ISRAEL Comments turned off

Imagine A World Without Israel-The Jewish State Has Made an indelible Mark

Posted By on November 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/11/20/imagine-a-world-without-israel/

Hamas didn’t invade Israel on Oct. 7 for its amusement. The barbaric sneak attack is a part of the pogrom intended to wipe out the Jewish state. It was a crime against humanity, and not just because of its savagery. We would all be worse off if Israel ceased to exist. The same cannot be said for Islamic terrorists.

Israel’s contributions to the modern world are momentous. When not dodging bullets, rockets, and homicide bombers, Israelis have since 1948 developed:

Copaxone and Rebif, drugs that treat multiple sclerosis, and Exelon, which treats mild to moderate dementia in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients.
The PillCam, “a minimally invasive ingestible camera in a capsule that allows visualization of the small bowel.”
The water desalination process.
The Sniffphone, “that can actually ‘sniff out’ diseases.”
And SpineAssist, “​​the first-ever spine robot” that has the “ability to provide real-time intraoperative navigation.”

The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, responsible for some of the inventions listed above, has also produced diabetes and flu vaccines, is using T-cells to treat damaged spines, and is a pioneer in industrial — and medical — uses nano materials. 

Other impactful Israeli products include drip irrigation, a revolutionary microprocessor called the 8088, the ​​NIR heart stent, voice-over-internet protocol, the ​​USB flash drive, the Waze navigation app, ReWalk, “a commercial bionic walking assistance system,” and “the first commercially viable firewall software.” 

Our own security has benefited from Israel’s labor and work ethic.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life Seamus Bruner

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

Nationally acclaimed investigative journalist Seamus Bruner reveals how billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg plan to control every aspect of daily life—from food and energy to reproduction and your personal data.

Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs, while lab-grown meats are a rare, expensive delicacy. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip.

Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way. Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute led by famed investigator Peter Schweizer, presents a mountain of original research and reveals shocking new evidence that shows their sinister agenda will soon become reality.

For example, the Controligarchs are:

Funding eugenics research that will allow them to pre-determine their children’s traits, creating a new caste system in which the ultrawealthy are able to hack their own biology—augmenting their intelligence with AI—to become superhuman or, they hope, immortal
Bagging billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crony stimulus and other forms of inflation-inducing corporate welfare that has allowed this tiny elite faction to double their net worth—adding trillions of dollars to their collective holdings—while the middle and lower classes work harder to earn less
Planning for “the next pandemic,” which means reinstating their lockdowns, implementing new waves of small business closures, and, ultimately, consolidating the ownership—of everything—into fewer and fewer hands

Bruner offers a gripping and groundbreaking look into the shadowy meetings and sweetheart deals behind global social-engineering efforts, proving that, despite their stated intentions, we must never cede control of our lives to billionaires.

Amidst daily disasters ranging from bank collapses to disease outbreaks to food and energy crises—each caused or exacerbated by the expert class—this thrilling investigation into the global elite is a must hear.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The sinister rise of the Islamo-left How ‘progressives’ became the allies of Islamist reactionaries. Tim Black

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/19/the-sinister-rise-of-the-islamo-left/

Is Hamas a terrorist group? This was the question posed to former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn by Piers Morgan on his Monday evening TalkTV show. It wasn’t a difficult question. Corbyn was being invited to condemn a group that had raped, tortured and slaughtered hundreds upon hundreds of Israelis just over a month ago, on 7 October.

Yet Corbyn couldn’t do it. Morgan asked the same question no fewer than 15 times. Each time, Corbyn, growing ever more irascible, avoided answering. He preferred instead to witter on about needing to ‘start a process that leads to a ceasefire’. His programming just wouldn’t allow him to respond. He was in the grip of the political equivalent of ‘computer says no’. (To be fair, Corbyn has now referred to Hamas as a ‘terrorist group’ in an article for Tribune, a full four days after refusing to do so on TalkTV, and a full seven years after referring to the group as ‘friends‘ at a public meeting.)

Corbyn’s shocking reluctance, when challenged by Morgan, to call out Hamas for what it is – a violently repressive Islamist group committed to the annihilation of Israel and Jews – is not just a personal failing. It is also the failing of much of what passes for the left in general today, from Labour’s Corbynista fringe to bourgeois academic ‘theorists’ to the hard-left activists organising those interminable ‘pro-Palestine’ demos. They all labour under the same delusion as Corbyn – namely, that Islamist groups like Hamas are at the vanguard of the global resistance to the West. And that Israel and its Western allies are inherently evil.

This is what needs to be interrogated here. Not Corbyn’s absurdist performance on Piers Morgan Uncensored. But the broader leftist milieu that enabled Corbyn’s performance. A milieu that now cleaves so closely to Islamism that it actually sees its regressive, violent antipathy to modernity as progressive. Indeed, a milieu among which there have even been some willing to hail Hamas’s pogrom and declare 7 October a ‘day of celebration’.

The roots of this moral and political degeneration run deep. Most of the blame lies with the left’s abandonment of class politics in favour of identity politics. This wasn’t deliberate exactly. It was primarily a response to the political defeats endured by the British working class in the 1980s, followed by the collapse of Communism abroad. By the 1990s, some on the left, disoriented and disillusioned, were turning away from – and increasingly turning against – the working class. In its place, they were starting to champion particular identity groups and to campaign around identitarian issues.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

This week’s positive Israel newsletter highlights that despite the on-going war, Israel’s citizens, its organizations, and its many global friends are steadfast in their desire to recover from tragedy, eradicate evil, and work to make a better world. Michael Ordman

 

POSITIVE NEWS DURING A WAR
 
62% of Israelis have donated. Nearly two-thirds of the Israeli public donated to various initiatives relating to the war effort during the 3rd week of the Israel-Hamas conflict and gave more money than ever. The joint study by Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Universities reveals the average donation is NIS 458 a week in cash or in kind.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/nearly-two-thirds-of-israelis-giving-weekly-donations-to-war-effort-says-study/
 
Evacuated kids keep learning. Some 80 children who have been evacuated from their homes near the Gaza border are keeping up with their studies. They follow the Sprint EdTech platform from Israel’s MindCET innovation center at its Yeruham HQ in south-east Israel (see here previously).  https://www.mindcet.org/en/
https://nocamels.com/2023/11/for-evacuated-israeli-kids-innovative-studies-keep-minds-sharp/
 
Free respite for rave survivors. Israeli Yoni Kahana, an ex-member of Chabad, is now owner of the Secret Forest retreat center in Paphos, Cyprus. He has assembled a team of trauma experts to provide free 5-day therapeutic retreats for groups of Supernova music party survivors. He is crowdfunding for more groups.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-an-exclusive-cyprus-retreat-center-supernova-rave-survivors-get-help-to-move-on/   https://charidy.com/recovering   https://secretfo.rest/en/
 
Caring for employees. The Israel R&D Center of AT&T has a 6-point plan for looking after its staff during the war. 1. Staying in contact; 2. Discreet mental support; 3. Employee relief fund and charity donation facility; 4. Kids programs; 5. Support for employees in IDF; 6. Volunteering initiatives.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sys0x11r7p
 
Office becomes hotel for evacuees. US-based Varonis converted its Herzliya office’s open space into a huge camp for 250 evacuees from the southern cities of Netivot, Ofakim, and Ashkelon and the northern city Kiryat Shmona. After one week, it moved them to a hotel that its employees paid for by redeeming their vacation days.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/y0lql80z0   https://www.varonis.com/
 
Support for all. Western Galilee Now’s Support Package initiative enables people to send gift boxes to evacuees, soldiers or any loved one in Israel. The boxes are filled with premium products sold by small Galilee and Negev-based businesses who are suffering loss of income due to the war. Backed by JNF-USA.
https://www.israel21c.org/gift-boxes-support-israeli-people-and-businesses-in-wartime/
https://united.westgalil.org.il/product/support-package-for-your-loved-ones/
 
The spirit of volunteerism. nearly 4,000 of the 5,700 young Jewish adults (aged 18-30) from abroad on the Masa Israel Journey program ended up staying in Israel during the war and many who left are returning. This article features one participant who came to teach English and is now a volunteer chef for the IDF.
https://www.jns.org/the-indomitable-spirit-of-volunteerism-in-wartime/
 
Volunteers on the farm. Many foreign farm workers left Israel at the start of the war. Charities Hashomer HaHadash, Achim Lemeshek, and Zav 8 have been recruiting Israeli volunteers to replace them.  30 volunteers are currently working at the Ben Saadon farm and packing plant in Be’er Ganim, near Ashkelon.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/agriculture-ministry-seeking-to-lure-out-of-work-israelis-to-take-up-jobs-on-farms/   https://www.jns.org/volunteers-give-first-aid-to-israeli-agriculture/
 
Israel can count on its math department. The mathematics faculty at Israel’s Technion is helping Israel’s war effort. Many are in the IDF reserves and on the home front. Others are harvesting vegetables, preparing shelters, delivering food & clothing to the IDF, and assisting evacuees from border towns.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2023/11/the-math-department-helps-in-a-big-way-on-the-war-and-home-fronts/
 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Foreign Minister Wong’s Telling Slip is Showing Peter Smith

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2023/11/foreign-minister-wongs-slip-is-showing/

I see that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has turned to Christianity from atheism and before that Islam. From the misconceived to the muddleheaded to the way, the truth and the life. Of the three, let me pick up on the truth. Truth and God are indivisible. And as part of giving mankind the best civilisation the world has seen or will ever see, Christianity gave and gives us an appreciation of the centrality of truth. The truth is always under attack by those with an agenda (leftists, Islamists, assorted barbarians) who wish to tear down our civilisation.

Where am I going with this morality tale about truth? To Gaza, actually, and to Penny Wong. “And we call on Israel to cease attacking hospitals,” she reportedly said. The archetypal lie by insinuation. Apropos, have you stopped beating your wife? Either through ignorance or commission, truth has taken a hike. She either has not studied the rules of war and, therefore, as Foreign Minister, is recklessly derelict, or she has read them and was being duplicitous in implying that Israel was in breach of them.

Any number of reports last week described fighting around Gaza’s largest hospital al-Shifa. Ms Wong should pay attention. Exactly who were Israeli forces fighting near to the hospital? Hardly unarmed doctors, nurses and patients. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that Hamas terrorists were stationed in, around and underneath the hospital in contravention of the rules of war.

Israel in conforming with the rules of war must be “proportionate.” While this civilising rule or principle is fraught with subjectivity in the heat of conflict, as I argue here, there is no circumstance which allows it to be deliberately flouted. (See, for example, Military Ethics by Stephen Coleman.) Unfortunately, most commentators, and I see that Teal MP Zoe Daniels has joined the misinformed throng, seem to have no idea what proportionality means. To be clear, it does not mean tit-for-tat. It does not proscribe Israel’s defence forces from attacking Hamas terrorists inside and near to a hospital, provided the military objective is adjudged important enough and provided that harm to doctors, nurses and patients is kept to an absolute minimum in achieving the military objective.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Flirtation With Evil Will Not End Well for Leftists TikTok’s days may be numbered in the U.S. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/19/flirtation-with-evil-will-not-end-well-for-leftists/

Has the TikTok Left just jumped the shark?

Well, yes. Imagine seizing on Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to the American People” as a revelation to justify your wounded adolescent narcissism and historical ignorance? This past week, a bunch of videos from the Chinese owned data-hoovering and propaganda-peddling app took the meme-world by storm by showering some love on the defunct Islamic terrorist and kicking America in the process.  Quoth one fragile female as she brushed her teeth: “Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.” Another client of this new experiment in juvenile mind control bleated that the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks taught her that America was a “plague on the entire world.”

Those videos were watched by tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. Millions—millions—have searched for bin Laden’s paean to Jew-hatred, radical  Islamic theocracy, and contempt for America. The Guardian newspaper, which had published a transcript of Osama’s letter back in 2002 when it first appeared, took it down because, an editorial note explains,  it “had been widely shared on social media without the full context.” Ah, “context.” Patient readers can still avail themselves of the 4,000-word lunatic effusion here. I offer two brief snippets, chosen more or less at random (slice him where you will, as Bertie Wooster observed, a hellhound is still a hellhound), just to give readers a little taste of the surreal world we’re talking about:

The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you [i.e., Americans] are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily. [My italics, but bin Laden’s emphasis.]

So what, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done? Bin Laden does not disappoint. 

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. . . . complete submission to His [Allah’s] Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). . . It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind. . . 

Et very much cetera.

In some ways, the letter is run-of-the-mill Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-style Islamic insanity. Naturally, “the Jews” figure prominently as the boogeyman of history, abetted by horrible America. But the presentation is leavened by the fact that bin Laden had recently been responsible for the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans. That sort of thing, beyond the capacity of your usual speaker’s corner blowhard, tends to concentrate the mind. The videos, made exclusively, I believe,  by women, are a different story. You’ll find them hard to come by now. TikTok, responding to public outcry, intervened to squash searches for them as well as “#lettertoamerica,” “osama letter,” and similar directives.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The New Elite Learning Curve: Descent into Ignorance By Eliot Pattison

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_new_elite_learning_curve_descent_into_ignorance.html

A generation of students have been taught that they don’t need to actually study facts or consider ethics so long as they learn how to shriek at the appropriate trigger points.

Between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, I lived for several months on kibbutz Hagoshrim, on the border of Israel with Lebanon under the shadow of the Golan Heights. Hagoshrim was referenced in a recent Wall Street Journal article about war preparations along the northern border, which reported that although the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona had been evacuated, the residents of Hagoshrim, the kibbutzniks, had decided not to evacuate but to stay in support of the army. I was not the least surprised, for I knew the kind of sturdy people who lived there.

One of my early jobs as a volunteer laborer on the kibbutz was to dig a grave. It was a Sabbath, and I was the only Gentile who could handle a shovel and pick so I worked alone. The ground was rock hard, and the job took most of the day. As visitors wandered into the cemetery, I learned that the grave was for one of the elderly kibbutzniks who had a line of tattooed numbers on his wrist, marking him as a Nazi death camp survivor. The news made my work even more somber and as I dug, I reflected on the horrors he must have endured. Eventually I became aware of a white-haired man sitting on a nearby bench, another of those battered souls bearing a wrist tattoo. When I took a break, he gestured me to rest on the bench beside him. I thought I should say something but had no idea what would be appropriate, or even if he spoke English. Finally, I just awkwardly offered “he survived all that hatred.” I didn’t think he heard, or understood, for he said nothing for a long minute. Then, forlornly staring at the grave. he just murmured “all that stupidity” and spoke no more.

I took the comment to be just a bitter offhand reply and thought no more of it as I resumed digging. But through the years the words returned to me. I had mentioned hate to one seasoned in hate, who had known it in its most savage, ruthless forms, had endured the 20th century’s vortex of death, and he had seemed to correct me. It wasn’t hatred that was the essential cause of Jewish persecution, he was saying, it was stupidity, the ignorance that allowed the hate to take root.

Any doubt I had about that conclusion has been eradicated by events on certain college campuses since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Mobs of students scream about the apartheid state of Israel without understanding Israel or what apartheid is. They shout about a history of oppression without bothering to understand the actual history. They rant about the need to return to a Palestinian state without knowing there never was such a state. They gleefully celebrate reports of unspeakable atrocities and call for more. The most extreme of these demonstrations have occurred on the campuses of our top-ranked schools. The more elite a university is, it seems, the more ignorant and intolerant its students have become. I doubt any of these protesting students at Harvard, for example, are aware that in the school’s early days graduates were required to learn Hebrew, because of the wisdom found in ancient Jewish writings.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Tenured barbarians On academic anti-Semitism. Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/12/tenured-barbarians

It’s been many years since we have had occasion to mention Rashid Khalidi—enthusiast for the Palestinian cause, bosom buddy of Barack Obama, and the Edward Said (!) Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University—in this space. Back in June 2005, in a column called “Faculty follies,” we quoted Khalidi’s thundering dismissal of what he called “the utterly spurious assumption that universities are strongholds of radical and liberal beliefs.”

As if to underscore the malign fatuousness of that declaration, Professor Khalidi has just put his name to an open letter, signed by more than a hundred of his Columbia colleagues, calling on the university to defend those students who publicly support Hamas, the terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and that, without warning, slaughtered more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel on October 7. That massacre, which also left some five thousand injured and saw more than two hundred people—including infants, toddlers, and the elderly—kidnapped and dragged back to the Gaza Strip, killed more Jews than any event since the Holocaust. Khalidi and his colleagues are incensed that the names and likenesses of some of these pro-Palestinian student protestors have been posted under the rubric “Columbia’s Leading Anti-Semites.” “As scholars,” the professors write, apparently without irony,who are committed to robust inquiry about the most challenging matters of our time, we feel compelled to respond to those who label our students anti-Semitic if they express empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians, and/or if they signed on to a student-written statement that situated the military action begun on October 7th within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.

Where does one start? We’re tempted to begin with the question of whether anyone anywhere has objected to people expressing “empathy for the lives and dignity of Palestinians.” But let’s leave that trope, along with the needling “as scholars” gambit, to one side for a moment and concentrate on two phrases: “military action begun on October 7th” and “the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel.”

In the modern world, a “military action” is understood to be an action undertaken to achieve a specific military objective and employing only those means that are in accordance with the recognized rules of combat. High up on the list of those rules is concern for noncombatants. It is an unfortunate fact that civilians are often killed in a military action. But they must not be explicitly targeted.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Stephen Miran Why Americans Dislike the Economy With real wages at 2015 levels, life milestones, such as buying a home, are increasingly unachievable.

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/why-americans-dislike-the-economy

“Why are the vibes so bad?” ask legions of commentators, noting the disconnect between polling on the economy and top-level economic indicators. The unemployment rate is within spitting distance of 60-year lows, and measured inflation has dropped from a punishingly high 9 percent rate to a lower, though still too high, 3.2 percent.

And yet, citizens are unhappy with the economy. According to a New York Times–Siena poll, 81 percent of registered voters described the condition of the economy as fair or poor, and only 19 percent called it good or excellent. Another poll, conducted by the Financial Times and the University of Michigan, found that a majority of voters said that they are worse off under President Biden then they were before, and only 14 percent said that they are better off. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, the Times–Siena poll found voters trusting Donald Trump more than President Biden on the economy.

To reconcile voters’ discontent with the economic data, we shouldn’t consider the top-level employment and inflation indicators separately. Instead, we should combine them—and when we do, we observe workers’ real (that is, after inflation) wages have declined significantly in recent years.

Some commentators argue that real wages are rising, but these claims are based on the popular average hourly earnings measure from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics. Average hourly earnings is a less useful indicator now because of large workforce-composition changes. During the pandemic, the economy shed large numbers of low-paying service jobs (for instance, in leisure and hospitality), which pushed the average wage in the economy higher. The average moved up because low-paying jobs dropped from BLS’s sample, not because individuals experienced strong wage growth. The effect reversed as the economy began adding those low-paying service jobs back, which pushed average hourly earnings down. Those composition effects linger today, as the economy is still short 560,000 leisure and hospitality jobs (adjusting for labor-force growth), relative to pre-pandemic levels, due largely to firms’ difficulty finding workers. 

More recently, labor shortages have eased, and firms have been adding back these workers. Given that leisure and hospitality wages are below those of all other major sectors tracked by BLS, these workers’ return to the labor force has dragged down average hourly earnings growth relative to other measures.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

When Neutrality is Immoral: Israel, Hamas, and the Problem of Moral Equivalence by André Villeneuve

Posted By on November 19th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20154/neutrality-immoral-israel-hamas

While many the world over had the integrity to condemn “the hideous crime, naming its perpetrators and acknowledging Israel’s basic right to defend itself against the atrocity,” the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches were unable to muster up such moral clarity.

While the IDF goes out of its way to minimize civilian casualties, Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups do their utmost to maximize them — not only by indiscriminately murdering Israelis, but also by hiding among their own civilian population and using them as human shields, resulting in disproportionately high numbers of Palestinian casualties, caused — deliberately — by Hamas.

If there is an “occupation” problem in Gaza, the occupier is Hamas, not Israel.

In this war, Christians — and all of us — have a moral responsibility to support a civilized nation’s fight against barbarism. Israel must eradicate a terrorist group, Hamas, just as we confronted ISIS. Then all of us need to contain the real mastermind behind such groups, the genocidal regime of Iran. Unfortunately, there is no other viable solution if we wish to preserve the West.

October 7, 2023: Another day that will live in infamy: Israel’s Pearl Harbor. Israel’s 9/11. The quiet Shabbat morning of Simchat Torah, concluding the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, suddenly turned into a bloodbath. Under the cover of heavy rocket fire, thousands of Hamas terrorists attacked Israel’s southern communities and left behind them a path of carnage and devastation, ambushing army bases and motorists, murdering some 364 people at a music festival, slaughtering families in their beds, raping women, executing children and Holocaust survivors, burning civilians alive, and kidnapping 244 people in Israel to Gaza. With at least 1,200 people murdered, it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. The barbarity of the Hamas attack was so unprecedented that even the world was brutally — if briefly — jolted out of its usual apathy and left reeling in horror.

The outrage, however, was short-lived. As soon as Israel began its military response to Hamas’s act of war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations erupted across the world, many of them quickly turning into anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate fests. Some even denied that the October 7 slaughter had taken place, despite the many eyewitness stories of survivors.