Meet Russell Rickford, Who Found Oct. 7 ‘Exhilarating’ Can you guess where he’s teaching? Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/meet-russell-rickford-who-found-oct-7-exhilarating/

The New York Post reported Thursday that “the Cornell University professor who last year called Hamas’ depraved Oct. 7 attack ‘exhilarating’ sparked more outrage Wednesday after taking part in an anti-Israel march on campus where protesters chanted, ‘Long live the intifada.’” More on Russell Rickford’s reappearance in the anti-Israel protesters’ ranks can be found here: “Cornell professor who cheered Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack sparks more outrage after marching in anti-Israel protest,” by Carl Campanile and David Propper, New York Post, September 19, 2024:

Associate history professor Russell Rickford walked with dozens of demonstrators as they spewed slogans against Israel, with one Jewish student calling the controversial instructor’s presence at the protest “insane” and another accusing him of “emboldening hate.”

Rickford was the only faculty member accompanying anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrators on September 18. The participants were calling for support of an Intifada, a violent “uprising” of Palestinians against the Jews of Israel, akin to the Second Intifada.

Photos and videos obtained by The Post show Rickford clapping along with the chants as he walked with a keffiyeh around his shoulders and wearing an Ivy cap on his head — similar to the hat he wore last year when he made his shocking statements.

Intifada is the Arabic word that in English means “uprising” or “shaking off.”

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, intifada has been used to describe violent Palestinian protests against the Jewish state, according to the American Jewish Committee. The White House has previously condemned the phrase.

Protesters eventually crashed a career fair that was held on campus where school officials said they pushed past school police officers — though it does not appear Rickford was part of that disruption from footage posted online.

State Department Aiding Illegals And the disturbing story of a Munich terrorist’s grandson. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/state-department-aiding-illegals/

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is primarily responsible for the invasion of some 10 million illegals, approximately the population of Portugal, with no criminal background checks. Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican and member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, charges that the State Department is encouraging foreign nationals to avoid seeking asylum in Mexico and instead enter the United States at “federal taxpayers’ expense.”

The State Department operates the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), which funds legal representation and counseling related to immigration proceedings. The PRM channels funds through non-profits and the UN Refugee Agency. Julia Valls Noyes, assistant secretary for the PRM, told Issa that the US government was not funding the non-profits and aiding in immigration activities.

“Your department is responsible for giving us knowingly false information,” Issa told Valls Noyes, pointing out that money is “fungible.” She acknowledged that some presentations would have been illegal but denied that they were funded by PRM. Issa wasn’t going for it.

“All the people involved in this have to be fleshed out,” Issa told a recent hearing. “It’s about not quitting until you have the truth and not quitting until people who attempt to obfuscate or hide have been held accountable.” This deceit has not received the attention it deserves and a key back story about a strange “migrant” also needs to be fleshed out.

American Liberty In The Balance

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/01/american-liberty-in-the-balance/

John Kerry, maybe the most pompous politician of our lifetimes, admits that the First Amendment is an obstacle to the Democrats’ hard-left agenda. It’s a deeply disturbing statement perfectly in line with the party’s irrepressible authoritarian urges.

At last week’s Sustainable Development Impact Meetings of the World Economic Forum, Kerry, a long-time U.S. senator from Massachusetts, secretary of state for four years of the eight-year Obama nightmare, Joe Biden’s climate czar and a failed presidential candidate, acknowledged that his party wants to censor speech that it doesn’t approve of.

“Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence,” he said. “What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”

This was ominously followed by his warning that “there are some people in our country who prepared to implement change by other means.”

His party will take that as a reference to Jan. 6. But the rest of us should understand that he’s saying that Democrats can take power the easy way or the hard way – so just turn it over to us in November and we won’t have to be more coercive than we already are.

Democratic senators demand sanctions against ‘settlement’ group By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/democratic-senators-demand-sanctions-against-settlement-group/

Three U.S. Democratic senators have urged further sanctions against “extremist settlers” and their supporters, singling out in particular the Amana (“Covenant”) organization, which works to develop Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

“We cannot allow a reckless and dangerous minority to continue to endanger Israelis and Palestinians alike through theft, arson, intimidation, violence, and worse,” the senators wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

“Targeted sanctions have long been a valuable tool in holding violent extremists accountable for their actions and creating space for peaceful and more rational actors to work,” they added.

The signatories are Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Jack Reed (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; and Mark Warner (D-Va.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The senators expressed strong support for the Biden administration’s earlier sanctions against Israeli individuals and groups, such as the Lehava and Tzav 9 organizations.

“Amana has a long and well-documented history of supporting extremist settlers who expropriate Palestinian land and threaten Palestinian landholders, farmers, and shepherds. Amana has played a central role in forming and sustaining hill-top outposts illegal under Israeli law, often by granting loans to bankroll their start,” they wrote.

Were the United States to sanction Amana it would join Canada, which imposed sanctions on the group in June under its Special Economic Measures (Extremist Settler Violence) Regulations.

Amana, the settlement movement of Gush Emunim, was established in 1976, becoming a registered association in 1978, to help develop communities in Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Galilee, Negev and Gush Katif (a settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip evacuated in 2005).

Israel’s war on Hezbollah enhances US national/homeland security Yoram Ettinger

 bit.ly/4drgASa

Israel’s war on Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthi terrorists – and their patron, Iran’s Ayatollahs – highlights Israel’s unique role as a force multiplier for the US.  It sheds light on the mutually-beneficial, two-way-street of US-Israel cooperation, which yields to the US taxpayer more than US foreign aid to Israel.
For example:

*Israel fights Hezbollah, which is a global epicenter – second only to Iran’s Ayatollahs – of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking and money laundering, extending from the Middle East to the American continent. As a proxy of Iran’s Ayatollahs, Hezbollah has proliferated terrorist cells in the US – “the Great American Satan” – and has carried out terror assaults on US installations in the Middle East and beyond. Moreover, since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has collaborated with drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil; has trained Latin American terrorists (on their way to the US) in the tri-border areas of Argentina-Paraguay-Brazil and Chile-Peru-Bolivia; has conducted a mega-billion-dollar money laundering operation between Latin America, West Africa, Europe and the Middle East; has terrorized pro-US regimes in western, northern and eastern Africa; and has systematically attempted to topple all pro-US “apostate” Sunni Arab regimes, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt and Morocco. Hezbollah and Iran’s Ayatollahs have targeted Israel as the vanguard of the US, and the US’ first line of defense, in the “abode of Islam.”

THE UN CHIEF’S FOUL LANGUAGE-RUTHIE BLUM

https://www.jns.org/the-un-chiefs-foul-language/

It’s one thing for terrorist regimes and their fellow travelers to condemn Israel for fighting back forcefully against the mortal threats in and along its borders. It’s even logical for those entities to bemoan the assassination of the mass murderers attempting to fulfill genocidal, hegemonic aspirations through the slaughter of Jews.

But when the knee-jerk reaction of self-proclaimed “human rights” champions with heavy titles and hefty budgets is to blame the Jewish state for defending itself, while making the free world a safer place, a more dangerous phenomenon is at work.

Nor does equating Israel with enemies bent on its destruction disguise the antisemitism at play. An expert at this transparent ploy is U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Following the Israeli airstrikes on Friday night in the Dahieh suburb of Beirut, Guterres expressed “grave concern.” What he didn’t do was mention the target of those attacks: Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah—the mass murderer whose death was celebrated across the Middle East, including in Lebanon, by the victims of his brutality.

This “cycle of violence must stop now, and all sides must step back from the brink,” he said. “The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, as well as the wider region, cannot afford an all-out war.”
The cycle of violence. That’s the classic euphemism employed by Israel’s detractors to deny its right—nay duty—to defend itself. And in case Guterres hasn’t been paying attention, an “all-out war” has been raging against the Jewish state for the past year, not including the ongoing battles imposed on it since its inception.

To make an even greater mockery of his role in the farcical international body, he proceeded to “urge the parties to recommit to the full implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 … and immediately return to a cessation of hostilities.”

HAMAS ADMITS: CHAIRMAN OF UN TEACHERS’ ASSOCIATION WAS A HAMAS LEADER [Notes by Tom Gross]

https://shoutout.wix.com/so/4aP91zP15?languageTag=en&cid=6d7b5d9a-848f-4a97-a205-5e75871c534e

Overnight, Israel attacked a Palestinian terror base in Tyre, Lebanon.The target was Fateh al Sharif, chairman of the UNWRA teachers’ association there, who was killed in the attack.

 Western media this morning are referring to him as some kind of innocent UN employee.

 What they are not saying is that this morning Hamas published an official proclamation (above) announcing his death and calling him the “martyr leader Fateh al Sharif Abu Al-Amin, the leader of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas in Lebanon and a member of the movement’s leadership abroad.”

 As is the case in Gaza, Hamas in Lebanon is deeply embedded in UNWRA, the UN body supposed to be dedicated to peace, not to murderous Jihadi terrorism.

UNRWA is funded by the British and other western governments

Our Ukrainian War Narrative—Paradoxes, Obsessions, and Disconnects Why does the Biden-Harris administration deify Zelensky and Ukraine but demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/30/our-ukrainian-war-narrative-paradoxes-obsessions-and-disconnects/

About half of America sympathizes with Ukraine’s plight and wishes to arm it.

After all, Kyiv was attacked preemptively by Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2022, in an effort to decapitate its government and turn the country into a Russian satellite, perhaps similar to the status of a Belarus or Chechnya.

The heroic ability of the Ukrainians to save Kyiv and to stop the Russian assault beyond the occupied Donbas and Crimea has hinged on Western weapons deliveries, specifically from European NATO countries and, to a far greater extent, the United States.

But now, after a reported 1 million combined dead, wounded, or missing Ukrainians and Russians (the actual figure is probably far higher), the war remains deadlocked with no end in sight.

Putin serially threatens to break the static front with tactical nuclear weapons. The Europeans are tiring. And no one in the United States has come up with a strategy to push back the Russians from either their February 2022 demarcation points or their post-2014 occupation of Ukrainian borderlands.

The result is a lot of disconnects, paradoxes, and mysteries about the war, the Biden administration’s role in it, and the general geostrategic landscape surrounding the conflict.

Ukrainian Election Interference?

Americans are demonized by the Uniparty elites for having doubts about their blank-check support for Ukraine. And while the American people are mostly anti-Putin, they are not always pro-Ukraine.

But why is that so?

For one, we know that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election.

Israel’s Bad-Faith ‘Critics’ By Tal Fortgang

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/11/israels-bad-faith-critics/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Their real goal is to delegitimize the Jewish state

It has become a cliché to point out that there is a difference between criticism of Israel and denial of its right to exist. The former is well within the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as it is with any country; the latter is not, as it entertains the possibility of dismantling a sovereign state (that just so happens to be the world’s only Jewish state), which is not considered a legitimate geopolitical option in any other context. But the distinction can be elided by disguising rejection of Israel’s right to exercise sovereignty — including the right to conduct defensive wars — as mere criticism of its conduct.

Not everyone attempts the disguise. Open Israel-haters like U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese deny that Israel has any right to self-defense, because they consider it an illegitimate state to begin with. Some call Israel’s military actions “genocide” not because of Israel’s conduct but because the war occurred within “the system of settler colonial apartheid that the Israeli government has built and maintained over the past seventy-five years,” as the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace wrote less than a week after October 7.

These extremists deny that Israel has any right to wage war against Hamas, even after October 7. Even if Israel killed only Hamas terrorists, and destroyed only weapons caches, and conducted a miraculous operation without harming a single civilian, Israel would still be in the wrong. Indeed, on this view, Israel could escape such condemnation only by accepting violence against its citizens or ceasing to exist — in other words, by forfeiting its most basic obligations as a sovereign nation. It is easy to see why most other Israel-haters would avoid making such an argument outright: When it is that easy to identify, it is easily dismissed as extreme, immoral, and, frankly, impractical.

What complicates things, however, are the frequent calls for “cease-fire” couched in terms of criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war. Most of Israel’s critics — humanitarians and opportunistic Hamas-sympathizers alike — have adopted this line. This is where classical just-war theory comes in. The theory holds that, for a war to be just, two distinct conditions must be met: First, a nation that resorts to war must do so for legitimate reasons. Second, the war itself must be conducted according to some basic principles that restrain soldiers from needless cruelty. These two parts of the theory have been wielded against Israel in a deliberately confusing manner since it launched its counteroffensive to destroy Hamas. This conflation strikes at the heart of our ability to speak and think clearly about Israel’s war against Hamas, and about what it would take to satisfy Israel’s supposed critics, including, occasionally, America’s most important elected officials and diplomats.

Islamophilia: A Very Metropolitan Malady by Douglas Murray

https://www.amazon.com/Islamophilia-Metropolitan-Malady-Douglas-Murray-ebook/dp/B08BT75Y7S/ref=sr_1_4?crid=27FQ26MNLODWH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.xMwQFPsMtjMVn3GT8bxg9L_FFNmHMWpJ2VhdM3h4s63wmshkDr

In this 2013 book (now reissued for the first time) bestselling author and broadcaster Douglas Murray, with trademark wit, delivers an alarming analysis of the post-9/11 world. It is a devastating satire on the climate of fear in the West today. Murray’s analysis is wildly entertaining yet ultimately profound:

“If absolutely everybody in the world agrees on something – from the President of the United States to most film-stars, pop-stars, Popes, Bishops, atheists, writers, film-makers, brain-boxes and everyone else – then surely they must be right. Well, no. I think they are wrong. Wildly, terribly, embarrassingly and dangerously wrong, “ writes Murray.

ISLAMOPHILIA shows how so many of the celebrities above, have, at some point chosen to abandon any hope or wish to criticize Islam and instead decided to profess some degree of love for it. Love, that Murray points out in the book, is often irrational and certainly misguided: Murray is not afraid to name and shame, and the book’s tour includes Sebastian Faulks and Martin Amis, Boris Johnson, South Park, Tony Blair, Ridley Scott, David Cameron, Liam Neeson, Justin Bieber, Random House Publishers, the BBC, Richard Dawkins, the Prince of Wales and even George Bush. Yes, George Bush.

“They may have done this for a range of good and bad reasons. Some of them have to done it to save other people. Some of them have done it to save themselves. Some of them have done it because they are too stupid to do anything else and others because clever people can be really dumb at times.”

Murray goes on to detail the extraordinary strategic cultural efforts made in recent years to “rewrite the last few millennia of history, minimising and denigrating the impact of actual scientists and promoting the claims of Islamic proselytisers”. And he has fighting words for the version of history depicted by Ridley Scott and others in Hollywood.