ISRAEL Comments turned off

Sunflowers and bad news: Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 18th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/sunflowers-and-bad-news/

Friday afternoon. Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv. Less crowded than last year at this time. Fewer tourists.

It’s the fault of the war. Airline cancellations and El Al price hikes didn’t help.

Still, rows of chaises with tanning nymphets are packed. So is the water. The Mediterranean is calm. No black flags warning of undertow. Kids splash around. Parents play paddle ball.

Tattooed waiters bustle back and forth, carrying trays with iced coffee and watermelon. Couples seated at low tables bury their feet in the sand, talking about nothing in particular.

A hang-glider flies overhead. It’s startling for a second—reminiscent of Hamas’s infiltration on Oct. 7.

My phone vibrates with an incoming message from my son. It’s a photo of a field of sunflowers in the Gaza envelope. He stopped to snap it on his way back to the front. Beauty before battle.

The Home Front Command app informs of incoming rockets in the south: Sderot, Nir Am and elsewhere. Then drones along the “confrontation line” separating Israel from Lebanon: Dalton, Rehaniya, Kerem Ben Zimra. Afterwards, Kadita in the Upper Galilee. Again, the confrontation line: Daphna, Kibbutz Dan, Hagoshrim, She’ar Yeshuv, Snir.

Katzrin in the southern Golan Heights and Ma’ayan Baruch on the confrontation line are also in the crosshairs. More barrages in the Upper Galilee—in Gadot and back to Katzrin. A repeat performance at the confrontation line: Misgav Am, Kiryat Shmona … the list of Hezbollah’s targets goes on.

But no sirens here in Tel Aviv. It’s been more than two months since the last time the White City was hit with Hamas projectiles, forcing residents to run for cover.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Eurovision handed Israel the win By David Isaac

Posted By on May 18th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/eurovision-handed-israel-the-win/

 Israel finished fifth overall in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. That surprise finish was widely celebrated by Israelis as a great success. In fact, it was a success greater than they realized.

The European public’s vote for a singer was a protest vote against the anti-Israel narrative of the elites and the antisemitic demonstrations marching through Europe’s cities by those celebrating Hamas.

“In a competition invaded by politics, the European public decided to respond and reject the clear bias and anti-Israel trend by supporting massively the Israeli candidate Eden Golan,” Daniel Shadmy, spokesperson of ELNET-Israel, a group dedicated to strengthening Europe-Israel relations, told JNS.

“After the judges of the competition snubbed the Israeli candidate, the European public voted with a loud and clear voice and put Israel as their second favorite song of the whole competition. Israel got top scores from 14 countries, this year’s record,” Shadmy said.

Israel actually won a 15th “country.” A new category, “Rest of the World,” includes voters from countries that aren’t participating in the contest.

Among countries whose public voted Israel into the top spot were the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland, Portugal and Italy.

The Irish public, considered among the most hostile to Israel (although perhaps that assumption should be revisited), put Israel in a respectable second place, giving it 10 votes.

“It is noteworthy that countries that were very critical of Israel, both politically and during the competition itself, such as Belgium and Spain, were among those whose public gave the most points to Israel in a clear message of protest,” Shadmy said.

Eurovision voting is a tally of two sets of votes: public and jury. Each counts for 50% of the total tally.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why the Palestinian Authority Should Not Return to Gaza by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

ttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20641/palestinian-authority-fatah-gaza

The Israeli government, according to reports, is being pressured by the Biden administration to send the money to the PA. This addled and dangerous proposal amounts to expecting the Jews to support the same people who are murdering them. The Biden administration has also been launching a legal and diplomatic offensive to discredit, isolate, and penalize Israel for trying to defend itself against terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, the PA, instead of acknowledging that it is terrified to go back to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, is trying to pressure Israel into accepting the creation of a Palestinian state and releasing the tax revenues. Unbelievably, the PA and the Biden administration apparently want Israel to grant Palestinians a state that will be ruled by the same murders, rapists and kidnappers who invaded Israel on October 7, 2023.

Abbas might one day return to the Gaza Strip – but only when he sees that Hamas has lost all military might and is no longer in control. Meanwhile, he feels safe and secure being in the West Bank, where Israel is in charge of overall security and is fighting against Hamas and other Iran-backed terrorist proxies. He knows that without Israel’s security presence in the West Bank, Hamas would have killed him and toppled the PA long ago.

Allowing Hamas to win its war against Israel would delight two countries deeply committed to supporting terrorism. The first is Qatar, an oil-field protected by a US air base, and a country with which President Joe Biden’s brother, James, according to court testimony, might reportedly have had business dealings

The second country is Iran, repeatedly designated as the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” and currently racing toward nuclear weapons capability. The Iranian regime – which presently controls four Middle East capitals in addition to its own — Sanaa, Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad — wishes to take over the Middle East, as well as oil-and-mineral-rich Sudan. Iran’s rulers would undoubtedly not only pave the way for more October 7-style atrocities against Israel, but also other neighbors — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt and Bahrain — especially if Iran obtains nuclear weapons.

Abbas, fearful of being called a traitor, is reluctant to take action against the terrorists. It might mean his death. Additionally, he is most likely not pursuing the terrorists because they do not directly threaten him or the PA.

If a Palestinian leader does not even have the bravery to condemn the unimaginable Hamas atrocities of October 7, how can one expect him to confront terrorism emanating from his Palestinian Authority?

The Gaza Strip needs moderate and pragmatic leaders who will embark on a process of deradicalizing and reeducating Gazans to lead peaceful, prosperous and constructive lives, freed of subjugation by their leaders, who will finally prepare their people for peace in the region. At the moment, unfortunately, among the Palestinians, no such leaders exist.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Heart’ of Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump A nonsensical and irrelevant narrative. by Jacob Sullum

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-heart-of-alvin-braggs-case-against-trump/

Porn star Stormy Daniels says she had sex with former President Donald Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel in July 2006. To keep her from telling that story, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen says, “the boss” instructed him to pay Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says that nondisclosure agreement was a serious crime that undermined democracy by concealing information from voters. Of these three accounts, Bragg’s is the least credible.

“This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said at the beginning of Trump’s trial last month. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

Contrary to Colangelo’s spin, there is nothing “pure and simple” about the case against Trump. To begin with, Trump is not charged with “conspiracy” or “election fraud.” He is charged with violating a New York law against “falsifying business records” with “intent to defraud.”

Trump allegedly did that 34 times by disguising his 2017 reimbursement of Cohen’s payment to Daniels as compensation for legal services. The counts include 11 invoices from Cohen, 11 corresponding checks and 12 ledger entries.

Falsifying business records, ordinarily a misdemeanor, becomes a felony when the defendant’s “intent to defraud” includes an intent to conceal “another crime.” Bragg says Trump had such an intent.

What crime did Trump allegedly try to conceal? Prosecutors say it was a violation of an obscure New York law that makes it a misdemeanor for “two or more persons” to “conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Landmark on the Road to Decline What the Biden regime and its political operators don’t consider. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-landmark-on-the-road-to-decline/

The normalization of antisemitic terror we have witnessed among protestors since the October 7 attacks on Israel is a portentous landmark on the West’s road to civilizational degeneration. Every dimension of our socio-political order––all three branches of the federal government, and many blue-state governments; popular entertainment and high-brow culture; mainline churches; corporate boards and C-suites; national security and defense agencies, and education from K-12 to universities–– has been corrupted by illiberal, if not antihuman ideologies that undercut the foundations both of our political freedom and equality, and the morality and ethics that nourish both.

We’ve known for decades that our educational systems have been failing to educate the young, even as politics, social fads, and culture war propaganda have replaced foundational skills like reading, writing, basic science, critical thought, and history. More inimical to learning is the illiberal attacks on First Amendment rights to free speech and academic freedom, and the enforcement of a rigid orthodoxy that punishes and “cancels” those who challenge the party line. Such a regime stifles truth and replaces history with false narratives that serve autocratic agendas.

The protests in support of Hamas, antisemitism, and genocide show how ignorant of basic historical facts are many students attending our most prestigious universities. Consider the historical terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism” incessantly chanted like mantras. They are now stripped of their meaning and reduced to question-begging epithets ––“mind-blockers” and “thought-extinguishers,” as the great historian of Soviet mass murder Robert Conquest describes them, which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the simple and unneeded process of inflammation.”

“Inflammation” is exactly the purpose of similar clichés like “genocide,” “settlers,” “famine,” “disproportionate,” “Palestinian homeland,” and all the other slogans and chants we’ve heard over the last eight months from the callow, self-righteous protestors. But it’s not just ignorance of history, but also moral idiocy that afflicts the “activists” siding with sadistic killers

And how grotesque is the lack of self-awareness among affluent “snowflake” undergrads who want to trespass, destroy, assault, and burn, and then demand they be fed, accommodated, and never required to be held accountable by the police, district attorneys, their universities, or future employers? They are the products of the same pathologies to which Sallust, the 1st century B.C. Roman historian, attributed the Roman Republic’s demise: “decadence and hubris—the natural dividends of prosperity.” Just as in Rome, the same cultural malignities now dominate our civilization.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Geert Wilders to Join New Dutch Government “‘strictest-ever’ asylum policy” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/geert-wilders-to-join-new-dutch-government/

Last November, Dutch voters rallied for Geert Wilders. The PVV party became the largest party in the Dutch parliament. Normally that should have meant that Wilders, who has spoken out against Islamization and globalization, should have been on track to become prime minister. But after quite a few months of negotiation, there will be a coalition government. Wilders isn’t being allowed to be PM but he has announced a tough asylum policy and an end to the EU’s ‘green’ war on farmers.

And the EU, the media and the rest of the machine will do everything possible to stop it.

Dutch voters have come out over and over again against an invasion of their country.

According to November exit poll data, men and women, urban and rural, old and young voted for the far-right party.

In parts of the Netherlands, such as the northeast, the previous election — in which, due to pandemic precautions, 70-plus voters could cast their ballot by post — revealed a generational gap between older voters, who still backed traditional parties, and younger voters, who supported Wilders more often. “The children of PVDA-ers [Labor Party] have become PVV-ers,” said De Voogd, referring to the Freedom Party by its Dutch acronym.

As well as luring voters away from other parties, the Freedom Party tapped into a major new voter potential: Non-voters. Dutch voter analysis has shown that Wilders’ second-largest source of new votes — about 11 percent — had come from people who had abstained in 2021.

And this is the first time there’s a government that may actually act.

The Netherlands has today said it will opt out of European Union rules and bring in its ‘strictest-ever’ asylum policy following Geert Wilders’ shock election victory.

The parties said they would file a request to the European Commission for an opt-out on European asylum policy ‘as soon as possible’. People without a valid residence permit will be deported ‘by force if necessary,’ said the report.

FOREIGN POLICY, OPINION Comments turned off

Only America First Can Reverse the Global Chaos Caused by the Biden Administration It is undeniable that our world today is much more unstable and dangerous because President Biden abandoned President Trump’s successful America First national security policies. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/17/only-america-first-can-reverse-the-global-chaos-caused-by-the-biden-administration/

There is only one word to describe the result of President Biden’s foreign policy: chaos.

Just consider how we have seen the Biden administration treat Israel, one of America’s closest and most important allies.

Biden officials have been far more critical of Israel than Hamas in the aftermath of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack, during which over 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered. Biden officials haven’t been demanding that Hamas release the hostages it took during this attack or agree to an immediate cease-fire. Instead, they have been publicly pressuring Israel to stop the war in Gaza because this conflict is extremely unpopular with Biden’s progressive base and is hurting him in the polls.

Moreover, because of his differences with Israel over the war in Gaza, last week Biden said he was withholding weapons from Israel that recently were approved by Congress. But this week, the Biden administration said it was moving forward on a new $1 billion arms deal for Israel.

Adding to this confusion, the Washington Post reported on May 13 that the Biden administration is withholding sensitive intelligence on Hamas and is refusing to share this information until the Netanyahu government makes concessions to not launch a full-scale raid into the southern Gaza city of Rafah. This intelligence reportedly concerns the whereabouts of Hamas’s leadership and Hamas tunnels in southern Gaza.

Think about that. President Biden is actually withholding terrorism-related intelligence from a close U.S. ally while it is at war against a terrorist group.

And it gets worse. Iran fired over 300 missiles and drones at Israel on April 13, the first Iranian attack ever against targets on Israeli soil. There have been more than 150 attacks by Iranian proxies against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 2023. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have fired dozens of advanced drones and missiles against ships in the Red Sea since last October. And the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. sanctions against Iran caused its revenues to be $71 billion greater by last fall than they would have been if Trump-era sanctions had been enforced.

These troubling developments in the Middle East are part of a broader deterioration of global security during the Biden administration, including the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an increase in Chinese military provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Sea, a surge in North Korean missile launches, major advances in Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and a new anti-Western “axis” comprised of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Brittany Bernstein :Pro-Palestinian ‘Anarchists and Communists’ Claim Responsibility for Vandalism at University of California President’s Office

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-anarchists-and-communists-claim-responsibility-for-vandalism-at-university-of-california-presidents-office/

A pro-Palestinian group of “anti-colonial anarchists and communists” says it was behind a recent vandalism attack against the University of California Office of the President.

The group claimed to have released hundreds of cockroaches and defaced the building’s exterior in a Sunday morning assault.

“With the Aurora Borealis above us and the martyrs in our hearts, we attacked the UC Office of the President in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance,” read a post by the “sacred black and red” on Indybay. “Using a fire extinguisher filled with red paint we covered the facade and smashed seven windows. Then, with access to the building, we released 500 cockroaches inside and emptied a second fire exintguisher [sic] onto the interior.”

However, while the president’s office confirmed to the San Francisco Standard there was damage done to its building, it did not confirm cockroaches had been released into the building. Police are investigating the incident as a “hate-related crime.”

The alleged vandals said they “finalized the act by leaving a water jug inscribed with ‘Bonk’ at the scene — an homage to the militants of Cal Poly Humboldt and the international student encampment movement.” The comment was an apparent reference to a pro-Palestinian protester at Humboldt’s California State Polytechnic University who hit a police officer with an empty water jug in April.

The vandals went on to post a screed about the UC system’s “entanglements” with Israel that calls for the abolition of the UC system.

“The University’s true fascist form has been put on full display, and hiding behind hollow progressive ideals is no longer an option for the dead-eyed desk killers,” the group wrote. “Abolish the UC showed us in 2020 that the University of California is nothing more than a settler colonial project, that their police are protecting the gates of colony, where knowledge is produced and captured by the State to only dig its claws deeper into the flesh of Indigenous lands here and abroad.”

“Let us not forget the UC became co-ed to breed settlers and populate the west coast,” it added. “Speaking only to the UC’s material connection to the Zionist entity obfuscates the extent of the political, theoretical, and cultural entanglements between the UC and the Israeli State. The University does not simply fund Israel, it creates Israel, and launches this white-colony into the post-modern Empire. What does divestment mean when the very essence and foundation of the institution is a fascist regime? Where does Zionism begin and end in the University of California? Is divestment an oxymoron? The UC must be abolished.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

California University President Placed on Leave after Approving Israel Boycott:Zach Kessel

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-university-president-placed-on-leave-after-approving-israel-boycott/

The president of Sonoma State University in California was placed on an indefinite leave of absence two days after he sent an email to the university community announcing that he had acceded to campus encampment organizers’ anti-Israel demands.

Ming-Tung “Mike” Lee issued a statement on Tuesday informing SSU students, faculty, and staff that, after standing for 19 days, the anti-Israel encampment on the university’s lawn had achieved at least one of its goals: an academic boycott of Israel.

“Over the past week, senior administrators met with students and faculty to listen to and discuss student demands. On Friday, May 10 and Tuesday, May 14, I joined the group to hear directly from them,” Lee wrote.

He went on to address the new academic boycott:

SSU will not pursue or engage in any study abroad programs, faculty exchanges, or other formal collaborations that are sponsored by, or represent, the Israeli state academic and research institutions. SSU also commits to immediately updating any SSU pamphlets and SSU-hosted websites that may still be circulating or searchable and to remove hosting or linking to any pamphlets, flyers, or brochures advertising the study abroad program where students are encouraged to study abroad in Israel. SSU will make it clear to any students that any such programs are terminated until further notice and not simply suspended.

Lee also indicated his desire to seek “divestment strategies” in accordance with the encampment organizers’ demands and wrote of his personal condemnation of what he called Israel’s “genocide.”

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Left Bows Low and Cries ‘Allahu Akbar’ Phil Shannon

Posted By on May 17th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/islam/2024/05/the-left-bows-low-and-cries-allahu-akbar/

Odd bedfellows are often found in politics or war, but is the secular Left’s lovey-dovey relationship with the anti-Semitic, genocidal Hamas fanatics in Gaza and, indeed, Islam generally, really such an odd pairing? We are entitled to speculate because there appears  no limit to what it would take for the woke Left to say, along with a majority of other Australians, ‘to hell with Hamas, to hell with Islam’.  Neither the bestial nature of the Hamas terror attack on Israel and the imported Jew-hate that consequently erupted here in Australia, nor the Muslim teen jihadi’s stabbing of a Sydney bishop, have proved to be a threshold too far for the modern Left.

No matter what depths of depravity are reached by Islam, it remains ring-fenced by the impregnable force-field of ‘Islamophobia’, one of the top sins in the Woke catechism and zealously enforced by the Left, even though ‘Islamophobia’ should more accurately be called ‘Islamo-awareness’ rather than an ‘irrational’ fear of Islam. Whilst Islamo-Fascism has a long history (one common enemy in particular united both the  Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Fuhrer, for example), Islamo-Leftism is a relatively new phenomenon in a Left which has traditionally been wary of, indeed hostile to, ‘radical Mohammedans’ (in Trotsky’s words) and their milieu.

So, what is going on with the infatuation of the Left with the barbaric, Jew-killing, gay-hating, women-raping, head-lopping religious fundamentalists of the Islamic faith, and their often silently supportive, more ‘moderate’, brethren?

Islam’s demographic march

Like the rest of the West, Australia is beginning to undergo Islamicisation.  In 1966, Muslims made up fewer than one in a thousand Australians (Islam did not statistically reach even the 0.1 per cent population needed to warrant its own religion category in the Census of that year).  From that invisibly low base, however, the acceleration has been rapid.  By the 2021 Census, Muslims in Australia had reached a population of 813,392 or 3.2 per cent of the total population.