ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Merry Christmas! Hanukkah Is Canceled By Gidon Ben-Zvi

Posted By on December 12th, 2023

https://www.newsweek.com/merry-christmas-hanukkah-canceled-opinion-1850487

Anyone still clinging to the belief that there is a difference between hating Jews and wanting Israel to disappear now needs to explain away another inconvenient truth. Scheduled Hanukkah celebrations across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been scrapped. The reason cited over and over is that hosting such holiday events would imply support for Israel in its war against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization.

A Hanukkah candle lighting that was due to take place at a music and arts festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, was canceled by the festival’s founder because the lighting of a menorah ‘seemed very inappropriate’ given current events in Israel and Gaza.

Let us conduct a quick thought experiment. Even supposing that holding Jewish people everywhere accountable for Israel’s actions since the Oct. 7 massacre was somehow valid, at what point did a country’s right—obligation—to defend itself against a group that invaded its territory, murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped over 200 men, women, and children, and drove over 200,000 citizens from their homes become ‘inappropriate’?

Moreover, this fear of being seen as siding with Israel over Hamas has not extended to Muslim-themed events and ceremonies in the United States and Canada, which continue to be held. When it comes to Muslim communities residing in these countries, there is a clear line being drawn between Hamas in Gaza and law-abiding citizens in Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, and Toronto exercising their right to worship and assemble as they see fit.

Despite this discrepancy between how two minority groups are being treated, Washington has repeatedly equated the plight of American Jews to that of Muslims living in the United States. Responding to a question about soaring rates of antisemitism and the wave of cancelled Hanukkah celebrations, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre said this week, “We have seen an uptick in hate, just more broadly, in different communities—obviously, also in the Muslim community. And so, we will do everything that we can to make sure that these communities feel safe.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Leftist Lunacy Fuels Hamas Atrocity J.T. Young

Posted By on December 12th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/leftist-lunacy-fuels-hamas-atrocity/

Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left.  Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology.  The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.  

As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it.  The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages.  Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”

Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered:  “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”

Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent.  Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.

First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings.  Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists.  And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for.  So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Puts Us On A Fast Train To Nowhere

Posted By on December 12th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/biden-puts-us-on-a-fast-train-to-nowhere/

At long last, we’re building the first high-speed rail project in our nation’s history. And it’s starting here.”

That was President Joe Biden announcing last week that us taxpayers will be ponying up $3 billion to help a private company build a bullet train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so gambleholics can start losing money more quickly.

The L.A. to Vegas train will supposedly be finished in time for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028 — just four and half years from now.

Well, anything is possible. A private company is planning to build the thing and claims to have the route and rights-of-way all figured out. But when you consider that Biden put up $7.5 billion to get private companies to put EV chargers all over the country and two years later not a single one has been built, constructing more than four miles of complex high-speed electrified rail each and every month seems a bit optimistic. (It took eight years to build an 11-mile extension to the Washington, D.C., Metro Silver Line.

But let’s say this private company can build it that fast, and that it will be a huge win for travelers, as Biden claims. Then why on Earth are taxpayers on the hook for a third of its construction costs?

What’s more, Biden’s claim that this is the “first high-speed rail project” in the country is a flat-out lie. Or did he forget about the high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Francisco that California has been working on since 2008 — the one that he and President Barack Obama threw $3 billion at 13 years ago?

Actually, Biden did eventually bring it up in his remarks last week (as transcribed by the White House):

Another high-speed rail project we’re announcing today is in California. Ultimately, it’s going to take folks from Los Angeles, through the Central Valley, all the way to San Francisco, b- — in less than three hours. But today, the journey can take eight hours by bus or car. Think of how this train will transform California’s Central Valley with new businesses, new residents, visitors, economic opportunities, or what it will mean to folks who live in inland towns and commute to work in Californian coastal cities. It’s a game changer.

Biden announced that he is dumping another $3.1 billion of taxpayer money into what has so far proved to be nothing more than a monument to wishful thinking and government waste.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Not ‘Trump the Dictator’ Again The Left projects itself onto Trump, and understandably finds itself all too terrifying By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 12th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/11/not-trump-the-dictator-again/

It is “Trump Will Destroy Democracy” season again. And predictably the Left has gone hysterical, after experiencing a trifecta of frightening 2024 news.

One, current polls in the primaries and in a general election for now show that Trump would win.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s popularity dives below 40 percent. His policies on the economy, abroad, at the border, concerning crime, and about energy poll even more feebly. Never has an American president utterly and deliberately destroyed immigration law for the sole purpose of inviting in millions of illegal aliens, to establish political constituencies supportive of agendas that otherwise have scant public support.

Two, unequivocal evidence is mounting that the Bidens are one of the most corrupt political families in American presidential history. Hunter, the Leona Helmsley of our times, is now indicted for massive tax evasion, despite his earlier, government-aided efforts of running out the statute of limitations on the full array of his crimes.

When asked about his grifting, Biden angrily denies the undeniable. He can only become animated these days, when asked to square his denials about knowing what Hunter was up to with a multitude of facts and data to the contrary. And so in exasperation he shouts, “Lies!,” “Lies!,” and “Lies!”

There is now conclusive proof that Biden himself lied repeatedly when he swore that he knew nothing about his wayward son Hunter’s grifting business. He used several aliases to communicate directly with his son’s grifting and quid pro quo partners.

Canceled checks show the president was paid substantial sums by family members after they received money from foreign governments—for nothing other than being related to the future president. The pay-offs were hidden by “loan repayment” lies; no one expects ever to find any such evidence that there were formal loan documents or agreements between Biden and his family.

Former Hunter Biden associates, explicit messaging on his laptop, IRS whistleblowers, and bank records all explain why an opulent Joe Biden enjoyed a lifestyle impossible on either a senator’s or Vice President’s salary. While Biden toured the country sermonizing that the rich must “pay their fair share,” it is increasingly likely that he had received huge amounts from foreign governments eager to purchase him as an influencer—and never paid taxes on such occult income.

Three, Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and feebleness have reached a point where he is one fall, one bad cold, or one long brain-freeze away from incapacity. He clearly is not running the country. How could he be, when he cannot finish a sentence without mangling the syntax, slurring the vocabulary, and confusing his listeners?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas Creates New Terrorist Group to Destroy Lebanon by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20214/hamas-lebanon

On December 4, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas announced the establishment of a new terrorist group in Lebanon….

Hamas, in short, is saying that it is planning a similar invasion of Israel, but this time from Lebanon.

Lebanese journalist Tony Bouloss warned that Hamas’s intention is to establish a new terror group in Lebanon that could… turn it into “Hamas Land.” “Hezbollah wants to turn Lebanon into a new Afghanistan, attracting all terrorist organizations in the world so that Lebanon becomes an alternative homeland for rogue groups.” – Tony Bouloss, X (Twitter), December 4, 2023.

According to reports, Hezbollah recently permitted the deployment of 400 Palestinians affiliated with Hamas along the border with Israel. The coordination between the two terror groups is taking place under the direct supervision of their masters in Iran….

Ultimately, the war Israel is currently waging against Hamas will weaken the Iran-led axis of evil in the Middle East; embolden Arabs to speak out against Hamas, Hezbollah and other terror groups, and finally hugely improve the lives of all the Arabs and Palestinians in the region by working toward peace with Israel.

On December 4, the Iran-backed Palestinian terror group Hamas announced the establishment of a new terrorist group in Lebanon with the goal of “liberating Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.” In the past two months, Hamas terrorists in Lebanon have carried out rocket attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in northern Israel.

Hamas has called on the Palestinians living in Lebanon to join the group, “Vanguards of the Al-Aqsa Flood,” the name it chose for its barbaric invasion of Israeli communities near the border with the Gaza Strip on October 7, when it massacred 1,200 Israelis and abducted 240 others to the Gaza Strip.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Anti-Racism Is a Religion — and Nearing Cult Status By Isaac Willour

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/anti-racism-is-a-religion-and-nearing-cult-status/

How much wrong is Ibram X. Kendi willing to do to prove he’s on the right side of history?
Linguist John McWhorter hit absolute paydirt in 2015 when he argued that 21st-century anti-racism is far more religious than political. “The Antiracism religion has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin,” McWhorter wrote. “It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.”

Having grown up in religious circles, I don’t find it hard to look at the modern anti-racist movement and see the parallels. Racial division may not be quite as prominent a topic right now as it was in, say, 2014 and the summer of 2020, as it takes a backseat to matters such as elections, the future of our political parties, and whether Thomas Jefferson actually invented the swivel chair. But this backgrounding can help us to see what the anti-racist true believers are really up to, and where the movement is currently placing its evangelistic — yes, that is the right word — focus.

Unsurprisingly, as with many actual religions, there’s a lot of lying and manipulation going on. Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of the American anti-racist religion, has released his newest ‘sermon’ via Netflix: Stamped from the Beginning, an adaptation of his 2016 tome by the same name. The documentary is like virtual church for anti-racists, except without . . . well, there are very few positives to virtual church, so the analogy holds. It’s exceptionally well-produced and well-told. And it’s a 92-minute tour de force in advancing the profoundly dishonest and overbroad rhetoric of the anti-racist religion promising to liberate us from America’s original sin.

“What is wrong with black people?” Such is the hopeful note that the film kicks off with. It makes the dichotomy of Kendi’s visual sermon apparent from the get-go: disagree with the story that’s about to be told, or the applications made from it, and you’re part of the group that thinks there’s something wrong with black people. And quite possibly, you’re complicit in the prejudice that has marked American history. “Often we assume that race is only about the color of one’s skin,” says presenter Angela Davis. But no: “It is about slavery.” This is when Kendi starts doing the thing he, and thousands of faith-healers before him, might be best at: telling stories that are very compelling — so long as you don’t think too hard about the bill of goods that’s actually being sold to you.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Son-Of-A-Gun-Number-One-Son Might Just Toss Pops Under the Bus Pere is getting a little nervous By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/10/bidens-son-of-a-gun-number-one-son-might-just-toss-him-under-the-bus/

So we finally have a serious indictment of Hunter Biden. Well, half-serious. After having been stiffed by lawyers for Biden fils, special counsel David Weiss removed one glove, checked the statute of limitations clock and the north-by-northwest breezes of public sentiment, and decided that he had better slip in a valid indictment or two, ones with some semblance of teeth or at least dentures,  before time ran out on all of them.

Back in August, I wrote in this space about “the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals” that Weiss offered Hunter. Weiss was, I noted, “supposed to be prosecuting the case. In fact,” I continued,

it would be closer to the truth to say he was burying it.  The full measure of sugar he shoveled into the deal is something that became known only accidentally thanks to an attentive judge. The world knew that Hunter was escaping any jail time for his tax and felony gun crimes.  We discovered that the deal also immunized Hunter against future indictment only because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who presided in the case, actually read the deal and had the gumption to say “Hey, what’s this?

It was embarrassing all around but, as William Hazlitt once observed, “those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Do you think that the cadaverous apparatchik Merrick Garland, Weiss’s boss, gives a hoot about “embarrassing” revelations? He’s way beyond all that. You cannot shame a man who is shameless (an observation that prompts me to note again the linguistic curiosity that “shameful” and “shameless” are nearly synonyms in English).

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Survey: Students Who Hate Israel the Most Know the Least About It Really, are you surprised? by Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/survey-students-who-hate-israel-the-most-know-the-least-about-it/

The Left’s Long March Through the Institutions has been a resounding success. Most of our nation’s colleges and universities, including — indeed, especially — those who enjoy an outsize influence on American politics and culture, have long ago ceased to be centers of higher learning and have become centers of far-Left indoctrination. Marxist sloganeering and agitprop masquerades as genuine intellectual inquiry, and so it’s no wonder that once American youth graduate from their once-renowned institutions, they happily take jobs in government or social media that involve stripping free speech and self-defense rights from Americans. They also hate Jews and Israel, in large numbers. But in emblematic of what American academia has become is the fact that those who hate Israel the most know the least about it.

Algemeiner reported recently that “students who care strongly about the ‘Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories’ do not have knowledge of basic facts surrounding the subject, and do not share similar concerns about other geopolitical conflicts.” This wholly unstartling fact comes from a survey of 230 undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley. Ron Hassner, who has the unenviable position of being Berkeley’s Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies, conducted this survey, which began by presenting students with 18 issues and asking them to rate how interested they were in them.

Hassner explained that these issues included “US-Iran relations, the civil war in Yemen, drone warfare, etc., on a five point scale, ranging from ‘I’m not that interested’ (1 point out of 5) to ‘I care deeply’ (5 points out of 5).” The survey went on from there to ask the respondents a “series of open-ended questions ‘on history, geography, and current affairs.’”

According to Hassner, 43 percent of the students were most interested in Israel’s alleged “control of Palestinian territories,” while expressing much less interest in “other Middle East occupations, such as the Kurdish struggle for independence, the occupation of Western Sahara, or the occupation of Northern Cyprus.” That’s understandable. These indoctrinated bots aren’t inundated daily with self-righteous Leftist twaddle about the massive, howling, world-historical injustice of the occupation of Western Sahara or Northern Cyprus. They likely haven’t even heard of either one.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Terry Jones :Nearly Half Of Dems Say Charges Against Trump Are Politically Motivated: I&I/TIPP Poll

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/11/nearly-half-of-dems-say-charges-against-trump-are-politically-motivated-ii-tipp-poll/

With less than a year to go in the presidential election cycle, most Americans almost always have a good idea of who will be running for president, and who won’t. That’s especially true when an incumbent president is eligible for reelection. As this month’s I&I/TIPP Poll demonstrates, that’s not the case this time around.

While both of the main parties’ likely candidates — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump — have healthy leads against potential competitors within their own parties in virtually all polls, it’s still not clear that either will even be on the ballot next year.

The media are full of stories that cite Democratic Party sources and contributors suggesting that the 81-year-old president, who has shown signs of age-related mental impairment in recent years, should drop out of the running. The complaints have become increasingly urgent as Biden’s presidential favorability readings have plunged sharply.

Meanwhile, Trump faces an unprecedented legal assault, with four separate indictments covering 91 allegations of criminal behavior on his part. In normal times, that would be a political disaster.

But these are not normal times.

To better gauge national sentiment, the national online I&I/TIPP Poll asked 1,301 registered voters this month a number of questions related to the upcoming primary election season. The poll, taken from Nov. 29-Dec. 1, has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Message in Gaza to Iran and Hezbollah Jerusalem, no longer afraid of taking the offensive, shows it is willing to go to the mat if pushed too far. By Yonah Jeremy Bob

Posted By on December 11th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-message-in-gaza-to-iran-and-hezbollah-al-shifa-hospital-war-hamas-cd7855b3?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Gaza City

Northern Gaza has been flattened. It isn’t just another combat zone. The area will need years of rebuilding before Palestinian civilians can live there.

I saw the fallout from the war between Israel and Hamas during a recent trip with Israel Defense Forces to Gaza City, including the vast network of tunnels around Al-Shifa Hospital, one of the terror group’s unofficial capitals. I moved around the area aboard one of the IDF’s Namer armored personnel carriers.

What happened in Gaza, and particularly at Al-Shifa, will reshape the Middle East, including for Hezbollah and Iran, over the next decade and possibly beyond. While the Mossad blocked Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons for more than 20 years, questions persisted about whether Israel would actually launch a major strike against Tehran if Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave the order to break out a nuclear weapon. My visit to Gaza answered that question.

But first, what has emerged from the war and the IDF’s taking over Al-Shifa Hospital and Hamas’s underground tunnels there? What paradigms have been shattered?

For the past 16 years, with Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip, Al-Shifa was untouchable. After the 50-day Gaza conflict in mid-2014, many Israeli defense officials said if they could take out the tunnels under Al-Shifa, they could end Hamas or cripple its leadership hiding there. At the same time, the IDF warned that Hamas was storing weapons and running command-and-control operations from Gaza hospitals. Al-Shifa, the pinnacle of those activities, is no longer untouchable. No part of Gaza is.

Hamas’s officials lost their precious underground network at Al-Shifa. They had sent forces and messages through the tunnels and sneaked commanders throughout Gaza City, with Israel’s mighty air force and technological sensors unable to track any of it.