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Kemi Badenoch: ‘I Don’t Think DOGE Is Radical Enough’The Tory leader on J.D. Vance’s ‘truth bomb,’ backdoor blasphemy laws, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Israel, Ukraine, and more. Bari Weiss

Posted By on February 22nd, 2025

https://www.thefp.com/p/kemi-badenoch-i-dont-think-doge-is

On Monday at the ARC Conference in London I sat down with Kemi Badenoch, who has been in charge of the Conservative Party for a little more than 100 days. When I last spoke to her—in December, on Honestly—Trump had just become the president and she had just become opposition leader. I asked her if she could turn her party—and ultimately, her country—around? And if so, how? This week, we sat for a follow-up conversation on immigration, the economy, whether the vibe shift has made it to the UK, and more.

Bari: One of the things that everyone has been talking about over the past few days is the blistering speech that J.D. Vance gave in Munich in front of a stunned group of European bureaucrats. And I want to read just one line back to you. “The threat that I worry about most vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China. It’s not any other external actor. What I worry about most is the threat from within the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values.” What did you think of the speech?

Kemi: I thought he was dropping some truth bombs, quite frankly. The Munich Security Conference clearly was not expecting what he had to say. And I found it fascinating that the chair of the conference burst into tears at the end of it and needed a hug because of how tough J.D.’s speech had been.

This is what I was talking about when I gave my speech this morning. It’s not liberal values that are the problem. It’s weakness. And that’s what J.D. was trying to tell that conference, too, that we need to get tougher. There’s this belief that tolerance is the core fundamental European value. To the extent that we are tolerating things that are actually destroying everything else, it’s this extreme view of tolerance that is undermining our security.

BW: What are some of the things that Europe and specifically the UK have tolerated that you think are no longer going to be tolerated in our new political moment?

KB: Well, the UK is not having a new political moment just yet. That’s what I want to bring about.

BW: Do you agree there’s been a global vibe shift?

KB: No, I don’t think so. I think that that is premature. I think there has been a big shift in the U.S. There has not been a global shift. Because of the dominance of U.S. media it can sometimes mean that people think that’s everything that’s going on—but it is absolutely not.

Nothing has changed in the rest of the world, as far as I can see. It looks like something may be about to change in Ukraine. But what Europe needs to look at and what we need to fix right now is our understanding of what it is that we are protecting. And it’s not just protecting tolerance of things that will destroy us. One example is what’s happening in the courts. We are having novel and expansive interpretations of law used in a way that was never the intention of Parliament. Parliamentary sovereignty is being eroded. We need to fix all of that.

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Hannah E. Meyers Why Won’t Cities Like New York Punish Anti-Semitic Rioters? Spineless institutions must fight back against criminals who target Jews.

Posted By on February 22nd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-hate-riot-new-york-borough-park

Seared into the minds of Jewish Americans are the innocent faces and bright red hair of the youngest Hamas hostages, Ariel and Kfir Bibas. The brothers, four and nine-months old, respectively, were kidnapped along with their mother, Shiri, by masked gunmen on October 7, 2023. Their father, Yarden, was also taken hostage but was released last week. Imagining Yarden’s anguish as he awaited news of his family’s fate only deepened the anxiety of millions who, like me, prayed for their safe return.

This week, the Israeli government confirmed that the boys were murdered while in captivity. Meanwhile, on Wednesday, a group of “protesters,” their faces wrapped in keffiyeh scarves to mimic Hamas militants, descended on New York’s predominantly Jewish Borough Park neighborhood to scream at Jews. “How many kids did you kill today?,” they chanted—with no sense of irony.

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This outrage—culminating in a brawl that police had to break up—reflects the growing normalization of masked rioters invading predominantly Jewish spaces to intimidate residents. Like Biblical villains, these agitators thirst for power. Like Hamas, they don’t care if they hurt the innocent, so long as they hurt Jews. The pro-Hamas mob pushed past police barricades and officers and approached nearby Jews, where fighting ensued.

It’s time for American cities and institutions to stand up to this targeted misbehavior. Simply complaining about “hate” won’t solve the problem. New York and other cities need to show some spine.

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The End Of The Eric Adams Prosecution : Holier-Than-Thou Federal Prosecutors Francis Menton

Posted By on February 22nd, 2025

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-2-20-the-end-of-the-eric-adams-prosecution-and-hoiier-than-thou-federal-prosecutors

Since my post a few days ago about the demise of the Eric Adams prosecution, controversy has continued to swirl around the matter. On the side supporting the action of the Trump/Bondi Justice Department, several new voices have emerged to join what were previously the lonely cries of a handful of people like myself and Josh Blackman. These new voices include James Copland and Rafael Mangual (of the Manhattan Institute), writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on February 18; and Alan Dershowitz in a column in the New York Post on February 19.

On the other side of the argument, an ex-colleague of mine sends me a copy of an “open letter” dated February 17, and signed by a gigantic list of well over 1000 former federal prosecutors. This letter essentially adopts the arguments set forth in the resignation letter of ex-SDNY US Attorney Danielle Sassoon, including echoing some of her language. A fair description is that these guys adopt a holier-than-thou attitude, claiming to be wholly pure and above politics and devoted only to the “facts and law.” Here are some excerpts:

As prosecutors, we were rightly prohibited from making criminal charging decisions based on someone’s political association, activities or beliefs, or because of our personal feelings about them. We knew it was impermissible to treat a defendant more leniently just because they were powerful or well-connected, or more harshly because they were not. We were taught to pursue justice without fear or favor, and knew our decisions to investigate and charge should be based only on the facts and the law. . . . Against this backdrop, we have watched with alarm as these values have been tested by recent actions of the Department’s leadership. Some of you have been ordered to make charging decisions based expressly on considerations other than the facts and the law, including to serve solely political purposes. To all of you, we communicate this: We salute and admire the courage many of you have already exhibited, and that will guide all of you as you continue to serve the interests of justice. You have responded to ethical challenges of a type no public servant should ever be forced to confront with principle and conviction, in the finest traditions of the Department of Justice.

The bold is in the original.

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From the Director’s Desk of the Henry Jackson Society Dr. Alan Mendoza

Posted By on February 22nd, 2025

The moment we were all expecting has come to the fore, bringing with it more horror, heartbreak, and deceit than anyone could have imagined. For Hamas has, once again, proven itself to be a barbaric entity, violating a ceasefire agreement with Israel it had already played fast and loose with on several occasions.

Yesterday was always going to be a sombre day, as Israel prepared to receive the first of its deceased hostages – those who had entered Gaza in life and were leaving it in death. However, Hamas has not only stuck the knife in further – they’ve twisted it for us too. At the transition to the Red Cross, Hamas orchestrated a grotesque ceremony to hand over the dead, a macabre spectacle clearly designed to insult Israel and grandstand before the world. This was not an exchange; it was a calculated act of psychological warfare.

The most despicable betrayal, however, came with the absence of Shiri Bibas. The mother of two young sons and wife to Yarden Bibas – who was recently released after an excruciating 484 days in captivity – was not returned alongside the bodies of her children, as previously agreed. Instead, Hamas substituted her body with that of an imposter who, as of this morning, remains unidentified by forensic experts but is presumed to be a Gazan woman. This flagrant deception has rightly ignited outrage, not just in Israel but across the international community.

This deceitful and malicious act has pushed what was already a tenuous ceasefire deal to the brink of collapse. If Hamas thought it could manipulate this moment without consequence, it has gravely miscalculated. Israel cannot afford to respond with half-measures. This is a violation that calls for decisive action and Israel would do well to take a lesson from the Donald Trump playbook: when a deal is broken, the response must be immediate and severe. In this way Israel should go straight for the jugular, eliminating what remains of Hamas leadership. The locations of these figures are known – now is the time to act, regardless of which countries they might be skulking in.

Israel must assert its control, send a message of unequivocal strength, and ensure that Hamas pays the ultimate price for its barbarism. The world is watching, and there should be no doubt left in the minds of those who threaten Israel’s sovereignty: breaking a deal with Israel, particularly one with terms as hideous as have been imposed by the terrorists, should mean signing one’s own death warrant.

Dr Alan Mendoza is Executive Director of the Henry Jackson Society. Follow Alan on X: @AlanMendoza

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The Roots of the Palestinian Sickness The West’s embrace of Hamas’s brutality is no accident—it was carefully cultivated over decades by intellectuals who legitimized atrocities under the guise of “resistance.” By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on February 22nd, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/22/the-roots-of-the-palestinian-sickness/

This week, as the civilized peoples of the West once again recoil in horror at the grotesque and violent spectacle that is Hamas, it is worth remembering that the bloody, brutal, and depraved character of the Palestinian animosity toward Israel and the Jewish people did not arise from natural circumstances. The blind and merciless hatred the radical Palestinians feel toward Israel is neither normal nor accidental. It was carefully and purposefully cultivated over the course of nearly a century and has been intentionally intensified and amplified by the intellectual discourse in Europe and the United States.

The monstrous treatment of the Bibas family—the kidnapping and murder of an innocent woman and her two small children, the parading of the corpses through a celebratory rally, the apparent attempts to hide the real causes of the children’s death, and the utter refusal to return the remains of their mother, Shiri—is not the behavior one would ever expect from a conventional regime, even one that bills itself as the “resistance” to an “occupying” force. Rather, it is behavior consistent with the ugliest, vilest, most brutal sects man has ever known—the Nazis, Lenin and Stalin’s Soviets, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and so on. This is no mere coincidence. The Palestinian/Hamas-nik consciousness springs from many of the same sources as the most horrific regimes of the twentieth century.

Nowhere in the world have the anti-realist philosophies of cultural Marxism been more ingrained and more destructive than in the discourse around and the practical politics of the Middle East. Arab nationalism was an early 20th-century identity movement that surfaced amidst the dying of the Ottoman Empire and which was patterned in many ways on the German nationalist undertaking. The early thinkers and founders of Arab nationalism looked to define themselves and their people and to build an independent pan-Arab state that stretched, essentially, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea. The identity the Arab nationalists created for themselves and the Arab people was defined principally in terms of who the Arabs were not, rather than who they were. And who they were not is European colonialists.

In this sense, the Arab Nationalist movement was quintessentially postmodern. It arose in opposition to the “truth” of Western cultural hegemony and obsessed over the sins and perceived slights of the colonial powers—including the Zionists. It fashioned for itself a majestic yet “lost” past of the Arab people. And it sought to restore that past through opposition to the prevalent ideas of Western liberalism.

Additionally, and more to the point, the Middle East as it exists in the mind of the Western intellectual or wannabe intellectual today is largely the creation of a narrative that was fashioned more than five decades ago, in the fevered imagination of a literary theorist named Edward Said. Said was ostensibly a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. But he was also the man most responsible for the current Western-liberal view of the Middle East and especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

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BREAKING NEWS FROM ISRAEL

Posted By on February 21st, 2025

Last night, Israel came dangerously close to tragedy. Five bombs exploded across Bat Yam, targeting public buses in a meticulously planned attack. Miraculously, the buses were empty—but they weren’t supposed to be. The devices were meant to detonate during this morning’s rush hour, filled with passengers. Israeli security forces have confirmed that additional explosives were found, and a manhunt is underway for those responsible. Hamas has claimed responsibility, and we now know that this was a deliberate, coordinated effort to inflict mass civilian casualties. Authorities are urgently searching for more hidden devices, while the entire country’s public transportation system has been shut down to prevent further catastrophe for the time being.

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Hollywood Can’t Handle Hard Truths Armond White

Posted By on February 21st, 2025

Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance is too reel and too real.

Maybe it’s because this is Black History Month that the complete Oscar lock-out of Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths seems so wrong. (It almost hurts more than the dismissal of Better Man.) Hard Truths was also overlooked for the Image Awards given by the NAACP, which is equally troubling. Both omissions reveal the worst about contemporary film culture. This isn’t simply a matter of actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s being ignored (despite already winning most of the season’s critics’ prizes). Fact is: Mainstream opinion has degraded.

It would be an exaggeration to frame the Oscar and NAACP inadequacies as injustice; no contemporary movie has more significance than Hard Truths, for the way it deals with the spiritual trauma of the Covid lockdowns. In addressing this subject, Mike Leigh returns to modern relevance after his two previous films, the period pictures Peterloo, about the 1819 massacre in Manchester, England, and Mr. Turner, a biopic of the painter J. M. W. Turner. In Hard Truths, Leigh comes back to the modern world with tough, piercing frankness.

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ICRC, despite criticism, still taking part in Hamas hostage ceremonies By David Isaac

Posted By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.jns.org/icrc-despite-criticism-still-taking-part-in-hamas-hostage-ceremonies/

Although the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) previously issued a plaintive call for hostage releases to be carried out in a “dignified manner” following criticism from U.S. Senate leaders over its participation in Hamas’s handover ceremonies, the ICRC still took part in Thursday’s exhibition involving the transfer of four dead bodies.

While Israel’s Channel 12 reported that the ICRC had refused to cooperate in the ceremony, almost leading to a “blowup,” Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights attorney and CEO of the Israel-based International Legal Forum, said that report wasn’t accurate.

“Apart from some timid request by the ICRC for a ‘private, dignified handover of hostages’, today’s release again descended into an obscene and macabre propaganda display, in which a Red Cross representative even joined a masked Hamas terrorist on stage, alongside the coffins of the four murdered hostages,” he told JNS.

Ostrovsky noted: “Under the Geneva Conventions, for which the ICRC serves as guardian, ‘humiliating and degrading treatment,’ such as what Hamas is doing in parading the hostages on stage, including the murdered captives, is considered a gross violation of international law and a war crime.” 

The ICRC, in a statement on Wednesday, urged “those with the responsibility and the authority over these releases, and those with influence on them, to ensure that they are conducted with privacy, respect, and care.” 

Hamas prisoner ceremonies, in which hostages are presented to braying Gazan crowds and forced to thank their tormentors, have been denounced by Israeli and U.S. leaders. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the crowds of Gazans who mobbed three Israelis during a Jan. 30 release. 

U.S. President Donald Trump expressed shock at the emaciated condition of three others released on Feb. 8. American lawmakers condemned the ICRC for its part in the ceremonies, saying the agency risked jeopardizing its image as an unbiased actor. (The Red Cross claims two of its seven principles are “impartiality” and “neutrality.”)

U.S. Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Washington Free Beacon website on Wednesday, “Participating in Hamas’s propaganda ceremonies definitely calls into question their supposed neutrality. Seems like the ICRC is more concerned about their public image than actually fulfilling their mission to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict.” 

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Liz Peek: A DOGE dividend could be a win-win-win for the GOP and Team Trump

Posted By on February 21st, 2025

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5155741-elon-musk-doge-dividend-trump-gop

With Democrats screaming that the sky is falling with each federal workerthe Department of Government Efficiency axes, Elon Musk’s team needs some good public relations.

James Fishback, CEO of “free-thinking” investment firm Azoria, has an excellent idea.   

Fishback made headlines recently by posting on X that, “President Trump and Elon Musk should propose a DOGE dividend — a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE.” 

Musk, who evidently sleeps with one eye trained on his X feed, sounded positive about the proposition, responding, “Will check with the president.” 

Why not? What better way to bring home to people the benefits of cutting waste and fraud out of the federal budget?  

Fishback explains his plan: “Our proposal for the President is simple: tax-paying households should receive $1 for every $5 of total savings that DOGE delivers. That means that if DOGE delivers $2 trillion in total savings, 79 million American households will receive a $5,000 check next summer because of President Trump’s bold leadership.”  

Imagine the benefits: 

Sending out checks will make DOGE’s success real, tangible and celebrated. Nobody dislikes getting money in the mail.
Taxpayers, whose money has been funneled into distasteful and wasteful ventures like spending $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia or $2.5 million to fund electric vehicles in Vietnam, will catch a rare break — finally! 
Democrats, who have reflexively and idiotically opposed DOGE’s efforts, will be silenced. Given their resistance — and their lack of leadership and message — they will not retake the House or the Senate in the midterm elections. Republicans will own what will come to be the most popular initiative ever undertaken by either party — reforming our bloated inefficient government and returning to taxpayers money that would have been wasted.
Additionally, the dividend will mean that the more spending DOGE purges from the $6 trillion federal budget, the bigger the checks will be. That means the country will be rooting for more cuts and more closings, cheering on Musk and his DOGGIES at every turn. 
If reducing government spending pinches growth, which it could, putting some money in consumers’ pockets would provide a valuable offset. One of the reasons the economy grew robustly while Joe Biden was in the White House is that he spent money recklessly, creating the kinds of deficits usually reserved for fighting wars or deep recessions.

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Prosecuting ‘Unacceptable Opinions’: Europe vs. the United States by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on February 21st, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21419/prosecuting-unacceptable-opinions

On CBS television recently — in a scene straight out of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police for political repression — three German prosecutors being interviewed explain that their job is to suppress “unacceptable opinions.”

The question, however, clearly is not actually about repressing all false information – just that, it seems, which displeases the so-called “left” as well as many of Europe’s newcomers. As one of the three German prosecutors put it, “Freedom of expression is fine, but there are limits.” There are, and they are carefully laid out in the 1969 US Supreme Court decision Brandenburg v. Ohio…

The so-called “left”, nevertheless, appears to have reinvented itself in a form that rejects everything that is not itself.

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser, a politician from Germany’s right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland… had posted on social media in 2021, questioning the socialist mayor of Hamburg’s decision to welcome Afghan refugees, by citing statistics about Afghan men’s involvement in gang rapes in Germany. The court ruled that her statements violated the “human dignity” of Afghan refugees as a group…. The court did not contest the validity of the statistics. She was therefore convicted not for peddling “false information,” but for telling the truth.

The good news is that the funding of this industry of lies by the US government is over. You can be skeptical of certain practices in Islam without being “phobic” and refuse to allow biological men (xy) to take part in women’s (xx) competitions without being “hateful”. Let us hope this trend will jump the pond.

A cultural war appears to be brewing between Europe and the United States.

At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance surprised attendees by downplaying external threats to Europe, instead emphasizing what he called “the threat from within” Europe. Vance argued that the greatest danger to European democracy stems from its own leaders’ retreat from fundamental values, such as freedom of speech and democratic principles. He lambasted European governments for suppressing free speech, citing examples like Sweden’s conviction of a Christian activist for burning a Quran, Germany’s crackdowns on anti-feminist online comments, and the UK’s restrictions on religious expression near abortion clinics. Vance compared these actions to “Soviet-style” censorship, suggesting Europe is abandoning the liberties it once championed during the Cold War.