Taking the weekend off….back on Monday April 1, 2024.
To all who observe: Easter is a lovely holiday and one to appreciate the comity between our religions now in the face of outrageous and dangerous anti-Semitism and world-wide persecution of Christians. Israel is a GPS of churches protected by the Jewish authorities.
Here is the Basilica of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth. Israel.
May you have a happy, relaxing and blessed day. rsk
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20521/qatar-al-jazeera-terrorists
The long-term agenda looks as if the US and Qatar intend to try to elbow Israel out of any say in what “humanitarian aid” is eventually be brought into Gaza
The US seems to believe that Qatar is aligned with it; the US has its major Middle Eastern airbase there, without which Qatar would be a vulnerable target. However, the report reveals Qatar as aligned with countries such as Iran, Russia, and China, and groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which seek to replace the West. Qatar supported the Taliban until Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani fled in his plane. Then Qatar offered to mediate.
It is the same act — “first the arsonist then the firefighter” — that Qatar is putting over on the Biden administration with Hamas. First, Qatar funds Hamas to the gills, hosts Hamas’s billionaire leaders in its capital, Doha, and allows Deif to declare war on Qatar’s megaphone, Al Jazeera. Then, the Qataris pretend to be impartial mediators, and the Biden administration pretends to buy their act.
It is no secret that Qatar and its news organization Al-Jazeera have long been serving as champions, protectors and lifelines for Hamas and other terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda affiliates and the Taliban.
“There are many channels who are biased, but this is past bias. Now Al-Jazeera is a voice for terrorists.” — Mohammed Fahmy, the former Cairo bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, reported by Eli Lake, aawsat.com, June 25, 2017.
In light of the new damning evidence of Al-Jazeera’s employing terrorists and its close connections to Hamas and other terrorist organizations, perhaps it is time for Israel and Western countries to learn from the Arabs, who understood many years ago that Qatar and its Al-Jazeera are not platforms for peace or news, but rather perpetuators of terrorism.
Qatar and its vast media network, Al Jazeera, have a long history, which, according to a report by the Middle East Research Institute (MEMRI), promote terrorism worldwide. The report notes:
“Al-Jazeera, therefore, should not be discussed as a means of telecommunications, but instead as an unyielding and forceful political tool of Qatari foreign policy under the guise of a mass media network.”
It was this communications powerhouse, the report continues, that basically drove Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from power and in 2012 replaced him with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, who was also driven from power a year later.
https://www.jns.org/anatomy-of-an-antisemite/
Francesca Albanese is at it again, cloaking her Jew-hatred in legalese and justifying it through denial. Yes, if there’s one thing that offends the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the so-called “occupied Palestinian territories,” it’s being exposed as an antisemite.
Not that it’s ever prevented the Italian international lawyer, who was appointed in 2022 to her three-year position, from going above and beyond the call of duty in bashing Israel at every opportunity. But her latest one-two-punch, in the form of a “report” on the war in Gaza, is a new low.
The document, titled “Anatomy of a Genocide,” is laden with footnotes to support its slanted hypotheses and wrong conclusions. It’s a practice that’s par for the course, so to speak, in the world of academia from which Albanese hails.
The problem isn’t with the headline of the 25-page screed. No, the name would be perfectly apt for a dissection of the religious-political ideology behind the Hamas-perpetrated massacre on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which coincided with Shabbat.
But in the Orwellian universe of the United Nations, where “Jewish lobby” conspiracy theorists like Albanese are embraced, right is wrong and good is evil. Hence, while the description of “genocide” in the report actually applies to the aims and behavior of Hamas, the “pay-for-slay” Palestinian Authority and all radical Islamists bent on the annihilation of the Jewish state, it is presented as proof of Israeli culpability—before and after Oct. 7.
Take, for instance, the passage stating that genocide is codified as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The acts in question are specified as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—explains why the horrific attack of Oct 7 and Israel’s just response changes everything.
It has changed the relationship between Israel and the United States, especially with regard to the possibility of direct American intervention.
It has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival.
It has revealed dangerous attitudes among America’s future leaders on today’s college campuses toward Israel’s possible destruction.
It has exposed media biases that have been exacerbated with Israel’s vulnerabilities.
It has united Israelis and Jews around the world as never before, despite the deep divisions among them politically, religiously, and ideologically. Nothing will ever be the same.
It has clouded the future of peace between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors and has diminished the proposals for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has made predictions about the future of the region nearly impossible, except that imposing instability is inevitable.
In this short book, Dershowitz analyzes these transforming events and suggests how to move forward.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/29/remembering-a-great-senator-who-put-his-nation-ahead-of-politics/
I was greatly saddened this week when I heard the news that former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman had passed away due to complications from a fall. Although I disagreed with him on some domestic political issues, there was no daylight between us on national security.
Senator Lieberman was a patriotic American and a good family man. He was also a man of principle who always put protecting the security of the United States and standing firmly with the State of Israel ahead of partisan politics. Senator Lieberman also worked closely with many Republican senators, especially the late John McCain and Lindsey Graham, on national security matters.
As much as we want to keep politics out of commemorations of the senator’s life and accomplishments, it is impossible to avoid drawing comparisons between him and leading Democratic officeholders of today who have not followed in his footsteps of putting U.S. national security ahead of U.S. politics.
The most dramatic example of this occurred earlier this month, when, in a speech from the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace and called for new elections in Israel. Schumer also echoed criticism by the Biden Administration on how the Netanyahu government has conducted the war against Hamas and for its opposition to a two-state solution peace plan, which Schumer said will make Israel a “pariah.”
There was a time when such over-the-top criticism of a U.S. ally and overt meddling in the politics of a friendly state would attract strong bipartisan criticism. Unfortunately, we live in a different era when Democratic politicians march in lockstep and will do anything to hold onto power. In the case of President Biden and Senator Schumer, this means ignoring America’s historic and crucial friendship with Israel to throw it and Prime Minister Netanyahu under the bus because the Israel-Hamas War is so unpopular with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing that it is hurting Biden’s reelection chances.
So it wasn’t a surprise that the only major Democrat to speak out against Schumer’s shocking criticism of Netanyahu was Senator Lieberman, who wrote a scathing op-ed that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on March 20 titled “Schumer Has Crossed a Red Line over Israel.” In his op-ed, Lieberman said, “while Mr. Schumer’s statement undoubtedly pleased American critics of Israel, for the Israelis it was meaningless, gratuitous, and offensive.” Lieberman also lamented that Democrats used to be the more pro-Israel party, but now Republicans are. A partisan divide, he said, is not good for Israel, which needs broad bipartisan support from the United States, and also undermines America’s need for strong alliances.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/03/25/rcps_samizdat_prize_matt_taibbi_jay_bhattacharya_and_miranda_devine_resisting_censorship.html
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.
The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.
Miranda Devine said if her story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had been able to spread widely before the 2020 election, the outcome might have been different:
MIRANDA DEVINE: At the New York Post, we had a little fraction of the truth, which was that [President Biden] was involved in this corrupt, influence-peddling operation with his family. We had a glimpse of that through Hunter Biden’s laptop. We published it, and I think if the story had not been censored by social media, Big Tech, the FBI pre-bunking our story, and the CIA’s 51 intelligence officials, we now know including serving CIA officers, had not lied about the story and said it was Russian disinformation, I think the outcome of the election might have been quite different.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, he thought the world had gone crazy:
DR. JAY BHATTACHARYA: I thought the world had gone crazy. I understood why a lot of people were scared — there’s a new disease floating around. But I’m an epidemiologist, I do public health policy. It was just a strange thing that I happened to be in the right place at the right time, so I did what I’ve always done and wrote scientific papers. What stunned me was the reaction to those papers by my colleagues and my university. It was a corruption of the basic scientific process. Attacking someone who is saying what the data shows.
It snowballed, it felt very lonely at the beginning, but people started to speak up at great personal cost. And I wondered the whole time, why it required any great personal cost at all. It’s a scientific question, it’s a policy question, we need a society where that kind of discussion doesn’t require courage… It shouldn’t be that when you have an emergency, that is when free speech is the most dangerous. You shouldn’t have some guru tell you what to do. It is exactly when there is an emergency that free speech is the most needed.
Matt Taibbi discusses what he found in “The Twitter Files.”
MATT TAIBBI: It was a lot like the journalistic version of the golden ticket in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” to look through the secret files of one of the world’s biggest corporations.
The first thing we were looking for actually had to do with Miranda’s story, and I thought because of a couple of interviews involving Mark Zuckerberg we would maybe find a few emails from the FBI about that one story. We knew that had been suppressed, and ironically we didn’t find a whole lot about Miranda’s story, but we did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, “Flagged by FBI,” “Flagged by DHS,” “Flagged by HHS,” “Flagged By Treasury.” We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.
There’s a journalist here who writes for RealClear, Aaron Maté, where the FBI basically passed a request from the Ukrainian Secret Service to take this guy off Twitter. It was a whole long list of spreadsheets full of requests about all these different journalists, and the scale of it was mind-boggling. That is what unites all three of us, we were all caught up in this story of mass censorship that until very recently was hidden. This has to be out in the open more, people need to know more about it.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-brutal-murder-of-new-york-city-cop-jonathan-diller/
NYPD officer Jonathan Diller was savagely murdered on Monday by a career criminal who was out on the street, with his career-criminal cohort, despite their combined 35 arrests.
Officer Diller was 31. He leaves behind his wife Stephanie and their one-year-old son.
A little before 6 p.m., Diller and his partner approached a Kia Soul that was illegally parked in front of a T-Mobile store near a bus stop in Far Rockaway. The car appears to have been parked there for about ten minutes, according to the New York Post’s sources, one of whom has seen police video.
Lindy Jones (a.k.a. “Killa”), 41, was behind the wheel. Guy Rivera was sitting in the passenger seat. It’s not certain what they were up to, but we can infer it wasn’t good. Rivera, who shot and killed Diller, also had a shiv hidden in his butt. And there turned out to be a second gun in the car. Police suspect the two sociopaths were planning a robbery.
Diller approached the passenger side of the car; his partner the driver side. Diller instructed the car’s occupants to roll down the windows. They refused. Rivera then ignored Diller’s direction that he remove his hands from the pocket of his sweatshirt. Finally, Jones unlocked the automatic door locks, but when Diller tried to open the passenger door, Rivera pulled back from the inside handle.
Diller again told Rivera to remove his hand from his sweatshirt pocket. It was then that Rivera fired his gun and shot the officer — one shot that pierced Diller’s abdomen under the bulletproof vest he was wearing.
Diller’s partner returned fire, wounding Rivera. He has been treated and will recover.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/moscow-massacre-could-it-happen-here/
A mass shooting at a concert hall in Moscow killed more than 130 people. With many others seriously or gravely wounded the number of dead is likely to rise.
The Islamic state released a statement claiming “credit” for the incident. Eleven suspects have been arrested. Early reports suggested the U.S. Embassy in Moscow had advance warning of the attack. The Daily Mail reported White House Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby said: “Right now we don’t know to what extent this warning [from the US Embassy in early March] and this attack are related. But we had some concerns about the possibility of a terrorist attack in and around Moscow earlier this month.”
The question that must be asked, as it has been suggested for some time, due to our open southern border, is this: Could it happen here? The answer must be an unequivocal yes. In fact, it has already happened here on Sept. 11, 2001.
Does anyone seriously think America’s enemies would not be encouraged by that previous attack and the Moscow atrocity to conduct a repeat operation in America? With such easy access to the country and with so many fanatical beliefs floating around the world, what would deter them?
The Cato Institute has noted that since 2017,”US Border Patrol has apprehended 342 border crossers who were on the Terrorist Screening Dataset, also known as the terror watchlist. Those numbers have shot up in recent years to 169 in FY2023 and 49 to date this fiscal year. Last month, The Daily Caller reported that Border Patrol apprehended an al Shabaab terrorist and released him into the United States in March 2023 after a mismatch on the watchlist. Later, the government discovered that he was on the watchlist, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested him within 48 hours. The Daily Caller’s headline was “ICE Confirms It Finally Nabbed Terrorist Allowed To Roam Free For Almost A Year.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-life-and-nickys-family/
The 2023 biopic One Life concludes with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene’s power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn’t even try to apply the emotional brakes.
If only the rest of the movie were as good as that final scene.
One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting, inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the “dump months” when movies that haven’t tested well are released.
One Life is not a bad movie. It’s just not good enough. I’d give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton deserves an eleven out of ten.
As I left the theater, I asked, “Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?” One Life didn’t answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I’d never heard of before. Nicky’s Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky’s Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.
Nicholas Winton (1909 – 2015) was born in London. His parents were German Jewish immigrants named Wertheim. During World War I, they encountered anti-German prejudice. In an effort to assimilate, they converted to Christianity and changed their last name to Wortham. After the war, they changed back to Wertheim, but eventually switched to Winton. Nicholas was baptized in the Church of England. At the elite Stowe school, young Nicholas attended chapel regularly and chose to be confirmed as a Christian. Later he self-identified as an agnostic and a socialist.
Winton’s father was a successful banker. The three Winton children grew up in a twenty-room mansion in West Hampstead. At Stowe school, young Winton made connections that lasted for years, including with charismatic Stowe headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. Roxburgh said that his goal, as an educator, was to produce young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” Winton fenced at Stowe and he would eventually be accepted to his nation’s Olympic team. He would never compete, though, as World War II canceled the games. After Stowe, Winton fenced at Salle Bertrand in London. There he fenced against British aristocrat, politician, and antisemite Oswald Mosley. Hitler attended Mosley’s second wedding.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-794069
A seemingly small detail in a news report caught my eye. The firebombs were “filled with nails,” a police spokesperson revealed. That was a new one for me, and I follow this kind of news closely.
A few days ago, Israeli police officers arrested two Palestinian Arab terrorists for throwing firebombs at Jewish homes in the mostly Arab Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. Beit Hanina is not some remote area: it is just five miles from the Western Wall Plaza and less than three and a half miles from Hebrew University.
It’s alarming how quickly the public has become accustomed to such assaults. Imagine if two white supremacists tried to burn down the homes of African-Americans in Washington, D.C. There would be an outpouring of angry condemnations—and rightly so—from political leaders, civil rights groups, and American Jewish organizations. But not a word is heard when Palestinian Arab attackers try to burn Jews alive in Jerusalem.
A seemingly small detail in the news reports about the incident caught my eye. The firebombs were “filled with nails,” a police spokesperson revealed. That was a new one for me, and I follow this kind of news rather closely.
A terrorist is carefully filling a bottle with gasoline. He is just about to stuff a rag into the top, which he will light when he is ready to turn it into a firebomb. But before adding the rag, he and his comrade pause. “Wait a minute,” one must say to the other. “In addition to setting Jews on fire, this could fire nails at high speed when it explodes. Let’s put a bunch of nails in the bottle, so the Jews will both catch on fire and be stabbed by sharp, high-velocity pieces of metal!”
It seems as if Palestinian Arab terrorists are constantly trying to invent new ways to inflict pain on Jews. Of course we saw unimaginably horrible new types of savagery on October 7. But before anybody thinks that such behavior is unique to Hamas, or to Gazans, let’s not forget that Palestinian Arab terrorists in Judea-Samaria, whether affiliated with Fatah, Hamas, or other organizations all use the same playbook.
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