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Why Do The U.S. And Israel Tolerate Qatar’s Blatant Anti-U.S. And Anti-Israel Policies? By Yigal Carmon*

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.memri.org/reports/why-do-us-and-israel-tolerate-qatars-blatant-anti-us-and-anti-israel-policies

Introduction

Two developments with dangerous and even explosive repercussions for the standing and interests of both the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East occurred in the last few days.

1. The U.S. has extended its presence at Qatar’s Al-Udeid airbase – CENTCOM’s main airbase in the region – for another 10 years[1]: In recent weeks, there has been criticism of Qatar for its sponsoring of terrorism, causing President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to maintain ambiguity about the future of the U.S.-Qatar alliance. This follows years of frequent undeserved U.S. praise for Qatar.

The Qataris, realizing that their very existence is threatened if the U.S. relocates its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, hastened to nail down the U.S. for another decade in Qatar. This happened despite Qatar’s support of both Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations worldwide, and despite its open alliance with Iran, including joint Qatari naval training with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[2] And the fact that it is standing with the Houthis, with whom the U.S. is currently engaged in military conflict to ensure free passage of shipping in the Red Sea.

Without CENTCOM in Qatar, the ruling family will be unable to continue ruling Qatar. Yet it seems like the U.S.  did not demand that Qatar reverse its policies of sponsoring terrorism – let alone demand the release of American hostages held by its proxy Hamas in Gaza, after it killed 32 U.S. nationals on October 7. How can this inconceivable approach on the part of the Americans be explained?

2. Israel is allowing Qatar to take charge of all the humanitarian support entering the Gaza Strip, where it is hijacked by Hamas gunmen as soon as it crosses the border. In fact, Qatar is keeping Hamas fighters in power, enabling them to kill Israeli soldiers every day. This is being done with the total consent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had, over the past decade, allowed Qatar to build Hamas’s military power in the first place. Netanyahu is now actually allowing an ongoing process, by which his soldiers are being killed every day because he is a captive and hostage of Qatar, as well as its collaborator, and does not dare confront it lest it expose him. One solution to freeing the aid from Qatar’s pro-Hamas influence would be by giving the money to Egypt and Jordan, who have peace agreements with Israel, so that they could fully control the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, with no Qatari strings attached.

These approaches on the part of the U.S. and Israel are also prompting the natural allies of both, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to distance themselves from them and to join anti-U.S. alliances such as BRICS. How can these two mindboggling phenomena be explained?

This report will attempt to answer these questions.

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They’re Black Democrats. And They’re Suing Chicago Over Migrants. The city greets new arrivals with resources like health screenings and rent support. ‘They’re giving migrants all the things we’ve been asking for since we came here in chains.’ By Olivia Reingold

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/black-democrats-sue-chicago?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“How dare you?”

That was the first reaction Cata Truss, a 57-year-old mother on the West Side of Chicago, had when she found out who was behind the push to turn her neighborhood park into a shelter for migrants: Democrats she helped elect. 

“All these people, I have supported every one of them,” she says about Mayor Brandon Johnson and his progressive allies. “I was like, ‘Are you freaking kidding me?’ ”

There was no way she was going to let Amundsen Park—what she calls “the crown jewel of the community”—go to the newly arrived migrants from the Mexican border. Especially not when there were black Chicagoans who needed the space, which she says kept her five sons “out of trouble” and busy playing football when they were young. 

“There’s a humanitarian crisis in the black community,” said Truss. “But every time we have a need in our community, we’re told that there are no funds. There’s no money for us.”

Truss and other black residents told me that Chicago, which calls itself a “welcoming city,” has been very welcoming—just not to them. Since August 2022, Chicago has greeted nearly 35,000 new arrivals with resources like laundry services, mental health screenings, and $15,000 in rental support per person—all funds that Truss says could’ve gone a long way in Amundsen Park in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, where nearly 28 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

So last October, a day before the field house was set to become a migrant shelter, Truss raced to the local courthouse, along with three of her neighbors—plus the head of the local NAACP chapter for moral support. For the next two and a half hours, she drafted a lawsuit in a notebook, then ripped out the pages and handed them to a clerk. Her argument, handwritten in pen, was that the field house was “designated for recreational use within the community,” not housing noncitizens. One of her co-plaintiffs, Gerald K. Harris, runs the football program at the field house that trained her five sons.

“I was like, ‘bring it on,’ ” she says. “Let’s fight.” 

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Investigation: Feds Spent $20 Billion On Migrant Refugee Assistance An all-time high in illegal entrants at the border creates all-time surge in taxpayer costs. Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

The U.S. border patrol made 2.5 million migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2023, an all-time high.

There seems to be no end in sight, or meaningful plan from the Biden administration to stop or slow the number of people coming over the border. Meanwhile, federal funds flowing to migrants are growing at an exponential rate.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com looked at just one federal office to get an idea of how much spending is going towards accommodating, transporting, and providing migrants with various other services.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a part of Health and Human Services, is a major vehicle for migrant-related spending. Congress appropriated $20 billion in just two years on “refugee and entrant assistance.”

Background

Last year, we published an oversight report on the unaccompanied children program run by the agency: up to 85,000 minors were lost after “sponsorship” with a “vetted” guardian. The New York Times found credible allegations of child labor law violations and congressional whistleblowers detailed large-scale child trafficking.

Now, our investigation into the agency reveals new oversight: 1. billion-dollar spending spikes in the adult refugee programs; and 2. potential conflicts-of-interest between agency leadership and its largest grant recipients. In fact, for decades, agency director Robin Dunn Marcos was employed in executive positions by two non-profit organizations that are among the agency’s largest grantees.

Here is a five minute interview describing the big issues in our reporting:

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Two Dozen Israeli Soldiers Killed in Single Deadliest Day of Fighting in Gaza

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/two-dozen-israeli-soldiers-killed-in-single-deadliest-day-of-fighting-in-gaza/

Twenty-one Israeli soldiers were killed after two buildings rigged to be destroyed by the IDF were struck by a Palestinian rocket with the men inside, bringing the day’s IDF death toll to 24 after three paratroopers were slain hours earlier as fighting intensified in the southern Gazan town of Khan Younis.

Israeli Army Radio reported that the twenty-one soldiers, all of whom were reservists, were operating across the border from the Israeli community of Kissufim in the middle of Gaza, attempting to secure a border zone between the Strip’s northern and southern half.

IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said during a press conference that the incident occurred “around 4 p.m., [when] an RPG was fired by gunmen at a tank securing the forces, and simultaneously, an explosion occurred in two two-story buildings. The buildings collapsed due to this explosion, while most of the forces were inside and near them.”

“The mission [was] to create the security conditions for the return of the residents of the South,” Hagari added.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country had “experienced one of the most difficult days since the start of the war,” and vowed to investigate the matter. “We need to learn the necessary lessons and do everything to preserve our soldiers’ lives,” Netanyahu noted in a statement released Tuesday. “We will not stop fighting until complete victory.”

Similar statements were echoed by Israel’s upper military and political echelons. “This is a war that will determine the future of Israel for decades to come,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant tweeted. “The fall of our fighters is a requirement.”

President Isaac Herzog praised the “heroism” of the fallen soldiers affirming, “there is no war that is more just.”

The incident was the deadliest since Israel began its invasion of the Gaza Strip in October. Since October 7, more than 500 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat.

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American Hegemony Is Not a ‘Distraction’ Noah Rothman

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/american-hegemony-is-not-a-distraction/

If the United States sacrifices its obligations, our threatened partners will seek accommodations with their aggressive neighbors at America’s expense.

Elbridge Colby is the rare Trump administration official who has established a bigger profile for himself outside the administration than in it. Rarer still, he’s achieved this feat while making largely productive contributions to the national discourse. Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development has devoted himself to advocating a vigorous effort to deter China from executing a potentially disastrous attack on Taiwan. But in his singular — at times, prohibitive — focus on the threat posed by China, Colby downgrades the significance of seemingly every other American strategic priority. He appears increasingly committed to a myopia that renders his advocacy unserious and undermines the cause he claims to support.

Like many on the right who are eager to slough off the old Reaganite consensus, Colby sees the conflict in Ukraine as a “distraction.” Even before Moscow launched its second invasion of Ukraine, he and his co-author, Stanford University’s Oriana Skylar Mastro, argued that the United States had succumbed to “delusion” if it thought it could compete against China and Russia simultaneously. Support for America’s partner on the European frontier would necessarily come at the expense of its effort to hem in Beijing. “To be blunt,” they wrote, “Taiwan is more important than Ukraine.”

That’s a debatable proposition. The other side of the argument maintains that Europe, of all places, is no “distraction.” The continent is home to America’s most powerful allies and its foremost trading partners. Its wars have a demonstrated tendency to conflagrate, dragging the United States into them whether Washington is predisposed toward intervention or not. Containing those wars is vital for the preservation of U.S. alliance structure. After all, we’re not talking about Europe’s “neighborhood” — say, for example, Libya, where America’s interests are dwarfed by Europe’s. This is the NATO frontier, a border along which a variety of critical and increasingly nervous U.S. partners reside. Deterring Moscow from testing the integrity of the alliance directly or sowing so much doubt about America’s commitment to the defense of the former Warsaw Pact states that they freelance their way into an infinitely more dangerous situation than the one we are currently confronting is no “distraction.” It’s a core, long-standing, empirically observable feature of American grand strategy.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that beating back Russian expansionist aggression is a “distraction.” That would be easier to accept at face value if Colby weren’t similarly eager to declare almost every other hot conflict on the planet a “distraction” from his preferred priority.

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Wanted: Palestinian Leaders Who Will Condemn Terrorism by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20325/palestinian-leaders-terrorism

If the Biden administration thinks that the Palestinian Authority leaders will cease inciting Palestinians against Israel, they need to think again.

How can Palestinian leaders, who are terrified of Hamas and even more terrified of their own people, be expected to prevent the terrorists from attacking Israel in the event that these leaders were handed a state?

In addition, why would Israel – or anyone else – trust any Palestinian leader who considers Islamist murderers, rapists and baby-killers as “part of the Palestinian national, social and political fabric”?

More than three months have passed since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, during which hundreds of Israelis were murdered, beheaded, raped, mutilated, and kidnapped — and it is still hard to find any senior Palestinian Authority official who is prepared to condemn the atrocities.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has held a number of meetings over the past few weeks with senior US administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, has refrained from publicly denouncing the Iran-backed Hamas terror group for its barbaric attacks on Israelis.

Abbas, it appears, fears a backlash from his people and other Arabs if he speaks out against the murder of Israeli women, children, and the elderly. One word against Hamas and its terrorism, and Abbas’ people might well label him a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel.

Abbas’s fear is not unjustified. Almost three out of four Palestinians believe that the October 7 massacre was “correct,” according to a public opinion poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Research Survey (PSR). The poll also found that support for Hamas had risen in the Gaza Strip, and more than tripled in the West Bank, after the carnage.

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Human Smuggling Operations by Cartels Turning Border Communities into War Zones By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/22/human-smuggling-operations-by-cartels-turning-border-communities-into-war-zones/

As the mass migration crisis continues to rage out of control, the increased human smuggling efforts by Mexican drug cartels is having disastrous consequences for border communities on both sides of the wall.

As Fox News reports, cartels are fighting over the money being left behind by illegal aliens in addition to the fees being paid to guide them across the border. The skirmishes have impacted towns in Mexico from Sonoyta to Ciudad Juarez, and their American counterparts lie Lukeville, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas. The cartels are clashing not only with each other, but with Mexican authorities as well.

One recent example was a gunfight in Sonoyta, Sonora, where members of the Sinaloa Cartel fought with members of the Mexican army, leading to an SUV being torched in the streets. By the end of the fight, which lasted for several hours, only five cartel members were arrested.

“This last one (shooting) was probably the most publicized because the videos made it to mainstream news, but it is not the first one,” said eyewitness Joel Perez. “This is all because of the amount of migrants arriving to this town.”

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And Then There Were Two Roger Franklin

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/01/and-then-there-were-two/

The news that Ron DeSantis had thrown in the towel — “suspended my campaign” in the  losers’ parlance of this and every year’s presidential races — broke early in the afternoon, too late, and no doubt by design, for the talking heads of the networks’ Sunday morning pundits to seize the moment and gloat about their prescience in expecting it all along. True, after Iowa and running a poor third in the state polls before New Hampshire’s primary on Tuesday (Wednesday in Australia), bailing out right now made sense for a faltering, cash-strapped candidate. But grim reality is not what aspirants to the Oval Office generally recognise, so often clinging in hope and self-deceit to their ambitions long after the ebb tide of support has left them on the beach. Think here of George Bush the Elder harrying Ronald Reagan in 1980 or, 28 years later on the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton refusing to concede until very late in the game that Obama had her whipped. In 2016, she had her own zombie challenger in Bernie Sanders, who terrier-like refused to let go despite knowing for a lead-pipe cinch that the Clinton machine had rigged the Democrats’ selection process to leave him with no chance whatsoever. Politicians in America are much easier to kill than their ambitions.

And that’s what makes the promptness of DeSantis’ decision both remarkable and his candidacy worth mourning. A year ago, there was an air of inevitability about him. Here was the governor of a booming state who represented so much of what Trump voters liked, indeed loved and still do. DeSantis had taken on the teachers unions and beaten them, picked a winning fight with Disney, Florida’s largest employer, and who extolled family values while pinning back the Mouse Factory’s big woke ears. He had served in the Navy – electorally a big plus, especially in the South and Flyover States — which Trump could not match, having waltzed away from military service in the Vietnam years on heels purportedly afflicted with incapacitating bone spurs. DeSantis had the record, the achievements and none of Trump’s personal and legal baggage.

The big-bucks donors — take that to mean corporate money — discerned a winner, set aside their reservations about a governor who gave Disney a good kicking and opened their wallets. That pundits and bookies alike rated him the early frontrunner was only to be expected.

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What We Don’t Know About the Danger of DEI in the Airline Industry is Scarier than What We Know By William Sullivan

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/what_we_dont_know_about_the_danger_of_dei_in_the_airline_industry_is_scarier_than_what_we_know.html

United Airlines became the subject of derision and mockery recently as a viral video emerged of United’s CEO Scott Kirby proclaiming his company’s potentially disastrous and deadly mission to have half of their future hires be “women or people of color” as part of its corporate quest for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), an ideological cancer that has been eating away at America’s academic, economic, and societal strength for years.

The reasons for the acute public outrage aren’t mysterious.  Millions of Americans fly commercially, and the idea of plummeting 30,000 feet over several minutes in anticipation of you and your family’s death is a frightening enough prospect for most people that the very idea of prioritizing race or gender in selecting pilots and mechanics seems nothing short of insane. 

And in the past weeks, we’ve learned that the door plug of an Alaska Airlines fuselage blew off of the aircraft at 16,000 feet, depressurizing the cabin and creating a scenario so harrowing and nightmarish that one passenger felt compelled to send a presumedly final text: “Mom our plane depressed. We’re in masks. I love you.”

The Boeing 737 Max was the plane involved, which some may remember was grounded after two deadly crashes overseas in 2018 and 2019, which claimed 346 lives in total and were both deemed the result of faulty equipment on the airplane. 

As many Americans are only now discovering as a sidenote to other outrageous DEI news, such as the FAA being decidedly hellbent on taking DEI to its most ludicrous extent by “actively recruiting” people who suffer from “severe intellectual abilities,” Boeing has also long been suicidally devoted to woke DEI initiatives.  They now claim, for example, that they want their employees to “look like America,” but are looking to have 92.5% of interview slates be “diverse,” i.e., non-white males.  This, of course, means that they are quite illegally prioritizing non-white male applicants for employment, and I am very much looking forward to the forthcoming lawsuits on these grounds. (See: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.)

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SENATOR JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA) ON IMMIGRATION -SILVIO CANTO JR. *****

Posted By on January 23rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/01/johnny_angel_youre_an_angel_to_me.html

EXCERPT

Who knew that common sense about border madness would resurface in the Democrat party with the words of Senator John Fetterman?  Well, it has and many conservatives are happy to see it.  Let’s check out the senator’s words, via Daily Mail:

As for immigration, Fetterman argued he can be both pro-immigration, while also favor policies to restrict the flow of immigrants across the southern border to a manageable level.

‘It’s a reasonable conversation – until somebody can say there’s an explanation on what we can do when 270,000 people are being encountered on the border, not including the ones, of course, that we don’t know about,’ he said.

‘To put that in reference, that is essentially the size of Pittsburgh, the second-largest city in Pennsylvania,’ the Democrat added.

In a December interview with Politico, the lawmaker said: ‘I hope Democrats can understand that it isn’t xenophobic to be concerned about the border. It’s a reasonable conversation, and Democrats should engage.’