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War Destroys Leftist Orthodoxies Those defending Hamas in the name of anticolonialism are being discredited. By Andy Kessler

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/war-destroys-leftist-orthodoxies-6947fb06?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Wars are times of transition, when old ideologies are discredited: slavery, isolationism, appeasement, socialism. Now, like the 1,200 health professionals who claimed during 2020’s protests and riots that racism was a bigger health concern than Covid, another set of progressives touting tired orthodoxies are being discredited before our eyes.

After Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians, a director of diversity and inclusion at Cornell’s business school glorified terrorism, writing about “the resistance being launched by Palestinians.” Remind me why we have DEI departments? At Harvard more than 30 students groups signed a letter claiming Israel was “the only one to blame.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is worried about “the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” Twitter is littered with tweets saying “this is decolonization in action.” All these support an oppression narrative.

Where did these people get such ideas? The universities. Here’s an introductory-level EMR (Ethnicity, Migration, Rights) class at Harvard: “Global Rebellion: Race, Solidarity, and Decolonization.” The course discusses how “to rebel against global white supremacy.” I found similar courses at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke and other top schools. Another Harvard colonialism course studies “decoloniality”—which sounds like a made-up academic term that turns out to involve “anti-oppression” and “de-Westernizing.” Notice how so many grievances mimic Marxist class struggles. Why does radicalizing and dividing students over identity take precedence over, well, real inclusion?

The attacks were “in light of the orgy of occupation.” Those are the words of Mohammed Deif, military commander of Hamas. Iran’s (drone-stricken) Gen. Qassem Soleimani included Hamas in the “Axis of Resistance.” The United Nations has a Special Committee on Decolonization. Sound familiar? Occupation, resistance, decolonization—progressive talking points all.

The economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1947 that the Soviet’s agenda was aided by korisne budale—useful fools, which has since morphed into “useful idiots.” While an overused expression, it fits this time. Those speaking of occupation, resistance and decolonizing are pure and simple useful idiots for terrorism, running interference and providing a rationale for depraved behavior. These witless nitwits have also aided Iran’s attempt to stop Saudi Arabia from joining the Abraham Accords. While many university presidents have since come out against the barbaric attacks, the damage has been done. A Great Discrediting has begun.

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former ambassador to China, emailed the University of Pennsylvania’s president saying his family foundation will “close its checkbook” based on Penn’s “moral relativism” and “race to the bottom.” I’ve heard of alumni of Harvard and elsewhere mailing $1 bills to their alma maters—as in, “That is all you’re going to get.” Hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman asked Harvard for the names of terrorist supporters so his firm could avoid hiring them. Boston University last month had an anti-antiracist backlash. “Defund the police” is becoming a distant memory.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When dummies become dhimmis.Victor Sharper

Posted By on October 23rd, 2023

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/231022

Ask one hundred people in the United States what a dhimmi is and perhaps a dozen would know but most would admit ignorance. In Eastern Europe, the number would be higher because of latent memories of battles fought against invading Moslem armies and Islamic occupation over hundreds of years.

Beneath the seemingly civilized exterior of man lies tribal hatred, desperately trying to claw its way out. When it does, man can easily rationalize even the most heinous of his acts as virtuous. His target invariably becomes a demonized, marginalized group he can scapegoat as needed. No group has suffered more of this tribal hatred than the Jews.

In the early 7th century, an Arabian warlord started a new religion: Islam. Mohammed, forced out of Mecca, found refuge with three Jewish tribes in Medina. Relations deteriorated quickly as Mohammed raided and plundered Jewish trade caravans. Mohammed banished two of the tribes and defeated the third at the Battle of the Trench (627). Mohammed was merciless in victory. All men were slain, and all women and children enslaved.

Under Islam, Jews and Christians would live uneasily as dhimmis, a non-Muslim underclass, forced to pay the jizya (tax), forbidden to own arms, and required to differentiate themselves from Muslims in their dress. For them, the story was one of forced conversions to Islam, slavery, death along with the Islamic institution of dhimmitude.

This is the word that describes the parlous state of those who refused to convert to Islam and became the subjugated, non-Muslims who were forced to accept a restrictive and humiliating subordination to a superior Islamic power and live as second-class citizens in order to avoid enslavement or death. These peoples and populations were known as dhimmis, and if such a status was not humiliating enough, a special tax or tribute, called the jizya, was imposed upon them.

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Iran: Behind Hamas’ Planned Genocide by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20069/iran-hamas-planned-genocide

In 1930s, Britain pursued a policy of appeasing Hitler and Nazi Germany in the hope of avoiding a war. To the contrary, as we know, by empowering the Nazis to invade and attempt to take over other nations, this policy of appeasement led to World War ll.

[T]he Obama administration imagined, it seems, that enabling the expansionist, revolutionary regime of Iran, which is designated a State Sponsor of Terrorism, to possess nuclear weapons, would somehow magically transform it into peaceful, collegial member of the family of nations. President Barack Obama appeased the ruling mullahs of Iran by lifting sanctions and inventing the 2015 “nuclear deal.”

What was actually the result? The international community witnessed even more rockets launched by Yemen’s Houthis at civilian targets, the deployment of Lebanese Hezbollah soldiers in Syria, and increasing attacks by the Iranian-funded Hamas on Israel and the United States. With billions of dollars of revenue pouring into the pockets of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Tehran did not change its behavior for the better. Instead, Iran became even more empowered and emboldened… as well as to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. Iran became, in fact, according to the US State Department, “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.”

At the peak of these appeasement policies towards the mullahs, Iran was emboldened to publicly harass the US Navy, detain US sailors, imprison American citizens, and threaten to assassinate former US officials on US soil for a $1 million bounty. Khamenei also repeatedly vowed “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” and to “raze the Zionist regime in less than 8 minutes.”

Iran’s radical regime, whose mission is to “Export the Revolution” and bring Islamist rule to the rest of the world via its military and terror groups, will not alter its aims through policies of appeasement.

The Biden administration and the European Union have pursued this dangerous policy — not just of appeasement, but also of financing terrorists; of supporting a regime that chants “Death to America,” “Death to Israel”; that plots to push the US out of the Middle East; that is committed to uprooting and replacing Israel; that has zealously been targeting American citizens and American assets, and that is one of only four state sponsors of terrorism, as well as a leading violator of human rights. It is high time to put Iran’s regime out of business.

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Government Gangsters: How the Deep State Imperils National Security By Janet Levy

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/government_gangsters_how_the_deep_state_imperils_national_security.html

Like most Americans, Kash Patel grew up believing that the country was run as a democracy, with a government that honors the will of the people and is accountable to them. 

It was only much later, as an attorney and then as a senior advisor to former president Donald Trump, that he encountered – and confronted – what has come to be called the Deep State, people at the highest levels of government, business, and culture who subvert democracy to serve their own ends.

In his recent book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth and the Battle for our Democracy, Patel describes the Deep State in broad terms as the politicization of core American institutions and the federal government.  More specifically, this oligarchy includes elected leaders, journalists, business leaders, and NGOs with leftist ideologies.  But its most entrenched and active arm comprises “members of the unelected federal bureaucracy who think they have the right to rule America, not Congress or the president.”

Courtesy Post Hill Press

The agents of the Deep State operate through a series of networks, violating their oaths of office, weaponizing the law, and spreading disinformation for political or personal gain at the expense of equal justice and national security.  He saw them in operation as the lead investigator of the Russiagate hoax. His book is not just the story of how he battled the leviathan, but also about how the Deep State can be defeated for good.

Patel knows from where he speaks.  In his 14 years as public defender and federal prosecutor, and later as a key Trump aide, he has had ample opportunity to trace the insidious machinations of the Deep State within the Department of Justice (DoJ), the FBI, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Department of Defense (DoD), the National Security Council (NSC), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  He has been inside the belly of the beast.

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Even CNN Gets What the Biden Administration Doesn’t By Matt Margolis

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/10/20/even-cnn-gets-what-the-biden-administration-doesnt-n1736759

When Biden announced that he was promising $100 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank, it was immediately clear to anyone with common sense that this money would end up in the hands of Hamas and not used for humanitarian purposes.

The Biden administration insists there will be safeguards in place to prevent this from happening, but no one really believes it will work—not even the pro-Biden CNN.

On Wednesday’s “Laura Coates Live,” CNN correspondent Hadas Gold and CNN military analyst Col. Cedric Leighton (Ret.) both agreed that preventing humanitarian aid from being seized by Hamas in Gaza would be extremely difficult because there are no mechanisms in place to ensure how the aid is distributed and used.

“Just, in hearing what he had to say about the conditions, really, of being in compliance or going along with what President Biden has said, the conditions about hostages being released, the ideas of how to ensure that the aid is not going to be essentially taken and siphoned off by Hamas. Is it realistic to think that could actually be a condition that could be met before aid gets there?” host Laura Coates asked.

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Biden Got $200K Payment From Family Business Tied to Islamic Terror, Hamas An envelope filled with “blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country” linked to terrorists and a “torture ticket” October 21, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-got-200k-payment-from-family-business-tied-to-islamic-terror-hamas/

In 2020, I dug into what was probably one of the strangest and most overlooked Biden family scandals.

James Biden, Joe’s brother, had become a principal at Americore whose business model was based on buying and turning around rural hospitals. But the turnaround was into the grave.

Obamacare had hit rural hospitals hard, forcing many of them to shut down. By Obama’s last year in office, 4% of rural hospitals had closed down, and hundreds more were on the brink. And the Bidens had figured out a way to profit from the devastation caused by Obama-Biden.

“His brother was very interested in rural health care and very interested in veterans’ health care, and it was something he really wanted to get behind,” an Americore executive recalled Biden telling him. “This would help his brother get elected.”

The hospitals were trashed and patient care fell apart, but James Biden was making money.

Hospital patients might have been able to get basic care and supplies, but the money wasn’t there. Meanwhile, James Biden had allegedly made off with $650,000.

According to the Americore CEO, “Jim Biden directed me to loan him approximately $400,000 of this money for him to use to repay a past-due personal loan.”

Later, “Biden took additional amounts totaling approximately $250,000.”

Thanks to the House Oversight Committee, we now know where some of it went.

In 2018, James Biden received $600,000 in loans from, Americore—a financially distressed and failing rural hospital operator. According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”

On March 1, 2018, Americore wired a $200,000 loan into James and Sara Biden’s personal bank account – not their business bank account. On the same day, James Biden wrote a $200,000 check from this same personal bank account to Joe Biden.

While Joe Biden getting cash courtesy of his brother trading on his name and sending it to the ‘Big Guy’ is bad, the details lead down a very disturbing trail.

According to bankruptcy court documents, James Biden received these loans “based upon representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.”

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The Demons We’ve Made: Zachary R. Goldsmith

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/the-demons-weve-made/

The supporters of Hamas in the West are the products of a postmodern education.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons is, at its core, a story of fathers and sons, a story of two generations typified by Stepan, the father, and Pyotr, the son. Stepan is a composite stand-in character for the Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, who looked to fashionable Western theory and socialism as the needed tonic to cure an ailing Russia. Pyotr, on the other hand, represents the chickens coming home to roost—a nihilistic fanatic par excellence who, born in the moral and ideological morass prepared for him by his father and those of his father’s generation, endeavors for nothing less than the total overthrow of society—“quick resolution by means of a hundred million heads.”

I couldn’t help but reflect on Dostoevsky’s Demons this past week as I observed so many little “demons” descend on college campuses across the country, marching and chanting in pro-Palestine cum pro-Hamas rallies, praising the most sickening and depraved atrocities imaginable. Unfortunately, as we all know, these atrocities were not works of fiction, but all too real pogroms carried out by the fanatical terrorist group Hamas.

The national group Students for Justice in Palestine hailed the terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that claimed the lives of more than 1,300 people and saw the kidnapping of more than 199 more “a historic win for the Palestinian people.” The group later called for a “Day of Resistance,” claiming “the Zionist entity is fragile, and Palestinian resistance is alive.” Hamas butchers are featured prominently in the promotional material of this group. At my own institution, Purdue University, the local SJP chapter hailed the massacre of Israeli civilians—the worst anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust—by celebrating “the recent uprisings in occupied Palestine” (Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005) and by encouraging the campus community to not “equate the violence of the oppressor” with that of “the oppressed.”

Purdue’s SJP decried “Western allies of the Zionist regime” for denouncing the massacre of innocents and claimed it as just deserts for “the decades of settler colonialism, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, forceful dispossession, military occupation, and many more atrocities happening to Palestinians on their land.” The rape of women and children before the eyes of their fathers, the decapitation of babies, the burning alive of whole families in their homes—these unspeakable acts were, in the eyes of Purdue’s SJP—nothing less than the “uprising by Palestinian freedom fighters in a direct response to the ongoing violence against innocent Palestinians.” This and other recent posts by Purdue’s SJP were “liked” on Instagram by many student groups in the Purdue community, including the Purdue Disabled Student Union, Purdue’s Latinx Student Union, the Young Democratic Socialists, and Purdue Immigrant Allies. Truly, the glories of intersectionality at work.

How is it, asks The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, that so many “flunked the Hamas Test”? That erstwhile “Students for Palestine” turned into “Students for Pogroms in Israel,” in the words of Conor Friedersdorf?

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Convoluted, Condescending, Contradictory: Biden Defaces The Nation Bob Maistros

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/20/convoluted-condescending-contradictory-biden-defaces-the-nation/

In good old groups-of-three style, your correspondent could have gone several directions in describing President Joe Biden’s spiel Thursday night.

Alliterative: Cringeworthy. Crass. Craven.Assonantal: Eerie. Airy. Arrogant.Rhyming: Stumbling. Bumbling. Crumbling.

But upon review and reflection, fell back upon the tried-and-true repeat-prefix formulation: 

Condescending. Convoluted. And most of all: Contradictory.

Condescending  

Biden immediately reminded his audience that he was “the first American president to travel (to Israel) during a war,” as if that had anything to do with the price of shakshuka in Beersheba. And later, “the first American to enter a war zone not controlled by the United States military since President Lincoln.” 

The “Being There” presidency: 80% of Chance the Chief Executive’s accomplishments involve managing to show up.

Next, you’ll learn he has a “much higher IQ than you.” Or at least than the Israeli leadership he ostensibly traveled to encourage but managed instead to talk down to:

“President Netanyahu and I discussed again … the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war … protecting civilians in combat as best as they can.”

You mean the prime minister (not president) whose government – after his people were slaughtered, tortured, raped, abducted, and subjected to a rain of thousands of missiles in brazen violation of “the laws of war” – seeks to minimize civilian casualties by warning an entire country to get out of harm’s way rather than be used as human shields?

“As I said in Israel, as hard as it is, we cannot give up on peace. We cannot give up on a two-state solution.”

Oh. You mean the “two-state solution” that, with your predecessor’s support, Israel and several Arab states shuffled off to the side while entering into true peace accords – now possibly shattered thanks to your encouragement and financing of terrorist organizations and their sponsors? 

“Israel and Palestinians equally deserve to live in safety, dignity and peace.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Intersectionality Devolves Left-wing radicals have long supported the violent “decolonization” of Israel.

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-radicalism-of-intersectionality

For years, left-wing intellectuals have treated “intersectionality” as an inevitability. The social theory, which holds that all oppressed peoples must join together to overthrow their common oppressor, has been an essential strategy of the Left.

There is some truth to this theory. When the fortunes of the Left are rising, intersectionality seems like a juggernaut: identity groups get aggregated into the mass, internal conflicts are subordinated to the cause of liberation, and a policy of “no enemies to the left” shifts political life in favor of the radicals. But the aura of inevitability surrounding the intersectional coalition is an illusion; moments of crisis can bring suppressed contradictions to the surface and begin a process of fragmentation.

The recent Hamas terror campaign against Israel might become such a crisis. Following the attack, the foot soldiers of intersectionality—most notably, Black Lives Matter (BLM), the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the academic “decolonization” movement—celebrated the militants who murdered civilians, raped women, and butchered babies. BLM’s Chicago chapter published a graphic lionizing the Hamas paraglider terrorists who killed innocents. The DSA blamed Israel for the terror attack against it, arguing that it was the “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” Ivy League professors with expertise in “decolonization” called it a “stunning victory” and said that “Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”

For years, these academics and groups had been able to hide their ideological commitments and operate with an air of respectability. But after last week’s statements, they have encountered a well-deserved backlash. Jewish groups, including the generally left-wing Anti-Defamation League, have condemned BLM’s anti-Semitism. A Democratic congressman quit the DSA in protest. Major donors have rebuked Ivy League universities for failing to condemn Hamas forcefully. The Financial Times warned that the “left’s take on Hamas” could lead to a “Democratic party split.”

While the backlash against the radical Left’s support of terror is welcome, that support should not have come as a surprise. All of the groups have long promoted the violent “decolonization” of not just Israel but also the United States.

BLM has promoted this ideological line since its inception. In 2015, BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors led a delegation to the Palestinian territories, so that the group’s activists could learn from the “Palestinian struggle.” She condemned Israel as an “apartheid state,” and the running theme of the trip was revolution, “from Ferguson to Palestine.” The same year, Cullors signed a statement drawing parallels between the Palestinian fight against Israel and the black one against America. During a speech at Harvard Law School, Cullors went further, telling the audience: “If we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project called Israel, we’re doomed.”

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A Wake-Up Call for Israel’s Critics By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on October 21st, 2023

https://themessenger.com/opinion/hamas-attack-israel-critics-palestinians-middle-east-myths

With 1,300 Israeli Jews slaughtered and nearly 200 taken hostage, what’s more infuriating: that critics presume to tell Jerusalem how to conduct a war and run its government or that their views are shaped by blind ignorance and naïve hope?

To its critics in America, Israel’s next steps are straightforward. Yes, hunt down Hamas, but don’t let innocent Palestinians die, shelve a judicial reform plan that offends us, and make peace with the Palestinians.

The right path must seem obvious to those who don’t recall (or weren’t alive) when 3,000 deaths on 9/11 shook us to our core, uniting us amid calls across the political spectrum that Washington do whatever it must (with no caveats attached) to prevent another attack. And that call to action came after just one attack from afar — and not, as in Israel, after relentless attacks across the border since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and Hamas seized control of it from the Palestinian Authority in a violent coup in 2007.

The right path must seem even more obvious now that we Americans no longer fear another 9/11 — and that, unlike Israel, we don’t live with genocidal terrorist groups on two borders; a nearby regime (in Tehran) that funds, arms, and directs them; other nations in a turbulent region that remain at war with us; and a global community that focuses undue attention on our imperfections.

Critics concede that “Israel has a right to defend itself” (words that demean the Jewish state because they’re simply assumed about other countries rather than having to be voiced), but they also say in defending itself, Israel should take only “proportionate” action, lest it ignite another “cycle of violence” — i.e., anti-Israeli terror for which critics will later blame Jerusalem for responding.

Do Israel’s knee-jerk critics have open minds? Are they willing to view the slaughter of October 7 and Jerusalem’s response in the context of larger realities? If so, here are three myths for them to revisit: