WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Egypt Shuts Down its Border to Palestinian Refugees from Gaza While Hamas calls on Gazans to be ‘human shields’. by Christine Williams

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/egypt-shuts-down-its-border-to-palestinian-refugees-from-gaza/

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Israel and has pledged U.S. support as the Israeli military bombards Hamas-ruled Gaza with airstrikes, and is preparing for a possible ground invasion. Hamas jihadis have fired thousands of rockets into Israel, and continue to do so. Egypt has now committed to providing humanitarian aid, but it has shut down its border to Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Israel also currently refuses to allow goods to enter Gaza “until around 150 hostages taken captive by Hamas during a weekend attack are freed.” 2.3 million people are now blockaded between Israel and Egypt. The bottom line is that while Egypt is willing to serve as a mediator and even to advance the view that Israel return to pre-1967 borders, its president, Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, is committed to his own country’s security interests. Egypt fears what Gazans may bring into Egypt if it opens its borders.

As result of the high level of terrorist activity and threat among Palestinians over the decades, Egypt is shutting down the only other escape route from Gaza besides Israel—the Rafah crossing. According to Reuters:

Egypt has long restricted the flow of Gazans on to its territory, even during the fiercest conflicts. Cairo, a frequent mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, always insists the two sides resolve conflicts within their borders, saying this the only way Palestinians can secure their right to statehood.

Gaza is saturated with jihadists, and Palestinians are now facing the ruins of a war that was started by Hamas — the jihadist group that Palestinians themselves chose to rule Gaza — an area also dominated by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Israel Will Attack Bibi will get his chance to finish the job. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-israel-will-attack/

There is an old saying, that professional militaries tend to fight the last war.

But Israel has learned its lesson, in particular, the lessons of the failed 2006 war against Hezbollah. This time there will be no pinprick attacks. Israeli will go big and hard and heavy. This will be Fallujah on steroids.

I reported on the 2006 war along the border zone for Newsmax and NBC News. After nearly two weeks of air strikes in response to thousands of Hezbollah rockets smashing into Israeli towns and villages, then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered elite IDF units to launch small probing cross-border strikes, in the hope of disrupting Hezbollah supply lines.

One of those units was Battalion 51 of the famed Golani brigade, which was ordered to take Bint Jbeil, a Hezbollah stronghold and the birthplace of fabled Hezbollah terror mastermind, Imad Fayez Mugniyeh.

The operation had been a total michal, or fawda, Israeli terms which have many unprintable equivalents in U.S. military slang. This is how I described the survivors in an forthcoming book, The Iran House:

The Golani troops carried enough food, water and ammo for a forty-eight-hour mission – and wound up staying five and a half days.

They humped fifteen kilometers in the dead of night to the outskirts of the village, then in the pre-dawn hours received the order to move into the town itself. And that’s where everything fell apart. They entered a narrow alleyway between houses when Hezbollah fighters appeared on all sides and opened fire. Eight soldiers were killed in less than a minute, and twenty-two more were wounded. Even more would have died, one of the survivors told me, if the deputy commander of their unit, Major Ro’i Klein, hadn’t spotted a grenade rolling toward them and jumped on it.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

College Students Backtrack on Hamas, Rush to Hide Connections and Pro-Hamas Statements By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/13/college-students-backtrack-on-hamas-rush-to-hide-connections-and-pro-hamas-statements/

Less than a week after Israel was struck by a devastating mass invasion by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, American college students who initially voiced support for the terrorists have now been forced to recant their statements for fear of being canceled.

As Just The News reports, perhaps the biggest example thus far is the story of Ryna Workman, the president of NYU Law’s Student Bar Association. Workman, a black woman who identifies as “non-binary,” had applied for a job with the law firm Winston and Strawn; after she had initially been accepted, the firm then sent out a public statement revoking her job offer after she stated that Israel “bears full responsibility” for the terrorist attacks, which she described as “Palestinian resistance” and “necessary.”

Elsewhere, students at Harvard are now facing backlash after over 30 student groups signed onto a public letter denouncing Israel as an “apartheid regime,” calling the Jewish state “the only one to blame” for the violence. Three days after the attacks, the list of signatories was removed, although archived versions still exist which include the full list.

After the list’s publication, Harvard alumnus and hedge fund CEO Bill Ackman said that “a number of CEOs” had approached him to ask if Harvard would reveal the identities of the student groups, “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.”

Members who defend “inconceivably despicable acts” against civilians should “not be able to hide behind a corporate shield,” Ackman added.

FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Admin Struggles to Not Let Barbaric Hamas Attack Stop Them From Appeasing Iran His speech made no mention of Iran which funds and arms Hamas By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/13/biden-admin-struggles-to-not-let-barbaric-hamas-attack-stop-them-from-appeasing-iran/

President Biden was justifiably praised for his remarks on October 7 and 10 pledging “rock solid” American support for Israel and strongly condemning the barbaric terrorist attack against Israel by Hamas, an Iranian terrorist proxy. Biden spoke passionately, calling the Hamas violence “pure unadulterated evil” and a “violation of every code of human morality.” Axios called Biden’s October 10 speech “perhaps the most powerful statement of support for Israel by a sitting U.S. president since Harry Truman recognized the Jewish state in 1948.”

But a crucial omission undermined the moral clarity of Biden’s speeches: there was no mention of Iran which funds and arms Hamas and reportedly was deeply involved in the planning and execution of the October 7 terrorist attack.

Making this worse, Biden officials have tried since last weekend to downplay reports of Iran’s involvement by claiming they haven’t seen any evidence of this. In response to bipartisan criticism of its approach, the Biden administration is now scrambling to address allegations that Iran was behind the attack without giving up its ongoing negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program that have provided Iran with significant sanctions relief and other concessions.

According to a bombshell Wall Street Journal report on October 8, Iranian officials helped plan the Hamas attack against Israel over several weeks and gave the green light to launch it during an October 2, 2023 meeting in Beirut. The Journal also reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worked with Hamas since last August to prepare the air, land, and sea incursions of the attack. The Journal sourced this article to “senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, another Iran-backed militant group.”

In addition, the BBC reported on October 8 that a Hamas spokesman said Hamas had direct backing from Iran for the attack.

There are many reasons to believe that Iran was intimately involved in the Hamas attack. Aside from the funding and arms it provides to Hamas, the level of sophistication of the attack was well beyond anything Hamas has done before.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Everything You Need to Know About the Israeli Occupation (That Is, Everything the Left Won’t Tell You) By Robert Spencer

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/10/13/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-israeli-occupation-that-is-everything-the-left-wont-tell-you-n1734997

” The idea that Israel is occupying Palestinian land was furthered in the 1990s by the Oslo Accords, to which Israel unwisely acceded, and in which it agreed to work toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which would only become a new base for more jihad attacks against a diminished Jewish state. But a Palestinian state, if it is ever created, would be the first-ever such entity in the history of the world. There is actually no Israeli occupation at all. The Squad, and the left in general, is either ignorant or malicious. Or, of course, both.”

There would be peace in the Middle East if Israel just ended its occupation, right?

That’s what the Squad wants you to think, anyway. The statements of the three primary members of this winsome leftist House coalition on the Hamas massacres in Israel had the distinct odor of canned talking points. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Make Mine A Double) issued a statement that said, “I condemn Hamas’ attack in the strongest possible terms.” That was a good start, but she then turned on a dime to blame it all on Israel: “No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.” Ongoing oppression and occupation, see? If Israel would just ease up on the poor Palestinians, Hamas jihadis would all open restaurants and shops, and peace would dawn upon the region.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Expert Calls ‘Three Strikes’ Against Climate Alarmism By Catherine Salgado

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/10/13/exclusive-climate-expert-calls-three-strikes-against-climate-alarmism-n1734824

Facts and data show “three strikes and climate alarmism should be out,” climate truth-teller Steve Milloy told PJ Media. “But it’s still at bat and swinging,” propped up by the “fake news media.”

Junk Science’s Milloy explained the three biggest truths undermining the mainstream narrative in exclusive comments to PJ Media. “We are 35 years into climate alarmism, and we’ve had no global warming since 2015 despite 450 billion tons of emissions; no type of natural disaster correlates with emissions or warming; and no apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true,” Milloy stated.

It’s time to admit the fraud. “That’s three strikes and climate alarmism should be out. But it’s still at bat and swinging because the fake news media shares its leftist agenda and will not call it out,” Milloy added. After all, governments can use climate change as a convenient excuse for increasing their power and control.

Milloy’s comments followed the publication of a new report. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental (E&E) Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate issued their “Climate Fact Check: September 2023 Edition.” Milloy posted the report at ClimateRealism.com.

The first myth the groups attacked was the media apocalypse prophesying on “global warming.” They looked at data to determine if September really did have record heat.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Hamas Fooled the Experts Why so many misread the Palestinian terror group’s openly stated intentions and motives by Armin Rosen

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/how-hamas-fooled-the-experts

For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.

This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.

The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Border Crisis Invites Terrorists Officials also need to consider the risk of a copycat attacker inspired by Hamas’s brutality. By Paul Mauro

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-border-crisis-invites-terrorists-to-attack-c7f154bc?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

What does war in Gaza mean for U.S. homeland security? The sudden outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas creates three broad categories of risk for domestic counterterrorism officials. First among them is America’s porous southern border.

I worked in counterterrorism with the New York City Police Department for 15 years. During that time, an undocumented border-crosser with a bad-guy footprint was a rarity. It’s hard for a foreign terror group to project power overseas. Not only is it expensive to deploy operatives on foreign soil, but doing so is rife with potential points of failure. The discovery of one in New York would have caused a “spin-up” involving major resources from surveillance teams to phone and cyber forensics.

The disaster at the southern border has made it easy for a potential terrorist to slip into the country. Such a “clean skin” is virtually untraceable. To make matters worse, we are inviting these border-crossers to come and paying their way to major terror targets like New York.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

What Israeli Victory Would Look Like To achieve its objectives in Gaza and secure the Jewish state, Jerusalem needs to turn the tables on Tehran. By Elliot Kaufman

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-israeli-victory-would-look-like-hamas-war-b5a2ee80?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Falk says, “I truly hope, and I actually expect, that the civilized world will support us not only when we’re the victims, but also when we’re the victors here.” Victory might also save the prospects for a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. “In this neighborhood, the strong survive,” Mr. Falk says. “The main reason that prior peace agreements were reached was because we’re strong.”

“I’m driving south to the Gaza corridor, the place Hamas invaded on Saturday,” Yonah Jeremy Bob says in our first phone conversation. “But it’s a straight drive, so let’s talk.” Mr. Bob is an expert on the Israeli shadow war with Iran, the subject of his new book, “Target Tehran,” and he covers the Israeli intelligence agencies and military for the Jerusalem Post. He’s busy tracking down answers to the questions every Israeli wants answered: How could this have happened? What’s the plan? Who will pay?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Benny Avni: America’s Lloyd Austin, Who Stared ‘Evil in the Eye’ While Commanding GIs Against ISIS, Emerges as a Powerful Ally of Israel in the War Against Hamas The defense secretary’s clarity could go a long way toward muzzling the growing international criticism of Israel as ground operations begin in Gaza.

Posted By on October 14th, 2023

https://www.nysun.com/article/americas-lloyd-austin-who-stared-evil-in-the-eye-while-commanding-gis-against-isis-emerges-as-a-powerful-ally-

When, even as Israeli special forces are entering Gaza in preparation for a massive invasion,  a top official says that Hamas is worse than ISIS, what jumps out is the identity of the speaker: In this case it’s the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who has devised much of America’s war on ISIS, and he knows the pitfalls of battling terrorism. 

“In countering ISIS, I felt that we were staring evil in the eye. What we are seeing with Hamas is taking that evil to another level,” Mr. Austin said Friday during a Tel Aviv press conference alongside his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant.

The retired four-star general’s clarity could go a long way toward muzzling the growing international criticism of Israel, which on Thursday urged northern Gaza civilians to evacuate and move farther south. On the Strip’s roads, long lines of cars were seen traveling away from Gaza City, where Israel is expected to concentrate its complex operation to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities.

On Friday afternoon, special IDF units entered northern Gaza as the air force  constantly pummeled buildings at Shujaiyeh, Gaza City’s home to top Hamas leaders. The special forces reportedly discovered several bodies of abducted Israelis. 

Self-described international human rights bodies are complaining that 1.1 million Gazans living in the city and north of it have no place to go. Some accuse Israel of committing a war crime. The United Nations “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences,” its spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said. 

“All who can influence Israel must push for this madness to stop and the order to evacuate reversed,” a former UN official and current leader of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, wrote on X. Even as similar organizations have, at best, weakly condemned the Hamas atrocities that launched the war, they are now urging America to muzzle Israel.