something, we have Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis to demonstrate what competent leadership looks like.

He’s like a breath of fresh air.

According to TIPP Insights which had an excellent rundown of all the competent things DeSantis actually did — providing fuel, restoring electric power, setting up shelters, and actually yanking open a closed landfill through a wise use of eminent domain so that hurricane debris could be dumped there to clear the roads for first responders:

DeSantis’s 15-minute address was a masterclass on what the government could and should do. Even the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a bitter critic of all governments, would have been impressed [though he would likely have been upset to know that the storm’s name coincided with his].

DeSantis was a picture of quiet efficiency, a master conductor of a disparate orchestra with hundreds of thousands of players. He starkly contrasted with Vice President Kamala Harris, who tried to show leadership on a Zoom call with senior federal officials also preparing for Hurricane Milton.

During the recent hurricane emergencies, DeSantis got immediately involved in protecting the state, having already been prepared for it, and then in help during the storm and after the storm. It’s a big job, given the double natural disasters he’s been dealing with.

But he got to it, and even delivered extra help to other states that didn’t prepare as well as he did, such as North Carolina, delivering massive amounts of temporary bridging so that rescuers could deal with washed away roads and bridges, rescuing the injured, delivering supplies, and getting others out of those areas.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Israel is Innocent of the Accusation of Genocide in Gaza And where the moral responsibility for Palestinian suffering really lies. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on October 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/why-israel-is-innocent-of-the-accusation-of-genocide-in-gaza/

Talk of Israel’s crime of genocide in the war against Hamas in Gaza is ubiquitous. It is treated as an axiom; to question the tenability of Israeli genocide is to act as if one is questioning an invariable law of nature. South Africa has even brought charges of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice. College protests and global public outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians—with the irrelevant special citation of women and children—are fueled by a misconception about the nature of genocide itself, a crime of which the Jewish state is innocent.

(I say the deaths of women and children are irrelevant in the citation of the alleged genocide because it is a surreptitious way of imputing greater moral value to the lives of women and children than to men. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The death of a man in war regardless of his age is just as tragic as the death of a child. All human lives regardless of sex have intrinsic moral value.)

The word genocide was first coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, to describe the systematic extermination policies of Nazi Germany during World War II. Genocide has been defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. It involves preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children to another group.

As an historical fact, it is worth noting that in the years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948, the Arab population of what many refer to as historic Palestine more than quintupled from 1.3 million to about 7.5 million. The Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria has continued to rise from 3.6 million in 2006, to 5.4 million in 2023. One has to point out that when there are far higher death tolls in the Middle East, say, in 2011 where up to 600,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war—a number which many writers state is ten times higher than have died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948—such war outcomes are never labeled as genocides.

There are some important points to be made here. Israel has never had a genocidal policy towards its Arab populations which have grown exponentially in Israel and in Judea and Samaria (also part of Israel). It cannot be accused of genocide in its current war against Hamas in Gaza for several reasons. There is no intent to annihilate the Palestinians in Gaza. The responsibility for the war lies with Hamas, which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023. No rational war can be fought when an attacked nation is asked to be morally responsible for the civilians of the aggressor region or country. Hamas bears full responsibility for any death toll of its citizens on two fronts.